Tough old girl knows when to follow orders. That leaves the rest of the passengers to worry about, including the prick sitting right behind me.
As if on cue, the heavy set goateed man let out a loud groan.
“What the hell…why am I tied up? What’s going on? Hey! What is going on?”
Mac could feel the man struggling in his seat.
“Sir, I need you to calm down. We don’t need them coming out here and hurting you or anyone else. Take care of your son, make sure he’s ok.”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do! You calm down! You calm down!”
The man’s voice was nearly screaming as his body catapulted itself forward, his shoulders mashing against both Mac and Eldra’s seats.
“Young man, please do what he says! Calm down and see if your boy is ok.”
The man continued to struggle, trying to lift himself from his seat despite his bound hands and feet.
Mac Walker’s patience had run out. The man was certain to bring unwanted attention to them. He half stood up and turned around in his seat, his eyes locking with those of the increasingly panicked father.
“I told you to sit down and shut up.”
The simmering tone of Mac’s voice caused the man to hesitate, as he glared back at his fellow passenger. This hesitation quickly dissipated though as he lunged forward, his mouth twisted into a snarl.
“I’d like to see you try and make me asshole!”
Mac clenched his teeth and sent his forehead crashing into the space just above the man’s nose. The precisely powerful head-butt delivered the result Mac intended, causing the other man to crumple back into his seat where he remained unmoving, once again unconscious.
“Damn, you kill him?”
Mac turned his head to look at the young black man seated across the aisle from him.
“No, he’ll be fine.”
The younger man’s eyes were wide as he looked Mac up and down, wondering what kind of man was able to incapacitate another man so easily.
“You some kind of soldier?”
Mac Walker leaned down to look at the father’s young boy, who sat quietly breathing in his seat, not yet having woken up. Mac was glad the child didn’t see his father taken down by him. Even if his dad was a world class asshole, a boy needed a father to believe in, not one to despise or think less of.
“I said, you some kind of soldier, man?”
Mac grunted as he sat back down in his seat.
“Yeah…I’m some kind of soldier.”
6.
Over the course of the next ten minutes, more and more passengers began to stir. Their faces were masks of confusion and fear as they tried to determine what was going on.
“Everyone – your attention up here! Everyone! Look here!”
The air marshal stood with his feet spread shoulder width apart glaring back at the passengers. His eyes gleamed with determined excitement, the lower lip of his mouth curling downward under the large mustache.
A woman near the front of the plane began to cry, resulting in the air marshal quickly moving to her seat and smacking her across the face with the back of his hand. Mac could hear the boy behind him begin to cry as well as the sound of the slap reverberated inside the confines of the cabin.
“Son, listen to me. Your father is right next to you, and he’ll be waking up soon. I need you to sit there and be as quiet as possible, ok? Be a good boy, and try not to make a sound.”
The child’s whimpering subsided.
The air marshal returned to his position at the front of the plane, his left hand pointing to the woman he had just hit.
“See? That is what you get if you don’t pay attention! There will be no shouting, no crying out, just you sitting in your seats waiting for my instructions. If you don’t do that, then you will be punished. Maybe the person next to you will be punished. Women, children, it doesn’t matter. So nobody messes up, ok?”
To emphasize his point, the air marshal withdrew his handgun and held it in his right hand, pointing it at various passengers who sat in fearful silence.
“I will kill you if I have to. Don’t test me. Just stay in your seats and keep quiet.”
“We might all feel a little more calm if you take a moment to tell us why you’re doing this.”
Mac’s statement filled the space between himself and the air marshal where it remained unanswered for several seconds.
“I didn’t ask for any questions.”
Mac Walker adjusted his body in his seat so that he was leaning to the right, allowing him an unobstructed view of the marshal. Their eyes locked as Mac held his stare until it was the air marshal who finally looked away.
“I don’t mean any disrespect. It’s just that you’ll probably find us a lot more cooperative if we know what’s going on – why you’re doing this.”
The air marshal’s eyes filled with rage as he walked toward Mac’s seat with his gun held in front of him.
“You want to be a hero, army boy? Yeah, I heard you talking to the old lady. Told her you were former military. Well guess what, I’m former military too, and unless you shut your goddamn mouth I’m gonna be killing some of these passengers. Their deaths will be your fault, understand? Maybe I start with that kid sitting behind you.”
The air marshal stood directly over Mac, his mouth curled into an animalistic snarl as trickles of sweat marked the sides of his face.
“No, that won’t be necessary. I was just trying to help you calm everyone down.”
The butt of the handgun crashed into Mac’s forehead, snapping his head back and nearly knocking him unconscious.
Ouch – that’s gonna leave a mark.
It took a moment for Mac’s vision to clear, allowing him to stare back up at the air marshal.
“You need another one, army boy?”
Mac shook his head, wincing as the pain from the blow to his head reverberated throughout his upper body.
The air marshal leaned down triumphantly, his sour breath scorching across Mac’s face.
“That’s what I thought. No time to play hero today, army boy.”
Mac lifted his hands up slightly onto his lap and spread his wrists slightly apart inside the confines of the zip tie. He made it appear as if he didn’t want the air marshal to see him doing so, when in fact, being seen was exactly what he hoped for.
“Oh no, there’ll be none of that.”
The air marshal reached down and pulled, causing the zip tie to cut into the flesh of Mac’s wrists.
“There, that’s better.”
Mac watched as the air marshal returned to his position at the front of the plane, the man’s face betraying his over-confidence in believing he had successfully intimidated the only passenger who might present a threat to his authority.
“If everyone cooperates, we’ll be touching down soon. You’ll be allowed to leave the plane, and go on with your lives, ok? But if you don’t follow my orders, then there’s gonna be trouble. People will be hurt or killed. Anyone here not understand what I’m saying?”
The passengers remained silent as the soft hum of the 767’s turbines indicated to Mac they were travelling at a normal cruising speed of just over five hundred miles per hour.
“How about you, army boy, do we understand each other?”
Mac nodded once, though the faint hint of a smile communicated his certainty there remained some unfinished business between them.
The air marshal noted the smile, and appeared ready to make his way back to Mac’s seat when suddenly the plane veered sharply to the left and then began descending rapidly, causing several of the passengers to scream out.
Mac Walker ignored the panicked cries of the passengers, instead focusing his full attention on the air marshal who had turned to run back toward the front of the 767, his gun still drawn.
Whatever that just was, he didn’t expect it. That tells me something is going on in the cockpit of this plane.
The plane continued to fall from the
sky, the hard left turn increasing as the chorus of passenger screams intensified.
Mac closed his eyes and relaxed his upper body, grateful in the pain of the just tightened zip ties pressing into the skin of his wrists. Years ago during the initial phases of his DEVGRU training, he had watched as a twenty-year Navy SEAL veteran demonstrated how one needed no more than a second, and a moderate tolerance for pain, to effectively escape from a zip tie binding.
The grizzled SEAL was a short man, no more than five six, with a gaunt, deeply lined face, and eyes that seemed barely to move, while at the same time taking in every detail of his surroundings.
“The tighter the zip tie around your wrists, the easier the escape. Relax your body, take a deep breath, raise your arms, and then simply roll your shoulders forward as you slam the wrists down onto your midsection.”
Mac and his fellow recruits watched as the longtime SEAL snapped the zip ties apart several times before instructing them to partner up and demonstrate they could do the same. Mac proved particularly adept at the maneuver, volunteering to break out of two and then three zip ties at the same time. By the end of the demonstration, his already considerable confidence was fortified even more by the newly acquired knowledge.
That was, until the SEAL instructor stood next to Mac and then secured Mac’s hands behind his back.
“Ok, son, show me what you got.”
Mac Walker didn’t hesitate, simply mirroring the same motion, but doing it from behind his body. His arms rose up, and then slammed down into the backs of his thighs, once again breaking the zip ties.
The veteran SEAL’s eyebrows rose slightly and then he simply nodded, a sign of being impressed which Mac knew to be extremely high praise for any DEVGRU recruit.
“Good.”
Mac now sat in the seat of a hijacked 767 and prepared himself to repeat that maneuver learned as a young recruit. His arms rose above his head, and then were brought down against his abdomen as he rolled his shoulders inward to create even more leverage against the bonds.
The zip tie broke apart just as they had done during his DEVGRU training. His hands were free.
His feet remained bound, but whoever had tied him and the others up, had made the mistake of doing so while leaving their shoes on. That made escape much simpler.
Mac merely placed his left toe behind the heel of his right foot and removed the shoe. Once that was done, enough space had been created to allow him to squirm his feet free from the zip tie. The former Navy SEAL then shoved his right foot back into its shoe and leaned across Eldra’s just then waking body and slammed the window cover upward, allowing him to once again look outside the plane.
What the hell?
Below them and growing closer as the 767 continued its rapid and violent descent, was a vast mountain range looming just below them It seemed the plane’s wings were nearly grazing the snow capped peaks.
Mac’s mind reviewed where a mountain range of that size could be located given their initial flight path over water, the hard left turn, and now descent, and concluded it was most likely the Pyrenees Mountains of northern Spain, the natural and imposing barrier between France and Spain.
So we would be heading toward the Mediterranean – but why?
Mac had no time to answer his own question as an unmistakable sound echoed from the cockpit of the plan, the kind of sound a man such as Mac Walker was all too familiar with.
Gunfire.
7.
The screams of the passengers once again filled the cabin. Mac ignored them, his eyes locked on the front of the plane, waiting to see who was going to emerge from the cockpit area. The 767’s flight stabilized almost immediately after the gunfire, slowly rising above the mountain range, indicating there had been a struggle, and that someone responsible for that struggle had been incapacitated, or more likely, was now dead.
“What did you see outside the window?”
The question came from the young black man across from Mac. His eyes were large round saucers in his head, as he glanced nervously to the front of the plane, and then back to Mac.
“C’mon man, what’s going on out there? Where are we at?”
Mac had already closed the window cover and sat back in his seat, still staring ahead at the cockpit area.
“Nothing – don’t know. We’re headed somewhere, but I don’t know where that somewhere is.”
Mac decided the less other passengers knew, the safer they would be. He already had to deal with the passengers’ collective fear over what might be happening to them. Full out panic would make the situation much worse, and greatly increase the chances of them all being killed.
“Was that a gun being fired? Did it come from the cockpit? Have they killed the captain?”
Eldra was the one to ask the question, having just awoken next to Mac. Though clearly frightened, Mac was again impressed by how calm she remained.
“Yeah, that was definitely gunfire, but the plane’s flight was corrected, so they still have somebody up there who knows how to fly this thing.”
“Why are you lying to us? Maybe you’re one of them! He’s lying everyone! He opened the window and saw mountains out there! A bunch of snow! Isn’t it obvious? The plane has been taken! It’s another 9-11! We’re all going to die! We’re all going to die and this son-of-a-bitch probably knows why! He’s in on it! It’s another 9-11 and he’s one of them!”
Mac turned to face the man who sat behind him, while also noting the father’s panicked rant had caused his son to begin wailing loudly as well.
“Oh shut up! Shame on you! Look at your boy there! You’re scaring him! This young man here might be our only hope of surviving this…whatever is going on here. So just be quiet!”
Finished with her admonition, Eldra continued to glare at the father of the young boy, her head shaking in disgust at the man’s accusations against Mac.
“Is he right? Are we flying over mountains?”
The black man repeated his earlier question to Mac.
“Yeah, he’s right. I’m looking at them right now. A bunch of mountains and a shit load of snow. Where the hell are we?”
Mac looked up to see the young man who had been making out with the woman he sat next to shortly after the flight had taken off, now leaning across his seat and staring out a window.
“Sir, I’d pull the cover back down over that window if I were you.”
Mac’s suggestion was ignored as the man continued to stare out the window even as his wife, or girlfriend, tugged on his shirt for him to sit back down in his seat.
“Hey, I think I see water! Off in the distance, I think---“
The young man’s sentence was cut off by the re-appearance of the air marshal.
“What are doing? Did I tell you to do that?”
Mac sensed the deadly tone of the air marshal’s voice. His eyes were locked onto the passenger who had been looking out the window, his right hand slowly rising until the weapon pointed directly at the younger man’s head.
“You all want to see things, huh? Ok, I’ll show you. I’ll show you what happens when you don’t follow my orders. You – come here. Cover that damn window and kneel down in front of me.”
The woman next to the man began crying as she wrapped her arms and bound hands around his shoulders while pleading to the air marshal.
“Please, he didn’t mean anything. He just wanted to see where we were. Please don’t hurt him.”
The air marshal stood silently for several seconds as he looked down at the couple, seeming to contemplate what he should do next.
“Is he your husband?”
The woman shook her head.
“No, he’s my fiancé. We’re engaged. He just proposed to me in Paris. We were on vacation and he…”
The woman’s reply broke down into a series of sobs as she continued to cling to her boyfriend who in turn, looked up silently at the air marshal, his mouth hanging slightly open as his own eyes welled up with oncoming tears.
The air marshal offered the couple a thin smile as he looked down upon them. Mac felt a cold shiver move through him as he realized the danger both the man and woman were now in.
He wants to kill them both. He doesn’t have to, but he wants to…
Mac’s intuition was quickly proven right as the air marshal placed his gun directly against the boyfriend’s left temple and then with his left hand, pushed the young woman’s head so her face mashed together with that of her fiancé.
“I had a wife once, not so long ago. She was raped over and over again by soldiers who wore the uniform of the United Nations. They called themselves peace keepers you know. But they brought no peace to her or our village. They only brought pain, humiliation, and finally, death. It was a war you Americans watched on television between stuffing your faces with fast food as your president stuffed himself into the mouth of a fat whore. A war started by Vatican’s Satan. So now here we are, and fate will decide if your fiancé can save you – one bullet, two lovers.”
The 767’s passengers were frozen in horror, most still unable to fully comprehend what was happening to them. Even Mac was uncertain what, if anything he could do. The distance between himself and the air marshal was too great, and if he was shot and killed attempting to save the couple, the rest of the passengers had little hope of walking out of this plane alive. Mac Walker intended to act, but the time to do so was not yet right.
The young woman, realizing what the air marshal was planning, attempted to pull her head away but it was too late.
The bullet tore through the left side of her fiancé’s skull, ripping through his brain, striking against the bone of the lower right skull, and then lodging deep in the man’s neck. The air marshal had released his grip on the woman’s head, allowing her body to recoil backward as her fiancé tumbled forward, blood pouring from his ears, nose, mouth, and eyes as his heart continued to pump blood despite a third of his brain having been blown into oblivion.
The young would-be bride’s mouth opened wide, but no scream issued forth. Instead, she remained like that in her seat, unmoving, her eyes vacant, staring into oblivion, the innocence of her former life forever altered by the twisted, emotional corruption of an air marshal gone mad.
Military Fiction: THE MAC WALKER COLLECTION: A special ops military fiction collection... Page 3