THE WIND TOSSED the Jenny around like she was a handful of dice in an all-in craps game. Which she was, actually. Hitch braced his hands against the heaving stick. His fingers had gone numb after the first fifteen minutes. He was only hanging on now because his fingers were too cold to unfurl.

Rain, hard as gravel, peppered him from all directions. The wind snarled and cursed in his ears, drowning out even the roar of the engine. The only thing letting him know the Hisso was still running was the thrum rattling up through the stick and the seat of his pants. That was pretty numb too, come to think of it.

The Jenny was trying her heart out, no question. But she couldn’t take much more of this, even if he could keep his fingers curled around the stick. Sooner or later, the turbulence would break the airplane—or he’d just plumb lose track of which dark blot was the sky and which was the ground.

Every now and then, Jael would raise her arm and wave the white scarf Earl had given her. She’d motion him one way or the other. But everywhere they turned, darkness surrounded them. Felt a whole lot like flying in big goldurn circles.

His heart beat so fast it was one great lump of pressure in his throat. C’mon, c’mon, he prayed. This couldn’t all have been for nothing. When a man made up his mind to risk his life in a one-chance-in-a-million venture, he was resigned to dying. But seemed like he was at least owed one chance.

Up ahead, Jael’s scarf flashed, a tiny blur of not-quite-black in the darkness.

Which way this time? He leaned forward and squinted.

The Jenny rocked, but not from the wind. Jael must be wiggling around.

He fought the stick. “Hold still, durn it.”

More wiggling. The scarf flashed again, followed by three more pinpoints of pale—her face and her waving hands.

Oh, for crying out loud… Was she really standing up again, in the middle of this?

She waved wildly. The faintest buzz of her screamed words wafted back to him.

“_What?_” he shouted.

And then he saw it too: a flash of light, almost like a star. Except there were no stars tonight. Just the infernal darkness of this hammering wind.

Schturming. It had to be. Nothing else would have a light.

He eased back on the stick and lifted the Jenny’s nose. “Come on, sweetheart. Just do this one last thing for me.”

She did it, and she didn’t even so much as balk. With a mighty roar of that blessed Hispano-Suiza, she lifted her snub nose into the storm and chewed right on through the wind. She might be a saucy little tramp most of the time. But tonight she was a warrioress, a Valkyrie.

The light flickered. For an instant, he half thought both he and Jael had only imagined it.

Then it shone out once more, hard and dazzling. It grew brighter and bigger. And then—the great bulk of _Schturming_’s white envelope loomed from out of the clouds.

He squeezed the stick until red-hot pinpricks pierced the cold in his finger bones. He nudged the Jenny down, below the envelope, toward the cargo bay in the bow end.

Just please let the doors be open.

He’d landed there once before. He could do it again. The glimpse he’d gotten inside the ship had showed a long corridor that seemed to stretch all the way through the entirety of the bottom level. It was wide enough—barely—for the Jenny, and it just might be long enough to get her stopped without crashing back out through the other end.

More light—a great square hole of it—flashed, not so bright as the smaller one. He almost forgot to breathe.

The doors were open. And… full of men. White faces turned up in their direction. Half a dozen lined the opening, watching the storm, no doubt.

So be it. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. He lined the Jenny up with the doors and killed the engine. Too much momentum and he wouldn’t be able to hold her steady enough to thread the needle down the length of the bay.

The men in the doorway scattered.

Just as well, since hitting them would have ripped up the wings and the landing gear good and plenty.

The wind clobbered the plane from above, and she plunged straight down, losing altitude. Without the thrust to keep her speed up, she would pitch into a dive any second now.

Just a few more feet. That’s all they needed. “C’mon!”

Her windmilling propeller entered the bay, and for four long seconds, she floated inside the dirigible. Along the ship’s walls, its supplies—boxes, barrels, crates—protruded from the fastenings that kept them from rolling about in the wind and the turbulence. The Jenny’s wingtips had no more than two feet of clearance on either side.

The wheels bumped the floor, and her tail started to sag. Her wheels bounced up, then came back down to skid. A few inches, just a few inches more—and then, bwack! The tail thumped down.

He dared a look over his shoulder.

The howling black hole of the storm engulfed his vision, only fifty or sixty feet back. By the time he looked back around, the rest of his body was already telling him the Jenny had come to a complete stop. A bare thirty feet separated the propeller from the dividing wall in front of them.

All the air left his body in a great whoosh. A wing and a prayer. That’s what that had been. Literally.

Adrenaline and cold shook through his hands, but he made himself yank his safety belt loose and find the revolver in his pocket. Zlo’s men had all either fled for their lives or thrown themselves face down on the floor. Judging from the blood on one’s face and the way his mouth was hanging open, he’d clunked his head on something.

The others started looking up and shouting.

“Oni zdes!”

Somebody ran to a speaking tube on the back wall and started hollering into it. “Eto pilot!”

This was where he and Jael advanced from dying in the storm to dying at the hands of indignant pirates. Great.

Hitch stood in the cockpit, braced the revolver in both hands, and cracked off two shots.

The baddies hit the deck again.

“Jael!” he shouted. “Can you move?”

She wallowed around in the front cockpit. This close to the dawsedometer, her pain level had to be near crippling.

He took another shot and maybe winged a guy, judging from the pained cry. He swung out of his cockpit on the far side of the plane and reached for Jael with both hands. “C’mon!”