Mirrorman

by Trevor Hoyle

  ‘No – no!’ Sarah wouldn’t let go.

  Cawdor prised her fingers loose. He spoke quietly and evenly. ‘I have to do as he says. Take care of Daniella. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. Believe me.’

  He squeezed Sarah’s hand and stood up. He could feel cold air down his back where the sweat had dried. The barrel prodded him in the spine as he went up the aisle, and he was aware from the slight tilting of the floor that they were descending.

  The curtain was held aside for Cawdor to step through. Six or seven people were crowded into the compartment leading to the flight deck. There was the black steward who had served Cawdor his dinner, along with other members of the crew: the captain, flight engineer, and two female flight attendants.

  Eyes bulging, a strip of insulation tape across his mouth, Senator Cobb had been crammed into a corner of the forward bulkhead next to the external door, hands taped at the wrists. The veins on his temples stood out, blue against his cropped white hair. He looked a prime candidate for a heart attack.

  A slim, attractive, dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties was casually holding two grenades, one in either hand, as if she’d picked them off a supermarket shelf and couldn’t decide which to buy. Cawdor was trying to work out how many of them there were. Including young Clint, three, he reckoned – or four if there was another standing watch over the copilot at the controls. His speculation was ended by a vicious jab in the back. Cawdor stumbled forward. He was brought up short by the blunt muzzle of a machine pistol being waved under his nose. Cawdor looked down the blue steel barrel into the eyes of the man in the blue work shirt, a head shorter than himself, with thinning fair hair and a badly pitted complexion that a scar along his cheekbone did nothing to improve. One of his eyes had a curdled milky appearance.

  ‘Your name Cawdor, am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You gonna cause me trouble, fella?’

  ‘I don’t intend to.’ Cawdor tried to keep his voice neutral. No hostility, no bravado, no fear. Zero provocation. But his heart was suddenly hammering in his chest. This man in the blue work shirt was somehow familiar to him. He’d seen that crafty pitted face with its milky eye somewhere before.

  The man waved his gun towards Senator Cobb. “This sonofabitch won’t talk on the radio. But I guess you will, Cawdor, because your wife and kid are with you, huh? That so? You talk on the radio, tell ’em what we want, OK?’ He was grinning now, as if enjoying himself, raising his sparse eyebrows. ‘If you don’t, I kill them. And I’ll do it, fella, believe it.’

  Cawdor nodded. ‘All right. Whatever you say.’

  There was some confusion then as Senator Cobb decided he’d had enough. He barged forward, face puce above the tape covering his mouth. Cawdor couldn’t figure him. Was he trying to be a hero?

  The man in the blue work shirt wrestled the senator back and pushed him against the external door. The barrel of the machine pistol all but disappeared in the senator’s stomach.

  ‘You wanna go through there? You wanna go through?’ the man yelled, giving him a back-handed slap across the face. The senator’s eyes bulged, a maze of broken blood vessels. I’ll do it myself, you sonofabitch. You’ll have thirty thousand feet to think about it –’

  ‘Open that door and we all go.’ The grey-haired captain spoke through thin, bloodless lips. ‘You know what’ll happen at this altitude if there’s a pressure leak?’

  The girl said boredly, ‘Let’s cut all this crap and get on with it.’ She was still juggling with the grenades in a manner that made Cawdor’s blood run cold. They might be fake, but they looked only too real.

  ‘Are we gonna make Santiago in one hop or not?’ the girl said to the man in the blue work shirt, who seemed to be the leader. ‘What do we tell these guys, Frank? We going for it or what?’

  Santiago? Cawdor thought. Which one? Chile? Brazil? Mexico? Panama? The Dominican Republic? How many other Santiagos were there?

  ‘He says we have to land,’ the leader said, referring to the captain.

  ‘I don’t believe him,’ the girl said. She shouted suddenly at the captain, ‘This plane has enough fuel for London, you lying bastard! You make London, you can make Santiago.’

  ‘We can’t, not without refuelling,’ the captain said. ‘We’d already covered over a thousand miles before we changed course. And we now have a headwind instead of a tailwind. That can make a difference of three, four, maybe five hundred operational miles.’

  ‘What if we tell you to fly on anyway?’ the girl said.

  ‘Then we’ll crash.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘My flight engineer, Mr Goldman, will show you the gauges. You can see for yourself.’

  ‘How would we know?’ the girl said angrily.

  The captain shrugged. He was either extremely cool or a damn good actor. ‘Those are the facts, miss. I’ll do everything I can not to jeopardise this aircraft and its passengers. There’s no alternative. We have to land.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘First I have to check our fuel and plot a new course.’ The captain glanced at his flight engineer. ‘What would you say, Ben? Tampa?’

  ‘No!’ The girl shook her head violently. ‘Outside the United States. Do you think we’re stupid?’

  ‘All right,’ the captain said calmly. ‘Don’t get excited. Let me look at the maps with my flight engineer and we’ll give you the available options. It’s got to be either Florida or somewhere in the West Indies.’

  ‘Colombia,’ the girl said. ‘You can make Colombia.’

  ‘No, we can’t. Not possible. That’s another thousand miles, at least –’

  ‘A’right, a’right,’ snarled the man in the blue work shirt, getting ratty. He looked around the crowded compartment, as if unsure what to do next. Finally he decided, jabbed a finger and ordered the girl to go up front with the captain and flight engineer and work something out. She followed them, juggling the grenades.

  The man placed an expensive-looking soft leather bag in the middle of the floor and opened it for Cawdor to see inside. It was packed with gelignite. From his pocket he took out a flat plastic device with buttons, like a TV remote control. ‘This –’ he held it under Cawdor’s nose ‘– activates that.’ He pointed to the bag. ‘And that goes on your seat down there in the cabin. Unerstan’ me, fella? Yeah? Get the picture?’

  He waggled his thumb over the button.

  Cawdor stared into the man’s one good eye. He had the bizarre notion that at any moment he might wake up. This entire situation had the feel of a dream – and at the same time a kind of fateful quality. Had he known what was going to happen, and blindly, stupidly ignored his gut feeling? But if he had known, he told himself, he would never have boarded the airplane with Sarah and Daniella in the first place. There had been no premonition, or he would have acted upon it.

  Something else was bothering him. These people were heavily armed, with guns, grenades and explosives. They had executed a daring mid-flight hijack of a major airline’s 747, which must have required meticulous planning. And yet they didn’t seem to have considered for longer than ten seconds what came next. As if they had decided to do it on the spur of the moment. Let’s go hijack a jumbo jet. Hey, guys, swell idea.

  Young Clint took the leather bag and placed it on the vacated seat next to Sarah. He reached into his pocket and dangled a pair of handcuffs in front of her. Standing in the doorway, Cawdor was made to watch as young Clint attached one bracelet to the handle of the bag and snapped the other round Sarah’s wrist. She wouldn’t look at him. She sat very straight and still, the circle of pearls glowing faintly above the dark-blue silk of her blouse.

  The gunman curled his finger at Daniella.

  Cawdor went stiff, fists clenched at his sides.

  The machine pistol jabbed hard into his ribs. ‘Easy, fella, you don’t want the lives of three hundred innocent folk on your conscience.’ The man sighed in Cawdor’s ear. ‘She’s very young. And very
pretty. Takes after her mom.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt her.’ Cawdor’s voice was trembling, husky with fear. ‘I’ll do anything you ask.’

  ‘Hurt her?’ said the man in the blue work shirt, sounding surprised. ‘I ain’t gonna hurt her, fella.’ He shook his head and chuckled. ‘Naw. Gonna give her a damn good time.’

  2

  It was beyond endurance. But there was nothing he could do except endure it. Cawdor closed his eyes and held his body rigid while the man in the blue work shirt with the pale freckled arms did everything he felt like doing in front of her father.

  He had her in the small cubbyhole with a sink on one side and a row of lockers on the other. Daniella had resisted until he struck her across the head with the metal fretwork butt of the machine pistol. After that she went quiet and docile, not even whimpering. He laid the weapon on the draining board of the sink to give him a free hand. In his other hand he kept hold of the remote-control device, arm stretched out at a safe distance from the grunting, thrusting action.

  Leaning in the doorway, young Clint now and then interrupted his watch on the passengers to glance over his shoulder. His face never altered its expression – jaw clamped, eyes squinting – at what he saw, not even the sight of the naked girl. Senator Cobb was slumped in the corner near the door where he had been pummelled and kicked, belly rising and falling with the exertion of breathing through his boxer’s flattened nose.

  ‘Come on, honey lamb, you can do better than that. Shake those hips now. Lemme feel some movement. With one hand on her buttocks, the other outstretched, he was doing a parody of a tango step, his thin bare rump jigging from side to side, pants round his ankles.

  The younger flight attendant had turned away in revulsion, her blonde head pressed into the steward’s shoulder. He encircled her with his arms, averting his eyes from the spectacle and gazing into nowhere with bleak despair.

  ‘Baby, baby, baby,’ the man in the blue work shirt crooned softly. ‘I do declare there ain’t bin nobody else but me. This snatch is spankin’ brand-new, honey. You’re as tight as a mouse’s ear. Oh, Lordy, praise be!’

  He snuggled up close, cheek to cheek, his tongue worming wetly in her ear. Daniella’s head lolled back, thumping against the curved bulkhead with the force of each stroke. She was still dazed from the blow of the gun butt, which had left a rising weal of orange and purple down the side of her face.

  Cawdor could have closed his eyes or looked away. He forced himself to watch. He was storing up pain. He hoarded it greedily. The amount of pain he was able to contain within himself, and not go instantly mad or berserk, seemed to him quite amazing. He could take a world of pain and not flinch. It was feeding him.

  And so he watched the man in the blue work shirt with an unblinking gaze as the bared teeth nibbled at the arch of Daniella’s neck. Heard the breath hissing from his nostrils, the grunting from his throat with each thrust.

  ‘First time with a real man for sure –’ Pausing to gather strength for the next one. ‘Bet I can make you come – your first time off, baby – trust old Frank to give you the big O – He got just what you dreamt of, sweet honeycup.’

  He ducked his head round, peering through the tangled strands of Daniella’s hair and his own, the remote-control device held at arm’s length while he continued to pump away.

  Still and silent as a statue, Cawdor watched him, piling up pain upon pain. The others in the small compartment, just as silent and still, formed a tableau of waxwork figures. The man in the blue work shirt grinned at that, grinned through Daniella’s hair, and concentrated once more on the business in hand.

  A few moments of eternity later, with a gasp through clenched teeth, it was over.

  A moment after that he was hitching up his pants, ignoring the girl as she slid to the floor and lay in a disordered heap.

  ‘You disgusting animal!’ The young, blonde stewardess squirmed round in the protective embrace of the steward, flecks of spittle flying from her lips.

  ‘I am, ain’t I?’ the man in the blue work shirt agreed. ‘Red-blooded animal, that’s me. You want some, baby?’ He rubbed his crotch and leered at her, tongue vibrating.

  Cawdor was suddenly aware of the other stewardess. Tall and slender, her dark hair trimmed above the ears and brushed sleekly back, she was staring hard at him, willing Cawdor to look at her. Their eyes locked. Cawdor saw her eyes drift sideways to the machine pistol on the draining board. A step – maybe two – and she would be within reaching distance. It didn’t concern him whether she knew how to operate it. She had seen a way and had the nerve to go for it; he trusted the faith she had in herself.

  Cawdor gave the slightest of nods.

  ‘Gimme coupla minutes to get the lead back in my pencil,’ the man in the blue work shirt was saying, ‘and I’ll show you what an animal feels like.’ He glanced at Cawdor. ‘You look kinda sick to me, fella. Whassa matter, flying give you the gip?’

  ‘For what you’ve done,’ Cawdor said quietly, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ He needed the man’s attention on him, away from the stewardess, and this did it.

  The man in the blue work shirt rounded his one good eye in mock alarm. ‘Holy Moses, you don’t say. Well, I can see you’re upset over somethin’, fella. But that-’ he jerked his thumb to Daniella’s crumpled form ‘– was just a piece of tail to me. ‘Sides, it had to happen sometime pretty soon. She was ripe for it. And, if it’s any consolation, you have it on good authority that no pimply sleazeball’s bin tamperin’ with the kid afore now. I can vouch for that.’

  Behind the man’s head, Cawdor could see the stewardess edging towards the draining board. There was no real plan. It would rely on speed and instinct. The instant that Cawdor saw the stewardess go for the gun, he would make a grab for the remote-control device in the man’s right hand. Keep it simple – nothing fancy, no frills.

  Forget his daughter lying bruised and raped by the sink, forget that every atom within him was shrieking to lash out and smash the man’s face to pulp and gouge the one good eye from his head. God willing, that would come later. No time for that now. Just act.

  But he still needed the man’s attention on him and nowhere else.

  Cawdor shook his head. ‘You won’t press the button. It’ll blow this airplane out of the sky and you with it.’

  ‘Wanna try me?’ Grinning, tongue between his teeth, the man held the device in the palm of his hand, a finger poised above it.

  ‘I don’t think it’s even connected.’

  The stewardess was within arm’s reach. So slowly that the movement was imperceptible, her hand started to rise away from her side.

  ‘That’s for me to know, fella, and you to find out,’ the man in the blue work shirt said. He seemed to relish the situation, toying with his victims, and Cawdor was happy to let him. ‘You think you can get me all riled up, is that it? You think I’m so dumb I don’t know what game you’re –’

  The stewardess went for it. Cawdor saw the pale blur of her hand. But from the corner of his one good eye the man saw it too. He snatched up the machine pistol from the draining board. Cawdor lunged towards him. The man reared back. More as a reflex than a deliberate action, his finger touched the trigger. A sudden and very loud staccato hammering filled the compartment. The machine pistol jumped and jerked erratically in his hand, discharging half a clip. Three shots went wide; the rest hit Cawdor in a scattered random pattern. His body folded up as if all the joints had become detached and he went down, clutching a bloody hole in his right side.

  A thick blue haze filled the air. It swirled upward, sucked in thin vapour trails into the air-conditioning vents. By some freak chance, against all the odds, not one of the bullets had punctured the outer metal hull of the aircraft. The 747 remained intact and airtight.

  Treading carefully because the floor was slick with blood, the man in the blue work shirt sidled around the hunched body. Daniella was cowering against the bulkhead, her knees drawn up. Above the knotted fist covering
her mouth, her eyes were rinsed out, vacant with shock.

  ‘Lucky break for us, Frank,’ young Clint said in a relieved voice. ‘Damn lucky. You could’ve shot a hole in this bird.’

  The man whirled round. ‘I fuckin’ didn’t, did I? So shut your face.’ He waved the machine pistol threateningly at the stewardess. ‘Another move like that, honey, you get it in the gut.’ He jabbed the muzzle into her stomach, then leant against the bulkhead, his eye flicking everywhere, never still.

  ‘Jesus, look at the state of these, Frank,’ young Clint complained, examining the soles of his high-heeled cowboy boots. ‘They gonna be spoilt.’

  The floor was a mess right enough, blood leaking everywhere, and getting messier by the minute. It was a problem. Impossible to dump the body outside the aircraft at this altitude. Already the floor was swimming. The man in the blue work shirt beckoned to the steward. He pointed to the floor. ‘There gotta be a trap here someplace. Open it up.’ Standing over the kneeling steward, he watched him remove a small floor panel with a stainless-steel bolt key. Through the black square hole, like through the opening door of a freezer, air from the baggage hold clutched everything with icy fingers.

  Waved on by the machine pistol, the steward slid the body across the floor and dropped it into the black emptiness. He replaced the panel and stood up, hands congealed and sticky, his trousers sodden, a ghostly pallor beneath his dark skin.

  ‘Satisfied now? Huh?’ the man in the blue work shirt demanded of young Clint. ‘There ya go. Another problem solved.’

  Through a moonless night, some 400 miles off the coast of North Carolina, the 747 flew on a southwesterly heading at 16,000 feet. Calmly and deliberately, the young copilot, First Officer Greg Richards, was nudging the aircraft lower, imperceptibly losing altitude. He had one aim in mind. To achieve the lowest permissable height for commercial aircraft, thereby equalising the cabin pressure and outside air pressure. There was still a long way to go.