“Can I help you?” asked the co-pilot in flawless Italian.
Kimball had to duck to enter the cockpit. The man maintained the same physical traits as the stewards — that of a darker complexion than their Italian counterparts and a total physiological difference in facial feature, more Middle Eastern. Although Kimball eyeballed the co-pilot with a steely gaze, he spoke to the captain.
“Enzio, you need to turn this plane around and head back to the gate.”
The co-pilot cocked his head. This man was speaking English, apparently an American. “I don’t think that’s a possibility right now,” he returned, his English as equally as flawless as his Italian.
“Enzio, stop the plane.”
But the pilot ignored him. Instead, he forwarded the throttle to pick up speed as they taxied toward the runway.
“Did you hear me, Enzio?”
The pilot nodded, his eyes focused on the moving landscape. “I can’t.”
The co-pilot appeared no more than a man in his late teens, his face bearing the fresh-scrubbed look of a choir boy. “Sir, please, if you take your seat—”
“Who the hell are you?”
An awkward silence passed in the cockpit before the co-pilot spoke softly into his lip mike, an order, and definitely in Arab.
Kimball immediately grabbed the man and pulled him close enough to smell the rosewater, the cleansing liquid of martyrs. “Stop the plane, Enzio. I’m not going to tell you again.”
“I can’t,” he said more astringently. “If I do, they will kill my family.”
Kimball turned to him. “They have your family?”
Enzio nodded, never once taking his eyes off the course. “This animal has threatened to behead my wife and children if I don’t comply with their wishes.”
Kimball turned back to the co-pilot. “Who are you?”
“Let go of me.”
Kimball tightened his grasp around the smaller man’s collar, and cinched the fabric until it threatened to choke Hakam. “Who… are… you?”
Hakam was barely on his toes, the tips of his feet seeking purchase as Kimball held him slightly aloft. “I could ask the same of you,” he answered, looking at the Roman collar around Kimball’s neck. “It’s obvious to me you’re no priest.”
The material around Hakam’s throat grew tighter.
“In fact, I would say that you’re a very skilled soldier.”
“You’re boring me,” said Kimball.
Hakam held his hands out to his sides in supplication. “It’s certainly not my intention to,” he said. And then, “And you’re not a member of the Swiss Guard, since you’re American.” He tilted his head in study. “Curious.”
Kimball lowered the man to his feet and pressed him to the cockpit wall. “And what did you plan to do? Crash Shepherd One into another building? Use the pope as a bargaining tool?”
“Nothing as mundane as that,” he answered.
“Then what?”
They looked each other straight in the eyes, neither man balking, their faces inches apart.
“Release me,” said Hakam. It was not a request, but an order.
“You’re lucky I don’t snap your pencil neck.”
“If you don’t release me within the next ten seconds, then your pope will be dead.”
Kimball hesitated.
“I’m not kidding,” said Hakam. “Right now, at this moment, I have a man with a garrote wrapped neatly around Pius’s throat. If you wait much longer, then you will be held responsible for the death of the pontiff when you had the chance to back off. Now you have five seconds.”
Kimball responded by grabbing the scruff of the smaller man’s collar and ushered him quickly from the cockpit and to the First-Class cabin. When they rounded the bend, Kimball saw the steward he confronted standing in the aisle behind the pope’s seat leaning over with a garrote drawn around the pontiff’s neck, the cord threatening to bite deep into the flesh and draw blood.
“Now you see what my fingers can do,” he told him, tightening the cord which forced the pontiff to ease himself slightly off the seat.
“If you hurt the pontiff, then I hurt him.” Kimball lifted Hakam off his feet and held him up as if displaying a doll.
“There is no stalemate here,” Hakam said. “If you hurt or kill me, then the pope dies, and someone will carry on in my place and the mission will go on. If the pilot deviates from his course, then his family will die as well.”
Kimball debated with himself for a brief moment before lowering the man to his feet, his hand still gripping the back of Hakam’s collar.
“Now release me.”
Against his better judgment Kimball released Hakam, who swiftly drew distance between them.
“As you can see, you never had a chance… Or a choice.”
Kimball looked around the cabin and spotted the stewards flanking him with their Glocks leveled. The faces of the bishops were tormented and frightened, none of them understanding the reality of the moment. Yet with the constant turning of their heads to take it all in, he could see they were trying to comprehend.
“I was hoping we wouldn’t have come to this point until we reached Dulles,” Hakam said. “But you don’t leave me with any choice.” In Arabic, he ordered three team members to take Kimball to the rear by the kitchenette and tie him down. “And leave one man to guard him at all times.”
As Shepherd One finally made its way onto takeoff lane, Kimball was escorted to the rear of the plane and secured to a seat with plastic ties binding his wrists to the armrests.
Inside the cockpit Hakam buckled himself into the navigator’s seat and looked out over the long stretch of runway, leading to the east.
Over the audio, Shepherd One was finally giving the green light.
Enzio did not hesitate. He forced the throttles forward, engaged the pedal, and held the yolk steady. As the jumbo jet picked up speed, the landscape passing by in a blur, he lifted the yolk and the airplane began to ascend at a steady pace.
And Hakam closed his eyes. Allahu Akbar, he told himself. Allah is the greatest.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They had lost all concept of time. The only way Basilio, his mother and sisters could tell the difference between night and day, was the change in humidity. Tolerable levels meant night; unbearable, day.
Basilio watched his mother lying on the mattress on the floor with her arms enfolding her daughters, pulling them into an embrace. Although their eyes were closed, he was not convinced they were actually asleep.
With his back against the corrugated tin wall and his knees drawn up into acute angles against his chest, Basilio determined the time to be night, since his skin was no longer tacky with sweat. Now he had the cover of darkness.
Grabbing the metal framing, Basilio hoisted himself to his feet. For more than a day he had searched for structural weaknesses such as a fissure in the wall or a loose rivet. But he found nothing. And then he turned ceilingward, his eyes fixing on the pilings of tin sheets not riveted to the crisscross of metal framing. The corrugated slabs of tin were weighted there, resting on top of one another, loosely.
After glancing at his mother with a momentary look, Basilio quietly began to climb the metal framework, the framing itself providing good foot- and handholds.
“Basilio?” His mother sounded tired, as if on the boundary between wake and sleep. “What are you doing?”
Basilio ignored her, one hand striving upward for a metal framing while his foot sought for the purchase of a metal foothold, each action propelling him upward.
“Basilio?” And then more harshly, a loud whisper to capture his attention. “Basilio.”
He turned and looked downward, his limbs spread across the framework like an insect frozen while in the middle of scaling the wall.