A freshness blew through his mind.
Commander Cook was buckled to his chair. He could not move as Cory worked his body. He knew where to strike the man, and how. The Irvin jacket offered little protection. Cory landed his last blow with a shout that his old instructor had termed kiai, a Japanese word meaning ‘concentration of spirit’: an incongruous memory to recall in the cockpit of this doomed plane.
When it was over, each watched the other, panting. Cory saw Cook reach for his mask, but his fingers slid from the clasp. Cory helped unfasten it. The orbit of his right eye was broken.
‘Help me pull her out,’ the commander said. His words were slurred.
Cory put his hands over those of the commander. The aircraft came level.
‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’
‘Can this thing fly itself?’
Commander Cook indicated a lever to his left, mounted on the fuselage beneath the oxygen hose connector. ‘Auto controls clutch. And. And altitude control.’ Cory reached across and pulled the lever until it clicked. When he looked again at the captain, he saw that Cook was unconscious.
Cory struggled to maintain his focus. The crew was dealt with. He had stopped Harmer before the Mayday could be sent. And, as far as he could tell, none of the passengers knew what had happened in the cockpit. It was possible that Miss Evans would come forward to check the cause of the dive. But Cory still had time. He had the parachute and the aircraft was flying even and true. He could still make it.
First, he removed the oxygen masks of the crew and spoiled their seals. They might still wake at this altitude, but he wanted it to take as long as possible. As he worked, he looked at the turned head of Commander Cook. ‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’
Cory sank to his haunches in despair. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and told himself that this would be worth it. He was fighting a larger war here. These were innocents but their deaths would not be uncounted. They would be stars on a wall somewhere. Cory would see to it.
The fire axe struck his shoulder with enough force to make him turn, biting down on his scream, looking up at the fury of Miss Evans. She put a foot in the small of his back to help work the blade free. As it came down again—certain to kill him—Cory made a fist and raised his arm with all the strength he had left. It looked like an absurd salute, but he prayed that the bones in his forearm would hold, and they did. The axe was deflected into the deck plate.
The block would not work a second time. Cory had to get to his feet. He did so with a flip that reignited the pain in his shoulder. The pain expanded and his head was consumed with disorienting flashes of electricity and cloudbursts of deadness and when his vision cleared he saw that Miss Evans was several inches above the deck where he had pressed her into the canopy by her neck. Cory looked in horror at his shaking hands. He let go and they both collapsed to the floor. Cory bit his tongue at the pain in his shoulder and waited for his wits to return. All the while, the engines pealed.
His pocket watch confirmed that he had only minutes left. The murder of Miss Evans had taken him outside of himself. He was no longer the man he had once been. That man who had proposed to Catherine: gone. With this realisation, his situational awareness returned. He began to work numbers, possibilities. Only minutes left.
He stepped between the seats, over the bodies, to the altimeter. They were at 21,000 feet and holding. Their speed was 190 knots.
Think, Georgia.
Miss Evans had fallen on her side with her arms and legs splayed. She might have been running. Cory thought about Patrick Harkes and wanted revenge. There was a principle in chess that a defensive move must go beyond defence. It must also attack. The escape with his life would be his defensive move, but his attack would be the transmission of the agreed signal. Jennifer, who was waiting for it, would understand that Cory had completed his secondary mission to kill Harkes. This misinformation would be worth the trouble if Harkes also intercepted it and derived the intended meaning. He would consider himself safe. A man who considered himself safe would not exercise the same caution when making his travel arrangements.
Cory smiled.
It had to begin with STEN.
Then E.
Wait; D, not E.
D, E, C.
STENDEC.
Not so difficult. Harkes would figure it out.
He pushed Miss Evans aside and shook Denis Harmer. Harmer blinked, but did not regain consciousness. Cory took the smelling salts from his pocket and broke a capsule beneath Harmer’s nose. The man’s swollen eyes widened. He rose to his elbows and his head bobbed within the turtle shell of his flight jacket. Cory pressed himself against the half-bulkhead of radio equipment to obscure Harmer’s view of the bodies and held his neck to prevent his head turning.
‘I’m pressing a nerve between the second and third cervical vertebrae,’ Cory said. He added an electromagnetic component to his voice that would register in Harmer’s headphones. ‘If you attempt to deviate from my strict instructions, you’ll be in more pain than you can imagine. Now: I want you to send our ETA together with a letter sequence.’
‘My eyes hurt. What did you do? Some chemical?’
‘It’s stuff from the fire extinguisher. Your eyes will clear in a minute. Now, I want you to send this sequence: Sugar, Tare, Easy, Negat, Dog, Easy, Charlie.’
‘Where’s the Skipper?’
‘You’ve got five seconds. Four.’
‘Alright, alright. Let me get set up.’
Harmer felt for the transmitter on the higher of the two radio panels. He plugged two jacks into the lower bank. He tried to face Cory, but Cory squeezed his neck. Harmer moaned.
‘Do what you’re told.’
‘You sound American. Is this some OSS caper?’
‘Send it now and I’ll let go. Make the message conform to all the normal conventions. I’m listening in. If there is even a hint of the word ‘hijack’, that’s it for you.’
‘But your code alone will indicate trouble.’
‘No. At worst, enigma.’
‘So it’s a game.’
The dits and dahs stopped his thoughts as Harmer thumbed the Morse paddle left and right. Cory felt the translation of the message flash through him:
Santiago tower from CS-59. ETA 17:45. S-T-E-N-D-E-C.
Cory watched the dials on the receiver. Nothing moved.
‘Did they get it?’ he asked.
‘Give it time.’
The reply came loud and clear from Santiago tower.
Dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Cory.
‘He doesn’t understand.’
‘Send the message again.’
‘Why? What is it?’
Cory adjusted his grip. ‘I told you to send it again. Quickly.’
‘OK, OK.’
As the Morse paddle flapped again, Cory listened to the blaring engines. The sky was overcast, for the most part, and the Lancastrian kept to the line set by the rudimentary automatic pilot. Cory understood this machine. It was a workhorse. And, equally, so were the unthinking mannequins inside. The radio operator: his movements were correlated with his nervous chemistry, and the pitch of the aircraft, and his body within it. That movement itself correlated with the instant before. And that movement correlated with another movement, still earlier, until the movements described a sequence that could be reversed to the moment of his birth. And the dance partner was Time, always leading. Time the entrapper. The milonguera.