Freedom Does Matter (Mercenaries Book 2) (21 page)

After Millie left with the girls, Ian was quiet for a moment. Then, he looked at Beckie. “Hmm. Very well. Let us use the time well. The negotiations?”

“Well, you remember where they left off, after the tsunami? We agreed to meet after three weeks, which makes it next week, but—”

“Indeed. One of us should return sooner than that. Kevin, perhaps—”

“No. Or… Not by himself. I’ve worked the sheikhs into wanting to agree, just like you were doing, and Kevin’s not comfortable taking that chair.” She rubbed his chest. “No one is, really, ‘cept me.” She laughed. “Likely ‘cause I don’t know enough to be afraid of where we could end!”

He took her hand and kissed the palm. “If you continue,” he said with a grin, “I will have to respond in kind…” He drew his fingertips along her shirtfront. Beckie shivered impressively, which had the salutary effect of forcing her chest against his hand.

Beckie did her best to ignore Millie’s call the first several times the doctor shouted. When she began to approach, however, Beckie turned toward her. “Another five minutes, no more. I promise!”

With a wave, Millie retreated.

“Before we were so rudely interrupted,” Beckie said with a half-choked giggle, “you were saying we ought to go back to Egypt early?”

“Indeed. But I am uncomfortable with you—”

“No time to get cold feet now. If I go back, I can do a preliminary with the sheikhs, see how much tsunami damage they’ve suffered, and if there are other issues that have come up since I left. If I can get them alone, just the two leaders, I want to see if they can tell me anything about Noorah’s sheikh, like why he’d be trying to kill us, and why his claim doesn’t bear up as well as theirs, if that’s his real motivation. And I can check on Saqira, see if she’s still alive…”

“It seems unlikely.”

“It does, ‘less they need her or one of the kids they think she can influence…”

“Can you lean over here? We have a minute left.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Day Twenty-one - en route Cairo

BECKIE WASN’T HAPPY TO LEAVE Ian and board the 737-700ER for the flight to Egypt, back to the negotiations. She waved to Jean-Luc through the cockpit door as she entered, and then found a seat several rows back. She took the bottle of water the copilot offered, but slid it into the seat back pocket for later. Kevin grinned in greeting after he’d drained half the contents of his bottle.

It was just the four of them on this flight; Sue and Dan had gone ahead on commercial flights to get the preliminaries arranged. She wrapped the blanket about her and curled up to replace some of the sleep she’d missed while spending more time than Millie wanted with Ian.

A bump on her head woke her. She’d loosened the seatbelt after takeoff and now, as she rubbed her head, she found herself against the seat ahead of her. Except it was now below her!

The plane was pitched down at an uncomfortable angle. What’s going on?

Across the aisle, Kevin seemed to be asleep, though he’d fallen against the forward seat, too. Asleep? Her heart began to beat faster as she pushed back enough to see over the top of the seat and looked down toward the front of the plane. She saw nothing unusual.

She worked her way to the aisle, looking both front and back. Nothing except noise, ever increasing. Kevin didn’t move when she shook his shoulder. In seconds, she’d fallen down into the galley where she could see through the open cockpit door.

Her breath caught; she froze. Jean-Luc was lying over the controls, unmoving.

Her heart paused, then began to beat furiously. She stood statue still, gripping the frame of the doorway so hard her fingers hurt. Her eyes swept the scene: Jean-Luc, the empty seat, the black of the sky outside the windshield, the stars through the overhead windows, the flashing of displays on the instrument panel. The display in the middle: the… altitude… no, the
attitude
indicator. The wings are still flat. But we’re headed down!

She jumped into the cockpit and leaned over the back of Jean-Luc’s seat to yank at his shoulders, trying to get him off the wheel. Grabbing and shoving and pulling; all the while she wondered how little time they had.

After a heave that almost cost her balance, Jean-Luc finally fell away from the wheel. Beckie crept along the console and fell awkwardly into the right-hand seat. She grabbed at her wheel and yanked back. When it moved, Jean-Luc’s leg fell from where it’d had been trapped behind the left control column. Jean-Luc, I love you! You maybe saved us. Well, your leg.

Changes still happened in slow motion: the dive became shallower, the numbers didn’t decrease quite so quickly. Sure wish I’d taken the flying lessons Jean-Luc offered. The plane was almost level. Beckie sneaked a glance at the numbers: they were still changing 102; 100; 98.

“What are you doing? You can’t—”

Thinking to look for the owner of the panicked voice, she pushed off on the wheel as she turned; the motion caused it to rotate and the plane dipped its right wing. As Beckie recovered, heart in mouth, behind her came a shout of anger and surprise. A scramble and clatter ended when something struck the intercom phone at the rear of the console. Keeping a hand on the wheel, she turned to look for the source. The copilot was lying on the floor, with blood flowing from a gash in his scalp.

Her mind was now doing cartwheels. What’s wrong with Jean-Luc? And Kevin? She glanced at the copilot, then stared. What’s this guy doing? She nudged his arm aside revealing a pistol next to his limp hand.

She made a few contortions to seize the weapon. She checked its safety before tucking it into her skirt’s waistband. Why’d he have a gun?

It took several minutes before her heart was beating more or less normally. While she made frequent glances to make sure the copilot wasn’t moving, she worried about Kevin and Jean-Luc. Then she was angry—at herself: God dammit, Ian, we still haven’t… Maybe that means I won’t die here? She sighed. No. No, it doesn’t. If I fuck up…

Beckie cast her mind back. This little… event had lasted less than ten minutes. The puddle of blood under the copilot’s head had stopped growing. Wish I knew more about him, she thought, but the pistol that had fallen from his hand convinced her that his intentions were not benign.

She took a closer look around the cockpit; nothing I recognize. The terror began to build again, until she throttled it. Hey, girl, get a grip! Jean-Luc let me ride up here. And he told me what some of these things do… Another look, this time including herself. The pocket in her skirt held… Cool! She snatched the new sat phone out and one-handed, scrolled until she found Patrice’s number. Hoping he could be available for low cost flying lessons, OJT, so to speak, she pressed SEND.

After a short eternity, Beckie heard Patrice say, “
Un moment, ma chérie,
” and felt her cheeks burning.

“’Allo? Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Patrice. Beckie. Beckie Sverdupe. I’m… I’m trying to fly this plane…”

It took her almost five minutes to convince him she was alone in the aircraft; that she didn’t know what had happened to the other three, and no one showed any signs of recovery. She finished the description of the plane and faltered to a stop.

“Well, it’s good in a way. Jean-Luc took the extended range plane and I flew it twice in the past couple of weeks.

“First, though, how’s the battery in your phone? From where you are, you can’t get to the up-link, so we’ll have to…”

She took the phone from her ear to look at it. Cool! Over half-way. She touched the speaker icon.

“… Get hold of the controllers and… If we can get you back on the auto-pilot, it might make sense just to have you go on toward Cairo. What’s your location?”

“No idea. Can you get it from the phone? We left five or six hours ago, now, so we gotta be over water.”

“Hmm. I need to do some research. While I do that, ease the wheel back to start a climb. There’s a panel just below the front window. About the middle of it, there’s a display marked Altitude. What’s it say?”

“41000.”

“Okay. That’s forty-one thousand feet, where the flight computer was set to fly. You said you were at about ten-thousand now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You want to come up on it slowly and when you get there, we’ll engage the auto-pilot again. Keep the heading at, you said it was eighty degrees?”

For the next hour, Beckie eased the plane up. She’d found a window on the glare shield panel labeled VERT SPD and did her best to keep it between 400 and 500. She wasn’t aware of the tension until her phone rang. She jumped, dropping the phone and rocking the plane in two of its three axes. She settled the plane; when it was again stable, she reached for the phone.

“Yeah?” She hated her shaky voice.

“How’s it going, junior birdgirl?”

Patrice’s humor was lost on her, but she didn’t throw the phone. I want to, though! “Alive and still above the ground. I think I just went above thirty-nine thousand feet.”

“Good. How’s the airspeed?”

She searched for that display again. When she found it, “M dot 79.”

“Good. Still at oh-eight-oh?” Beckie started to answer, but Patrice continued, ”I found the flight plan that Jean-Luc filed. You are still over the Atlantic, since his plan was for the North Atlantic transit. Air traffic control knows where you are. Sunrise will be an hour or less. You are coming up on the next way point, at N54W20.” Beckie just waited;
she
had nothing to add. “Unless… You could be north of it. Well, no matter.”

No matter? What’s that mean? Beckie quivered all over.

For the next ten minutes, Patrice led her through a series of knob turnings, readings and button pushings. At the end of it, he said. “Let go of the wheel.”

Even though Beckie had been holding it loosely for several minutes, she did not welcome this instruction. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. The autopilot’s doing all the work now. The stuff we went through verified that the course to Cairo is loaded in the flight management computer, and set up the LNAV mode…”

“Oh! LNAV just lit up over the attitude display.”

“Good! VNAV PTH and FMD SPD should also be there.”

“Yeah. So I just… let go?”

She did. The plane continued, except within a minute, the wheels turned themselves and the plane rolled slightly. The heading changed to 110 degrees. When she reported this to Patrice, he told her it was fine; that’s what the autopilot did. It was finding the selected course.

“Okay. I’m sorry to leave you alone again, but I have to talk to some controllers to figure out what will happen when you arrive. You might have guessed that this is the easy part. Just don’t move the control column or we’ll have to set the autopilot up again. Call if you need me, otherwise I’ll call back when I know something, but no later than two hours. Bye for now.”

He checked in again five minutes before the two hours were up.

“I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but people are uncomfortable with untrained you overflying them. Like Paris, which is just off to your left.”

“Clouds. Can’t see a thing. You wouldn’t believe how lonely it is up here. Damn airplane doesn’t even talk to me.”

“You don’t want it to talk to you. Planes never have anything good to say. Anyway, we’ll let the computer follow Jean-Luc’s course for another half-hour or so, till you reach the Lurag waypoint. We’ll put in a change before you get there.”

“What’ll that do?”

“It’ll keep you at least 20 miles off the coast of Italy once you hit the coast south of Turin. You’ll fly about an hour, then turn to 130, which will put you in line with the runway at Al Alamain International Airport, which is, as one news writer put it, ‘a barren airstrip surrounded by flat, desert nothingness… a stretch of lifeless land.’* You get no points for figuring out why you’re being sent there.”

“’Cause if I splatter the plane on the scenery, there won’t be much collateral damage?”

“Bingo.” Patrice’s snort was almost entirely humorless. “Not that there’s even a lot of scenery. I understand if you run off the runway, you’ll just bury the wheels in sand. But that’s no reason to do it.”

They spent most of the time to the Lurag waypoint entering the new course into the computer and checking everything again. At five past ten, the control wheels turned slightly and the heading swung around, stopping at 137. Thinking to save what was left of Beckie’s sat phone’s battery, Patrice disconnected once he reminded her, “We have the radar up on your display, set for 200 miles. Call me when you see the coast.”

As commanded, almost exactly at eleven the plane adjusted itself once more. Beckie settled herself after a quick trip to the lav. Patrice said I could leave if I had to. The clouds she’d seen over France cleared up as she made her way southeast off the coast of Italy, but since she was in the right hand seat and Italy was off to the left, there wasn’t a lot to see, even at forty thousand feet.

The monotony was broken just after noon; she heard footsteps along with a groan. Gotta be Kevin! She still glanced at the copilot’s body, which hadn’t moved since falling just aft of the console. “Kevin! God, I hope that’s you!”