Her legs were wobbly, and she was very grateful for the instinctive courtesy that kept him standing there, waiting politely as she gathered herself, found her balance. It wasn’t the long ride in the helicopter that had made her so shaky; she was used to travelling by this mode of transport, and had been too dazed to even notice their route, the frequent stops for refuelling on the journey from Oukaïmeden. They had crossed Morocco, landing briefly in Algiers, then buzzed over the Mediterranean to Cagliari, right at the base of Sardinia; from there it had been another jump over the bright blue Tyrrhenian Sea to their final destination. If Belinda had looked out of the small window of the military helicopter during the journey, she would have seen nothing below her at all; no islands, and barely any boats apart from the occasional ferry taking passengers from Naples to Corsica. In the summer, there would have been many more ferries, carrying tourists from one beautiful Italian island to another; but it was the beginning of March, far too early in the year for sunbathing or swimming, and the boats were on their winter schedule, the islands inhabited only by their year-long residents, a fraction of the people who would swarm to them in the summer.
