Zombie Team Alpha (7 page)
~13~
They didn’t land in London. Nor did they comply and divert when requested to by the EU controllers as they flew past Denmark and Sweden. Morgan had been able to stay one step ahead of everyone and keep up her game of swapping transponder signals to match the existing routes of other flights, up until the moment their Wi-Fi signal from the only satellite she could hack into disappeared over the horizon and went dark.
Now they’d have to make the rest of the flight to Russia on their last known course, hoping the appropriate administrators and commissars had indeed been notified and properly greased. And, given the currently strained relationships with Russia, any requested extradition back to the US would be scoffed at, perhaps even mocked.
Cutter smirked, thinking again of the stern-faced woman agent they’d left behind in Atlanta and what she must be thinking about all this.
She is probably apoplectic
.
He climbed from the pilot’s seat and made his way past a snoring Gauge and back to the seat where Dr. Martinez was sitting. She was reading a book, something about genetically engineered dinosaurs made from chickens or something.
Looks kind of dumb.
He didn’t even bother to check the name of the author. It wasn’t his type of story.
He sat in the seat opposite her, and she set her book down and looked at him over her glasses, which were perched on her thin nose. She pushed them up slowly with her middle finger.
“That book any good?” he asked.
“What is it you want?”
“Right down to business, huh? No small talk? No, ‘How are you doing today, Jack?’”
A tiny smile played at the corner of her lips, and she pulled off her glasses and bit on one of the tips.
Damn that’s hot.
Cutter squirmed in his seat a little. She had that school librarian look—smart with a touch of naughty underneath. He swallowed the small lump in his throat. “We are about an hour out from Vuktyl airfield—if you wanted to know.” He leaned in closer. “Where is it exactly that you call home?”
Dr. Martinez put her glasses back on and picked up her book and opened it. She raised it slightly and started reading again.
“Just trying to make small talk,” he said dismissively. “Don’t you think we should get to know each other a little better before we land? Hell, I don’t even know why I thought this job would make any sense in doing whatsoever. We probably should have passed.” He did know a lot more than he was saying, really. Playing dumb worked such wonders on people and often got them to open up and talk freely.
But not always
.
She set her book in her lap again. “
And?
A little unprofessional, Mr. Cutter. Do you expect me to brief you and explain it all? Maybe at a level someone such as you can fully understand?”
Bingo.
He had her thinking just like he wanted her to. The best way to deal with arrogance was to turn it into an advantage. It was a simple maxim of his.
He scratched at the two-day-old growth on his cheek. “Yeah, I kinda was thinking along those same lines.”
She drew a deep breath. “Very well.” She removed her glasses once more, folded them neatly, and set them on top of her book. “You are expected to do what I say, when I say it, and for how long I say it. Got that?”
Really?
He pulled away and shrugged. “Is that all? Well, if you insist. Do I get to be the one on top at least?” He started to unbutton his pants as he watched her for reaction.
Her eyes widened a bit. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You don’t want me to get undressed first? That’s kind of impractical, but—”
She frowned at him and said nothing else, so he changed to a more serious tone. “No? I guess not then. So, given that we have some time to talk, is there anything we should be preparing for when we land? Any complications to consider when we go to fetch this—artifact? After what happened last time”—He became deadly serious—“I don’t want to walk in unprepared.”
“No,” she replied, “you have to do nothing other than to protect me while I go to retrieve it.” She rearranged her glasses on the back of the book. “I foresee no other complications.”
“Then why the hell were we hired and paid a king’s ransom to go get it? Why not someone else? And don’t you think we should be playing a bigger role given our history? We’ve been through this before, and, last time, it got completely screwed up because we went in there with barely any information whatsoever. We were attacked by these…things…and my wife was—”
“Mr. Cutter,” she said, speaking to him as if she were lecturing a small child. “You have been hired to escort
me
to the mine and help
me
retrieve the—” She paused. Her lips moved as if she were searching for the right word.
Cutter waited, hoping that she would describe it in such a way as to give him a better clue as to its real function. Even his wife had refused to tell him much about the artifact, preferring to keep it as one of her few secrets from him. She’d once said the origin of the thing was so crazy that he wouldn’t believe her if she did tell him. And he believed in a lot of crazy shit.
Tantalizing him, Dr. Martinez opened her mouth to speak. Then she stopped herself and remained silent.
“Damn,” he whispered, mostly to himself.
“I assure you,” she said coldly, “I will be the only one allowed to go near it and touch it.
Am I clear?
We can’t risk the recovery going wrong again and people getting hurt.”
“Why is that?”
Again, she did not answer. She was hiding something.
What? What are you hiding?
He watched her for clues, but discovered nothing. She put her glasses back on and picked up her book.
Whatever
, he finally thought as he made a fist and bumped it against his thigh. He’d had plenty of clients that wanted to keep things secret. He always made them pay for that privilege, just as he had now. Four million bought a lot of privacy. He was also certain that he’d find out soon enough what was going on. She couldn’t hide it forever. And, thanks to Gauge, they had enough armaments to start a war if they wished to do so.
Instead of continuing his current line of questioning, he pivoted back to his original question. “Why us? There are scores of other private security teams out there who could have been hired to get you to Russia and back.”
She lowered her glasses and looked him straight in the eyes. “Because I once knew your wife.”
Ah
. Everything began to click into place. He remembered her now from the book cover dust jacket on his wife’s nightstand. There was an implied connection between these artifacts and primitive man at some level. It had been his wife’s field of study. Dr. Martinez was apparently a professional colleague of Sharon’s. But what was the ultimate connection between the two?
He slapped his hands against his thighs and stood. If Morgan got the Wi-Fi signal back up, he intended to do a little internet research on Dr. Martinez. Morgan had said earlier that she’d assembled a background report on her, but he still wanted to do a little research of his own.
Maybe I can find some nice nude selfies if I search hard enough.
~14~
Sometimes I can be a damned fool
. Thankfully, Cutter also knew that God was well known for watching out for fools and small children. He had always figured he was more of the former and less of the latter, despite the fact that others often debated the point vigorously.
Right now, though, in all seriousness, he hoped that God had his back because if He didn’t, Cutter and everyone else on board the plane were screwed.
It had started when they’d altered their route to skirt the final sliver of EU airspace just past Sweden. While they had taken on a splash of extra fuel in Atlanta just before scooting out of there in a hurry, their not-so-well-calculated flight plan that had called for an addition refueling stop in London before continuing into Russia had failed. Apparently, the US justice system really wanted him and his crew—
the bastards.
While Morgan had planned for reserves, just in case, those reserves hadn’t quite been enough and were now completely depleted, which had caused the engines to quit.
At least all the annoying whining noises were gone
.
Looking over at the co-pilot, Cutter asked, “Did you get confirmation we can land? It might also be good to check in with them and make sure they are not planning to shoot at us during our approach.”
The co-pilot turned a lighter shade of pale.
Cutter tried to hold the wheel in a loose grip but with just enough firmness that he remained in full control of the aircraft. Coming over the mountains and descending below twenty-thousand feet had kicked up a great amount of turbulence and was causing everything to feel like a bad rollercoaster ride, doubly so, given that the aircraft was nothing more than a glider now—and a very poor one at that.
Keeping the G4 on the verge of a stall and making tradeoffs for distance was one of the most challenging ways possible to fly such a heavy jet. And, as much as he hated to admit it to himself, he was still gripping the controls just a little too tightly.
Loosen up there, partner.
He rolled his shoulders and glanced at the co-pilot. The guy said something over the radio in Russian then nodded to Cutter, who asked back, “Did you express to them the seriousness of our situation?”
The co-pilot, wide-eyed, nodded back.
Cutter had tried to contact the control tower in English, which was supposed to be recognized worldwide by all country’s control towers, but this particular one apparently wanted to be different, or their grasp of the English language was about as good as his grasp of Russian, which consisted of maybe one or two words.
“Here we go,” he said, rolling his shoulders again before withdrawing the plane’s flaps a notch.
Ahead, he could see nothing other than a thick gray mass of clouds. Below the windscreen, lights were blinking incessantly on the instrument panel, and the artificial horizon indicator showed that their flight path was level.
Good.
But he could also tell that they were making an overly steep descent.
Not so good
.
Since the G4 did not make even a second-rate glider, added to the fact that it was also stuffed full with a heavy load of armaments in the cargo hold, it flew much like a pig with stubby little wings. But, fortunately, there was one small bit of additional good news—this wasn’t the first time he’d made a landing on instruments alone, though he would have preferred to have had the engines running, and to have been able to actually see the ground.
Probably better I can’t
.
Readjusting his sweat-slicked grip on the controls, he whispered to himself softly, “A nod for a wise man, and a rod for a fool,” which seemed a far more appropriate thing for God to be doing than simply protecting fools.
Stupid should hurt.
But in this case, he could sure use that nod.
He turned to check on his passengers. Morgan was glancing at him nervously from her seat. She’d closed her laptop and stowed it away beneath her feet, but her hands kept fidgeting as if she still wanted to keep typing.
She mouthed, “We going to make it, right?”
“Of course,” he mouthed back and punctuated it with a smirk.
Gauge was fully awake and staring out the window beside him. Even though he was feigning calm, Cutter could tell that the man was a little scared. Gauge was not the type would want to die in a fiery plane crash. He was more the type who would want to be taken out in a hail of gunfire while riding on the back of a shark and firing a bazooka.
Behind him, Dr. Martinez sat quietly, staring forward. Cutter had probed her a little further over her relationship with his deceased wife, but she had given up no additional details that connected all the various dots. Morgan hadn’t been able to add much either, but at least he knew a smidgen more about those artifacts, at least enough to know not to touch one. Still, there was something important Dr. Martinez was holding back from him, and that bothered him to no end, but not quite as much as figuring out how in the hell he was going to land the aircraft.
With a sudden jolt, it felt like the bottom had dropped out from under him and he was falling. He went weightless for a brief second and rose from the seat. Then he smashed down hard in his seat and was rocked sideways as the entire aircraft shuddered and banked hard to the left. He jammed his foot into a corner and corrected right and was buffeted again by another patch of turbulence, then was thrown forward and hit the control yoke, causing the air in his lungs to rush out all at once.
Unexpectedly, the plane smoothed and leveled out all on its own, but still continued to buck in smaller and smaller staccato waves as it settled.
Gasping, Cutter took a few quick breaths and refocused on what the hell he was doing. Alarms in the cockpit were going off incessantly as even more buttons started flashing in a dizzying, chaotic display, like some madman’s dream. He quickly refastened his harness and cinched it tight. He realized he’d been far too casual about everything. It was time to get serious.
“I’m trained to fly,” Cutter said through the headset to the co-pilot as he took control again, “but I’m not certified for this particular model. Is there a procedure for all this?”
“Hold steady on oh-nine-four,” came the co-pilot’s shaky voice.
Cutter did as instructed, but without any power coming from the engines, he was having a difficult time keeping the plane on any kind of straight course. The co-pilot ran his hands over a series of switches too quickly for Cutter to see clearly in his peripheral vision, but the alarms began to shut off one by one.
Then the STALL WARNING light started blinking.
Cutter cleared his throat. “Is this thing even capable of a zero power landing?”
And the co-pilot didn’t even shrug or say another word. He seemed to be reviewing his life and all the choices he had made in it.
Another alarm started.
HYDRAULIC FAILURE.
The co-pilot came out of his trance long enough to silence the alarm, then he spoke over the radio in a frantic, high-pitched voice.
“Mayday, Mayday. Golf-Sierra seven-seven-four-four. Request immediate clearance for landing. Both engines out. Hydraulics failing. Mayday, Mayday. Please respond.”
He’s gone on autopilot.
Cutter lightened his grip on the controls again and waited for a response on the radio call.
None came.
The co-pilot repeated his plea, this time in Russian.