“Shut up, jerk!” Leilani growled. “Or, so help me, I’ll fill you full of lead!”
She looked at Kurt, smiling proudly. “How’s that?”
“We need to work on your dialogue a bit, but not bad.”
Kurt glanced out the window. The horizon to the east was starting to sharpen, but the sky was still inky purple, and for the most part it was hard to tell where it ended and the sea began.
He could see the other two jets ahead of them, but only because of their navigation lights. The closest plane looked to be a mile away and maybe a thousand feet lower. The lead plane might have been three miles out and a thousand feet below the other one. The whole squadron was descending. He heard no transmissions and assumed they were operating under radio silence.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
“Don’t say anything,” the captain ordered.
Kurt figured that was a dead end, he could hardly threaten to blow up the plane if they didn’t tell him. He checked the altimeter and saw they were dropping through eight thousand feet. Another ten minutes like that and they’d be in the drink. He strained his eyes forward but still couldn’t see a speck of land.
He decided they’d waited long enough. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If you two want to live, you’re going to do what I say.”
“What if we don’t?” the copilot spat.
“Then I’ll blow up the plane,” Kurt said.
“It’s a bluff,” the copilot said. “He’s a weak American. He’ll never have the—”
Before the man finished his sentence, Kurt backhanded him across the temple. The man’s head snapped sideways, and he put a hand to the fuselage wall to steady himself.
“You think I want to end up back in Jinn’s hands,” Kurt said, “would you?”
The guy held the side of his face and looked back at Kurt like a scolded animal. The two pilots exchanged a look. Kurt was counting on the fact that both men knew what kind of a lunatic Jinn was. He guessed the bodies at the bottom of the well weren’t the only employees he had dispensed of in his day.
An argument broke out between them in Arabic.
Kurt backhanded the copilot again. “English!”
The man glared at him and slowly began to reach for his seat belt lock once again. “You’re right,” he said. “Jinn will make you beg for death if he catches you. But if we let you go, it will be worse for us.”
The seat belt clicked loose, and the man turned in his seat and stood, looming taller in the small cockpit.
“So blow us up,” he said. “Take us all to paradise.”
Kurt looked at the man, trying to stare him down. The man didn’t blink, and while Kurt didn’t blink either it was a standoff he couldn’t win.
“So be it,” Kurt said.
He let go of the spoon and flung the grenade at the copilot. It hit him in the center of his suddenly shocked face. He grabbed for it like a man in a shower trying to catch a wet bar of soap. He knocked it toward the captain.
With eyes as wide as saucers, he lunged for it, only to be intercepted by a mighty right cross from Kurt.
Kurt had put his whole body into the swing, pivoting from the hip and shoulder, pushing off with his right foot and firing his arm forward with every ounce of muscle fiber in his body.
The man went limp and fell backward on the captain and the control yoke he held, sending the aircraft into a steep dive.
Weightless for a second, Kurt collided with the ceiling. When he crashed to the floor, he lunged forward, grabbing the unconscious copilot by the belt and yanking him backward. As he pulled the dead weight off of the captain, the dive flattened out a bit, but a small pistol appeared in the captain’s hand.
With a swing of his left arm, Kurt knocked the captain’s hand sideways and the gun discharged. The bullet plugged the copilot in the side. A second shot hit the seat.
Kurt tried to hold the captain’s arm away, but the leverage wasn’t with him. The captain yanked his arm back, pulling it free and aiming at Kurt again.
Kurt ducked and shoved the yoke with his palm, pushing it over. The aircraft rolled hard as the captain fired again.
The shot missed, hitting the panel above them. It exploded in a shower of sparks. A group of warning lights came on accompanied by alarms sounding.
The plane went into a rolling dive, dropping toward the sea. It became difficult to do anything but hold on. Kurt managed to slug the captain once before being thrown back by the centrifugal force of the turning aircraft.
Kurt reached for his boot. The pistol swung his way as the captain lined up the kill shot.
Kurt thrust his arm forward and the captain stopped in midmotion with Kurt’s knife in his heart. His face went blank, the small gun dropped and his eyes drifted backward.
The plane began to roll over once again, and Kurt grabbed the control stick, fighting to counter the spin. Slowly the aircraft wings leveled. But by now the ground-proximity warning was going off and the computer voice was chirping, Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.
Kurt was pulling up, but he didn’t want to rip the wings off. The nose came up slowly even as the altimeter continued to unwind. Finally Kurt saw the horizon again, and a second or two later the nose of the aircraft pointed above it.
As the speed bled off and they began to climb, some of the warning lights and alarms shut down. As they passed a thousand feet on the way back up, the computer stopped telling Kurt what to do.
With the plane stable and level, Kurt looked around the cockpit. He was sharing a seat with the dead captain. The copilot lay on the floor between the two seats, looking just as dead. Someone else was missing.
“Leilani?” Kurt shouted.
“I’m here,” she said, poking her head back into the flight deck from below.
“What happened to you?”
“I fell down the ladder,” she said, coming forward and looking a little groggy. She bent and picked something up off the floor. It was the grenade. “Why didn’t we blow up?”
“I took the fuse out,” Kurt said. “It’s still got explosives inside, but they can’t go off without the fuse.”
She placed it gently in a cup holder.
“Should I tie these guys up?”
“It’s a little late for that,” he said. “Let’s get this one out of my seat.”
He stood, and Leilani unbelted the dead captain and pulled him loose while Kurt held the controls.
“You’re flying the plane,” she said as if she’d just realized it.
“Kind of.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that?”
“I should have been more precise,” he said. “I can make it go side to side, up and down, fast and slow. I can probably point it in the right direction. What’s going to be tougher is landing this thing without leaving a smoking crater in the ground or having it break into little pieces when it hits the water.”
“Oh,” she said, looking suddenly pale.
“But I’m a quick study,” he said, trying to boost her confidence. “And with those two dead I don’t really have a choice.”
Kurt had flown small planes before, never long enough to get any licenses or ratings, but he knew the basics. Most of it was instinct. Other than high-performance military aircraft, planes tended to fly themselves. They were designed to be stable and forgiving, although he found this Russian flying boat to be nose-heavy like a ship with a ballast problem.
“What about the LAPES thing?” she said. “Couldn’t we drop out the back?”
“We might just try that when we get where we’re going,” he said.
He studied the instrument panel, spotting the controls for the rear door and tail ramp. He marked their location in his mind.
By now they’d climbed back up to five thousand feet and were back on the original course. Several miles ahead of them he saw the other two jets silhouetted against the brightening sky. They were still descending, but the nosedive and spin had brought Kurt and Leilani well below their altitude.