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By Root 759 0

a senior man who ran a quiet county - this was less a matter of his competence than of the nature of his area, but police hierarchies tend to place stock in results, however obtained. The helicopter arrived on the barracks helicopter pad at a quarter to nine. Captain Ernest Joy and Trooper 1/c Freeland were waiting. Neither had taken a helicopter ride before, and both were a little nervous when they saw how small the aircraft was. They always look smaller close up, and smaller still on the inside. Mainly used for Medevac missions, the aircraft had a pilot and a paramedic, both of whom were gun-toting State Police officers in sporty flight suits that went well, they thought, with their shoulder holsters and aviator shades. The standard safety lecture took a total of ninety seconds, delivered so quickly as to be incomprehensible. The ground-pounders strapped in, and the helicopter spooled up. The pilot decided against jazzing up the ride. The senior man was a captain, after all, and cleaning vomit out of the back was a drag.

'Where to?' he asked over the intercom.

'Bloodsworth Island,' Captain Joy told him.

'Roger that,' the pilot replied as he thought an aviator ought, turning southeast and lowering the nose. It didn't take long.

The world looks different from above, and the first time people go up in helicopters the reaction is always the same. The takeoff, rather like jerking aloft in an amusement-park cable-car ride, is initially startling, but then the fascination begins. The world transformed itself before the eyes of both officers, and it was as though it all suddenly made sense. They could see the roads and the forms all laid out like a map. Freeland grasped it first. Knowing his territory as he did, he instantly saw that his mental picture of it was flawed; his idea of how things really were was not quite right. He was only a thousand feet above it, a linear distance his car traversed in seconds, but this perspective was new, and he immediately started learning from it.

'That's where I found her,' he told the Captain over the intercom.

'Long way from where we're going. Yoa think she walked that far?'

'No, sir.' But it wasn't that far from the water, was it? Perhaps two miles away, they saw the old dock of a farm up for sale, and that was less than five miles from where they were heading, scarcely two minutes' flying time. The Chesapeake Bay was a wide blue band now, under the morning haze. To the northwest was the large expanse of Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center, and they could both see aircraft flying there - a matter of concern to the pilot, who kept a wary eye out for low-flying aircraft. The Navy jocks liked to smoke in low.

'Straight ahead,' he said. The paramedic pointed so that the passengers would know where straight-ahead was.

'Sure looks different from up here,' Freeland said, a boy's wonder in his voice. 'I fish around there. From the surface it just looks like marshes.'

But it didn't now. From a thousand feet it looked like islands at first, connected by site and grass, but islands for all that. As they got closer, the islands took on regular shapes, lozengelike at first, and then with the fine lines of ships, grown over, surrounded by grass and reeds.

'Jeez, there's a bunch of 'em,' the pilot observed. He'd rarely flown down here, and then mostly at night with accident cases.

'World War One,' the Captain said. 'My father said they're leftovers from the war; the ones the Germans didn't get.'

'What exactly are we looking for?'

'Not sure, maybe a boat. We picked up a druggie yesterday,' the Captain explained. 'Said there was a lab in there, and three dead people.'

'No shit? A drug lab in there?'

'That's what the lady said,' Freeland confirmed, learning something else. As forbidding as it looked from the surface, there were channels in here. Probably a hell of a good place to go crabbing. From the deck of his fishing boat, it looked like one massive island, but not from up here. Wasn't that interesting?

'Got a flash down this way.' The paramedic pointed the pilot over to the right. 'Off