by Jim Geraghty
“Do you want to die?” Richards shouted.
“We need that plane disabled!” Alec shouted. “I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”
The plane violently bounced down the uneven, rocky, long-unused runway, on a collision course with the resurrected Cyprus Airlines plane ahead.
***
In the other cockpit, Naresh, Gul, Sarvar, and Kolak screamed a cacophony of expressions of disbelief, rage, and fear. How could a plane be landing at this runway at the precise moment they were to take off?
“Can’t go around—” Naresh tried to scream above the din, realizing there was almost no way to avoid a collision. He tried to steer left, but the plane, a hybrid of modern avionic equipment inside an ancient husk, wasn’t built to turn on a dime. The enormous, four-engine C-17 was barreling down at them like a giant gray whale, massive fins angled to the ground, ready to flop upon them and crush them under its mighty weight. The sight of the C-17 filled the cockpit windows, getting larger and larger, until it was clear impact was inevitable.
“How?!” Sarvar screamed.
Impact was seconds away, Gul saw the small American flag insignia on the side of the approaching cockpit, he realized how.
“The Americans,” he whispered. “Those fuc—”
Too late.
***
Once Richards knew a collision was unavoidable, he steered left as well, trying to at least avoid a head-on crash. Finally, the two fuselages weren’t perfectly aligned, and instead were parallel. If the two planes had only consisted of the fuselages, the horrible wreck could be avoided. But it was too late: The plane’s wings clipped each other; the Trident’s tore off like tin foil, the C-17’s tip sheared off, and the two planes, crippled, careened off in different directions.
***
Inside both planes, the collision felt like the entire room had been punched, picked up, thrown down, and stepped on. Heads slammed against cockpit chairs.
Inside the Trident, Gul never awoke because he had managed—just barely—to not lapse into unconsciousness. He did feel like his internal organs had tried to bounce out of his body, and had only been held inside by the lap and chest belt straps. Was it the wind knocked out of him? He coughed.
Was there gas leaking from the wing? Would the plane burst into a fireball soon?
He looked around in tearful frustration. He managed to get out of his cockpit seat. Beside him, in the pilot’s seat, Akash held his head and moaned. He might have a concussion, Gul concluded. Kolak was groaning, saying he thought his rib cage was broken. Sarvar was at least able to walk and had painfully, slowly undone her seat belt.
Looking out the cockpit door that hung open, he saw Osman and Bahadur’s bodies, out of their seats, lying motionless, the surgical bay a mess of violently tossed equipment. He called their names and heard no answer. Osman dead—this meant no plastic surgery. Poor Bahadur, he had spent so much time figuring out what it would take to make a plane rise from the dead. Better that he enjoy his final rest than see his work torn to pieces around him.
Gul looked at Sarvar as she rose from the chair and turned to stumble her way out of the cockpit. This was a disaster; their final battle was coming much sooner than they had ever expected. Akash and Kolak were trying to will themselves out of the cockpit chairs, with little success. Perhaps they would be able to stumble out of the plane and run, perhaps not. In all likelihood, they would be found by the UN peacekeepers, which meant they could he hospitalized and treated, but also arrested.
“The second plan,” Gul painfully whispered to Sarvar.
She nodded. There was no way to avoid it now. “Send the signal, and we can try to get off the base, get off Cyprus some other way.”
He nodded, although he doubted there would be any escape this time.
His bag in the compartment behind the cockpit had been tossed around violently during the collision, but the phone within it was intact.
They had to get to get away from the plane, to a spot with a strong wireless signal. From there, Gul and Sarvar could record their final message. It would activate every last Atarsa sleeper waiting in the United States. Their last act would be launching attacks nineteen through sixty-six—forty-seven devoted followers, in forty-seven different locations across the continental United States. Atarsa’s sleepers would charge into public squares, schools, hospitals, train stations, churches, and movie theaters, stabbing people until they were stopped. It would be terrifying.
His plan had been to peel off the Band-Aid slowly, to subject his enemies to an excruciatingly slow and steady stretch of pain and suffering. Now he would tear it off all at once, a burst of the same pain flooding the system all at once. This was not how he wanted his last battle to end, but it would be appropriately spectacular.
***
Alec hadn’t been knocked out often in his life, but he hated the feeling each time. It was as if his mind was a television and someone had changed the channel without warning. One moment he was in the plane, then a half-awake, half-dreaming state, with noise all around him, a throbbing pain in the back of his head and a sudden confusion. It felt like being in bed, but he didn’t remember going home and going to sleep. And what had happened in Cyprus? How did I get home unless … I’m not at home. He jerked his head and realized his head had been hanging down, and his vision came into focus. Still in the cockpit. In pain. How much time had passed?
“Katrina?”
Alec looked over at the other seat in the cockpit behind the pilots and his heart stopped. Katrina sat motionless and silent in her chair.
He snapped off his seat belt and reached for her—she was breathing. A moment later, she groaned.
Alec swore. He looked up and down, and didn’t see anything sticking out of her. He pinched her thigh and she squirmed. Good, he thought, no paralysis. She groaned again. She closed her eyes tightly, but he used his fingers to open her eyelid. She weakly groaned in objection.
“If I had to guess, your head hit on something and you have a concussion,” Alec said. He knew his assessment was a hope as much a diagnosis. She mumbled something that sounded like an incredibly implausible insistence she was fine.
“Yeah, that’s what all the quarterbacks say,” Alec said.
Richards coughed in the cockpit seat. “Well, I just broke a two-hundred-million-dollar plane. I’m sending the repair bill to Langley.”
Cook also groaned. Alec stood up and realized he was in the least pain out of the quartet. He suddenly smelled jet fuel. That’s a bad sign.
“I’ve got to get you guys out of here,” he said. He looked out the cockpit windows, trying to get a sense if anyone was rushing to approach the C-17. He couldn’t see where the Cyprus airliner was. The collision must have prevented their takeoff, but where were they?
He carefully unbuckled Katrina and began the process of trying to lift her in his arms. The doorway to the cockpit was not particularly wide, and he was going to have a tough time carrying her through it.
***
He had to gingerly try to carry Katrina down the flight of internal stairs, and stumble over to the main entry doorway. The door opened out and down, with the door forming the “integral air stairs,” a little stairway down to the tarmac. He heard Richards and Cook starting to follow behind them.
The door opened. Outside in the night, Alec was frustrated that no one had run up to the damaged C-17. Their plane had just crashed on an airstrip in United Nations territory—where the hell was everyone? He saw some movement behind parked trucks on the parallel access road beyond the runway.
“I could have ordered a pizza by now,” he grumbled, before hearing gunshots.
He instinctively tumbled to the ground, taking Katrina with him. Alec refocused his attention to his left. About thirty yards away, he saw a blue-beret-clad United Nations peacekeeper lying on the tarmac, holding a bloody thigh. A second peacekeeper was similarly on the ground, lying flat, entirely without any cover or anywhere to hide.
Cook and Richards hit the deck
as well.
Farther down the airstrip, he saw the Trident, freshly shorn of one wing. A man and a woman ran toward the dark terminal building across the runway. There was shouting by the far edge, and Alec realized there had been a response team from the peacekeepers on the base, approaching both planes, and then someone had come out of the Trident and started shooting. The United Nations team had been taken surprise by the first shots, but they had scrambled for cover and were shouting into radios for armed response teams.
After twenty seconds, when no further shots had been fired, Cook and Richards began crawling on their bellies toward Alec and Katrina. Alec looked across the tarmac.
He was certain it was Gul and Sarvar running toward the darkened terminal building. It stood in the night, a long-forgotten and abandoned monument to 1960s architecture, with most of the letters stop the roof missing: NI O INTE N IO AI P RT
Alec watched them run … and then smiled.
He turned to Cook and Richards. “Can I trust you guys to get her to a medic?” He checked Katrina’s pulse and breathing again, then turned his attention to her holster and removed her pistol. He grabbed the extra clips.
“Where the hell are you going?” Cook asked. Alec pointed toward the terminal building.
“There are a couple of heads over there I’ve gotta get mounted and stuffed,” he said.
***
Getting inside was no problem; the windows of the terminal building had been smashed decades earlier. Sarvar and Gul simply stepped through the empty space where a window once stood. Once inside, they realized they were stepping on decades of pigeon droppings, crusted upon the floor. Their feet stuck with every step.
Sarvar went deeper inside, knowing that it was just a matter of time before someone from the United Nations peacekeepers would track them down. Everything depended upon getting that message out. They crept past faded tourism and cigarette billboards from a half-century ago.
The wall had once been decorated with blue and black airliner silhouettes; now it was faded and scratched. Wallpaper peeled from the walls. Gul proceeded inward, past what had once been “Health Control,” and checked his wireless signal. Not as strong as he needed for a message as important as this. They heard glass breaking behind them.
***
Alec looked at his bloody shin and sighed. Next time, he swore, he would just step over the broken glass window instead of trying to dramatically leap over it.
He scrambled to a corner and looked at his leg. Not as bad as he had feared. He had been bitten by a snake, swum in Mexico’s filthiest waters, incinerated some human cockroach, survived a plane crash, and now broken glass sliced up his shin. The universe seemed to be conspiring in a far-reaching effort to cut him off at the knees.
He saw movement out the corner of his left eye, and swiveled, pointing his gun. There it was again, something moving, fairly high in the darkness of that corner of the terminal entryway. He fired a single shot, and the pop echoed and reverberated throughout the terminal building.
So much for the element of surprise, he thought.
A moment later, the source of the movement fluttered out of the shadows: a barn owl, common to Cyprus. Farmers and conservationists welcomed the bird to protect carob trees. Alec found himself wishing he had killed the damn bird.
***
Gul and Sarvar froze when they heard the shot, but realized it was a significant distance away from them in the terminal hall. They scrambled around a corner and ducked into what had once been a duty-free shop, shelves now empty and broken. He turned to her and whispered, “We’ll need that distraction you promised.”
She nodded. She held up her phone and determined the signal was strong enough to send a text, if still a little iffy for Gul’s all-important video message. She pressed a series of buttons, and sent two messages.
Two angry old men awaited the signal. She couldn’t suppress a chuckle; this little precaution had taken so little money, so little equipment. Just a propane canister, nails, ball bearings, some basic electronics, and the right cold-hearted elderly men. The Voices had guided her, finding the perfect prospect living bitterly and alone in the Alaykoy neighborhood, just northwest of Nicosia Airport. When obtaining an actual mortar was deemed too dangerous and likely to attract attention, Sarvar had instructed the hard Turkish Cypriot how to assemble a giant makeshift slingshot in his backyard. He didn’t need perfect aim; the long rubber tubing would hurl his propane tank-bomb high into the air. He believed he would send it across the border into Kokkinotrimithia, hitting the damn Greeks. Sarvar knew the old man’s projectile was far too heavy to arc across the border. Much to the old fool’s horror, his bomb would fall out of the sky in some Turkish Cypriot neighborhood intersection, just outside the UN Compound gates.
The surrounding Turkish Cypriot authorities wouldn’t know that, of course.
What the hard Turkish Cypriot didn’t know was that Sarvar had made the same deal—even buying the same equipment—with a hard Greek Cypriot in the neighborhood of Egkomi, just south and east of the airport. His projectile would also fall short, most likely landing in the neighborhood of Agios Dhometios.
And within a few minutes, the two armies on each sides of the border would fire in response, each convinced the other had just fired a mortar.
***
Broken glass.
Alec peered around a corner and thought he saw movement about halfway down the terminal, in what had been a duty-free shop, when he was distracted by the sound of a distant explosion. Alec briefly froze in terror, worrying that the C-17 had exploded. But from his glances through the broken windowpanes, he could see that both planes remained in place, no carrot-colored glow of exploding gas tanks. No, that boom seemed too far off, somewhere to the west, beyond the airport.
Less than a minute later, a second boom, from the other side of the airport. What the hell was going on out there? Now gunfire, farther away. He wiped the sweat from his brow and eyes.
***
Gul and Sarvar shared one last passionate kiss, and went their separate ways. They knew that without extraordinary luck, they would never see each other again.
***
The accelerating noise of gunfire and explosions convinced Alec no one would hear the sound of his footsteps, and he advanced more confidently. Alec quickly peeked around the corner and saw her: Sarvar Rashin, looking away, peering around another distant corner. There was no sign of Gul, but Alec figured he would come running as soon as his woman was down. Good.
Alec raised his gun, lined up Sarvar Rashin’s head square in his sights, and pulled the trigger with great satisfaction. A second later, he winced as his shot went significantly lower than he expected. Still, by his standards, it was a good-enough shot, ripping through Sarvar’s hand holding her gun. It blew off her ring finger, and her gun clattered to the floor. She howled in pain and turned to him with a hiss.
Alec exhaled and decided that if anyone asked, he would say he had deliberately aimed for her hand.
“Hands up!” he ordered, holding his gun steady with both hands, ready to put the next shot through her head, or at least somewhere closer to it. “Well, what’s left of that hand.”
Arm trembling, she did so, glaring at him, full of hate.
Alec found her hateful visage pleasing; her monotone warnings on the seemingly endless terror videos struck him as smug. “Sarvar Rashin. Do you remember your first words in that first message?”
Sarvar stared back and didn’t hesitate. “You brought this on yourself.”
Alec chuckled. “That will do, too, but I was thinking of, ‘you are not safe.’”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Alec smiled. “I’m the goddamn consequences.”
It would have been a fantastic moment, and he would have felt awesomely victorious pulling the trigger again at her center mass if the wall next to them hadn’t suddenly exploded, knocked to pieces by a Greek Cypriot—fired mortar landing outside. Alec was knocked across the room,
pelted with pieces of concrete, inhaling and choking on dust, slamming against the floor and painful shock waves reverberating from his shoulder to his fingertips and up and down his spine and back and down to his legs and toes like a slinky. Alec’s ears rung and he wiped dust from his eyes. What the hell was that, a grenade?
Then Alec heard another high-pitched whistle of a mortar landing, and another explosion, the sound of pieces of gravel and dirt and whatever had just been there crumbling and landing everywhere. The floor shook, and he could hear faraway gunfire picking up.
He wiped his eyes again. Where the hell was Sarvar? He looked—not where she was a moment ago. He silently swore to himself. He looked around. Where the hell was his gun? He felt around. No sign of it. He made a fist and pounded the floor in frustration. Got to move. Got to move!
***
Richards and Cook kept their heads on a swivel, confused and incredulous that the urban neighborhoods around the airport had suddenly become a war zone. One howitzer had fired from the Greek side, slamming into the wall of the main terminal building behind them. With their wounded compatriot safely moved behind a truck as cover, the blue-beret-clad UN troops were now running around and shouting orders, seeming to forget about the three Americans outside the crashed C-17. Richards and Cook had carried the groggy, mumbling Katrina farther away from the C-17 and looking in vain for decent cover.
“What the hell is this?” Cook shouted. “Heck of a time for Greece and Turkey to go to war!” The gunfire was thankfully distant, but the howitzer had demonstrated that death could fall out of the sky at any moment.
Across the runway, they saw two figures stumble out of the Cypriot airliner and hobble toward the airport building.
“That’s bad,” Cook said. “With those two in there …”
Richards finished his thought. “It’s four against Alec. He’s a goner.”
Beneath them, Katrina’s eyes snapped open.
***
Alec mumbled one profanity after another. Like that sock that went missing in the dryer, his gun seemed to have just slipped into another dimension during the explosion. Maybe Sarvar had somehow grabbed it, but considering her not-so-suppressed rage of a moment ago, she seemed like the type who would shoot him the moment she had the chance. She, too, seemed to have completely disappeared. Hearing noise from upstairs, separate from the gunfire outside, he scrambled down a hall, looking for the nearest doorway.
