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.