Flames — she could see flames through the perforated carbon fiber fuselage of the dying jet. The exploded turbine had turned the plane’s composite skin into a ragged mess. Heat and wind and sound flooded the cabin with unimaginable ferocity. Twenty million alarm bells went off through her mind as the jet tumbled through the air, all of them screaming going to die, going to die, going to die. Through the shrapnel holes she saw sky, water, sky, water as she tumbled too fast to even catch a glimpse of the horizon.
The jet hit an updraft, slamming her down into her plush leather seat with monstrous force, pinning her down. To her right, the young man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. Too much blood lost in just moments, his body simply shut down. The jet screamed, the whistle of wind through the fuselage blending in with the shrieking engine, a perfect maelstrom of mechanical distress. Then a wham, like getting hit with a blindside rugby tackle, like missing a step and taking that first big hit falling down the stairs, the jet bounced off the first of the whitecaps. Her entire chair tore loose, spitting sheared bolts and metal fragments as the aluminum mounts ripped free. Debris cartwheeled through the air, cracking Dr. Nassiri on the side of the head. Her vision swam gray.
The jet struck the water again, off-center, and toppled to a dead stop, slowly rolling over to total inversion, wrecked and flooding. Dr. Nassiri hung upside down, watching helplessly as a collapsing bulkhead fell onto her young female student, pinning the woman against the bench. Dr. Nassiri released her safety belt, tumbling helplessly through the air before splashing into the gathering flood of ice-cold seawater over the thick carpet. The freezing water was a gut shot, a snap back to technicolor reality. The aircraft was filling — rapidly.
She couldn’t tell if the body to her right — no, it wasn’t a body, it was her student — she couldn’t tell if he was living or dead, but he wasn’t moving and there was blood and—
A single image froze in her mind… exposed pink brain matter leaking from his crushed skullcap as angry, foaming seawater flowed over his motionless mouth and nose. Dr. Nassiri pushed herself to her knees, reaching with a shaking hand towards the collapsed instrumentation panel. The young woman hung upside-down in the leather seat, pinned down by the bulkhead. She whimpered as the rising water floated her long, sweat-soaked ponytail in a wet pile. Dr. Nassiri tried to push the debris off her, but it wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t even tremble.
“Help me,” moaned the young woman. “Please, help me, please, help me, please!”
It was then that Dr. Nassiri caught a glimpse of the jagged carbon fiber strut sticking not into but through the girl. She couldn’t bear to make eye contact; she could only see the terrible wound torn through her pupil’s chest. The girl probably couldn’t even feel it through the rush of endorphins and adrenaline.
Dr. Nassiri tried to speak, and then the water was over the young woman’s face, her dying student bubbling ineffectually beneath. Her ears popped with the pressure of the rising water. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be the last few seconds of her life.
Water flooded the interior with renewed force, pushing Dr. Nassiri upwards into a rapidly shrinking air pocket. The plane was upside down, everything was wrong. Pushing with her legs — and she treaded water now — she could just reach the manual release lever of the emergency door. She yanked on it, once, twice, to no avail. Horror flooded over her, as the last remaining vestige of rational thought told her too much exterior pressure.
The plane would need to flood and equalize the pressure differential before she could release the door. Her tiny air bubble would disappear — and then how long until the end?
She had no time to think, no time to consider any other options, she took one ragged, burning breath of jet fumes and smoke and thin air and ducked underwater as the last of the air bubbles flowed through a lattice of shattered carbon fiber and streamed to the surface. She fumbled blindly for the lever and—
And then it was free, just like she’d done a dozen times before. The door swung open. Her clothes caught on jagged metal as she squirmed her way out of the tiny opening. Freedom—kicking her legs, she pushed for the glistening surface, breaking into thick, smoky air. Sunlight streamed through her burning eyes amid a growing slick of flaming aviation fuel.
My lamb, my little lamb!
With three more kicks of her legs, she swam underneath and away from the field. She popped out of the water, gasping for breath. The stinging seawater cleared from her eyes just enough for her to slowly turn around, treading water. She saw no land, nothing but endless rolling waves and the burning fuel slick. No sign of the mysterious vessel that had sent the beautiful jet spiraling from the sky.
My little lamb, my beloved only son.
But then something in the distance — incoming boats, attracted by the smoke. Three of them, lost in the heat of the day as they sped towards her. Three low, fast fiberglass hulls, unpainted, filled with dark faces and bristling with weaponry.
Do not search for me, my son.
And then the pirates were upon her.
CHAPTER 2
Jonah Blackwell suspended himself from the ceiling of the chain-link cell, his eyes shut against the red tones of the rising sun. His fingers and toes wrapped around the steel links, holding his too-thin form in the air as he slowly lowered and raised his body against the force of gravity, letting his muscles clench, then release, each contraction bringing him a few inches closer to the unbounded brilliance of the cloudless sky.
He’d do a thousand repetitions this week. He planned a thousand more next week, maybe a thousand and one the week after. Finishing his quota for the day, he allowed his calloused feet to drop to the dirt floor of his cell. Jonah crouched, his bare knees reaching far past the ragged cuffs of his western-style khaki shorts. At a lanky six feet two inches, the ceiling of his cell was too low for a proper pullup. Never mind that — with the protein-poor diet served to the prisoners, he could maintain little but lean, stringy muscle.
Prison 14 scarcely stood out from the endless drab brown desert landscape of southern Morocco, just two dozen buildings behind concrete blast walls and concertina wire. A tiny outpost of misery marooned in a sea of
desert, leaning guard towers held silent sentry over a large courtyard ringed by rows of auxiliary tents and trailers. A ragged motor pool held a dozen decrepit pickups, each modified with military paint and human cages. The main gate opened to the desert and a disused perforated concrete pad complete with a skeletonized helicopter, long since stripped of any salvageable parts.
The prison had been hurriedly built to house a few dozen inconvenient reminders of an attempted coup. It now held nearly five hundred religious dissidents, misplaced progressive idealists, and disgraced political apparatchiks. The temporary outpost had long since become permanent, at least as permanent as anything in the Sahara. Past sandstorms scarred every building as the thick bulwarks slowly lost a long war of attrition with the desert wind and sand.
Prison 14 of the Moroccan Directorate of Territorial Surveillance did not officially exist, nor did the indistinguishable, ragged men housed in the endless rows of eight-by-eight chain-link cells. The designation of the prison, the numeral 14, was an intentional affront to logic, seemingly conjured by the desert itself as a cruel joke — there was no Prison 13 any more than there was a Prison 15.