Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  “Greetings and welcome,” intoned a smooth Euro-trash voice-over. “We’re so glad you could join us.”

  Coleman sat up. “Here we go.”

  “I’ve always believed that the best choices we make are informed choices, and so over the next few hours, as you consider whether or not to sponsor one or more passengers with your hard-earned money, you and I are going to get to know them.”

  “My God,” said Madeline. “They’re going to present this like it’s a telethon.”

  The black rectangle flickered—and then became a live video feed from the main cabin of Flight 816. Columns of terrified faces from every age and every race gawped back. The shaky camera zoomed in on a young woman in the third row. Hundreds of millions of people beheld her smooth, sun-brown skin, long-curled auburn hair, and vibrant green eyes. They scrutinized her simple, short-sleeved turquoise blouse. They noted that she wore no makeup. They fixated on the tiny mole on her neck, just to the left of her larynx, and made careful observation of the plain silver cross she wore on a plain silver necklace.

  They discussed these things on Twitter.

  “Say your name for the people,” suggested the voice.

  The young woman meekly muttered her response.

  “A little louder please, dear. The world needs to get to know you if they’re going to want to save you.”

  She sat up and repeated her name to the camera lens in an accent as southern and soft as a slice of red velvet cake: “Oletta Harmon.”

  The camera angled down to the fingers of her left hand, which were entangled among the thicker, furrier fingers of the man sitting beside her. Her silver ring tapped against his silver ring. The camera then traveled up. Hair-mopped forearm. Athletic biceps. Geometric face. Blue eyes. Blond hair.

  “Well,” said Coleman, “at least they’re not playing the pretty-white-people-in-jeopardy card.”

  The young man stood up straight and spoke in an accent nearly identical to his wife’s:

  “My name is Anson Harmon.”

  “Newlyweds?” the off-camera voice asked.

  Anson answered with a small, serious nod.

  “Is this your honeymoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “And whose idea was it to go to Cozumel?”

  The young man’s flat face creased with tension. “Mine.”

  The camera zipped back to Oletta and focused on her big Irish eyes, so brimming with sad love.

  “Any regrets, Mrs. Harmon?”

  Madeline shook her head in disgust. Fortunately, she had just received the perfect email from the Justice Department to distract her. She opened the email’s attachment and quickly read the preliminary report she’d requested on the son of a bitch in custody down in Atlanta.

  Officer slain…

  Suspect arrested at the airport…

  FBI sent a translator to assist…

  Holy fuck.

  Madeline had to read the sentence again to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks, but sure enough, there in paragraph six was the name of her ex—in all-caps even.

  Madeline read on about The Oprichnina and scrolled down to the addendum, which offered up all intelligence the Justice Department currently had on the hoary Russian gulag—which amounted to not a whole lot. That was really the territory of the CIA, and Madeline suspected that there was, in a room not unlike the Truman Building’s 5E, a gathering of spooks discussing just how much of that territory they were willing to reveal to their brothers and sisters at the FBI.

  Bellum Vellum had no such quandary.

  What was it, an eight-hour difference between Washington DC and Grozny? Madeline shot out an email to the unfriendly but competent fellow who oversaw company operations in that neck of the woods. She expected a reply within the hour.

  Or she could get the information she needed even sooner if she called up Xana…

  No.

  Some doors, no matter how tempting the destination behind them, needed to remain shut. Madeline reminded herself that temptation itself was a warning. She would not buckle. Sure, time spent with Xana, even on the phone, was guaranteed to be exciting and shocking and unpredictable—but so was an active volcano. Or—even worse—what if those months in rehab had extinguished Xana’s glorious fires? Madeline wasn’t sure she could handle that kind of heartbreak.

  On the monitor, a shrunken man in his golden years was begging for his life. A chyron underneath his face identified him in Times New Roman as Erskine Faulks.

  “Please…please…I have seven children…three grandchildren…I have been a good Christian my whole life…I don’t want to die…”

  “Few of us want to die,” the terrorist leader, off-camera, answered. “But we’ve all got to go sometime. Convince the people at home why your life is more valuable than that of the Harmons. You’re in your eighties. They’re newlyweds. Why should a person donate his or her money to save you when that money could be donated to save a loving young couple at the dawn of their happy life?”

  To emphasize the point, the camera angled back to Oletta and Anson, who were still holding hands.

  “I…well…they don’t have to choose!” the old man wept. “They can give a little for them and a little for me too!”

  “I’m not sure if that’s the best advice. A man who tries to save everyone saves no one.”

  Madeline’s stomach roiled.

  Just in time, Barrett Coleman looked up from his computer and shared some good news:

  “We’ve got them.”

  She looked over at him with skepticism.

  “The NCTC have traced a wire transfer of one dollar to a bank account in—wait for it—Banco de Credito y Financiero de Cuba. Time for the State Department to make a phone call to the president of Banco de Credito y Financiero de Cuba, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know.” She frowned. “These bastards have been very clever so far.”

  “You think it’s a false flag?”

  “I think it’s worth investigating but I also think…yeah, I think it’s too damn convenient.”

  Coleman picked up a phone. “Madeline, you got to learn to be less cynical.”

  As he initiated the process of tracking down the bank president, Madeline got up and stretched her back. Her legs still felt wiry from her hike. She traveled out into the empty hallway and found the nearest window. Nobody enjoyed the hot, swampy air of Washington, DC, in July, but oh, the view could be scrumptious. The cherry blossoms along the Mall shimmered with pink promise under the midday sun. Farther on, the Capitol Building held fast atop its prepossessing hill; no matter the light, no matter the temperature, no matter the season, marble would always be what it was, never mistaken for anything else, not even by a poet.

  Marble was implacable.

  Reliable. Comforting.

  Yes.

  “Madeline?”

  She turned about. Coleman stood a few feet away. Once again, he had that good-news glint in his eye.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “In five minutes, none of your worries will matter. Operation Orange Rescue is a go. Time for these Chechen cocksuckers to feel the wrath, courtesy of Delta Force.”

  Chapter 35

  Hellhound-2, up in the trees with Hellhound-1, had the dual jobs of surveillance and time minding. Over the past five minutes, he dutifully bounced his attention from their tropical surroundings, which were hazy with mealybugs and whiteflies, to the digital numbers on his wristwatch as they flitted backward, backward, backward…

  0:00.

  “Go,” he whispered into his headset.

  As there was no telling how dark the interior of the barn might be, Hellhound-8 and Hellhound-7 activated their night-vision goggles, rendering their tunnels a shiny sea green. The next part was easy: All they had to do was stand, and their hands and shoulders—not to mention the submachine guns held firmly in their hands—would poke up through the dirt and they would be inside the barn.

  It all rather reminded Hel
lhound-7 of Groundhog Day. He had always been fond of Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day was his older sister’s birthday, and ever since they had both become adults, he’d made sure, every year on February 2, to send her two gifts: one for sentiment—perhaps a bottle of perfume he knew she liked—and one for humor. The humorous gift, naturally, was themed around a groundhog. One year it was an ice cream cake shaped to resemble a groundhog. One year it was a copy of the film Caddyshack. And she would moan about his teasing but he knew she liked it. Sometimes finding the proper gag gift for his sister’s birthday was the most taxing accomplishment of his year, and for a Delta Force operator, that was saying something. And so, yes, while most of his mind was trained on the task at hand, a small portion of his thoughts, the portion he compartmentalized during exercises like this, dwelled fondly on the many birthdays of his older sister. He had already picked out next year’s gag gift. He had found it at a flea market in Manitoba: a handwoven red sweater with a chipper-grinned groundhog in brown-and-black yarn across its front.

  This was the last image buzzing through Hellhound-7’s brain when he crested over the dirt and some fucker inside the barn promptly shot him twice in the head. Fragments of his skull and brain were kicked to the soil by the bullets, perhaps the very same fragments that had been ruminating about the sweater. His killer, meanwhile, tugged his limp body out of the hole and laid it down on the hot flat dirt.

  Hellhound-8 fared slightly better—but only by happenstance. As he was about to stand, his night-vision goggles malfunctioned, the right side flickering for a few beats before solidifying into clear monochrome. Those few beats afforded him the opportunity to hear the two gunshots that felled his fellow reconnoiterer, and so instead of fully emerging from the tunnel and receiving the same double-tap treatment to his brainpan, Hellhound-8 remained crouched, waited another beat, and then sprayed up through the dirt a dozen 9mm rounds from his MP5.

  Presumably a twelve-round spray of iron would scare off his personal topside assassin. Either way, for the sake of the hostages, the mission had to carry on. 8 brushed the fallen soil from his goggles and surfaced into the barn.

  He leveled his back with the dirt floor and swept his weapon forward. Because all of the passengers’ windows had been shaded and the main door had been shut, the only ambient light inside the barn came from the airplane cockpit. 8’s night-vision goggles remained a godsend—providing they didn’t malfunction again. He spied a middle-aged Middle Eastern man in a T-shirt and jeans sprawled thirty inches to his left. The man was gasping wetly. His chest was a rainbow of bullet holes. 8 quickly added another to the man’s right temple but remained on guard. The fucker who had capped 7 was still out here somewhere.

  What little cover existed here existed either behind one of the airplane’s forty-inch wheels or on top of one of its wings—which would have been especially unfortunate as 8 was underneath one of the wings, specifically starboard. He rolled onto his stomach and pawed at the trigger of his MP5.

  Thanks to a tiny camera attached to his night-vision goggles, the boys outside knew exactly what was going down in here. While they weighed their options, Hellhound-8 weighed his own.

  The facts were these:

  1. Even with the engines on a low hum, the weapons-wielding folks inside the airplane must have heard all this gunfire, and yet none of them had come out to investigate.

  2. This indicated patience, and patience didn’t lend itself to the kind of rash and reckless behavior that 8 really could have used right about now; after all, rashness and recklessness led to mistakes.

  3. This also indicated a confidence that whatever problems—if any—were occurring outside the airplane could be handled by those fuckers positioned outside the airplane.

  Hellhound-1 must have come to the same conclusion, because Hellhound-8 heard in his earpiece the team leader deliver the order:

  “Abort.”

  So be it.

  8 readied himself for a quick scurry back into the tunnel—but then caught another glimpse of his comrade-in-arms lying out in the open on the other side of the barn. He and his team would retrieve the corpse, no question about it, and rain hellfire on those who dared take the life of an American soldier, but for 8 to attempt to retrieve the body now would have been suicide. On the other hand, in the meantime, if he snatched the corpse of the motherfucker he’d killed, maybe that would provide the terrorists with enough incentive to break cover and come after him. As soon as they emerged from the barn, they would be annihilated, and the mission could proceed.

  “Package arriving from the north,” he muttered into his mike. For 8 to maintain optimal sight lines inside the barn, he needed to shove the corpse into the hole first and then follow it down. He grabbed the body by an arm and tugged the deadweight toward the tunnel.

  A bullet zapped 8 in the left shoulder. His clavicle shattered into a dozen puzzle pieces. Only then did he see the asshole by the airplane wheel. 8 fired back a short burst of rounds but his aim was way off, although he did manage to poke a few holes in the wall of the barn.

  The corpse was less than a foot from the hole. One good shove and it would slide in, headfirst. If his message had been received, someone was already in the tunnel to take the body.

  Another bullet splattered dirt an inch away from 8’s right boot. He was quickly regretting having implemented this plan. One saving grace of it all was the white earpiece he spotted in the corpse’s right ear. No wonder the terrorists were so eager to stop 8 from snatching the body. They wouldn’t be able to communicate as effectively if that transmitter fell into enemy hands.

  The corpse’s head leaned into the tunnel. This action caused its mouth to open wide. 8 shifted a hand under the body’s right arm to achieve leverage and as he succeeded, a pellet of hot lead punched him in the sternum and knocked the wind clean out of his lungs. His Kevlar vest kept the bullet from actually entering his lungs, but it sure didn’t protect him against its brute force.

  8 tasted blood.

  He must’ve bitten his tongue.

  He tried to sit up but couldn’t.

  He couldn’t see or hear his opponent but that didn’t matter. Only the mission mattered.

  If he couldn’t sit up, if he couldn’t use his arms to push the body into the hole, then goddamn it, he’d use his legs. He lifted his left boot and brought it down between the corpse’s thighs and with a modicum of satisfaction kicked his foot back into the body’s groin as hard as he could.

  The body slid into the hole.

  8 flashed a bloody grin.

  The grin remained on his lips even after the next bullet took his life.

  Chapter 36

  As soon as they heard the first gunshots, the passengers crouched down in their seats and covered their heads. Those in window seats leaned away from the windows. And of course came the screaming. Even after everything they had been through so far today, they still had enough shock left inside to scream.

  Of course, not everyone screamed in terror. One gentleman near the back of the plane cried out: “Place your seats in their upright positions, ’cause the cavalry’s arrived!”

  And not everyone flinched or crouched. Two passengers who didn’t move at all were Sean and Marie Walder, although every now and then the muscles of their eyelids fluttered. Larry sat beside his son and held his hand. The boy’s flesh was wet like mud.

  Bislan had been interviewing a bruise-eyed sorority girl when the gunshots began. He simply turned the camera on himself and cheerily informed the viewing audience: “Stay tuned! We’ll be right back.”

  He turned off the camera, waited for a break in the gunfire, and then took to the intercom.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he calmly said, “I would like to take this opportunity to remind you for your own safety to keep the blinds for your windows down. This interruption should be over momentarily.”

  That said, Bislan disappeared behind the business-class divider. Another burst of gunfire erupted outside, and this time a few of the passe
ngers cheered. The cavalry had arrived, and none too soon. Still, none of the terrorists appeared especially perturbed by this most recent development. Marie and Sean’s burly handlers weren’t fidgeting. Murad and Edil were maintaining their posts without batting an eye.

  And then: one more gunshot.

  And then: soft weeping.

  What did it mean? Hypotheses spread like plague. Kip and Kenneth Wood reached for their window shade, but their older brother Davey managed to slap them away before they could succeed in raising it. Other passengers had returned to their cell phones. Larry couldn’t help but wonder how much juice those gadgets had left in them before their batteries ran dry. His own phone was still in Bislan’s possession.

  Speaking of Bislan, here he came, back from business class, back from dealing with the crisis outside, ever-placid, ever-cheerful.

  “Ladies and gentlemen…”

  The murmuring quieted.

  “I apologize for any inconvenience this interruption in our proceedings may have caused. Let me assure you that although the video accompaniment has been temporarily halted, the website itself has remained active and the world has been showing its love to you in the form of charitable contributions. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the sizes of our wallets were proportional to the sizes to the hearts?”

  Larry had never wanted to punch anyone in the face so fiercely as he did in that moment.

  “As you may have deduced,” continued Bislan, “an attempt was made just now to end our time together. Such an attempt was inevitable, as was its likelihood of failure. That said, this is a Newtonian universe and so a rude and violent action demands a reaction equally rude and violent.”

  On cue, Murad and Edil ratcheted their weapons.

  “I don’t like it any more than you,” Bislan added, “but the physics can’t be denied.”

  He pointed to Row 12, Seat E, and Edil marched forward and yanked the woman with the bottle-black curls to her feet.

  “What’s your name, love?” asked Bislan.