Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  He couldn’t allow anyone, certainly not Daggett, to take that away from him.

  46

  * * *

  Daggett pulled open the door. Hot fumes engulfed him.

  “You can’t go out there,” John Wayne hollered. “You need field clearance.”

  He spotted a car, a discolored and scratched Quik-Link logo on its door panel, just pulling up to his left. It occurred to him there was still a chance to stop this plane. If he could damage the landing gear …

  He walked at first, because he didn’t want to alert the manager too quickly to his intentions. But as he heard “Hey!” barked from behind him, and recalled the two security guards, he realized there was no room for subtlety, and broke into a run.

  The keys were in the ignition, which confirmed there was a God, as far as he was concerned, and also confirmed that he was meant to stop this plane at any cost. It was only a matter of removing the fire extinguisher. Such a simple task, and one now so far from possibility. He should have acted sooner, he realized. He should have ignored protocol and headed straight to the plane. This realization flooded him with guilt. If that plane went down, it was his fault.

  On the far end of the fuselage, just before the tail and the huge company logo, he could make out Duhning 959–600. He could recall from his trip to Seattle and his visit to the Duhning simulators exactly what it looked like inside the flight deck; he could recall from his late night in the FAA lab, from the voices recorded there, exactly what conversation was now taking place in the plane that lumbered along a hundred yards in front of him. Recollections so vivid, he found it hard to concentrate on his driving.

  The car was not exactly long on acceleration. He put his foot into it, and rather than surging ahead, the engine sputtered, flooded, and nearly died. He backed off, allowing it to cough its way back to life, and then tried a more gradual approach, to which the car responded quite well. The speedometer marked the increase in speed as the distance to the taxiing plane inexorably shortened. He heard a confusion of car horns dropping down the musical scales as he left them behind him, only to realize too late that these were warnings of his straying off course. The asphalt field was laid out in a complexity of corridors, marked with road paint, delineating traffic lanes for planes, support vehicles, and automobiles. Daggett had strayed from the predesignations, and the wolflike cries of warning came as he found himself a fly beneath the foot of an elephant. The front wheels of a 747 bore down on him, fat black rubber so large that they might have flattened him had the pilot not veered at the last possible second, avoiding the collision. Now, added to his confusion, for he had briefly lost sight of the 959, he heard the familiar wailing of a police siren far in the distance, and knew damn well where it was headed.

  Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by huge aircraft. Everywhere he swerved, there was another plane in line. This one heading away from him, that one quickly approaching. Their sheer size instilled such a sense of vulnerability that despite the huge amounts of open tarmac, it seemed instead there was nowhere to go. He negotiated himself a position and a path in a narrow no-man’s-land created between the wingtips of the crisscrossing traffic, and increased his speed once again. Up ahead, its image distorted by the blurred heat waves escaping the tarmac like a giant plastic curtain, the 959 pivoted on its right tires and crossed an active runway where a commuter plane was just landing. The resulting image, foreshortened by the great distances involved, briefly made it appear the planes would collide, and he wondered if he could be so lucky to have this plane stopped by some unrelated force completely out of his power. But as they cleared each other easily he began to comprehend the enormity of the field, and to realize not only how deceptive it was but how far he had yet to go to reach the 959.

  With the sound of the siren still a good distance off, but growing closer, he had to plot a route across not only the taxiing aircraft to his right but also the active runway beyond. He peered beneath the fuselage of a taxiing Boeing, and caught sight of another plane landing, and realized with a good degree of trepidation that the planes were coming one right after another, in intervals of only five or ten seconds. The thought of maneuvering this sluggish car through that gauntlet gave him pause. Perhaps the answer lay just ahead—he could follow in the path of a jumbo jet as it was cleared to cross.

  He accelerated in an attempt to join a crossing already in progress. He saw the other car far too late, his attention to his right, on the taxiing planes, not his left. In that brief, flickering moment of panic when one senses imminent danger, Daggett understood he was about to be hit broadside. He raised his arm defensively to shield his face on impact, and leaned away from the wheel, faintly reminded he had forgotten his seat belt. The blow came with enough force to shatter all the windows in one blinding fraction of a second. His car slid fully sideways a good fifteen yards, right into the path of the taxiing planes. He was thrown, headfirst, against the far door panel, which he literally bounced off of, and after spinning through space, he found himself in the backseat as the car slid to a stop, the frightening smell of fresh gas surrounding him, mixing with the caustic odor of burning tire rubber. The cubed pellets of the broken windows enveloped him like foaming bath water.

  Dazed and disoriented, he shook his head in an effort to clear it. Glass flew off him like water from a wet dog. His right arm was numb, as if he’d slept on it. Only then was he capable of accessing what had happened to him. Only then did he look through the open windows of his car, through the open windshield of the other, and find himself face-to-face with Anthony Kort.

  47

  * * *

  Kort took the collision much harder than he had expected. His forehead had glanced off the steering wheel and was bleeding into his left eye. He had hit Daggett’s car dead center, and the two had slid, pretty much together, for quite a distance.

  The first thing he saw, as the orbs of blue light settled from his vision, was Daggett, in a similarly dazed condition, staring back at him from the rear seat. He reached for his holstered weapon, inside the coveralls, but it wasn’t there. He spotted it then, where it had been thrown, on the floor of the passenger seat, and stretched to retrieve it, prevented by his seat belt. Clumsily, he freed himself, took hold of the gun, sat up quickly and aimed.

  The second thing he saw, a vision delayed by his murky left eye, was the huge front wheels of a jet as they swerved away from Daggett’s car and connected fully with the back fender of his, spinning him around furiously, a full hundred and eighty degrees. His shot rang out vaguely in the direction of the terminal, as the gun once again flew out of his possession and out of sight. The massive underbelly of the jet streamed overhead, his car passing between the twin set of midships landing gear, and miraculously avoiding further contact.

  He scrambled out of the car, rolled onto the tarmac as he collapsed from weakened knees, and came to his feet as he saw Daggett crawl over the front seat and slip behind the wheel, and the car begin to roll. At first, it failed to register that a car so badly damaged could possibly run, but run it did. It ran away from him. And he ran after it.

  He reached for the back strut of the missing rear window just as the engine caught and the car leapt ahead. His fingers firmly fastened, the acceleration threw him up onto the trunk of the car. He pulled himself up to and through the space of the missing window and tumbled into the backseat. Briefly, he caught the fearful whites of Daggett’s eyes as the driver saw he had company. In one swift movement, Kort sat up and locked his right arm around Daggett’s throat and drew his arm tightly into a choke hold. Only seconds now, and it would all be over.

  48

  * * *

  Daggett felt the arm clamp around his Adam’s apple like a vise, and the voice of some nameless instructor from a dozen years earlier spoke as clearly to him as if he were sitting in the seat next to him. Within five to seven seconds, the victim loses consciousness. He slammed on the brakes. The grip continued. He felt the energy drain from him as his brain was den
ied blood. Darkness loomed at the edges of his vision, a tunnel narrowing, and the entire tarmac, with its endless lines of planes and glowing jet engines, with its puffs of smoke as tires bit the asphalt, and sirens crying like frightened gulls, seemed suddenly caught in a lovely rosy twilight.

  His fingers groped for the release lever that controlled the front seat. He knew it was there, just out of reach perhaps, but definitely there. They brushed it once, but did not light. The vise tightened its grip. He leaned forward for the lever, and as he did, increased the pressure on his neck. Unconsciousness beckoned. He touched the lever. As his foot squeezed down on the accelerator, lurching the car forward, he jerked the lever, released the seat, and shoved it back as quickly and as far as it would travel. He heard the man scream as his feet caught beneath the seat, and felt the arm’s strength briefly weaken. He reached up, took hold of the man’s hand and pulled hard, diminishing the pressure, gasping for air as he tugged once more and spun to break the hold.

  Kort released him completely then, as the car drifted out of control, driverless, slowing and wandering out into a lane of incoming aircraft. Daggett made no rational decision; logic or training played no part in his actions. He dove over the seat at the man and went after him like a wild animal. In the limited space of the car, the ability to fight effectively was reduced to a few painless blows, at which point each man responded by going for the other’s neck. Daggett was at a complete disadvantage here, his throat already weakened considerably by Kort’s choke hold. And it was only as he realized that Kort was strangling him with one hand, while he choked him with two, that an array of tools—wrenches and screwdrivers—was strewn about the floor of the backseat, and that Kort had taken a screwdriver in hand.

  He realized this fully as Kort stabbed him between the ribs.

  He knocked the man’s hand from the tool, leaving it stuck in him, the pain momentarily blocked by some survival switch thrown inside the brain, pinned the man’s arm beneath his knee, and found a wrench in his hand. Where that wrench had come from was anybody’s guess. It was as if God Himself had handed it to him. As he raised his arm high to deliver the blow of a lifetime—or a deathtime, he was hoping—the intensity of the pain from his wound then found him, both electrifying and numbing. Rather than coming down strongly, as he had intended, the wrench was delivered effectively but not fatally to the front of Anthony Kort’s skull.

  Breathless, bleeding, and stark raving mad, Daggett looked up to see the 959 at the end of the runway just releasing its brakes for takeoff.

  49

  * * *

  Daggett reached back, located the source of his pain, and removed the screwdriver with a single agonizing pull. A scream, born as much of rage as of pain, resounded out across the open expanse of tarmac and, despite the roar of a dozen jets, was heard by two baggage handlers traveling on a TUG outside Terminal A. With the screwdriver removed, the wound bled badly. He started to crawl back over the car seat before realizing the limitation of movement imposed by his injury, and ended up sliding, face first, down into the seat that itself was broken, stuck in its track, nearly in the backseat. A huge jet passed directly over him in a deafening roar as it landed. He glanced to his right in time to see the tires of the 959 begin to roll, confirming his greatest fear: He wasn’t going to stop it from taking off.

  His reaction was immediate. Sitting forward on the edge of the broken seat, the radiator now steaming, he nursed the car up to its maximum speed, abandoning any pretext for safety, cutting a straight line toward the control tower. He drove directly beneath the planes where necessary, cut others off in their paths, and narrowly missed a direct collision with a single-engine Cessna he hadn’t seen until it lifted off the runway, one tire actually bouncing off his roof. As he traveled at over sixty miles an hour toward the tower, the 959 traveled faster toward its takeoff. Again he found himself haunted with the memory of the dry, professional voices as the two pilots negotiated a hundred tons of airplane down a runway and into the skies. Most critical of all was that he note the exact moment the plane’s wheels left the tarmac. He racked the rearview mirror (the only surviving piece of glass in the car) to afford him a view of the plane, his shirt sleeve tugged back, the seconds counting off.

  With Daggett still thirty yards away from the tower, the plane took off.

  He had his driver’s door open before he applied the brake. It was only now, as he skidded to a noisy stop by the base door to the tower, that he realized the sirens and the activity he had believed directed at himself were in fact clustered around one of the distant gate entrances to the field. Then, as if to prove him wrong, he heard another siren and saw two flashing lights approaching him at high speed.

  He checked his watch: ten seconds gone; thirty-seven remained. He could picture Chaz Meecham’s description of the detonator. With the cabin pressure in effect, and the nose pointed up, the timer had begun to count down the flight’s final seconds.

  The guard, at the bottom of the tower, his weapon drawn, stepped in front of the only door blocking it. “Hold it right there, buddy. Hands out where I can see ’em.”

  “FBI!” Daggett called out, still limping at a painful run toward the man. Not slowing. His hand fished for his ID and he realized it wasn’t where it belonged. Somewhere in the backseat of the car perhaps; misplaced but not lost. The authority in his voice caused the guard a moment’s hesitation, allowing Daggett to come another two steps closer. He had no time to debate that authority, or to rummage the car in search of a plastic laminated piece of paper with a color photograph. He was FBI. That was all that mattered. He had something less than thirty-seven seconds and only a vague idea of how he might yet prevail.

  He pulled up just short of the man and kicked him in the groin with his full momentum behind the blow, simultaneously ducking and blocking the weapon out of harm’s way. He pushed the guard aside, jerked the door open, and started climbing stairs. Each time he lifted his left leg, the hole in his ribs felt exactly like Kort had stabbed him there again. He hobbled up the stairs at an amazing pace, hollering out in agony with every other step. As he reached the first landing, his watch telling him twenty-seven seconds, shots rang out from behind him. Whoever had been driving that patrol car was now pursuing him.

  One of the bullets hit him.

  There was no explaining it. Instead of concentrating on what now seemed like endless steps ascending to the tower, instead of seeing his life pass before his eyes, or hearing his mother’s voice, or seeing a vast white room where ghostly white figures welcomed him, he charged up the stairs.

  The bullet hadn’t slowed him at all. It passed through the flesh of his arm, just below his left armpit. Seventeen seconds. One last flight of stairs. Footsteps nearly on top of him now. They’re going to shoot me dead, he was thinking. I’ve come all this way to be shot dead by my own kind.

  And there was Hairless—Agent Henderson—the stump of a gumshoe who had been part of the Bernard arrest, signaling for the two guards behind Daggett to hold off their fire. “What the fuck?” he shouted at Daggett, his eyes on the two bloody wounds on his left side.

  But Daggett blew past him shouting, “The Quik-Link 959, the Quik-Link 959, who’s got it?”

  Twelve seconds, his watch pleaded.

  “Flight control’s got that one …” a woman shouted out.

  “There’s a bomb on board! Patch through to them!” Daggett yelled at the top of his lungs, thinking in terms of police radios, sprinting toward her. He hadn’t known exactly what he would do once he reached here, but at the time it had seemed his only chance of getting through to them, the only possibility of communicating, was from this tower. What had Meecham said? A three-way switch, each phase of which had to be working in order for the detonator to blow. Daggett could stop the timer only by closing one of the earlier gates. Think! Think! Not enough time for the plane to level out. “Tell them to decompress the cabin! Decompress the cabin, right now!”

  Seven seconds.

  How c
ould they remain so calm, these people? In a voice that might have been mistaken for a priest’s, the young woman called out in a southern drawl, “Mayday, Alpha-one-five-niner, this is National ground control on an emergency intercept. Explosives on board. Please decompress aircraft immediately. Repeat, blow air packs immediately. Mayday. Mayday.”

  “Five seconds!” Daggett screamed.

  The room had gone as silent as a library, Daggett’s breathing and the hum of electronic gear and cooling fans the only sounds. The woman said calmly into her headset microphone, “Emergency intercept, Alpha-one-five-niner … confirm loss of cabin pressure. Confirm loss of cabin pressure” She placed a hand firmly to her earset. “Alpha-one-five-niner …”

  Daggett, watching the seconds expire on his watch said, “Now!” his eyes then straining out the window to see an aircraft that was too far away to be seen.

  “Confirm please, Alpha-one-five-niner. Confirm please …” Her hand still on the earphone. Every head in the room was turned. It seemed every breath was held. She looked to Daggett and nodded without a hint of expression. “That’s affirmative,” she said to him. “We’ve got callback.”

  It was as if he were a beach ball that had been overfilled with air to the point of bursting. His tremendous sigh of relief washed away the anxiety with a huge expulsion of air that was soon echoed by everyone in the seats around him. “Tell them to level out—they’ve got to get out of the climb—and get them back here as fast as possible.”