by Amber Wyatt
Rob did not give a damn. He sat patiently at his controls waiting for Behnke to finish his phone call so that he could start up the engines. With a long and steady career as a cameraman on a reality adventure show, Rob was accustomed to being behind the camera, not in front of it. As long as he was getting paid, he had absolutely zero interest in being famous, nor in taking credit for any heroic bullshit.
Thomas checked his watch, then reached forward into the cockpit and held up two fingers in front of Behnke’s face and silently mouthed two minutes. Their filed flight plan with air-traffic control at Opa Locka Executive Airport gave them a ten-minute window to get up into the air and head north into their fictional flight corridor towards Orlando.
“It’s ok, I’m done,” said Behnke ending the call. “That was Hana, our contact in the zone. They are already waiting at the rendezvous point with transport for us. We will be on the ground with them in around half an hour.”
“Okay everyone,” Thomas said to the others. “Last phone calls please, and then switch your phones off. We will all keep our phones off for the next twenty-four hours, to avoid any possibility at all of the authorities tracking us. After that it will be too late for them to interrupt the expedition.” Not to mention that there would be little or no phone coverage where they were headed.
Numb with terror, and not sure that she could trust her own voice, Gina texted Raj with clumsy fingers to reassure him that everything was ok, and that she would be in touch when she could. She added their pre-agreed, secret code-word both to let him know that it was really her, and that she had not been kidnapped forced to send the text under duress. She also reminded him to tell the others to keep their damned mouths shut and to stick to the cover story that she was resting her voice for a few days before her next recording session. Then she turned off her phone to avoid the dozens of frantic replies that would doubtless follow.
Five seconds later the engine roared into life and her pulse spiked. Gina saw the reaction on everyone else’s face as they all felt the same surge of adrenalin. No turning back now. They were on their way. Everyone looked thrilled except for Wilkins who, if possible, managed to look even more nauseous than he had before. Gina tried to scrunch a little further away from him in case he still had anything left to vomit out. The powerful turboprop howled louder and they all leaned into the acceleration as the plane surged forward like a racehorse out of the gates. She had never been in such a small plane before and was surprised that it was only a few seconds later before Rob pulled back on the stick and they lifted off the ground into the air.
“WHOOHOOO!” screamed Behnke. He pumped his fist and gave a thumbs-up to Tristan, who grinned madly back and dutifully filmed Behnke ‘flying’ the plane as it climbed powerfully, before panning the camera sideways to the window, to catch some footage of the trees and highway flashing past underneath them. Gina rolled her eyes at Behnke’s antics, but then let out a gulp of fear as the plane suddenly dropped and bucked like an angry horse.
“Don’t worry,” said Thomas reassuringly from right behind her. “Just a small bit of turbulence. We are through it now.” And then after a moment, while her pulse was still short and quick. “We’re coming up to four thousand feet. Look at that view.” He indicated the right-hand window where Tristan was still filming.
Gina’s breath caught as she followed his pointing hand and found herself awestruck by the beauty of the sun-gilded clouds as they climbed up through them. She had been in planes countless times before, but the tiny turboprop seemed to be so close to these giants of the sky, that she could literally reach out and touch them. They were just so real and clear. She could almost believe that you could jump on to them and bounce back up.
“It’s beautiful!” She shouted back over the noise of the engine.
“It’s great isn’t it?” Thomas grinned back. Gina realized she was shivering slightly and leaned back into him, grateful for the warmth of his body. The tiny cabin was not insulated and the temperature was noticeably cooler up at this altitude than it was down at ground level. She did not know how long she looked out at the clouds for, but suddenly Rob did something to the controls and they descended again, into an opaque white mist, before coming out under the cloud base.
“Is something wrong? Are we landing?” Gina’s stomach clenched, and she was suddenly aware again of the thick straps of the parachute harness strapped around her chest and legs.
“No,” Thomas answered her. “We just needed to check out the plane from a cold start and confirm the climb capability, but now we need to get under the radar horizon to give us as much time as possible before the air force tries to intercept us. We’ll be flying at just under five hundred feet on our approach to the quarantine zone. Then once we are on target, we will quickly pop up to over five thousand to make the jump.”
“Where the hell are we?” Gina was looking out of the window. They were flying low over what looked like swamp and jungle. “Is that the Everglades?”
“Yes, it is part of the deception plan. We need to keep our route towards the quarantine zone secret for as long as possible. If we flew this low over Miami, or any urban area, the police would get dozens of calls about a low flying plane.” Thomas indicated a shadow on the horizon to their right. “Fort Lauderdale and the zone are coming up very soon. The plan is to enter the zone where it crosses over into the Everglades and then we will jump into a big area of open land just west of Sawgrass Mills.”
“Sawgrass Mills,” Gina repeated numbly. She had had no idea that they would actually be so close to where she wanted to go in the first place. She had just planned to use Behnke to get into the zone before splitting up from the group and heading off on her own. But it seemed that once again fate was intervening in her life and taking a hand. Her stomach clenched uncomfortably as she suddenly realized he had said the word ‘jump’. Incredibly, she had actually forgotten for a moment that they were going to be jumping out of the plane with parachutes.
“You know it?” Thomas had to repeat the question twice before she heard it over the noise of the engine. “Sawgrass Mills?”
“Yes, ah…” Gina gathered her thoughts quickly. “I’ve shopped there once or twice.”
“We need to get ready.” Thomas said. Gina yelped in surprise as he lifted her effortlessly and pulled her back on to his lap. Then he started to clip her harness on to the front of his and tighten up the straps so that they were securely fastened to each other. His hands were surprisingly gentle as he pulled back her hair and placed her goggles firmly on her face.
Holy shit! We are actually going to do this! Gina’s stomach started to churn with fear and her heart began to thump so hard she thought it would burst out of her rib cage. Next to them, Tristan was hooking up his harness on to Wilkins. She hoped that she did not look as miserable as the Englishman did, and tried to put on a brave face. A lot of this was going to be on Behnke’s stupid documentary, and she did not want her fans and the entire world to see her looking as if she was about to pee her pants with fear.
“Coming up on the border!” shouted Rob from the front seat.
“Tristan, film me!” Behnke gestured urgently. Tristan obligingly clicked his camera on and pointed it at him.
Behnke fixed the camera with what he imagined to be a smoldering look. “We’re coming up on the border,” he said in as a deep voice as he could, and gestured towards the window. Tristan gave him a thumbs up and a wink, then panned to the window and down at the treetops flashing past below.
Everyone looked out of the window with varying degrees of eagerness and anticipation. Even Wilkins appeared to have forgotten his earlier nausea, which had been replaced with curiosity.
Suddenly there it was, underneath them. High, double-fences of chain link, topped by barbed wire stretched left and right as far as the eye could see. They passed over three, then four sets of fences. They knew that hidden in the open ground in between the fences, as had been widely publicized when the zone was put in place, were all
manner of alarms, seismic sensors and minefields. Then there was one final barrier, a massive, steep-sided berm, to stop any desperate attempt to ram a vehicle through the border defenses. The berm flashed underneath, seemingly barely beneath their wheels.
“That’s it, we’re in the zone,” Rob said.
“Tristan,” hissed Behnke, waving his hand, until the camera was pointed back at him. “Okay everyone,” he intoned dramatically. “We are in the zone!” He looked over at a gesture from Rob, who was pointing upwards. “Oh right,” he gathered himself and smoldered at the camera. “Get ready everyone. We are going to climb to jump altitude now. Three minutes to jump!”
Rob did something to the controls and the engine howled with power. Suddenly there was a huge bang and the passenger compartment was filled with blood and glass. Gina screamed and Thomas cursed in German behind her. The plane surged upwards as if they had hit a ramp and Gina felt as if she was being squashed to the floor. This must be what it’s like when astronauts pull 10Gs at launch, she thought crazily. There were more bangs in rapid succession and the plane shuddered with each impact. With the front windscreen gone, the deafening roar of the engine was even louder than before. Wind blasted in from the powerful propeller in front.
“We’ve been hit! They’re shooting at us! Jesus Christ we’ve been hit!” Behnke screamed over the noise, throwing up his arms to protect his face. “They’re shooting at us. Land the plane! Turn around!”
Rob ignored him and focused all his concentration on pulling back on the controls to climb at full power. “It’s a bird-strike!” he shouted back to the others. He had no idea if they could hear him or not over the noise. He knew that there were golden eagles and other large birds in the Everglades, but he did not know what these ones were. He had only caught a glimpse of the huge flock for a fraction of a second as they had exploded out of the trees in front of the plane, and then one of them had hit the windshield right in front of him and blown the plexiglass panel in. Only the fact that he already had his skydiving goggles down, in preparation for the jump, had saved his eyes from flying fragments.
In less than a second they had been hit by a dozen birds on the wings and on the wheels, and Rob tried desperately to climb out of the flock. He was not worried about the wings, they could take a lot of punishment, but a solid strike into the air intake might damage the engine. If they lost power, they were flying way too low to make an emergency landing. There would be no time at all to extend the flaps or even choose a decent flat area to try and land in.
There it is, blue sky! Rob heaved a sigh of relief and blinked uselessly through the blood on his goggles as they finally climbed into clear air. Then there were two final bangs almost simultaneously and another explosion of feathers into the cabin. Fuck that’s two straight into the prop, he thought calmly as he felt their controls weaken under his gloved hands. That’s it. We’re losing power.
The powerful Pratt & Whitney engine coughed once, then twice and stopped. Then there was only dreadful silence and the wind whistling through the broken windscreen. Even Behnke had stopped wailing. This time the others had no problem hearing Rob when he turned and shouted back at them.
“Brace yourselves. We’re going down!”
Chapter Seventeen
Change Of Plans
The deafening roar of the turboprop had been replaced by a raw blast of wind which whipped through the open cockpit and swirled around the passenger compartment like a mischievous, invisible genie, tugging and jerking hard at all their clothes. Gina realized that the smears across her vision were blood spots drying on the outside of her goggles, and almost went cross-eyed looking at them. It was a welcome distraction from the fact that the engine on their plane had stopped, and that they were currently plunging towards their imminent deaths.
“We’re at fifteen hundred,” shouted Rob over his shoulder. Despite the wind they could hear his voice loud and clear. He looked directly at the tandem couple closest to the jump door. “Thomas you can jump now if you go straight to your reserve!”
Gina found herself unceremoniously thrown around as Thomas quickly shifted to the side and wrenched open the sliding door on the side of the plane. She had been aware that he was way more than twice her size but she had not realized quite how strong he was. For all his bulk the huge man moved as fast as a cat, almost oblivious to the smaller human strapped to his chest.
There was a terrifying glimpse of the ground below them, trees flashing underneath, giving way to buildings and roads, and then the sky flashed above her as Thomas leaned back and pulled himself back inside.
“No. Too many obstacles,” he shouted back at Rob. “We’ll come down in the plane.”
“Behnke, set the flaps to… Behnke!” Rob shouted, but Behnke had curled up with his hands covering his face, and had started to babble and cry in a high-pitched whine. Gina could just about see him if she craned her neck around. At first she had thought he was injured, covered as he was in blood and feathers, but it was quickly apparent that he was just having a panic attack.
Despite the fear that she herself felt, Gina was momentarily mesmerized by the surreal sight of a two hundred fifty pound, steroid-inflated bodybuilder curled up in the fetal position on his small pilot’s chair, trying to hide behind his hands. At least it keeps his hands and feet off the controls, she thought to herself.
“Fuck, he’s gone!” Rob reached up himself and started pumping the handle to extend flaps. “We’re fine people,” he called back into the passenger cabin, shouting so that he could be heard over Behnke’s wailing. “We easily have enough speed to do an unpowered landing. There is a nice, straight patch of highway underneath us. Just brace yourselves in case we come in hard.”
See, we should have just planned to land on the highway to start with! Gina’s heart was pounding with the heavy thudding of an adrenalin surge. Part of her was relieved that she was not going to be doing her first parachute jump after all, the other part of her wished that Thomas had chosen to jump with her, and they could float gently down and watch this plane crash from the safety of their parachute.
“Quick,” Tristan unclipped Wilkins from his harness and pushed him towards the back of the compartment. “Help me shift those equipment pallets. We need to dump as much weight as possible.”
“Do we really have to?” Wilkins grunted as he tried to shift one of the uncooperative crates.
“Yes!” Tristan snarled back. “If we crash or roll on landing, these hundred-pound boxes are going to be churning around in here like a washing machine, breaking bones and messing up my pretty face.”
The two men crouched awkwardly on their knees in the small compartment and manhandled the heavy packs forwards towards Thomas, who grabbed them one-handed and effortlessly launched them out of the door into the howling void.
“Thirty seconds,” Rob called from the front. The plane dropped and bounced alarmingly as it hit a patch of turbulence and someone yelped with fear. A few seconds afterwards Gina realized it was her.
“Okay get in that corner and brace yourself,” Tristan pointing Wilkins towards the rear of the plane, and doing the same thing himself with his back against the co-pilot’s chair. Thomas slammed the side door shut, to prevent them from being thrown out on landing, turned to sit facing backwards towards the rear of the plane, and braced himself with his back against the pilot’s chair. Gina was still sitting on his lap, strapped to his chest.
“Shouldn’t we unclip? I mean separate?” She asked, looking down at her harness.
“No,” Thomas said. His voice was so deep it was like having a sub-woofer vibrating against her back. “This is safer.” He put his arms around her and Gina found herself wrapped up in a safety cage of hundreds of pounds of solid muscle and bone.
“Ten seconds,” Rob called back. “Brace, brace, brace!”
Despite the blood droplets smeared on her goggles, Gina could see every tiny thread and weave of Thomas’s sleeve in front of her face, and beyond his arm, every in
finitesimally small detail of the passenger cabin was burned on to her retinas with painful clarity. It’s true what they say, she realized, just as you are about to die, time seems to slow down. Part of her realized that she must primarily be a visually-oriented person, as she could hardly notice the sounds around her, but she could see everything in horrifying and minute detail. In front of her Wilkins was vomiting copiously on to the cabin floor in front of himself, the powerful wind gusting around the cabin whipped strings of saliva back up on to his face, shirt and hair.
I hope that shit doesn’t reach me, Gina looked at the widening pool of liquid on the floor between Wilkins’s legs. He puked up his lungs before we even got on the plane. I can’t believe he has anything left to come up. She wondered if, when they crashed, whether Wilkins and his liquid mess would be catapulted directly into her face, and whether Thomas’s impressive arms would be enough to shield her from damage. Fuck, are they going to find my body covered in vomit and merged with some fat English dude?
Then she became aware that her hearing had returned and all she could hear was Tristan shouting and cheering.
“Fucking smooth bro! Fucking awesome! I love you brother.”
Thomas’s arms unfolded from around her and she realized that the wind had stopped in the cabin. In fact, there was no sound at all. Nor was there any movement. As a blessing even Behnke had stopped gibbering and wailing, and was peeking out from between his fingers. She looked out of the window to see buildings and billboards above the highway. They had already landed without her even noticing it. Her mouth dropped open as she realized just how skillful a pilot Rob was.
“Piece of cake,” Rob grinned from the front, but his hands were shaking as he took off his goggles and pushed his fingers through his hair, stretching out his neck. “Jeeeeeesus…” he sighed in relief.
Thomas unclipped Gina’s harness and seated her down gently on the floor of the cabin. Then he opened the jump door and looked out, peering from side to side. They were plumb in the middle of a long stretch of deserted highway. A small breeze stirred some dried leaves and they rustled across the concrete. Otherwise there was total silence.