The sudden, total deceleration ripped the rotor blades away from the helicopter. The two remaining stabilizer bolts snapped like breadsticks and the entire tail assembly was sent plummeting down toward the waters of the Adriatic Sea, burnished to a gleaming copper by the rays of the rising sun.
The helicopter began spinning around and around at an ever-increasing speed. Skender Visar, who had calmly supervized the death and degradation of so many human souls, reacted to his own impending doom with an animal howl of terror. The pilot simply switched off the engine, leaving the main rotors to autorotate like the blades of a windmill.
For a brief moment, calm was restored. The cabin stopped spinning. Visar grinned feebly in a desperate attempt to disguise his cowardice. The pilot began sending out a Mayday message and calling for rescue. A Bell 206B3 JetRanger under autorotation descends at a speed of seventeen miles per hour. With an experienced pilot at the controls, the chances of survival are good, even when landing on water. But Carver had banked on something else.
A helicopter’s tail rotor is powered by a driveshaft that runs from the engine along the tail boom. But the power can’t be transferred from the shaft to the rotor without a gearbox. This box is a heavy hunk of metal and sits at one end of the boom, acting as a counterweight to the cabin and engine at the other end.
When the rotor was ripped away from the helicopter, it yanked the gearbox out of its moorings and left it dangling off the driveshaft at the open end of the shredded tail boom. It stayed there for ten, maybe fifteen seconds, pulled by gravity and pummeled by the wind. Then the connection to the driveshaft gave way and the gearbox joined the debris tumbling to the sea.
Without its weight, the JetRanger lost any semblance of balance. One second the pilot was looking at the sky. The next he was pointing straight down at the sea, and the chopper had ceased to be a functioning aircraft, becoming instead a glass-and-metal coffin plummeting toward the churning waters, and all the pilot could hear was the manic rush of the air and the death scream of Skender Visar.
Samuel Carver was fast asleep when the people trafficker died. Hours earlier, he’d swum back to the rented motorboat he’d moored just around the headland from the bay where Visar’s villa lay.
He’d peeled away the wetsuit, dried himself off, and changed into a pair of jeans and a loose cotton shirt. He’d then returned to the tourist resort of Hvar, where he was staying, moored the boat, and had a late dinner in a restaurant down by the seafront. Carver ordered grilled seafood and a chilled bottle of Pošip Cara, a fresh white wine from the neighboring island of Korcula. He ate at an outside table and watched the girls go by. Then he walked back to his hotel, just like any other tourist, bidding goodnight to the night porter before making his way to bed.
The next day Carver breakfasted on fresh rolls and sweet black coffee before he checked out, paying in cash. He boarded a ferry across the Adriatic to the Italian port of Pescara, just another anonymous foot passenger at the height of the summer season. Once he got to Italy, he bought a train ticket home—no documentation or ID required, no record kept of his journey, cash accepted without question.
Carver traveled first class. He read a book that wasn’t about bird watching. He joined in the conversation when fellow passengers felt like talking, stopped along the way for a couple of decent meals. He did everything he could not to think about what he’d just done.
TEN DAYS
LATER
1
The man smiled to himself as he walked into the walnut paneled room, relishing the cool of the air-conditioning after the blazing August heat. He pushed his sunglasses off his face, up over his thinning, tightly cropped black hair. The semidarkness too came as a relief. The peoples of the cold, gloomy north might be happy to spend their summer holidays roasting their milky skins to a crimson crisp, but he was a child of the sun. So he respected its power and sought the shade at midday.
He only had a few minutes to himself. Soon he would be expected back outside, where the servants were laying a table for lunch under a white canvas awning that flapped in the Mediterranean breeze. He