Cost of Life (8 page)

While the old man was kindly rap-rap-rapping on the cockpit door, four of his newly boarded buddies were rounding up the folks in business class and relocating them, along with their attendant member of the flight crew, Lucy Snow, to the main cabin. Two of the four men carried submachine guns and two of them carried army-surplus duffel bags.

Lucy had watched the old man rise up from his seat and cross to the plug door. She'd assumed he was simply freaking out and seeking the nearest means of escape. She had half a mind to help him with the door, but the old man got it open by himself and that was when the ladder clanked against the door's aluminum jamb and, shortly thereafter, the four interlopers in their sweat-stained coveralls climbed aboard.

He greeted them by name. Alvi and Ansor. Murad and Edil. He hugged them with affection.

Alvi and Ansor took over the business-class cabin, unloading tech equipment from their duffel bags. Murad and Edil, the gunmen, directed Lucy and the business-class passengers toward the few available empty seats in the main cabin, where everyone and everything had become a loud, indistinguishable chaos. Murad and Edil both bore the ashen, swarthy countenance of their homeland, the redoubtable Chechnya, but the two men were distinguishable from each other by affectation: Murad masked the upper half of his face with a pair of clunky black spectacles while Edil concealed the lower half of his face with an ill-groomed black beard. Murad and his eyeglasses traveled down the aisle to the rear of the aircraft. Edil remained up front. Their invasive presence—abetted certainly by the presence of their submachine guns—cowed most of the passengers into slack-jawed silence.

Most but not all.

In fact, a few of them—namely the occupants of Seats A and B in Rows 15 and 16—were already scheming for an insurrection. Their default leader was Drake Coxcomb, the refrigerator-sized ex-cop. He and his co-conspirators had exchanged numbers during landing. This way they could communicate via text message—unless the terrorists blocked their cell phone signals.

Terrorists.
It was a word for the TV, for news reports from halfway around the world, for stories about strangers. Perhaps all this slack-jawed silence among the passengers owed more to cognitive dissonance than it did to actual fear. Or perhaps slack-jawed silence was simply the visual metamorphic stage between “passenger” and “hostage.”

H&K MP5s,
texted Drake.
Serious guns.

Nsty enough 2 kill but wont do srs dmg 2 fuselage.
This typed reply came from Archie Llewelyn. He and his boy Mickey were on the last leg of a twenty-two-hour trip from Sydney, Australia. They were accompanying the ashes of Mickey's mother, Ella, to her final resting place at Machu Picchu, as per Ella's wishes. Her ashes were currently in an urn in a suitcase in a pressurized compartment in the airplane's baggage hold, currently the safest place on the entire airplane.

The longer we wait,
texted Archie,
the more entrenched theyll become. Gotta act fast.

Mickey replied this time:
When? Now?

Drake nonchalantly craned his neck to locate Murad, who was poking his head into the rear lavatory in search of hiders.
Soon,
he answered to his cohort.
Soon.

Some were taking to sudden captivity better than others. Take, for example, two of the flight attendants: Addison Welles and Francisco Zafon. Addison was the neophyte and Francisco the seen-it-all go-to for handling tricky passengers. And yet it was Francisco who had retreated to the aft gallery to curl up in a ball and it was Addison who knelt beside him and, not knowing what else to do, attempted to calm him by petting the thick dark curls of his hair and trying to ignore the bobbing and jerking of his head against her candy-red fingernails with each of his full-body sobs. She considered pouring him a cup of ginger ale.

“Shh,” she told Francisco. “There, there.”

As she ran her fingers across the back of Francisco's hair, something tapped the back of hers. Addison glanced around and came eyeball-to-barrel with Murad's submachine gun.

“Go,” he grunted. He pointed to the main cabin. “Sit.”

In reply, Francisco moaned. Maybe if he squeezed his knees to his chins hard enough, he could fold himself invisible.

As for the other two flight attendants, Maryann and Deja, they took it upon themselves to soothe those passengers in their nearest vicinity, which included the gaggle of Spelman College coeds on their sorority's summer adventure, their pastel-colored bathing suits practically glowing through the paper-white cotton of their T-shirts. Maryann and Deja whispered assurances that everything was going to be fine, and they believed it too. After all, what was faith, as the Good Book taught them, other than belief in the substance of things unseen?

Lucy Snow, a zealot in the church of skepticism, wasn't nearly as optimistic as her two co-workers. No, this was a scenario that was going to worsen before it improved. Airplane hijackings did not end bloodlessly. Years ago, when she first set her mind on becoming a flight attendant to help pay for nursing school—back when the position was still referred to as a “stewardess”—her father had sat her down like a toddler and had tried to frighten her into a change of mind.

“In 1961, this guy hijacked some plane—doesn't matter which—and he shot two employees of the airline and left the pilot blind as a bat. It was all over the news. In 1970, same thing. Eastern Airlines. Just last year—last year, Lucy—a lady got upset about having to sit in the aisle seat and so she splashed a stewardess in the face with her hot coffee. Second-degree burns. You remember that? Now why would a beautiful young thing like yourself want to become a flying maid?”

Maybe the old man had a point.

And speaking of old men, after unsuccessfully acquiring access into the flight deck, the aged leader of the terrorists wandered back into the main cabin, muttered a few choice words to Edil, and then with his right hand, his good hand, he picked up the front-of-cabin speaker to address his captive congregation:

“Ladies and gentlemen, hello!”

All attention shifted to the well-dressed man at the mike.

“I do apologize for this inconvenience. My name is Bislan and I am here to help. Please know that none of this is personal. For your safety, we ask that you remain in your seats. You are however free to use any and all electronic devices. Take out your phones. Call your loved ones. Call anyone you'd like. We encourage this! We want to make this experience as comfortable for you as we can.”

Bislan concluded with a genuinely warm smile, hung up the speaker, and returned to the cockpit door to once again knock-knock-knock.

Reese had the Glock fixed on the door.

He knew the door was bulletproof. His gesture was symbolic. Symbols mattered. Emblems, flags, a hand across the heart. And heroes were symbolic of the good in man. Reese's stepfather had taught him that at a very young age, with stories of Benjamin Franklin and Jackie Robinson and John F. Kennedy. Heroes mattered.

Only later in life—long after his stepfather was kicked out of the house—did Reese come to realize that all of his old man's heroes also happened to be philanderers, but didn't that make their valiant deeds all the more human and therefore admirable? And if Reese slept around more than he should, wouldn't that make an action like this, serving as the last defense against a terrorist invasion, all the more heroic?

“Little pigs, little pigs,” called Bislan. “Let me in.”

Instead of responding to the wolf at the door, Reese used his free hand to adjust the dials on the transponder to squawk
7500
to the nearest air traffic controller. Once they received this code, they would know that a hijacking was in progress, protocols would be put into effect, and, very shortly thereafter, a swarm of special forces troops would come bursting into the barn.

All Reese had to do was wait out the wolf at the door and keep Larry Walder from doing anything stupid.

Correction: anything
else
stupid.

Having the gun was helping to keep the traitor in line—but was it incentive enough? Reese scanned the room for suggestions. Hmm. He could use the gauze to bind Larry to his seat…but how effective would gauze really be? It sure wasn't doing much to stanch the bleeding in his thigh and it was doing absolutely nothing for the pain. Reese had already dry-swallowed a brace of ibuprofen from the med-kit but they had yet to kick in—as if two over-the-counter pills would really counterbalance a gunshot wound.

A gunshot wound! Christ! And how was any of this fair? Reese was an apple pie American. He grew up in the suburbs. He worked a white-collar job. He exercised daily, had his hair trimmed every two weeks, and he even called his mother every day. He was a Norman Rockwell figure. Norman Rockwell figures weren't supposed to get a goddamn-in-the-thigh gunshot wound!

“Captain Walder,” called Bislan, “the fact that you've yet to open this door leaves me troubled. I need to come in and make sure you don't fly us off into the sunset. You wouldn't want to jeopardize the ongoing guaranteed safety of your beautiful blond wife, Marie, and your darling boy…what's his name again?”

Larry opened his mouth to respond, but Reese turned his gun on him and shook his head. Heroes gave no quarter to their foes. Larry shut his mouth.

“Captain Walder,” Bislan continued, “that just now was a test to see whether or not you may be under duress. Obviously you remember the name of your son, so I can only conclude that you are indeed under duress. Now, there is that rather unfortunate hit to your head, but for you to be showing symptoms of a concussion now, several hours later and after flying an airplane…well…I'm no doctor, but it beggars belief. And so I am left to assume the duress comes not from within but from without. To put a fine point on it, Captain Walder, I suspect you may be currently held hostage. The irony alone must be driving you mad, but have no fear. Your cavalry has arrived. Alvi, get the drill.”

“Drill…?” muttered Reese. “Hell no.”

He hobbled near the cockpit door and leaned against it. Let them try to poke a hole through the steel. That would give him a perfect sight through which to aim and shoot. Now, if only his thigh didn't feel like it had a barbed spear thrust through it! Hmm. How many ibuprofen was considered an overdose? Never mind. The med-kit was still on his seat and he would have to recross the floor of the flight deck to retrieve it. On the other hand, Reese could make Larry get it for him. And after Larry obeyed, Reese would shoot him in the leg. Yes. That seemed just. Eye for an eye, leg for a leg. Yes.

But first he would get answers. He pointed the gun at the traitor.

“Tell me everything you know about these people,” he said.

“I don't know anything, Reese, I swear.”

“Oh!” cawed Bislan from the other side of the cockpit door. “Captain Walder! Is that the voice of the first officer that I hear? Hello, First Officer! Unless I'm mistaken, your name is Reese Rankin. Is that correct?”

“We're not having a conversation,” Reese replied, glaring at the door. He then wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his gun hand. The sweat made his small wrist hairs sparkle like the grass on a springtime dawn. “So you can go fuck yourself.”

“Yes, well, in lieu of that, First Officer Rankin, might you be inclined to consider my counterproposal?”

“Americans don't make deals with terrorists.”

“But you do! You do! In a free market, you make deals with everybody! It is one of the many qualities I adore about Americans! I also enjoy your westerns. I love their mythology. The heroes are such pragmatists. Gary Cooper.
High Noon.
You strike me as a real pragmatist, First Officer Rankin, so I'm not going to huff and puff and threaten to murder a passenger if you don't open up this door. No. I'm merely going to suggest as Option A that you open this door in the next two minutes or, Option B, I will have my men with their guns come in through the windshield.”

Both Reese and Larry glanced with sudden trepidation at their spacious windshield. The glass was layered several times over with clear resins and acrylics thick enough to stand up to the impact of birds—but was it bulletproof?

Um, no. It was not bulletproof.

“I rather hope you choose Option A,” bargained Bislan. “Option B will leave us with such a mess to clean up, not the least of which will be the smear of your brains and blood all across the control panel. Do you have any idea how much blood the human body contains? You would be astonished to find out. I was. We're little more than blood-bags with legs and we pop so very, very easily. You have one minute left to decide.”

Reese pressed a hand to his throbbing thigh. The once-white gauze had long since darkened to salamander skin.

“First Officer Rankin, I should inform you that Gary Cooper would open the door. Gary Cooper knew that in order to become Gary Cooper, people had to see him be Gary Cooper. Option B leaves you with no one to tell tales of your grand heroism. Or do you think Captain Walder, whom I assume you're at this moment intimidating with a weapon, will give you a eulogy?”

Fuck Gary Cooper—Reese wondered what his stepfather would do in this situation. Well, for one, his stepfather would never have gotten himself boxed in. No, if there was one thing that slippery fish excelled at, it was avoiding corners.

And then there was the matter of his dying thigh.

What little Reese knew about blood loss and gangrene and sepsis was enough to conclude that he required expert treatment of his wound. Among the passengers, there had to be a doctor or a nurse or someone who could practice medicine. They could take one of those tiny bottles of vodka from the drink cart and sanitize his wound and keep it from getting further infected.

Deal with the battle at hand and then be better equipped to deal with the war. Reese might—no,
would
—have to relinquish his Glock, but once his thigh was mended, he would lead the passengers—his passengers—in a revolution the likes of which had not been seen since 1776.

For Christ's sake, today was Independence Day.

“Let's roll,” Reese said, and he unbolted the door and opened it, whereupon Bislan shot him twice in the face.