seat behind him, drilling into its thick leather padding, then another nicked his left shoulder and plowed into the bulkhead. The life raft was made up of separate compartments and, despite the holes cutting through it, it was still fully inflated, but it wouldn’t be long before it started to sag and give Zahed the opportunity to get out from behind it.
Reilly had to take him out before that happened.
He also had to move fast. The plane was still dropping.
He crouched low and bolted toward the back of the cabin, away from where the bullets were landing. He stopped at the edge of the life raft, took a deep breath to steady himself, and pounced, pulling the raft’s edge away with his right arm while lunging with the knife in his left arm.
He caught Zahed by surprise and cut him across his right wrist.
The Iranian’s handgun fell from his hand and a fountain of flood erupted from his arteries. He just stood there, frozen in place, staring at Reilly in utter shock, still pinned against the cabin door by the life raft’s self- erecting canopy.
Reilly’s eyes lasered into him. He would have liked to savor the sight for longer, but he couldn’t afford to loiter. The plane was still dropping, smooth and unfussed, without banking left or right, just heading down to the sea in a straight line, the autopilot clearly still engaged.
Reilly scowled at the Iranian.
Reached behind the man and popped open the lower section of the cabin door.
Consigned every pixel of Mansoor Zahed’s wide-eyed, livid expression to his memory.
Shouted, “I guess you won’t be needing that tombstone after all.”
And shoved him out with a heel kick to the groin.
Chapter 65
The Iranian dropped out of view instantly and without a sound. Reilly stood in the freezing gale and watched the rising sea through the open doorway. For a moment, he wondered if, of the two of them, the Iranian wasn’t the luckier one. Then he turned his attention to the massive nylon bumper blocking his route to the plane’s controls, stepped around it to where it was jammed through the cockpit’s doorway, and started hacking away at it with his blade.
He shredded, pulled, peeled, and ripped away at the yellow nylon wall like a psychopath on a rampage.
He couldn’t feel any pain anymore.
His training was paying off, adjusting and optimizing his bodily functions for the one task they needed to ensure right now: survival. Everything was working toward that end. His adrenal glands had flooded his system with adrenaline, heightening his brain’s ability to process information and making it more alert to a barrage of sensorial inputs. Endorphins were flooding through him to dampen any pain he felt and stop it from distracting him. His brain had unleashed a flood of dopamine, causing his heartbeat to speed up and his blood pressure to rise. His bronchial passageways had dilated, allowing more oxygen into his lungs to fuel his bloodstream faster. His liver was secreting a rush of glucose to boost his energy. Even his pupils had widened, for better vision.
A synchronized piece of machinery, dedicated to its own longevity.
He pulled apart enough of the life raft to clear a path into the cockpit. Pages from Steyl’s information ring binder were flying all over the place, ripped out by the hurricane that was swirling inside the cabin. He swatted a couple of them away as he stepped over the fallen pilot’s prone body and climbed into his seat.
He tucked the knife under his belt, strapped himself in quickly, and looked out. The sea level was looking worryingly close and getting closer by the second. Worse, the aircraft was vibrating heavily, its airspeed dangerously high.
Reilly’s eyes scrutinized the instrument panel. He had never flown an aircraft before, but he’d been in enough cockpits of small aircraft in the course of his work to know broadly what the controls did and what the main gauges meant. He saw one that told him the plane was dropping at close to fifteen hundred feet per minute. Various other dials had their needles well beyond their red lines. One of them, the airspeed indicator, had a needle that was pushing against its stop pin, off the scale and way beyond the red-and-white “Maximum Operating Speed” barber pole. He knew he needed to throttle back to try to slow the plane down, but before his hand reached the twin levers, he heard a mechanical splutter over the high-pitched scream of the engines. It was coming from his right. He flicked a glance out the side window in time to see the starboard engine’s exhaust pipe belch out a trail of black smoke and flames.
Within seconds, the port engine did the same.
Full power at low altitude was beyond the engines’ design limits, and smoke started pouring into the cabin through the air vents in the ceiling. A bunch of warning lights lit up at the top of the instrument panel. Reilly leaned in for a closer look. The most prominent pair among them had “FIRE—BLEED AIR SHUTOFF PUSH” marked on each of them. His heart pounding, he flicked up the safety flaps on them and pressed the square buttons, which killed the air intake from the engines and cleared the smoke from the cabin. Just then, two other buttons lit up. They were marked “BOT ARMED PUSH.” He wasn’t sure what they were, but figured they were also related to the fire and hit them too. Those must have triggered the extinguishers, as the fire and the black smoke that were gushing out of the engines stopped. But then, so did the engines. They shut down, cutting out the noise and slowing down the plane’s descent. Within seconds, the props stopped turning altogether. Reilly saw that they had feathered, their blades now angled parallel to the airflow and perpendicular to the wings. On cue, two green autofeather lights within the warning lights clusters started blinking.
He’d succeeded in putting out the fire, but in doing so, he’d also killed the engines.
The Conquest was now hurtling toward the sea. Disconcertingly, it was still doing that in a controlled manner, the autopilot maintaining it in a clean, linear glide slope.
A heading Reilly needed to overcome.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and pulled it hard toward him. He felt the plane’s nose edge up a touch, but it was too hard to maintain the pull on it, and the second he relaxed his grip, even barely, the nose went right down to its diving stance, rushing toward a watery grave. He was fighting a losing battle. Something was blocking his efforts and keeping the plane stubbornly glued to its trajectory.
Then he spotted it. The small, red switch on the pilot wheel marked “A/P DISCONNECT.”
Autopilot disconnect.
He had nothing to lose. If the autopilot was running the show, it was the enemy. It needed to be eliminated.
He hit the switch and heard something that sounded disconcertingly like a loud doorbell. The wheel immediately went looser in his hands. He hauled it back again, making sure he kept it and the pedals centered to keep the wings level. This time, he felt a change. The nose was edging up. Not much, but enough to be noticeable. It fueled him to try even harder. He kept pulling, as much as he could. He saw the water level rising up dizzyingly to meet him and pulled even more. It felt like he was trying to physically lift the plane up himself, which, in a way, he was.
With each concerted pull, the Conquest’s nose came up some more, and as it did, the plane’s airspeed decreased. But then if Reilly relaxed his grip, even marginally, to regroup for a new pull, the nose fought him and went back down. It was like trying to reel in a monster marlin. By the time he could see the texture of the individual ripples in the sea’s surface, the indicator was telling him he was traveling at a little over a hundred knots. Water was rushing past below him now, an endless dark blue conveyor belt that was whizzing by, tantalizingly close and welcoming and yet easily deadly if the ditching went wrong.
Reilly tried to steady his breathing and kept the plane straight and almost level, avoiding any banking and bringing it down ever so gently. He was in no rush to hit the water. Unless a tanker appeared in his flight path, he felt safe where he was. As long as he didn’t try to land, he didn’t run the risk of plowing into the sea and getting shredded in the process.
Still, he had to land at some point. And he had to do it before he hit landfall, which was out there somewhere.
He concentrated hard, and kept massaging the wheel to keep the nose more or less level and control the
