by Joshua Corin
“Larry, this is all very helpful. Before we continue, though, I’m going to give you my number so you can call me back at any time. Are you ready?” He then proceeded to give his phone number and, for good measure, he repeated it. “All right. Now, Larry, I have a very unusual request to make and I need you to be on board with this.”
Did he have a choice? Had he ever?
“Where is the leader now, Larry?”
“The flight deck.”
“And where are you?”
“As far away from him as possible. I’m with my wife and kid. We’re in the main cabin.”
“You mentioned that they were drugged. Do they have someone looking after them if you leave for a few minutes?”
“And go where?” Larry looked around. “There aren’t many options here, Jim.”
“I need you to go back to the flight deck.”
Larry’s blood chilled subzero. “Why?”
“I’ll be candid. We need to establish a bridge of communication with them and then we need to use that bridge to acquire vital intelligence on the situation. Only then will we be able to act in a way that allows for the best possible outcome.”
“In other words, you want to know what their demands are.”
“There are a lot of variables. But I promise you, Larry, he’s expecting this phone call. Do you have any idea how many people on that plane have dialed nine-one-one just in the time we’ve been talking?”
“But why? I mean, why are they allowing us to do this? People are taking pictures of the hijackers with their phones and it’s not like they’re wearing masks. This is all very strange. And then there’s Marie and Sean…I swear to you, I didn’t have a choice…I did what I did because of them and if it meant making sure they were safe, I’d do it again…”
“I know, Larry. No one is accusing you of anything. And as for your other questions, the sooner we get those answers, the sooner we’ll be able to put our rescue operations in play, but the only person who can give us those answers is in the flight deck and the only person who can get him speaking to us right now is you.”
The curtain separating the main cabin from business class wasn’t drawn. Larry had an unobstructed view of the flight deck. The door was ajar.
The carpet by the door remained smeared with Reese’s blood.
“There’s another reason you’re the one I called, Larry. Like it or not, for all these people on board this plane, you are their captain.”
Yes. Larry shut his eyes. The bruise on his forehead spat daggers into his skull. If only he could curl up with Marie and with Sean and go to sleep. Such a simple request, Lord. Surely within Your abilities to grant. Please.
He opened his eyes. The cabin blurred into focus. Larry kissed Marie on the tip of her nose and strode toward the front of the plane. He passed quilts of faces, corduroy brows and button eyes and mouths that were not mouths but moth-eaten holes. He squared his shoulders and straightened his uniform.
One of the passengers, an older woman, snagged him by the wrist.
“Captain, what’s going on?” she pleaded.
Larry sighed, shook his head, and continued on toward the front. Bearded Edil held up a hand to stop Larry’s approach. Bespectacled Murad watched wary-eyed from the cabin’s aft.
“I need to see the man in charge,” Larry said.
“You need sit down,” Edil answered.
Well, at least he spoke a little English. That would make Larry’s next bit easier. He held up his phone and said:
“It’s for him.”
Edil frowned and then leaned back and exchanged words with his two friends in business class, Alvi and Ansor. Alvi was sliding a thick lithium-ion battery into the butt of a digital camcorder while Ansor was preoccupied with some activity on his laptop. Both of them engaged Edil in what appeared to be, from body language alone, the shrugs and smirks of humorous banter. What they said, though, seemed to do the trick, and Edil relaxed his aggressive stance and was about to wave Larry onward to the flight deck when, with the flinging of a paperback novel at Murad, retired police officer Drake Coxcomb initiated his insurrection.
Chapter 23
Drake couldn’t believe his luck. The captain and his phone were actually blocking the bearded terrorist’s line of sight. Could there possibly have been a better opportunity? Drake glanced at the Llewelyns, his comrades-in-arms.
He saw the excitement in their faces.
Good.
Borrowing the chunky Stephen King novel his wife, Rhonda, had purchased at the airport bookstore and envisioning himself as one of the mighty discus throwers he and Rhonda had witnessed live during the ’96 Atlanta Olympics, Drake catapulted the paperback toward Murad.
The paperback flapped fifteen feet through the air. It struck Murad square in the face, breaking both the bridge of his nose and the bridge of his glasses. One half of his glasses slid to the carpet. The other remained stubbornly fixed in place. By the time Murad was touching a finger to the blood draining down his nostrils, the father-and-son team of Archie and Mickey Llewelyn were out of their seats and barreling down the aisle toward him like a pair of unchained bulls.
Archie had never before been in a fight—unless one counted the knock-down-drag-out verbal beatings he and his late wife had often traded over the dinner table. And what effect did this have on their son? When he was a child, Mickey had tried to stop them and then fled the room in tears. By his ninth birthday, the tears stopped. By his tenth birthday, he was able to stay at the table through the duration of the row. By his twelfth birthday, he was supplying color commentary. He could be quite creative.
What wonderful words then must have been tickling his tongue as he beheld his father lower into a running crouch and tackle that terrorist son of a bitch into the beverage cart. Aluminum cans rained down on the two scufflers. Murad struggled for his Heckler & Koch submachine gun but by now Archie’s son had joined the fray and had snatched the weapon into his own hands.
Mickey had never held a gun before.
Meanwhile, Drake climbed on top of his seat and, careful not to hit the ceiling, shouted in his most authoritative voice: “Let’s do this, people! Let’s take them down!” Not quite the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, but enough to motivate the gaggle of the sorority girls to climb over the seats like lionesses and pounce on the two brutes in the exit rows. They used their smartphones and their in-flight magazines as bludgeons.
Lucy Snow took command of the insurgency at the front of the cabin, rallying the business-class passengers against Emil. The bearded thug shoved Larry out of the way and readied his H&K for Lucy and her crew’s frontal assault.
“Stop!” he bellowed. “Sit!”
They stopped.
But they did not sit.
Back at the tail, Archie was delivering his right fist knuckles-first against Murad’s already-broken nose. The small bones crackled with each blow. Somewhere on the carpet, one of Murad’s lenses shattered. Murad retaliated by clobbering Archie in the eye with a can of Coke. It wasn’t enough force to push Archie away, but it was enough to cause the Aussie engineer to wince and buy Murad a few precious seconds of respite with which to cough up some of the blood that was draining down his throat and spit it into his opponent’s eyes.
That was when Mickey stepped forward with the gun. His intention was to close the distance between himself and his target. His intention was to intimidate his target into a cowering ball of quivering terror.
He had the best intentions.
However.
Years at The Oprichnina had bestowed upon Murad a close, personal relationship with his primal self, and his primal self only understood survival. His primal self wasn’t about to show weakness. His fingers blindly felt the carpet for one of the many shards his eyeglass lens had shattered into, located a nice sharp chunk, and then without hesitation drove the wedge of thick glass into Mickey’s right anterior talofibular ligament, splitting the fibrous tissue connecting the front of the ankle to the front of the
foot.
Mickey cried out and fell to his knees.
Murad snatched the gun, toggled the firing mode to single-shot, and pulled the trigger twice.
One of the 9mm bullets passed through Mickey’s left lung, pierced the plastic door of an overhead bin, and planted itself inside a passenger’s suitcase.
The other 9mm bullet stayed put in the lung.
Screams burst like thunderclouds throughout the cabin, though even at their loudest they couldn’t match the earsplitting rapport of the H&K MP5. The screams and the gunfire interrupted any progress the coeds had achieved in their pile-on beatings of the exit row thugs, Zakayev and Zurebny, who used the momentary distraction to their advantage. They twisted their assailants’ fingers out of joint and snapped their forearms as if they were dried spaghetti. Now they didn’t have to shove the young women away; with broken fingers and arms, the young women were recoiling on their own. Drake moved to help them, and Zakayev stepped into the aisle to block him. His meaty palms were each the size of Drake’s face. The college girls had given him a pair of black eyes, but they just made him appear even more menacing.
Then came a third gunshot from the tail of the plane. Drake whipped his head around and watched Archie, soaked to the stomach with his own blood, lie down on the carpet beside his gasping son. Drake moved to help them and Zakayev wrapped a hand around the ex-cop’s left biceps.
“No,” said the Chechen.
Drake wavered. He knew there wasn’t much he could have done for the men, but they didn’t have to die alone. Then he caught the gaze of his wife, a woman who could summarize whole novels with a glance, a woman he had known for forty-six years, who had spent many of those years wondering if that day would be the day his death on the job turned her into a widow—no, Drake couldn’t do that to his Rhonda.
He took his seat.
By now so had Lucy and her crew.
Old Erskine Faulks whimpered. He was not the only one. But at last some semblance of decorum had returned to Flight 816. Murad resumed his post by the rear lavatory, as if the dying Aussies weren’t lying at his feet, their breathing ribbons of wet air the only sounds to be heard in this long, hot room of people.
That is, until Bislan emerged from the flight deck, picked up the front speaker, and announced in his crisp accent:
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Please sit back and relax while I go over our itinerary for the rest of the day.”
Chapter 24
Bislan continued:
“As you all by now are well aware, we are not, I’m afraid, on our way to Mexico. I have never been to the Yucatán myself, but I have heard very good things. Personally, I would have chosen to visit during the winter months, but that’s just me.”
Maryann and Deja were tending to the injured coeds as best they could, but without access to the painkillers and ice-packs from the kitchen, the best medical support they could provide was to elevate broken bones and remind those with bloodied noses to lean forward so as not to choke.
One of the coeds, smaller than the rest, had blood leaking from the corner of her right eye. She dabbed at it with her sleeve and tried not to cry. She knew the salt in her tears would have been like fire.
She tried not to cry. She failed.
“Have you used this time to phone your loved ones to reassure them you are well? Good. Family is important, and not only in times of crisis. Family is the one of the two gifts we all receive when we are born. Family and life. Only a fool squanders his gifts.”
Rhonda considered rising to aid the Australians in the back, but one look from Murad cautioned her to stay seated. Drake, meanwhile, had to bite down on his lower lip to keep from screaming. To have been so close to freedom and then to have it snatched away? To have two brave men down and be utterly helpless to save them?
Rhonda patted him on the back of his hand to soothe his restlessness.
Drake didn’t want to be soothed.
Drake wanted revenge.
“You see,” said Bislan, “it’s all about numbers. Everything is, really. I denied this fact for most of my life, but it’s true, and I’m here to reveal that truth to you. Some of you will hate me for it. Some of you will thank me. In mathematics, this is known as an additive inverse, and in a universe that favors equilibrium, additive inverses are as inevitable as equilibrium itself. And don’t we all loathe equilibrium! Equilibrium implies fairness and we’ll have none of that, thank you very much. It’s why communism will only be a theory. Fairness is an anathema to the human spirit and to illustrate this truth, very soon you are all going to be the focus of a rather remarkable social experiment.”
Experiment? Davey Wood’s nitwit younger brothers, Kenneth and Kip, perked up in their large seats. The round-faced adolescent, on the other hand, had a more realistic understanding of just how unbelievably fucked up their situation was. Davey seethed with aggravation. He hated his face, he hated his brothers, he hated this trip their parents had forced them to take, he hated the fact that their parents had forced them to take this trip on a separate plane from theirs to take advantage of some kind of “package deal,” and he especially-especially-especially hated the fact that he had been too cowardly to rise up during this insurgency, that he had proved his high school tormentors right, that someone like him would never end up with someone like, say, that screen-melting stewardess Addison…not unless he did something heroic. If he did, maybe he could impress her. He could impress everybody.
“We all love experiments and why not? They are the purest form of expression we have for our irrepressible curiosity. And what are experiments other than a type of competition we engage in against ourselves? Maybe that’s why I am so fond of your country. Is it any wonder that the Great Experiment in Self-Government is also the breeding ground of dog-eat-dog competition? Enough of my philosophizing. You want to know the conditions of the experiment. But let’s put it into more American terms. Let’s not call it an experiment. Let’s call it a game.”
Addison didn’t want to know the conditions of the experiment or the game or anything. She wanted to soak in a bubble bath scented with lavender while Wynonna Judd’s greatest hits sang from her stereo. If she knew anything, Addison knew this: Nothing bad could happen to a person in a bubble bath, especially not while fortified by Wynonna Judd’s mighty voice. In her mind, as she sat there in her seat on this plane, Addison played and replayed her and her two sisters’ favorite Wynonna song, “Tell Me Why.” In her mind, she and her sisters were children playing dress-up in their mommy’s diaphanous, earth-tone dresses and mile-long shoes, and she and her sisters were singing harmony.
While the bleeding Aussies were screaming out for help.
Addison shut her eyes. She inched up the volume on her memory-stereo and with her mother’s tan dress lolling off her prepubescent body she lowered herself into the bath.
“All games have players, pieces, stakes, and rules. Ladies and gentlemen, the good news is you don’t need to know the rules of the game and that’s because the bad news is that you’re the pieces. There will be thousands of players. And I think you’ve already figured out the stakes.”
Francisco still had one foot in his nervous breakdown, but enough of him had returned that he knew just the thing to counter the drone of this madman’s words and, at the same time, perhaps add a modicum of comfort to those who were suffering. He spoke some of the first words he ever was taught: Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Others around him joined in, drowning out the warble from the intercom. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
“At precisely twelve o’clock, the game will begin. Call your friends. Call your family. Call the news media. Blog about it. Post on Twitter. Let everyone know. At precisely twelve o’clock, anyone who wishes—anyone in the world—may access a website we have set up to bid on any of you. They will be able to pledge any amount of money using any major credit card. They can bid as many times as they’d prefer on as many of you as th
ey’d like. The game will last for three hours. Those of you who, after the three hours have passed, have accrued the top five highest bids will be set free. Those of you in the bottom five will be executed. It all begins in less than an hour.
“I wish I could give you some food or drink in the interim, but I’m afraid that, for the sake of logistics, you will have to remain hungry and thirsty for a little while longer. Don’t worry, though. Neither I nor any of my men will eat or drink in front of you. We want your stay here to be as pleasant as possible. Anyway, I shall leave you to your phone calls.”
Archie shivered. Since when had it become so chilly on this airplane? When he and Mickey had left Sydney, the temperature there had been just under fifteen degrees Fahrenheit—not cold, true, but far from warm. July in Sydney meant the nadir of winter. But they were now in the American South (or thereabouts). Where was the god-awful humidity they had read all about in their travel guides? Where was the broiler-oven sunshine? Archie shivered again.
Mickey asked him something, but his words were pebbles sinking into the sea. Archie’s son. Such a solid young man he had turned out to be…though, oh, what a marble-mouthed terror the boy had been as a toddler! Like that one time, God, when Mickey, who couldn’t have been more than two years old, spilled Vegemite all over Archie’s architectural blueprints and then smeared shapes along the crisp paper with his tiny fingertips, and all Archie had done was leave the room to take a piss. And how the child had been so proud of his handiwork, holding it up for his dad’s approval when the man had reentered the den! Archie’s lips curled up at the memory. Even catastrophe could be amusing in retrospect. Surely one day he and Mickey would sit in Paul’s Bar down by the water. They’d have a pitcher of Coopers Pale Ale on the table between them and they’d recount the time the two of them were on a plane that got hijacked and even though they’d both been frightened, they knew that fear was nothing but bluster and bluff and together, Father and Son, they’d taken down one of the terrorists—there was no denying the facts—and now here they sat, smiling and laughing and downing some beer, but Christ on a cross, this beer was so cold, so cold. So cold.