Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  Eventually, Larry had backed the plane up the trail as far as it would go.

  Engines spooled and stable? Check.

  Flaps set? Check.

  Throttles at twelve o’clock? Check.

  Heart in mouth? Check.

  Larry throttled forward.

  The airplane advanced toward the barn. Five thousand feet to go and each one passing by faster and faster. Each bump rattled the altimeter, but not Larry’s nerves. The bumps in the road were the least of his concerns. He just wanted to keep his plane from crashing at ninety miles per hour into the trees.

  They passed the halfway point. The barn was coming up very quickly now. Larry could make out the bloodstains on the dirt.

  Faster, faster, faster. Oranges blurred past the side windows. They were six seconds from reaching the barn. Larry rubbed his right hand dry against his slacks and reached for the yoke. Nothing less than perfect timing would suffice.

  Three seconds until the barn.

  Murad glanced over at him and said something in Chechen, something inquisitive, something that probably translated to: “Are we going to take off?”

  Not yet. They needed a bit more runway, a bit more speed.

  The Airbus entered the barn. Sunlight vanished in a wink. Ahead of them, outside the eastern side of the barn, were columns and columns of trees, acres deep, impenetrable.

  Larry released the throttle. Tugged back on the yoke ten degrees. Inside the barn, the airplane’s nose rose off the ground like Atlas waking up.

  The trees were tall. The barn was taller.

  The airplane angled toward the clouds. Its attitude remained flat to the horizon. Its tail, the Pegasus insignia proudly displayed along its length, cleared the top of the barn’s threshold by twenty-one inches.

  They climbed into the sky.

  Murad goggled the rearview screen with astonishment.

  “Thanks for the help, asshole,” said Larry.

  Chapter 54

  Murray Bannerman, anxious flier that he was, had himself bent in crash position well before the plane took off. His precaution proved epidemic, and by the time the airplane had begun its acceleration toward the barn, 150 of the 168 remaining passengers aboard Flight 814 had their heads between their knees.

  So did all of the flight attendants.

  Among those who didn’t were stoic Frank Brown. He didn’t see the point. He could do the physics in his head. If they did crash, little comfort would be provided by himself first curling into a ball. Curling into a ball like that, as far as he could surmise, increased the probability that one might jerk forward at an awkward angle, smack one’s bent neck against the folded tray table, and instantaneously break a vertebra.

  Erskine Faulks didn’t assume a crash position because he couldn’t. He had been sitting for nine hours. His decades-worn tendons were already screaming. Instead, as the airplane accelerated toward the barn, Erskine did take advantage of the one escape afforded him by his age: He turned off his hearing aid.

  Small comforts were always better than none.

  But once the plane raced toward the barn and rose into the air without incident, and only then, and oh-so-slowly, did the passengers begin to uncurl their twisted bodies. It would be a stretch, though, to say that any of them relaxed.

  All of that video-blogging had long ago run out the battery on Horatio Wygant’s phone, but he continued to take mental notes. Let everyone else be lost in the adrenaline of the moment. He would be the reliable witness. All history required was one. After it seemed as if they had reached their cruising altitude, he gazed out his window at the clouds. He was reminded of the great Aristophanes comedy in which two Greeks attempt to create a utopia in the sky so they can emulate the birds, which they absurdly believe are fearless. He made another mental note to bring up this allusion when recounting this part of the ordeal in the book he was sure to be paid to write.

  The clouds below soon became the clouds above. The sea gave way to land. They were nearing an island. Only one major island was this close to Florida, and its name was soon on the lips of a dozen passengers.

  Cuba.

  But why Cuba?

  To the west encroached the skyline of a metropolis. This had to be Havana. Larry eased on the yoke—and that was when the indicator on Engine 1 started pulsing amber. The oil pressure had dropped below eighty pounds per square inch.

  Murad tapped on the digital display and then sputtered something in Chechen. Larry had no idea what it was, but the sound of panic was universal in all languages.

  They were still about ninety seconds out from touchdown.

  Seventy-one PSI. Sixty-six PSI. Sixty-two PSI.

  The indicator light turned red. Then the other indicators—bleed pressure, oil temperature, exhaust gas temperature—turned red.

  Murad’s eyes and mouth boggled.

  Given the amount of abuse the poor bird had suffered through the past ten or so hours, instrument failure at some level had been inevitable. Honestly, Larry was shocked it had taken so long.

  “Looks like we’re about to lose the engine,” he said. “Want to go climb out on the wing and check it out?”

  The Chechen bobbed his head this way and that way in search of a solution. The poor fool.

  “Let me guess. They trained you on some tiny turboprop. This ain’t that, pal. Time to show you what a real aircraft can do.”

  Banking to compensate for the dead engine, Larry then extended the flaps—well, the flaps he could extend—and increased speed. They were sixty seconds from touchdown and now approaching faster than ever. Autopilot = disengaged. Auto-throttle = disengaged.

  Murad shrieked.

  Larry, meanwhile, hadn’t felt this comfortable in his own skin in a long, long time. He knew it wouldn’t last, but, for a moment, he didn’t care. A minor victory was still a victory.

  All 150,000 pounds of the steel Airbus were now within hopping distance from the runway. If everything went well, the folks in the cabin would never know something was wrong. If everything didn’t go well, there would be a crash. There would be an explosion. If everything didn’t go well, there would be death.

  But all Larry was concentrating on was success.

  He knew what he was doing. He knew what he was doing.

  He knew what he was doing.

  He landed the plane on the tarmac as gently as a baby’s kiss.

  No crash. No explosion.

  Murad exhaled a lifetime’s sigh and wiped a film of sweat from his upper lip.

  “This girl was built to keep on ticking,” said Larry.

  As he taxied her toward the three hangars at the end of the runway, though, her scratched-up windows began to cry from a light summer rain. Through the drizzle, Larry noticed an unmarked feederliner parked a couple dozen yards away.

  Bislan took to the speaker:

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Bislan, “once we come to a complete stop, I and my associates will take our leave of you. After that, you are free to do whatever you want…although if you wait here maybe a few more hours, your friends in the American armed forces will have you rescued. I and my associates want to thank you for your cooperation in today’s affair. Know that I am aware of the effect this has had and will have upon your lives. If there is a lesson to be learned from this, please let it be that the trauma you experienced here today, the suffering, the fear, is experienced every day around the world in places you ignore while your suffering was not ignored, not for one minute, not by any country. They could have banned our website or blocked it and they didn’t. Think about that, and remember.”

  The plane came to a complete stop. A quorum of workers in bright jumpsuits rushed out to greet the plane. A stairway was rolled to meet the cabin door.

  Back on the flight deck, Murad opened the cockpit door, and Bislan entered. Larry undid his seat belt and faced down the old man, whose withered left hand was buried in a trouser pocket. His right hand held his pistol.

  “Captain Walder, it is with dee
p regret that I inform you that your journey with us isn’t over quite yet.”

  Chapter 55

  “I’m sorry,” said Bislan. “I am. But put yourself in my shoes. While there’s still a chance that I and my associates can be located, we’re vulnerable. We need insurance. So we’re taking you and your flight crew. It’s not personal. In a day, we will have arrived at a safe location and no one will know where we are and then we will no longer need our insurance. What is one more day?”

  “Yeah,” Larry said, “but that’s not entirely true, is it? You say no one will know your secret hiding place, but if you’re taking us with you, we’ll know where it is. That makes us a liability. But you already know that.”

  Bislan smiled warmly. “I expect to rely on your discretion.”

  “No. You won’t. We’ll get to your lair or cave or whatever and once you are confident that you’re safe, you’re going to kill us, same as you did Reese and Lucy.”

  “Or I could kill you now and take your wife and son with me instead.” Bislan caressed Larry’s forehead with the barrel of his gun. “But either way, we’re on a bit of a timetable. Choose now.”

  “Does it make you feel like a real man, threatening the lives of a defenseless woman and a child?”

  “I’m not currently threatening them. I’m threatening you. Choose.”

  “Can I at least say good-bye to them?”

  “It’s better if you don’t,” replied Bislan. “And besides, there isn’t time.”

  Mutely, Larry nodded. Bislan led him out of the flight deck and down the stairs into the drizzle. The tarmac under their feet was warm. Francisco, Addison, Maryann, and Deja were already there, standing in a wet clump, with the two brutish fellows who had been guarding Marie and Sean now out here guarding them. The last to exit the airplane were the two laptop geeks and Murad, who shut the door behind him.

  Bislan marched them across the runway to the smaller plane. At first, the remaining members of Flight 816’s crew gazed back through the rain at the plane and the people they were leaving behind. But here was a new plane anyway, much smaller, much older.

  “Don’t worry, Captain Walder,” said Bislan, “you get to be a passenger on this trip!”

  And this was a fact. The feederliner had its own crew—a heavyset Cuban who sat in the cockpit and drank coffee from a tall silver thermos. Actually, the whole airplane reeked of coffee, and many of its seventy polyester seats were patched with stains. The Chechens had their hostages sit together in the middle rows while they themselves split—some in the back and some up front.

  Bislan, of course, chose to sit up front.

  While the pilot cycled through his final prep, the old man borrowed one of his compatriot’s cheap flip-phones and dialed the warden’s direct line at The Oprichnina.

  The call just rang and rang.

  “Is our money safe?” Murad asked him.

  Bislan flipped the phone shut. “Are the Cubans not cooperating? They are because they have been paid.”

  “I’m sure their money is safe. They were the first ones you paid. I’m talking about our money. I’m talking about the ransom.”

  “It’s safe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know.”

  “That’s not an answer!”

  “You should see if they have ointment for your face. You look like an avocado that’s been dropped from a hundred feet.”

  Was their money safe? Bislan didn’t know—and he was afraid to find out. According to protocol, every cent donated on the website was transferred via encrypted channels to the servers at The Oprichnina. They could have beamed the data to any one of a thousand underground banks they knew through Zviad’s connections, but it was Bislan in the planning stages who had cautioned against it. Any large deposits, he reasoned, would attract undue attention if, say, there were at the same time a massive blackmailing scheme under way that was receiving worldwide notice. The financial data would be hidden on the servers until the time was right to distribute it.

  And “it” had totaled just under $847,000,000.

  “Walls keep things in,” he muttered, “but they also keep things out.”

  No matter. The Cubans would land this small plane on the deck of a certain Danish container ship already sailing past Haiti on its long journey east to Andalusia, and then their escape would be complete. In victory, Bislan didn’t want to have to execute the hostages, but Captain Walder had been correct in his assessment. What a pity. The black American had been a fantastic pilot.

  There were just so many corpses.

  “Everything is going to be fine,” he said, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the Fates.

  He sighed. He was so tired.

  What a long day.

  When all this was over, he was going to search out the most beautiful masseuse in Spain and have her work his muscles for hours. For a few dollars more, he might even ask her to cuddle. Yes, that would be very nice indeed.

  He hopped over to the window seat and peered out at the glittering Caribbean Sea. He could name every island in the Caribbean Sea. He had memorized them one day when he was nine. Or was it eight? He knew each island’s colonial allegiance, each island’s main export, each island’s main import, but he never expected to see them. The children of factory workers who themselves were the children of factory workers had little hope of seeing the exotic Caribbean. These were the same waters that Columbus first navigated in 1492 and that pirates roamed for centuries onward. So many dead ships under these sparkling tides. So much—

  Wait.

  Was it his imagination or had their plane suddenly taken on a descending angle? He looked around the cabin. His comrades didn’t seem to notice a change. Then he found the faces of Flight 816’s crew. Walder, the Hispanic, and the three white women. Gazes that had been fixed upon the floor or upon nothing at all were now focused on the windows. They knew something was off.

  Bislan marched toward the cockpit. A flimsy curtain separated it from the main cabin. He slid the curtain aside and leaned toward the Cuban pilot and in passable Spanish he asked:

  “Is there a reason we’re descending?”

  The pilot tapped at his instrument panel. “One of the engines is bothering me. It could be nothing, but I don’t want to risk it. And with this rain picking up…I’ve already cleared us to land at an airport not far from here. It is better to be safe, don’t you agree?”

  “How long will this take?”

  “I can’t answer that until I know what the problem is.”

  Bislan scowled and returned to his seat. Captain Walder would be able to verify if something was actually wrong, but the man certainly wasn’t about to volunteer that information. Maybe if Bislan took out his gun? No. With the danger to his family now past and with his own death guaranteed, Captain Walder had no incentive to do anything of use and there was nothing Bislan could do to motivate him to cooperate. Fine. And really, the Cuban pilot had no reason to lie. He had been well compensated.

  Ah, if only Murad still had his glasses…

  By now, the others had noticed the change in their altitude. They turned to Bislan for answers, as they always had. He told his confederates what the pilot had told him. He spoke in soothing tones. He was so convincing that he even convinced himself.

  By the time they landed, the drizzle had matured into a downpour. Their plane careened dizzily across a paved black strip before skidding to a halt. On either side of the strip were palm trees. Bislan was reminded of the orange grove. Oh, the exotic vistas he’d beheld just today…his child-self never would have believed it.

  Then again, would his child-self ever have believed a future that included prison? That included torture? That included murder?

  So many murders…

  The Cuban pilot opened the cabin door and, shoulders hunched against the rain, climbed down the automatic stairs to the tarmac. Bislan watched him go and then decided, to pass the time, to play a game called Where Had They Landed?

/>   Facts:

  1. They had taken off from an airfield in the western part of the island, close to Havana, and had only been in the air for a little over two hours.

  2. The airplane’s speed, at least when Bislan had checked in on the pilot, had been two hundred knots. Two hundred knots translated to 370 kilometers per hour.

  3. Most of those two hours had been spent over land, and Cuba was almost thirteen hundred kilometers long.

  4. Therefore they were still on Cuba.

  But where?

  Bislan closed his eyes. He visualized the map in his boyhood atlas. The leaves of that book had been so thin and fragile that if he didn’t lick his fingertips before turning the page, the paper would tear and what an awful sound that would be—plus even a small tear in a map might break a country into pieces. He had been extremely careful with his atlas. He had kept it under his bed with the various volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia he had been given by various teachers. He never did manage to collect a full set.

  But back to the map of Cuba. There it was in his mind, clear as ink on a delicate page. Each inch was equal to two hundred kilometers. The island canted from the northwest to the southeast like a backslash in the blue. He traced the cities as he traveled down the backslash. Havana, Matanzas, Colón, Santa Clara. Camagüey. Holguín. Holguín? No, not far enough. Through the rain, as they made their final descent, hadn’t there had been a port with boats in it? Where was there a port on the southeast end of—

  Oh.

  Oh no.

  He was about to stand up, about to scream, but it was too late, because in that instant of ice-cold revelation, dozens of heavily armed US Marines suddenly stormed aboard the plane. Among them were six men in camouflage. Their leader, Hellhound-1, recognized Bislan and stepped toward him, gun-barrel-first:

  “Welcome to Guantánamo Bay, motherfucker.”

  Chapter 56