by Matt Rogers
But the security didn’t know that.
They disappeared, lurching back behind cover, opting not to get into a firefight with what they assumed were trained combatants.
‘Now,’ Slater said.
Together, he and King tossed their duffels over the lip of the ledge, where each bag thudded to the tarmac after a second’s freefall. If either of them followed that trajectory, they’d probably break both their legs. Instead they used their non-dominant hands to guide them down the rock wall, keeping their guns firmly clenched in their right hands. They probed with the toes of their boots and dropped steadily, foot by foot, down the wall. When Slater deemed he was close enough to the tarmac to avoid serious injury, he let go and plummeted to the runway. Landed, rolled to his feet, and dusted himself off.
King opted not to risk the plunge, given his barely-recovered ankle, and took a few seconds longer to finish the descent.
When he touched down on the runway, Slater handed his duffel over, and together they took off at a run for the plane.
They caught the pilot and co-pilot halfway out of the exit door, racing to get away from what had quickly become an active war zone.
King intercepted them at the bottom of the stairs and held them at gunpoint. They froze, shaking.
He turned to Slater. ‘Do we need them?’
Slater studied the plane. It was a Dornier Do 228 — a twin-turboprop with an odd rectangular fuselage. He said, ‘No. I can fly it.’
King jerked his gun in the direction of the terminal and stepped aside to let the two men past. ‘Go.’
They didn’t need any further prompting. The moment they found a gap they both took off at a mad sprint, practically shouldering past King in their desperation to get away. They were halfway to the terminal before either King or Slater had mounted the stairs.
Slater took both bags and hustled up into the fuselage. There were maybe a couple of dozen seats in total for passengers — one on either side of the aisle, running the entire length of the plane. They were a sickly brown colour, made of cheap sticky leather. Slater dumped the duffels on the nearest empty seat and ran for the cockpit. He levered himself into the pilot’s seat, soaked in the myriad of controls, and started deciphering what seemed like an impossibly complex puzzle to the untrained eye. But a couple of years in the Air Force during the pre-black-ops days of his career had taught him everything he needed to know, and he figured a twin-turboprop plane shouldn’t be too much to handle.
He familiarised himself with the controls, and assumed the aircraft was STOL-capable.
Short Takeoff and Landing.
It had to be.
The runway was the shortest Slater had ever laid eyes on.
He gulped back apprehension, fired both turboprop engines to life, and started backing out of the loading bay.
From the open fuselage door, King screamed, ‘Faster!’
Slater’s heart skipped a beat, and he urged the aircraft to speed up.
It groaned in protest, but responded.
Then the first of the gunshots rang out across the tarmac.
81
King was crouched low in the open doorway when he noticed the jeeps roaring around the side of the terminal.
He counted four in total, all open-topped, all packed tight with insurgents brandishing assault rifles and handguns. There was a paramilitary army headed their way, and seemingly no one around to stop it. The floor underneath King shifted, and he realised Slater had spurred the plane into motion. The wheels rumbled on the tarmac, backing out of the loading bay…
…right into the path of the first jeep.
‘Faster!’ he roared, and Slater seemed to get the message.
The plane jerked violently as it reversed, and King snatched at the door frame so he didn’t go tumbling out onto the runway.
He steadied himself, then took careful aim and squeezed off a flurry of rounds — six consecutive pumps of the trigger and the driver and passenger died amidst an explosion of shattered glass as the windshield gave out. The jeep veered to the right as the dead driver slumped forward over the steering wheel, and within seconds it had crashed nose-first into the rock wall bordering the rear of the airport. It seemed no one was wearing seatbelts — bodies went everywhere, some still alive as they were hurled from the vehicle.
Slater finished reversing and King heard him talking to himself as he worked the controls. King didn’t blame him. It was a logistical nightmare — figuring out how to fly a specific type of plane whilst under attack.
So King focused on taking the heat off them.
He lined up his aim with the second jeep, and unloaded the last five rounds. The plane was bouncing and shaking, throwing his concentration and focus off. Although he didn’t hit any of the insurgents, he blew out the two front tyres when his aim drifted low. The jeep dropped forward on its nose and sparks flew off both exposed wheels. It slowed drastically, nearly taking out the vehicle behind it as its speed plummeted.
The two remaining jeeps avoided the collisions narrowly, and surged forward.
King fell back behind the seats as eight gun barrels floated in his direction.
Bullets tore through the open doorway, blowing out some of the windows.
That’s fine, King thought. As long as the engines stay intact.
He reloaded and threw caution to the wind by crab-crawling back out into the line of fire.
He had to. The longer he spent cowering away, the more time the insurgents had to fire at the turboprop engines.
He tried to line up his aim, but it was chaos. Slater was roaring forward out of the loading bays, and the plane careened out onto the start of the runway. King almost had one of the jeeps in his sights, but then the floor lurched beneath him again, sending him tumbling and rolling several feet down the aisle. When he righted himself, he realised Slater had lined up the nose of the plane with the end of the runway.
‘Hold onto something!’ Slater roared from the cockpit. ‘We only get one shot at this.’
King stared down the length of the aisle, through the cockpit, out the windshield. He saw the runway stretching down the mountainside, uncomfortably short for a standard takeoff, and then he saw it plummet away into nothingness.
Hence the need for a fast start.
If you don’t build up enough momentum, you don’t generate enough lift to get the plane off the ground before the runway simply ends.
Fuck, King thought.
The end of the runway sent shivers down his spine.
Then more bullets tore through the open doorway, blowing out the opposite porthole windows.
‘Do it!’ King yelled. ‘No time.’
He could already hear the chorus of the turboprop engines rising. Slater was charging them up, building power through the propellers, preparing for—
King saw him slam the controls.
The plane lurched off the mark. King nearly went head over heels as the floor shifted underneath him, and then his stomach was dropping and they were racing into the plunge. They gained more and more speed as the nose dipped and they raced downhill, and more bullets hit the fuselage, and King fought and clawed his way to the open door frame and emptied the rest of the P320’s magazine at the pursuing jeeps. He could barely keep the contents of his stomach down, let alone control his aim in any meaningful way, and he was pretty sure the entirety of his shots missed. There was no way to tell, though — the wind was roaring in his ears and bringing involuntary tears to his eyes, and when the gun was empty he snatched hold of the nearest seat and held on for dear life.
Then he turned all his attention to the front of the plane.
They were gaining speed faster, the whole fuselage rattling and shaking and groaning. Slater was hunched over the controls like a man possessed, every morsel of his attention seized by the view out front. Wind howled in through the open portholes, deafeningly loud in the fuselage, and King roared, ‘Are we going to make it?!’
The end of the runway was impossibly
close.
Do we have enough speed?
His heart was in his throat. Slater was by no means an experienced pilot — King knew he’d be relying on the archaic remnants of his brief Air Force career. This was one of the most dangerous airports in the world, and only seasoned STOL-capable pilots made regular flights in and out of Lukla…
The whole plane suddenly bucked violently, the whole fuselage bouncing up and down at once, nearly throwing King head-first into the wall. He went pale and clammy, convinced one of the engines had blown out. By now, there wasn’t enough room to stop. If they didn’t lift off, they’d plummet to their grisly deaths and—
The view of the runway disappeared, replaced by sky.
King gripped the back of the seat with white knuckles as the floor rose underneath him, nearly taking him off his feet.
The nose had lifted off the tarmac.
But what about—?
The whole plane jerked and bucked and went airborne, and the floor suddenly dropped away, and King thought he’d get flung out the open doorway as his vision rattled and frantic noise screamed in his eardrums and—
They were in the air.
Not falling to their deaths.
The back of the plane had nearly bottomed out as it came off the runway at the very last second, but they’d made it.
King collapsed in relief.
Lukla fell away almost immediately, already a tiny blip through the portholes, and King let his wobbly legs recover before stumbling his way to the front of the plane.
He stopped in the cockpit doorway and said, ‘How close was it?’
Slater’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Which told him everything he needed to know.
‘Fuck,’ King said. ‘Let’s never do that again.’
‘You read my mind,’ Slater mumbled.
Then King noticed the multitude of warning symbols flashing across most of the screens.
As they levelled out above the mountains, Slater said, ‘I think we might have a problem.’
82
Slater coasted for close to ten minutes.
The controls screamed at him, desperate for manual intervention. They might as well have been hieroglyphs. He could handle a standard flight path, but this…
This was way above his pay grade.
But Phaplu was close. Incredibly close. The airport, as far as he could tell, was less than five minutes away if they maintained their current speed. Slater figured it’d be the longest five minutes of his life, but he was confident the old Dornier could tough it out.
Then the nose dipped violently.
If he hadn’t been strapped in, he would have hit the roof. Luckily King had deemed it prudent to find a seat, because he might have been thrown out of the plane entirely. They each jerked against their seatbelts and crashed back down into the seats in twin heaps.
Slater coughed, fought the urge to lose the contents of his stomach, and squinted hard at the controls.
Everything was falling apart. He didn’t know what exactly had caused the chaos — one of the bullets striking something vital, obviously — but now the situation was growing more dire with each passing second. The plane jerked again, and Slater had to fight to prevent it dive-bombing into the peak of the nearest mountain.
Sweat beaded on his forehead, and ran off his nose.
He gritted his teeth and fought for control.
Then he spotted Phaplu. The village was barely visible in the valleys below, but he made out the roofs of buildings and, alongside it, the tiny runway. He dove for it, abandoning all hope of a smooth landing.
Because they were running on borrowed time.
The Dornier whined and shook and rattled in its descent, but it was rapidly approaching the village, and if Slater could touch down in one piece, they’d be at the home stretch—
Then one of the turboprop engines faltered.
There was a pop to their left and the plane jerked brutally to the right.
Slater’s brain screamed, Emergency landing.
Only option.
But that wasn’t even an option. They were screaming toward Phaplu, perhaps a minute out at best, but there was no way he could touch down on a runway that short with the engines in their current state. He swore at the top of his lungs, and heard King unbuckle his seatbelt behind him.
King fought his way into the cockpit doorway.
‘Was that an engine?!’ he shouted over the roar.
‘Sure was.’
‘Can you land?’
‘I don’t think so.’
King went white as a ghost. ‘What do we do, then?’
Slater’s brain was going haywire as a dozen different thoughts fought for his attention. He could barely concentrate on the landscape, let alone—
The landscape.
He spotted the bright blue glacial river running parallel to Phaplu, less than half a mile from the village. He thought he recalled a name he’d read on a guide map days earlier, but it was deep in the recesses of his mind.
Solu?
He wasn’t sure. It sounded right. It didn’t matter either way.
He aimed for it.
Which mattered plenty. He was committing to it. There’d be no room for an alternative plan.
It was this or nothing.
An emergency landing, or a fiery crash.
No Plan B.
King realised too. ‘Oh, shit.’
Slater didn’t have time to respond. He was zoned into a tunnel, like he’d taken the entire planet’s supply of Adderall at once. There was the river, and nothing else. He could see the position of every rock, every trickle, every sliver of dirt on the riverbanks. He got a sense of the depth of the water, the flow of the streams, the rising and falling of the land beneath it.
Then, in the blink of an eye, he realised a landing would be impossible.
And the only feasible option for survival presented itself.
‘No,’ Slater said. ‘No, no, no, no…’
‘What?!’ King shouted.
Slater steeled himself.
‘Leave the bags,’ he said, his voice ice, his demeanour ice. ‘We don’t need them anymore. Go to the exit and get ready to jump.’
‘What?!’
‘No other option.’
‘You can’t land?’
‘It’ll tear the plane apart.’
‘Holy shit,’ King said to himself, backing out of the doorway. ‘Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.’
Slater heard the cursing fade as King went down the fuselage toward the open doorway, bracing himself against the wind the whole time.
Then he zoned in even harder on the river.
He flew lower.
Lower…
Lower still…
Lower.
Then he pulled up at the last second and the Dornier levelled out perhaps twenty feet above the river. The speed was ludicrous, the wind deafening, the fuselage rattling, the whole plane threatening to shred to pieces at the slightest provocation.
They wouldn’t make it thirty more seconds.
Slater employed every ounce of concentration he had available and let impulse take over. He opened his gaze wide, expanding his peripheral vision, and waited for the right moment.
Then he saw it.
A couple of hundred feet ahead, the light blue of the glacial water was a shade darker.
There was enough depth there.
He figured out trajectories fast, calculating when to jump and—
NOW.
He twisted in his seat, unclasped the seatbelt, and yelled, ‘Jump!’
King obliged. Anyone else would have hesitated, but both of them were keenly aware of the importance of timing in a world like this. King heard the command and threw himself out the door without a moment’s hesitation, his body pummelled by the wind and the G-forces. He whipped out of sight and was gone.
Slater leapt out of the pilot’s seat, scrambled out of the cockpit, and flat-out sprinted for the exit door.
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Every stray thought in his brain, every instinct, every ounce of common sense — it all banded together and urged him to stop, screamed for him to stop.
He felt the nose of the plane dip with no one behind the controls, and knew the Dornier would impact the water at any moment.
He fought against the wind and clawed his way out of the plane into the open air.
83
He only fell ten feet before hitting the water with horrific intensity.
Still travelling at the same speed as the low-flying plane, he had the sensation of shattering every bone in his body as he broke through the surface. There was a single moment of impact, and then absolute silence.
He floated in the glacial water, barely conscious, barely clinging onto his sanity and his life.
If he passed out now, he’d sink to a watery grave.
He floated gently downward a couple of feet, and his feet touched solid ground.
The bottom of the river.
He hovered there for a spell, in too much pain to function, unsure whether he’d paralysed himself. He couldn’t see a thing, and realised he had his eyes closed. At the edges of his hearing, he picked up a dull concussive underwater boom, and recognised it as the plane plunging into the river further downstream.
He let the icy water numb his wounds before opening his eyes.
It was surprisingly bright. The water was clear, so cold it had nearly frozen over, and the natural ice bath helped to dull the pain. He pushed off the bottom and ascended to the surface. When he broke it, sunlight flooded his senses, and he blinked hard to adjust to the new conditions.
The Dornier rested in a hundred separate pieces only a short way down the river. Slater found himself floating toward the wreckage, and he swam to shore before he got caught up in the debris. It would have pulverised him if he’d hesitated only a couple of seconds longer. And if they’d jumped from a greater height — well, it wouldn’t have been pretty for their internal organs.
The miracle of unnatural reflexes had saved him, once again, from death or permanent disfigurement.
He clambered onto the riverbank and collapsed on his front. His stomach churned restlessly, and he realised he’d swallowed river water when he opened his mouth and vomited a torrent into the mud. Then he rolled onto his back, put his hands behind his head, and tried not to think about what he’d put his body through.