The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (27 page)

Then I cram myself as deep into the back of the belly as possible. If I am anywhere near the landing gear when it retracts back up into the plane, I will be crushed or at least lose one of my limbs. So that I don’t asphyxiate, I have a breathing device that will deliver fifteen minutes of life-giving oxygen from roughly 25,000 feet (when air pressure is nil and things get dicey for humans) and 51,000 feet (when humans just straight up die). And let’s not forget about hypothermia. At cruising altitude the temperature will drop to minus fifty or sixty degrees Fahrenheit. I know I can withstand this for about ten minutes before I pass out. Of course I have a shitload of speed to keep my mind sharp and pump up the overall performance of my nervous system. I also have Acetazolamide, a drug that hard-core mountaineers take to prevent altitude sickness. It makes the blood more acidic and more efficient at transporting oxygen to my major organs. And I brought along a blister packet of cyanide. I know, old school spy shit. I figure in the unlikely event I am captured and not killed, I will just check out cold war style and leave those assholes to deal with my foaming, twitching corpse.

Sounds fun, right? Actually, what I just described
is
the fun part. The rest of it is a total drag. When we reach cruising altitude, provided I am still alive and conscious, I have to jack open the access panel to the main cabin so I can crawl into the plane. I am hoping to have
some
energy left to kill everyone on board, but you never know, so I have a syringe full of adrenaline to chemically bond with the speed and turn me into an unstoppable monster that feels no pain and has the strength of five orangutans. I have only used this rocket ship speedball once before, and if memory serves, the last time I shot it I tore a man’s arm off and beat him to death with it.

I can hear them loading the baggage into the plane. They have also started fueling it, something I thought they had already done before I came aboard. That sucks. Now my whole respiratory system will be irritated and burning from here on out, and that is significant, considering I will barely be able to breathe as it is. I shove my nose into my Kevlar jacket and try to minimize the damage. After what seems like an eternity, I am extremely light-headed (also bad for the whole blood-brain-oxygen combo). But I can hear the heavy vehicles carrying Locke and his entourage enter the tarmac. By the sound of it, he’s got a bunch of gung-ho ex-military juicers protecting him because they drive like fucking maniacs up to the plane, screeching to a halt, and banter like a bunch of frat boys all the way into the passenger compartment.
They are fucking heavy too
. The plane sinks down a few inches on its wheels when these sides of beef get settled into the leather.

That means things will definitely get very ugly. Big men who are experienced fighters are a major pain in the ass. They see themselves as gladiators and they will always try to get you to take them on “man to man” if you have the drop on them. I love it when they say “
mano a mano
” and have no idea that means “hand to hand.” Learn some basic fucking Spanish. Only half the country speaks it. Anyway, don’t fall for their bullshit. They die just like everyone else when you do your job properly. No amount of toughness and teeth gritting is going to help even the biggest oaf to overcome the catastrophic blood loss of a torn aorta. Think of yourself as a slaughterhouse worker. Don’t get too close to the livestock and use the right tech to stun them and bleed them out.

The pilots finally button up the plane and start to taxi. I get ready, strapping myself to anything metal with some strips of 5,000-pound webbing. This will keep me from getting sucked out of the landing gear housing if I am knocked unconscious on takeoff. A Gulfstream 650 is basically a rocket ship with cushy leather seats and busty bimbos
serving steak sandwiches. It needs fewer than 6,000 feet to take off at a speed of 300+ knots. It has a top speed of Mach .925, and it gets there in a hurry. Until we get into our less aggressive ascent pattern from 10,000 feet and up, I will be pinned to metal and unable to move a fucking muscle.

The pilot’s a fucking cowboy because he doesn’t even slow down as he taxis and turns to takeoff position. Then he punches the throttle. By the feel of it, he uses about 3,000 of the required 6,000 feet of takeoff runway and we shoot nearly straight up into the sky. Because of the plane’s attitude—pointing nearly vertical—I am now at the mercy of some serious G forces. I have no control whatsoever over my body, so you can imagine my dismay when I slide straight down and my legs are hanging out of the landing gear housing, dangling in the wind—the 400 mph wind, that is. In this position, when the landing gear goes up in a matter of seconds, I’ll be cut in half.

So, I move my hand like a broken seal flipper and pull my speedball from the chest zip on my Kevlar jacket. It feels like I am attempting to dead lift a Volkswagen as I attempt to move the thing toward me. I manage to pull off the syringe cover with my teeth as I hear the pilot attempting to retract the gear. One of my pieces of webbing is blocking it momentarily, buying me precious seconds. I jab the syringe into my neck and plunge it. Almost immediately, I am jacked to the gills on gack. I claw my way back into the landing gear housing as the servomotors chew their way through my webbing. When I get my feet inside, it’s much easier to maneuver, which is good, because the webbing that was hindering the landing gear servomotor just snapped. The sudden release of the gear causes it to whip up into the housing, knocking me back into my hiding hole with the force of a freight train. The last thing I see is my hand just before my face smashes into it.

W
hen I wake up, I’m hypothermic and gasping for air because we’re almost at cruising altitude. I quickly throw on my breathing apparatus and hungrily devour some oxygen. My hands and extremities are numb, and the black spiders of frostbite are starting to inch down my skin. If I could feel it, I would be in excruciating pain from my cracked collarbone. I can tell it’s cracked because it has a golf ball-size lump on it. What else? Definitely some broken toes and maybe a sprained ankle, but again, the numbness is masking any pain of injuries I might have.

My watch is telling me I have about one minute of air left in my breather, so I get my ass in gear. I pull my tools from my zips with shaking hands and go to work on the panel I was trained to be able to remove with my eyes closed. It’s open within a couple of seconds. A blast of warmth hits me in the face but I don’t linger because I know that this hull breach will eventually trigger an air pressure drop alarm. So, I shove myself through the three-foot-square access panel and find myself crouching in the aft baggage compartment. I quickly replace the access panel and seal it with marine repair cement.

With the panel secured, I take a moment to enjoy the finer things in life: oxygen, heat, light, etc. In the end, my midbrain tells me,
this is all we need. Everything else is just window dressing.
Hypoxia is still getting the best of me so I gobble up some more Acetazolamide.
Right away, the foggy feeling is gone and I feel like I have full possession of my physical and mental faculties.

According to my specs, there should be a transformer box that controls the lighting in the passenger cabin somewhere in the wall between the aft lavatory and the baggage compartment. I cut into the molded plastic wall until I find it. It
also
supplies the heat and AC controllers with juice, so I have to be careful not to cut those. If I did, all of us would freeze to death before the captain could descend to a more hospitable altitude. I tape those to the wall and cut the wires that power the lights.

The plane goes dark.

I hear them out there calmly discussing the problem. I put on my night vision goggles. I have a few seconds to get some work done before they find the emergency lighting switch, which is back here by me. I wait for the first guy with any brains to come back here for that. He is massive. A three-hundred-pound Samoan with his prodigious mop of hair trained into a lunch-lady bun on the back of his head. I am ready for him, holding pretty much the only gun that is safe to use on an airplane. It’s composite and has a range of one foot. Remember what I was saying about the slaughterhouse? This is just like a slaughterhouse stun gun. In fact, it is based on an actual device called a free bolt stunner. Most modern stun guns have a pointed, retractable spike that pierces the skull but retracts. The free bolt was designed for emergency, in-the-field euthanasia of large farm animals that can’t be restrained. Kind of like my new friend, Mr. Samoan. The bolt can actually release from the pistol so you can use it at short range, and it does not require contact. I designed this one to have a cylinder like a revolver, and since the bolts are thin, it can hold fifteen.

POP!

The first large animal, Mr. Samoan, is euthanized. He falls face-first onto the floor. One of his friends comes running to see what
happened and
POP!
He falls on top of the Samoan’s body and I duck as one of the security thugs starts chucking knives in my general direction. I pull one out of the wall and, like the true circus freak I am, I whip it about twenty feet right into Mr. Knife Thrower’s forehead. He points to his head as if to say “Do I have something here?” and falls into a tray of cocktails. The boys are all taking cover, so it’s hard to count them, but I estimate there are now nine security types left and my target is nowhere in sight. That’s fine, because these guys have protocol to follow and Locke is probably hidden in some custom-built panic room.

I push my way into the passenger cabin. It’s a fucking mess in there, broken glass all over the place, three dead bodies, and the fun has only just begun! One of the thugs pulls a water-based stun gun. It fires a stream of highly conductive water, made up mostly of salt and other minerals, and juices the stream of water with an ungodly amount of electricity. He shoots me in the nuts. I am wearing Kevlar, which wicks water almost completely and is not conductive at all, but it’s still pretty painful to get shot in the junk with a few thousand volts. The disadvantage of these weapons is that, unlike the Taser I’m carrying, they don’t shoot the razor-sharp barbs that sink into the skin like fishhooks and allow you to
volt fuck
some poor bastard for as long as your batteries last. I fire these into his balls to see if
he
likes it. Then I cram a wine cork in the trigger guard and the bro gets juiced until his head starts to smoke.

Now it’s time for the thug that has “had enough of this shit” and wants to—you guessed it—“take me on
mano a mano
!” He is also a man mountain. His strategy is to rush me. I immediately go into bullfighter mode. Instead of taking any of the force that this heavier, stronger, and more insanely angry bull wants to deliver, I stylishly sidestep like a matador and
POP!
He gets a bolt in the back of the head.

Now there is more electrified water coming at me and the stream
gets me under the neck guard. It knocks me back and I fall right on top of the dead Samoan. I roll off him and land in the galley and another thug is instantly on me. This is what he wanted, a close quarters grappling match where he can suffocate me with his muscles and manhood. I see his face as he puts one of my arms in an exotic hold and pulls a combat knife that he intends to bury in my throat. My free hand stops it but not for long. He has leverage, weight, and strength on his side. I have half frostbitten fingers and I am totally exhausted.

There is something about his sadistic smile that fills me with uncontrollable rage. It travels under my skin like a wave of liquid heat. I am instantly sweating, and my ears are roaring from what I’m guessing is an adrenaline surge. Without hesitation, I move his knife hand and pull the blade into me. It sinks into the flesh above my cracked collarbone and goes right through to the floor. The pain is earth-shattering, but manchild’s knife is stuck in me and in the floor and he now has no weapon. That’s when he frees my other arm to reach for something. Big mistake. I grab his hair and shove my two fingers deep into his eye socket. He attempts to jump up off me but I use my knees to flip him over the top of my hand and onto his back. I pull the knife out of me and shove it in the spot behind his ear, severing his brain stem.

“Who’s smiling now, asshole?”

I leap to my feet and rush the other three as they rush me. Instead of hitting them head-on, I dive into the knees of one of them with all of my body weight. Both knees buckle and I hear the telltale snap of ligaments and tendons. As the guy lies there whimpering, I laugh out loud at him.

“Oh, did that hurt fat ass?”

I pile drive his neck with my knee, crushing his windpipe and breaking his neck. Two left, and they pull guns. They are thinking that if they just fill me full of the low-velocity rounds that don’t pass
through, they can dispatch me quickly without endangering the aircraft and Locke.

“Go ahead, you stupid fucking meatheads. Shoot. You’ll pop this plane like a shaken soda can and kill us all.”

They say nothing, just quietly stalking me, pushing me back to the galley wall, which is thick enough to stop a bullet. I have to move quickly, so I pull my second Taser and fire it into the chest of one of the thugs. The juicing I give him causes him to jerk and fire his weapon into the floor. Oops. As he shakes and twitches, the other guy grabs a chair and braces himself for the plane to lose cabin pressure and plummet to the earth. I wrap the wires from the Taser around him and shove him to the ground. Then I see one of their water stun guns and I snatch it up.

“You ever play that carnival game where you shoot the clown in the mouth with the water pistol and blow up the balloon?”

I unload the fucking thing into his and his buddy’s face, penetrating their nostrils, mouth, and ears. They fry like death row cons sitting on Old Sparky, their eyeballs bursting into flames. I cover their heads with a blanket to keep from setting the plane ablaze and assess the situation. The thugs are all dead. Locke is nowhere in sight. Then all of the plasma screens fire up and Locke appears.