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  “That’s the only one! Commander Gonzo and the other local pilots maintain the field on the south slope. It’s just long enough to get clearance. There’s no other safe place up here to land a plane, and if they were flying their own chopper, there are more convenient places to touch down. They’ve got to have a plane waiting on the south slope!”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Jones asked. “Let’s go after them!”

  “With the head start they have, you’ll never catch up,” Max said, the excitement draining from his voice.

  “There’s no shortcut?” I asked hopefully, but he just shook his head.

  “There’s a shortcut to my research station, but not to the south slope. If I had two good legs, we might be able to make it to my chopper in time to intercept them over the runway and keep them from taking off, but in the condition I’m in…” He stretched his wounded leg and winced. “It’s no use even trying. They’d be halfway across the state before I made it up there.”

  There was only one word to describe the looks on everyone else’s faces. “Defeated.” But not mine.

  Now it was Frank’s turn to ask me the question I’d asked him a few minutes earlier. “Um, why are you grinning, Joe?”

  “Grab your stuff, everybody. We’re taking that shortcut back to the chopper.”

  “But without Max, who’s going to fly it?”

  “You know that helicopter flight simulation game I’ve been playing?”

  “Oh no—”

  “I am.”

  16 THRILL RIDE

  FRANK

  BUT THAT’S JUST A VIDEO game!” I protested.

  “A very realistic video game,” Joe said confidently.

  “Those types of simulation programs are similar to what they use to train modern pilots,” Dr. K said.

  “See, bro? No big deal.”

  “Yes big deal! We’re talking about a real-life helicopter here! Do you remember the last time you tried flying something real?” I asked, reminding him of the high-tech flying car we’d accidentally commandeered on a recent international case in Paris.

  “Sure do,” he said proudly. “Landed that bad boy without a scratch.”

  “Yeah, after almost flying us into the Eiffel Tower!”

  Joe shrugged. “You said you wanted to do some sightseeing.”

  “Please tell him this is a bad idea,” I pleaded to Dr. K.

  “Flying a helicopter isn’t easy, even with hands-on training,” he said. “I’d be inclined to say no way—”

  I sighed with relief. “Thank you, Dr. K—”

  Dr. Kroopnik wasn’t finished, though. “But I’ve learned never to doubt a Hardy boy.”

  I turned to Jones for help. She’d be the voice of reason to talk some sense into them.

  “Sorry, Frank, I have to agree with Doc K on that one.”

  I’m pretty sure my mouth was hanging wide open by this point. Was I the only one with any common sense?

  “But the controls are dismantled,” I protested. Surely that would dissuade Joe. “You don’t know how to fix a helicopter by yourself.”

  “I can talk you through it easily enough. It’s pretty simple to reconnect as long as you have the right part.” Dr. Kroopnik pulled out a small fuse.

  “See, nothing to worry about, bro-pilot, everything is under control,” Joe reassured me unreassuringly. “This is our shot to stop them before they get away.”

  I closed my eyes and massaged my temples. “I can’t believe I’m letting you talk me into this.”

  “To the chopper!” Joe declared, and started marching up the hill.

  “Wait, I still need to tell you how to fix it!” Dr. Kroopnik called after him. “And how to find the shortcut!”

  “Right,” said Joe, putting on the brakes and turning around. “Got a little overexcited there for a minute.”

  I buried my face in my hands and groaned. What had I gotten myself into?

  For better or worse, we were on our way a few minutes later, helicopter repair instructions and shortcut directions in hand. Jones volunteered to stay and look after Dr. K until we could come back to get them or send for a rescue team. Thankfully, she’d thought to bring a first aid kit with her. We left the compass with the tracking device behind as well so the perps wouldn’t see it on the move and know we’d escaped. More important, we took the GPS monitor Jones had brought so we’d know exactly where to find our friends when someone came back to fly them out.

  Joe and I booked it back to the chopper, moving as fast as we could without hurting ourselves on the rough terrain. By the time we got there, we were both drenched in sweat and panting from exhaustion. Running up a mountain is no joke! A chance to sit down and rest for a while would have been a relief—if I weren’t about to be sitting in a helicopter next to an amateur helicopter pilot who’d never flown before!

  Dr. Kroopnik’s instructions were spot-on, and when the moment of truth came, the propellers whirred to life just like he said they would.

  “This is incredible!” Joe shouted, pumping his fist in the air.

  “Incredibly risky!” I squeaked, triple-checking my seat belt.

  I’m no stranger to adventure, but gut-dropping voluntary thrill rides like roller coasters, skydiving, high-elevation zip lines, or say, CHASING AFTER AIRPLANES IN HELICOPTERS WITH UNLICENSED FIRST-TIME PILOTS WITH NO FORMAL TRAINING WHATSOEVER? Not so much my jam.

  I gripped my seat as tightly as I could and closed my eyes as the small, two-seat helicopter jerked into the air.

  “Whoo-hoo!” Joe hollered.

  “Ugh,” I moaned.

  The chopper dipped and lurched clumsily as it rose over the trees. My stomach dipped and lurched along with it. So did my nerves.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I yelled over the sound of the rotors, unable to look.

  “More or less,” Joe yelled back.

  “I’m really rooting for more!”

  I felt the aircraft level out as it gained altitude.

  “I think I’ve got the hang of it now!” Joe shouted as the helicopter propelled forward a lot more smoothly than it had been.

  I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. The view was spectacular as we zipped over the trees—except for the thick black smoke rising into the sky in the distance to the north where the wildfires were.

  “I’m sure glad we’re not flying through that,” Joe said. “Keep an eye out. The runway should be just over this ridge.”

  The perps’ plane came into view before the runway did. And it wasn’t on the ground.

  “We’re too late!” I yelled as a bush plane rose up from the trees and took to the sky ahead of us.

  “Not too late to chase them!” Joe called back.

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say!”

  The plane was only big enough for a handful of passengers and looked similar to the small Cessna we’d taken last year, but I didn’t know enough about the different aircraft manufacturers to tell the difference.

  I looked down as we flew over the open field where the makeshift runway was. Two figures looked back up at the helicopter in surprise. One was wearing camouflage. The other was a raccoon. The camouflaged perp had ditched the mask and beard he’d been wearing when he tied us up. He—or should I say she—had also let her hair down. A long braid was draped over her shoulder like it had been at the general store the morning before. The Ghost of the Wild Man was a woman after all.

  “It’s Cherry and Ricky!” I yelled. “They must have handed the garnets off to Stinky in the plane!”

  “Perp One’s identity confirmed! Now for Perp Two!” Joe said, hitting the gas—or whatever it is you hit on a helicopter to make it go faster!

  I turned my head to get a last glimpse of Cherry. I couldn’t quite tell, but it sure looked like Ricky was shaking his little raccoon fist at us.

  The plane rose sharply over the next peak, then took a sudden nosedive over the other side.

  “They’re trying to shake us
!” Joe shouted as the chopper crested the peak. We made it just in time to see the plane’s tail disappear down a dangerously narrow canyon wedged between two mountains.

  “There it is!” I yelled. Then I saw the look in my brother’s eyes as his brain calculated whether or not to follow.

  “Joe…,” I cautioned him.

  “Copy that. As fun as that looks, I think I’ll save canyon racing for my second flight,” Joe assured me. “As long as we keep a high enough elevation, we should be able to see them come back out.”

  He was right. The plane rose back over the mountain range a minute later and took a sharp turn north. Straight for the rising cloud of thick black smoke.

  “I don’t think that canyon dive was his only daredevil move. He’s heading straight toward the fire.”

  “Talk about a smoke screen!” Joe said.

  “Talk about reckless! He won’t be able to see a thing.”

  “Neither will we. I think that’s the point.”

  The smoke grew thicker, sweeping over the chopper’s windshield in dark whips as the distance between us and the fire closed. Soon we could see flames leaping from the treetops ahead.

  “We’re losing visibility fast,” Joe said, veering the helicopter back toward clean airspace.

  I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  “Don’t worry, dude,” he assured me. “I haven’t gotten to this level of the video game yet. Flying blind into a wildfire at low altitude is a little beyond my expertise. That plane is flying barely higher than the mountain peaks, and who knows what he’s flying toward.”

  “We’re heading in the direction of town,” I said, looking down at the river, which I knew ran past the Bear Foot Lodge toward Last Chance. “Let’s keep flying this way on the outskirts of the smoke where we still have visibility and see if he comes back out.”

  “Good call, bro-pilot. I’m on it.”

  A skinny metal tower poked into the sky from one of the mountains below.

  “There’s a cell tower!” I shouted. “I bet that means we have service again.”

  I reached into our pack, pulled out my phone, and powered it on. Bingo. I dialed only three digits. 9-1-1. It picked up on the first ring.

  “There’s an emergency rescue situation on Black Bear Mountain,” I shouted as loudly as I could, hoping the operator could hear me over the rotors. “Two people are stranded, one of them has a badly injured leg, and the other is recovering from anaphylaxis. They’re going to need an airlift out ASAP.”

  I yelled the coordinates from the GPS tracker into the phone and repeated them twice before clicking off. I was going to tell them about Cherry and our pursuit of Stinky’s plane but thought better of it. It sounded so outrageous, I was afraid they’d think the whole call was a hoax.

  I studied the GPS, noting the tracking device’s location on Black Bear Mountain as well as our position over the next mountain range to the northeast. Smoke blanketed the mountains on Joe’s side of the chopper to the my left. Blue skies reached out toward the horizon—and Last Chance—out my door to the right. “We should be due north of town.”

  Joe scanned the edge of the smoky sky to his left. “The smoke starts to let up ahead. We can swing north and follow the edge of the fire to see if he tries to make a break for it. But if he kept heading north over the thick of it, then we’re out of…” Joe paused as he squinted out the window. “Look! I think I see the plane!”

  The aircraft’s silhouette was faint, but sure enough, there it was, flying dangerously low over the mountaintops, veering back toward the clean air ahead of us. That wasn’t all it was veering toward, though.

  “It’s flying straight at that fire tower!” I cried, pointing to the six-story metal-frame tower atop the next mountain peak. It looked a bit like Dr. K’s ranger station, only taller. And it was dead center in the plane’s path. “I don’t think he can see it!”

  “Bank right! Bank right!” Joe screamed out the window, trying to will the pilot to safety.

  Whoever was flying that plane had racked up a host of crimes and endangered our lives in his reckless pursuit of Aleksei’s garnets, but that didn’t mean he deserved to crash. We wanted him brought to justice, not hurt!

  We watched helplessly as the distance between the bush plane and the tower closed. I could tell the exact moment the pilot regained visibility—and it was one moment too late. The plane veered sharply to the right as the tower rushed toward it. I held my breath as the fuselage cleared the tower, and for a second I thought he was going to make it. An instant sooner, he would have.

  We could hear the impact of the left wing as it took out the fire tower and was ripped from the plane.

  17 FINAL DESCENT

  jOE

  I WATCHED IN HORROR AS THE one-winged plane burst out of the smoke from the wildfire and careened past our windshield, spewing its own trail of smoke behind it. The only thing I could do was follow it as it went down.

  “If he bails out, we can still try to rescue him!” Frank shouted.

  “Already on it,” I said, turning the helicopter south away from the wildfire to stay on the disabled plane’s tail.

  Frank hit redial on his phone and shouted into it. “There’s a bush plane going down south of the forest fire! Get rescue crews—Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” He looked down at his phone with a grim expression. “I lost the signal.”

  “The plane’s losing altitude fast. He’s—” As I looked ahead, the mountain forest below us started to give way to the first signs of civilization. “Oh no.”

  The plane was headed straight for Last Chance.

  The pilot must have had the same reaction I did, because the plane began struggling to climb. It was still going down fast, but all it would take was a little extra elevation to clear the village before it crashed.

  “You can do it!” Frank shouted. “Just a little more!”

  “I think it’s high enough! As long as he can maintain that trajectory, he can clear the town with room to spare.”

  “It’s all woods on the other side of town. At least no one will get hurt in the crash.” Frank paused, watching the smoke billow from the plane’s missing wing as the aircraft made its doomed final approach toward Last Chance. “I mean, no one else.”

  “The pilot!” I shouted, gawking out the windscreen as a lone figure leaped from the plane. “He bailed just in time!”

  Relief surged through me as I watched the parachute unfurl over Last Chance.

  I didn’t have to see the daredevil pilot’s face to know who it was. I recognized him instantly.

  He floated serenely toward the village as his pilotless plane soared out of control and crashed into the hills on the other side of town. The explosion was almost as bright as his hideously tacky, neon-pink Hawaiian shirt.

  18 LOOK OUT BELOW

  FRANK

  COMMANDER GONZO!” I SHOUTED AS Last Chance’s most eccentric bush pilot parachuted from the burning plane.

  How could I be so sure it was him? We’d have to follow him down to the ground to confirm it, but chances were high that a place this remote didn’t have more than one wildly reckless, bald-headed, ugly-floral-shirt-wearing pilot.

  When we’d flown with him on our last trip, he’d made his introduction by almost crashing a vintage convertible into the side of the Bear Foot Lodge, and then he nearly wrecked the plane before we even took off. Our short flight up to Black Bear Mountain with retired Air Force Flight Commander Gonzo “Doc” Gonzales had certainly been a memorable one. Before flying with Joe, I would have said it had been the most frightening flight of my life. It had also been one of the most entertaining. The guy was totally out there, and he’d been pretty lovable because of it. Apparently, he was also a dangerous gem thief.

  “So much for Gonzo being booked on an out-of-state charter,” I said.

  “Yeah, he was booked, all right,” Joe said bitterly. “By Cherry Fritwell.”

  “Looks like Steven is in the clear. We were suspicious of the w
rong out-of-town local.”

  We’d suspected Steven’s out-of-town alibi because he’d already tried to steal the demantoid garnets once before. Gonzo’s alibi hadn’t raised any red flags because he’d had no connection to the first crime. Sure, his flight safety record may have been suspect, but we’d never had reason to be suspicious of him. If anything, he’d been an ally. He’d even taken it on himself to fly back to Black Bear to rescue our stranded friends after we cracked the case.

  A jolt of disappointment stabbed me in the gut. Joe and I had worked a lot of cases, and we’d learned that sometimes a person you really like can turn out to be a villain. You never quite got used to it, though. It still hurt every time.

  The disappointment was replaced by a wave of relief when the empty plane exploded in the woods safely away from Last Chance. I could see Gonzo salute his lost plane as he floated toward the village.

  “I’m going to hover over Main Street and we can follow him if he runs,” Joe said. “I’ve got a few questions for Commander Gonzo.”

  “I think we’re going to get a chance to ask him,” I said.

  Gonzo had been trying to guide his parachute down toward the pasture next to the cemetery, but Mother Nature had other ideas. A gust of wind caught the chute just as he was approaching the church and carried him straight toward the steeple. He kicked wildly, but it didn’t do any good. His body cleared the steeple, but his chute didn’t. The chute snagged and ripped—but just far enough to leave Gonzo dangling a story off the ground over the church steps.

  Gonzo wasn’t running anywhere.

  By this time, Joe had the whole helicopter-flying thing down pretty smoothly, and he was able to land safely in the pasture next to the church.

  Joe and I stood in front of the little church a minute later, looking up at our dangling, neon-floral-clad perp. He had a cut over his eye, and his yellow-tinted aviator glasses were cockeyed. The skunky odor hadn’t worn off any since we’d last smelled him in the cave under Aleksei’s cabin.