Kim breathes lightly, her face smashed into the cushion of the airplane sofa. She carefully opens an eye, just a slit, eyelid quivering a little. She tries to see past the tangled hair in her face.
Shoot. A heavy glass vase overflowing with plastic flowers blocks her view. It rests on a glass coffee table and it is difficult to see past that as well. She concentrates though and finally sees past them both, and there is Dai Gu in a heavy black leather chaise, watching something on his tablet. She thinks he is probably watching TV from Kaliningrad or Russia or wherever they get their TV from in such a remote outpost of civilization. She can hear the speakers, but she doesn’t understand the language being spoken.
Lying quietly for hours, biding her time, she has become oh so familiar with the plastic flowers and the heavy glass vase they are stuck in. The position she is in is not uncomfortable, but she has been in it for hours, hands tied, her muscles screaming at her to move, even a little, but she has resisted the temptation with all her will. However, the time has come to give them some relief.
Kim kicks the back of the sofa in an attempt to launch herself across the coffee table. The first kick doesn’t quite do it and she is forced to use her upper body as well the second time. This time she is able to land on the coffee table without breaking it, grabbing the heavy vase two handed, and pulling it through a short arc directly into the side of Gu’s turning head. As she finishes landing on her feet, she spits a couple capsules at Gu’s now limp figure. She searches for, finds, and takes his weapon.
Kim stops for a second to take a quick look around the cabin, toward the front of the plane and sees one of the Russians, Sergie, standing up from his seat, pulling his gun. Kim doesn’t hesitate but fires Gu’s pistol and watches as the man falls rather than sits back down in his seat. She doesn’t know where she hit him but the hand with the gun drops and the gun falls to the floor. She looks over at the Russian kid, Victor, who, in his panic, is struggling to free himself of his seat belt.
Kim trains the gun on him and Victor looks at her, frozen, too scared to speak. She gets up and walks around a pair of overstuffed white chaises to stand next to him. Victor looks up at her, eyes pleading, but Kim raises the gun, bringing it down very fast, all the while praying to herself not to kill him. He is knocked out.
Kim then turns to the big guy, who is holding his firing arm. Apparently, this is where she must have shot him. He grimaces back at her. Lucky shot, she thinks. Kim bends down and takes his gun off the floor.
She carries both guns and walks to the front of the plane through a wood partition that takes her to the galley. She quickly locates a paring knife small enough to cut her bonds. While doing this, she takes care to stay out of view of the cockpit, which is sitting with its door open right ahead. She knows the pilot and copilot are aware of what happened in the cabin via the plane’s own version of CCTV. Now, all she has to do is wait for one of them to come out to ask for her gun. There was one shot, they heard it, and now they’re going to want to disarm her before anyone else gets hurt.
Sure enough the copilot, young and fit, wearing trim black slacks and an ironed white shirt, makes an appearance. He stands and looks at her, fixing her with an unwavering gaze. She notices thick black, combed back hair. He speaks and she tries to place the accent. Portuguese?
“Madam, please. The guns.” He gestures toward them where she has placed them on the counter.
Kim grabs one and in an instant the gun is at his forehead. She waves it, meaning for him to go into the passenger cabin, which he does. He stares at her as she closes and latches the sliding door that’s part of the dark wood partition, but which won’t hold up against anything very substantial for very long.
Finally unencumbered, Kim walks back into the cockpit. The pilot looks over his shoulder as she climbs over the rear console that separates the pilot’s seats and sits down in the copilot’s seat as if this were the most natural thing in the world for her. She fixes him with a purposeful stare while training the gun on him. He is unperturbed and says nothing, but rather regards her with a steely expression filled with obvious dislike.
Kim looks him over, sizing him up. He has short hair, greying at the sides, is close shaven, wears gold wire rim glasses that don’t seem to have much of a prescription, and is probably thinking how difficult this is going to be.
Kim reaches over and slaps his hands, showing with the motion that she intends for him to remove his hands from the yoke. He doesn’t respond. She then puts the muzzle of the gun to his head.
“Yes you will, or so help me!” Kim orders. She touches the snout of the gun to his forehead, pushing forcefully.
The pilot nods at her and releases his grip, with a flourish, as if to emphasis that whatever happens now will be her fault, not his. Kim leans over, grabs the right grip of the yoke and pulls it down. Sharply. The plane starts to pull right. She watches as the pilot uses his feet to compensate for the roll, moving the foot pedals and thus the flaps, the control surfaces on the wings of the plane, to accommodate a turn. After a brief period of turning the plane in one direction, Kim orders the pilot to then take it in another direction. After executing that maneuver, she finally lets the pilot take over.
The pilot immediately corrects the plane’s direction of travel back toward their destination, a heading on which they proceed for a while. Finally, Kim looks at him and raises her gun, waving it back and forth, once again. Somehow the pilot understands this. He repeats the turning movements from before, essentially flying the plane erratically. This goes on for some time, a game of back and forth, tit for tat, until finally the radio sparks to life. The pilot moves his hand to the radio controls.
“No!” she exclaims, again waving the gun.
They are nearing Gdansk and it becomes apparent that they have drawn the interest of authorities on the ground. The pilot glances out the window to the right and she follows his gaze. Closing quickly in the dark immediately outside the cockpit window is a bright light beaming at them from beneath the shadow of a scary, quite large, unmanned aircraft. The drone’s long thin wings have massive rockets drooping beneath them and a camera pod tucked beneath the fuselage swiveled their way, the very picture of darkest death and impending doom. They turn to the other side of the plane only to see another, identical drone take up position there.
Again, the radio activates. Again, it is ignored.
In response, the drones move in concert to position themselves in front of the business jet.
There really is no choice.
They follow.
Chapter 74
On Fire Page 73