Shepherd One (12 page)

“Is a different crew taking us back?” he asked the pope.

The pope nodded. “I saw Enzio in the cockpit when we
boarded.”

“But is a different crew taking us back?”

“Sometimes one specialized crew will switch out for another
during a lengthy trip,” he said, “so that others can return to their families.
And we’ve been away for awhile.” He turned toward Kimball. “Why?”

Kimball did not respond. Instead, he studied the stewards
who served the bishops with smiles on their faces and congeniality in their
eyes. They were not the same crew. “It seems to me this is a different team,”
he said.

The pope shrugged. “It very well may be.”

It very well may be
, Kimball mentally parroted.
But
something’s
very, very
different here
.

And then it hit him. The marginally darker skin tone, the
facial features—it was all quite reminiscent. They were of Middle-Eastern
origin.

“Oh, no,” he whispered.

#

Hakam quickly retreated
into
the cockpit and hunkered close to the pilot. Captain Enzio Pastore ignored him
as he meticulously checked the switches and toggles.

“Get this thing moving,” said Hakam.

“We need clearance, first.”

“Then get it. I want this thing in the air.”

As Enzio spoke to the tower through a lip mike asking for
the authorization to takeoff, Hakam grabbed a laptop that had been placed on
the Navigation Station, and plugged a phone line from the back of the computer
to a USB port on the navigational board. He quickly booted the laptop, until
the screen bore the emblem of the managing software, then closed the lid.

“From this point on, Captain Enzio, you will maintain your
heading to Dulles. And you will not alter our course under any circumstances
unless I say so. If you choose to do so,” he tapped the top of the laptop,
“then you will see firsthand what will happen to your family. Have you ever
seen a beheading?”

Enzio did not answer. Nor did Hakam expect one. Hakam simply
wanted to plant a seed in the captain’s mind that the fate of his family
depended on his forced loyalty to him. Anything else would result in the
executions of his wife and children. 

“We have clearance,” he finally said.

“Then bring this thing about and get us in the air. At what
attitude are we scheduled to level off at?”

“Thirty-three thousand feet.”

Hakam nodded:
Perfect
!

#

Kimball maintained a
disturbed
appearance, his hand massaging the curvature of his chin in thought as he
watched the stewards’ buckle in. The moment the plane hitched and began its
movement to the takeoff lane, Kimball quickly unbuckled his seatbelt and stood.

The pope reached out and placed a hand over the thick girth
of Kimball’s forearm. “We’re you going?” he asked. “The plane is about to take
off.”

“I need to see Enzio about something.”

“I believe he’s somewhat busy at the moment. Can’t it wait?”

He looked up and saw all the faces of the stewards looking
at him, their eyes making him the focal point of the moment. “No,” he said,
drawing his arm away. “It can’t.”

Kimball moved at a quickened pace but was intercepted by a
steward who stood from his seat and placed a halting hand on Kimball’s chest.
“Please, sir. The plane’s about to takeoff. You need to take your seat.”

Kimball looked down on the man, who was about eight inches shorter,
and saw the practiced smile of feigned geniality. His eyes were a deep
chocolate, the flesh surrounding them sunken and dark. 

“It won’t take long,” he said, and then made a move to pass
the smaller man only for the steward to block his path once again.  

“Please, sir, I have to insist—”

Kimball grabbed the steward’s hand and bent his fingers
backward, driving the man to his knees. “Let’s put it this way,” said Kimball.
“Stand in my way again, and I’ll personally see that you won’t be playing the piano
anytime soon. Get it? Got It? Good.” Kimball released the steward’s fingers and
headed for the cockpit, with the man kneeling on the floor cradling his hand.

The steward, with a painful grimace on his face, managed to
work the garrote from his watch and pulled the line taut between his hands,
working his injured fingers over its ends.
Let me show you what I use my
fingers for
, he thought, and then he got to his feet.

#

The co-pilot Kimball
made eye
contact with earlier was sitting at the Navigation Station. A closed laptop was
situated on the topside of the Navigation Station and to the man’s left.

“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.

“Get down here,” she ordered. “Now.”

He nodded. “If I don’t do something, then we will die. You
know that.”

“Basilio, please.”

“Mama, if papa were here—”

“You’re not your father,” she interjected. But to Basilio it
sounded more like a criticism, the tone of her words biting painfully deep.
“Basilio, please. Even your father would not do this, if he was here. He would
use better judgment.”

“Papa would never sit by and wait for his family to die.” He
turned and began to climb, one hand over the other, his feet finding the ridge
of the framing, and pushed himself upward.

“Basilio, please.” Now she sounded desperate. “Basilio!”

At the top he placed the flat of his palm against the tin
sheets and tested its weight by pushing. Nothing, the piled sheets were too
heavy. So he moved to his left, and then to his right, testing, pushing,
looking for a weakness, finding nothing. Watching him carefully with her hands
nervously fisted against her chest, his mother realized the futility of her
appeals.

At the rear edge of the wall, when a tin sheet lifted
beneath his efforts, Basilio hesitated as if caught off guard. A moment later
he lifted the tin sheet, his arm and shoulder straining with effort, the cords
of his neck sticking out, as he carefully lifted and deposited the sheet to a
point that gave him marginal access to slip through.

Looking down at his mother, he assured her would return with
help before the sun was up.

“Basilio, please. They’ll kill you.” Tears were streaking
down her cheeks, the courses of wetness shining silver from the minimal light
filtering through the hole.

“Please, Mama, you know I have to do this.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. Another rites-of-passage for a boy
becoming a man, she considered. She just didn’t think she would have to let go
of him so soon.

Quietly, Basilio was through the access and gone. And then
there were the slight footfalls traversing along the metal sheets overhead
before they disappeared. 

Basilio was on foot.

#

Kimball was strapped
to the
armrests of a seat in the rear of the plane by common plastic ties, not
flexcuffs. Flexcuffs needed cutters to free the subject because escape was
virtually impossible. Plastic ties, on the other hand, were far more doable to
break or bend or squeeze through since they were the industrial ties used to
bind the trash bags after a commercial flight. Nevertheless, the ties that bound
him were cinched so tight they chafed the flesh around his wrists until the
pins-and-needles effect raced along both arms. The blood flow was becoming
stymied.

To his left, buckled into his seat across the aisle, was his
captor, a man with hardened features and eyes as black as a midnight sky. The man did not register Kimball at all. He merely sat with his eyes forward as the
plane ascended at a thirty-five degree angle.

With his opposing hand that was shielded from the view of
his guard, Kimball began to work the wrist of his right hand to break the
binding tie. But the tie did not break or give. In fact, the industrial ties
turned out to be a high-grade quality, which concerned Kimball. The
pins-and-needles effect was dramatically increasing, meaning the blood flow of
fresh oxygenation was decreasing. Soon his muscles would weaken and desist
function altogether, rendering his limbs useless.

Immediately he began to flex the fingers of both hands,
trying to stimulate blood flow. It was not working, his arms starting to take
on that “falling asleep” effect. And then he worked his right wrist against the
sharp edges of the tie, slicing the flesh, his blood providing a lubricant.

He continued to work his wrist back and forth, cutting,
chaffing, slicing, red rivulets running and soaking into the fabric of the
cushioned armrest. And then he began to torque his hand in such a way that the
motion of trying to free himself nearly cost his flesh to peel back in a sickening
avulsion. But Kimball had no choice. His limbs were growing weaker, the muscles
starving for oxygen.

In an effort to free himself Kimball pulled back and his
blood-slicked hand slipped free. Immediately he could feel the blood rushing
back into his hand, which had grown cold and blue, as well as the accompanying
heat that coursed through every minuscule fiber and nerve ending.   

The problem was he still had one hand to go, a hand that was
beginning to blacken under the constraints of the tie—his left hand, which was
within his captor’s eyeshot.

If seen, Kimball chanced a bullet to the brain. But then
again, Kimball determined he was marked for death anyway.

They all were.

He knew he needed to make a move and make it quick.

And then it happened.

Instead of making a move, the move made him.

#

The moment Kimball
slipped
his hand free of the binding tie, Shepherd One achieved a milestone: It had
reached the point of no return.

The plane ascended at a constant grade and reached a level
of twenty-four thousand feet, the atmospheric pressure reaching 5.45
pounds-per-square inch, when the pressure at sea level is 14.7
pounds-per-square inch. The moment Shepherd One reached the
twenty-five-thousand-foot level, then the altimeters in the payloads would
sense the radical pressure change, and initiate a one-time signal to the mother
boards that would immediately recognize the additional memory space used, and
engage the nuclear weaponry as ‘activated.’ Adversely, however, once Shepherd
One reached the descending altitude of ten thousand feet, the altimeters would
again measure the change in atmospheric pressure, recognize the conditions of
the new altitude change, and begin to deliberately shut themselves off. Once
the mother board recognizes the shutoff connection and sudden loss of memory,
the devices would, by program design, acknowledge the immediate change, and
detonate within a nanosecond of the shut-off point.

In the cockpit, as the aircraft rose, Hakam never took his
eyes off the cockpit altimeter. The moment the aircraft reached 25,000 feet, he
visualized the weapons activation, could sense them being born.

And in all his praises to Allah, he never felt so complete
or contented.

Al-Khatib Hakam, born in Dearborn, Michigan, had succeeded.

And in his mind’s eye he could imagine what was going on one
level below him.

In the cargo bay the payloads began to whine in a high-pitch
resonance, the computers accepting the sudden immergence of its online resuscitation
before tapering off to a mild hum. If Shepherd One should ever fall below the
ten-thousand-foot mark, then the payloads would go off in a six-kiloton flash
of white-hot fire and devastation.

Shepherd One was rigged to never land again.

And al-Khatib Hakam was pleased.