“Who’s the new bidder?”
“I don’t know his name. But I know he was willing to pay big dollars to make sure you survived.”
“All right. So if we’re off to see my new benefactor, why all the cloak and daggers…” Sam’s eyes drifted down toward Andre’s pistol. “Or in this case pistols?”
Andre frowned. “Hey, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea here, you’re in serious trouble. Your… ah… what did you call him? — benefactor — didn’t just save your life to be kind.”
“No, I suppose he didn’t. So why did he save my life?”
“I don’t know. Something to do with the information on that tape. Whatever the hell that means. I hope you’ve still got the Betamax.”
Sam nodded.
There was no point trying to hide it. The tape was stuffed in his backpack. He was trapped in the cargo hold of a military aircraft. They were probably thirty thousand feet up. No way out.
Andre asked, “Where?”
“In the backpack.”
“Hand it over.”
Sam slipped his arms free of its shoulder straps and handed it to him. Andre opened the bag, confirmed a Betamax tape was inside, and zipped it up immediately. Relief plastered across his face.
“So why not take the tape and kill me now?” Sam suggested.
“Hey, I’m with you… better for you and better for me. But according to the man I work for it’s not that simple. He needs to be certain of what you know, and what you don’t know. My guess, someone from the Pentagon sent you to infiltrate the Russian Mafia, but what you found there turned out to implicate someone back stateside in some pretty lousy shit. Heads will roll. I mean, some high-ranking Pentagon official or something was about to get screwed. Whoever they are, they have deep pockets, and they’ve got their fingers in the wrong pie… so they need to know exactly what you recall.”
The C17 banked and its nose dipped to commence its descent.
Sam reached for the Makarov.
The mercenaries moved in quickly to disarm him.
His hand never gripped its handle. Instead, he received a blow to his jaw like a sledgehammer, immediately followed up by two sharp jabs into his solar plexus. Whatever muscle memory Sam had been relying on in hand to hand combat was clearly inadequate against previous members of an elite special forces’ unit.
He hit the floor and what ensued was a very one-sided brawl. Multiple punches and kicks landed on him, keeping him down low, in a position of submission.
It was a fool’s errand. There was no way he could possibly win, but it was the best option he had. After all, he was a dead man as soon as the plane hit the ground. Besides, Andre had just told him he wasn’t going to shoot. The man was being paid to keep him alive until they reached the ground — ergo, his best chance of survival was to fight while he was still in the air.
But it had come to nothing.
A couple of the mercenaries pulled him up to his feet.
Sam kept his hands closed tight. His world was spinning. Adrenaline flowed throughout his veins. A unique combination of fear and elation rose as he mustered a stupid grin.
Andre put his pistol away in a side holster. “Let him go…”
The two mercenaries backed away.
The muscles in Andre’s face tightened. He balled his hand into a fist. Without saying anything he punched him in the gut once. It was a targeted move designed to incapacitate a person. Short and powerful, with enough force that it ripped the wind out of Sam’s lungs.
Sam crunched over into a ball.
The muscles of his diaphragm spasmed.
He tried to breathe, but for a moment nothing happened. Terror rose faster than he could suppress it.
Andre’s lips twisted in malevolent pleasure as he watched Sam begin to asphyxiate. “See, I told you that it was best to just sit there with your mouth shut until we arrived, but now we’ve had to make things hard on everyone — most of all, yourself.”
Sam opened his mouth and tried to make a response, but nothing would come out.
Nearly a full minute passed before Sam recovered, started coughing, and eventually took his first breath.
It tasted sweet and delightful.
He whispered something in a crackling, nearly inaudible voice.
Andre said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear that… what did you say?”
Sam tried to speak again, but couldn’t muster much volume.
Instead he grinned sardonically.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Andre asked, his eyes narrowed on Sam’s closed fist. “What have you got there?”
Sam opened his hand and started to laugh. “You and I… we’re both dead men walking.”
In his open hand was the pin to a grenade.
The C17 Globemaster III banked to the left.
And the grenade started to roll along the cargo hold with a metallic clanking sound…
Chapter Forty-Two
Everyone dropped to the floor.
The grenade came to rest on the starboard edge of the fuselage, turning the cargo bay into deadly silence.
Sam expelled the last breath in his lungs.
The grenade exploded.
One mercenary was killed instantly.
The blast ripped a hole in the fuselage roughly eight feet wide and sent a shockwave throughout the entire cabin. His ears seemed to echo the blast inside his skull. The noise was followed by silence and the stillness that Sam imagined might come with what could only be considered a pre-death experience.
A moment later, everything changed.
Air whirled as it funneled through the giant hole in the fuselage. The plane rapidly began to depressurize. Two mercenaries closest to the opening were sucked out immediately and Sam, for the second time since boarding the flight, fought to grip something on the floor of the cargo hold to prevent himself from being sucked out the jagged gash in the fuselage.
Air rushed over him. Like an invisible monster from one’s nightmares, it pulled him toward the open void and certain death. There wasn’t anything any of them could do until the air pressure equalized in the plane.
His fingers dug into the tiny gap in the steel grate that lined the cargo bay. The gap wasn’t big enough to accommodate them. The gust of wind raging toward the scarred opening in the fuselage teased at him.
Two more mercenaries, unable to find sufficient perch within the cargo bay, were dragged out the void, with the second one making a sickening crunch when his head struck the remaining piece of steel bulkhead as he flew out the opening, killing him instantly.
It was just the amount of motivation Sam needed to jam his fingers in deeper.
He screamed with pain. It was like someone slowly hitting each of his fingers with a hammer. His legs lifted upward, and his only point of contact with the aircraft were his two middle fingers.
It didn’t last long.
The opening was sufficient to allow the cabin pressure to equalize with the outside environment within fifteen seconds.
As it did, Sam found his legs slowly returned to the ground and he was lying flat, his fingers still burning with pain. Sam didn’t wait for the next step. He stood up and turned to face his attackers.
About fifteen feet away, Andre looked at him. His face, a mixture of vacant confusion and mulish obstinacy. He was bleeding from his forehead where a piece of loose debris had struck him, and looked partially concussed.
Andre picked up his Glock, narrowed his eyes, and tried to focus it on Sam.
Hanging onto the cargo net, Sam recognized Naftali, the Israeli ex-member of the elite Sayeret Matkal. He’d dropped his Uzi during the original blast. The weapon had slid to the aft of the cargo hold, near the tail gate.
Naftali, recovering faster than Andre, let go of the cargo netting and reached behind into his inner thigh holder for a knife.