The Templar Salvation (2010)

by Raymond Khoury

  The plane was dropping.

  Reilly caught his breath and steadied himself against the seat nearest to him. He heard the wind wrench the open door panel off its hinges and watched it get sheared off the plane. His eyes wide with alarm, he scanned left and right, looking for direction while trying to calm his mind, fighting the primal fear from the surge of chemicals that his amygdala was flooding his brain with and trying to reinstate some kind of rational control.

  Gunshots interfered with the process.

  On the other side of the life raft, Zahed was firing furiously, obviously trying to deflate the raft or kill Reilly.

  Or both.

  Bullets were ripping through the life raft’s nylon skin, and there was nowhere for Reilly to take cover.

  He ducked down and moved forward as several objects fell to the cabin floor and rolled forward, the contents of the life raft’s emergency pack that had fallen out of it as it twisted in the confined space.

  Reilly’s eyes danced over the cascade of items, processing their value. He saw an expandable paddle. A sea mirror. A jug with a handle for bailing. Rescue line. Hand flares.

  And a knife.

  Not huge. Not a carbon-steel combat knife that could gut an alligator. Just a safety knife with a floating orange handle and a tame-looking, five-inch serrated blade.

  It was just lying there, resting against the base of the club chair.

  Calling out to him.

  Stabbing him with hope.

  He reached down and grabbed it. Five seconds later, his hands and feet were free. A round penetrated the 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.

&nb
sp; 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 glide. Then a continuous horn blared—the stall warning.

  He had to bring it down now.

  He nursed the wheel forward by a fraction of a millimeter. The plane drifted lower, one foot at a time, slowly, gracefully. It skimmed the tips of the small swells in a veil of spray, then it touched down. The sea was pretty calm, and although the Conquest’s fuselage skittered across the white tips, it didn’t flip over or break up. The feathered props helped keep the ditching smooth, and the small aircraft kept bouncing along until the weight of the water finally overwhelmed its forward momentum and it plowed to a sudden stop in a cloud of white foam.

  The deceleration was brutal, ninety knots to zero in under a second. Reilly was thrown forward against his shoulder harness, but it did its job and kept him from slamming into the controls or flying out the windshield.

  Water started rushing into the cabin instantly.

  Reilly knew he didn’t have long to get out. Not with the cabin doors sheared off. He yanked his harness off, got out of his seat, and scrambled out of the cockpit and through the narrow gap between the two front seats, over the dead pilot’s body. Several inches of water were already sloshing around in the cabin, with more flooding in every second. His eyes darted around, searching for a life jacket. They found something better, another bright yellow pouch, this one tucked away behind the other front club seat and smaller than the life raft’s valise. Big blue letters across it told him it was the “Emergency Grab Bag,” which sounded just right to him.

  He grabbed it and bolted to the cabin door, then he stopped in his tracks and cast his eye toward the back of the cabin, to the crates that were stacked between the rear seats and the partition behind which he’d been stowed.

  The texts.

  The ones that had survived since the dawn of Christianity.

  The two-thousand-year-old legacy that Tess had brought to light.

  His chest constricted at the thought of losing them, of letting Tess down, after everything that had happened.

  He had to do something.

  He had to try to save them.

  He stormed up to the crates, scanning the cabin around him, looking for something he could use to save them, something he could put them in that was watertight. Anything. A bag, some plastic sheeting—part of the life raft. It was there, ripped apart, big chunks of yellow plastic sloshing around in the rising water.

  It would have to do.

  He grabbed hold of a big chunk of it and pulled it toward him, looking for a decent piece that would be large enough to do the job. He found a section that might work, part of the tubular ring of the raft. He pulled out his knife and sawed away at it, cutting out a duffel bag-shaped section that was open at one end and sealed at the other.

  The water was now at his knees and rising fast.

  He stomped across to the crates, pulled the top one open, and started loading up the leather-bound codices into the nylon tube, one by one. He knew he wasn’t handling them with anything near the care they deserved, but he didn’t have a choice. He knew he wouldn’t be able to save them all, he knew that, but even saving some of them, a few of them, was still something.

  The water reached his thighs.

  He kept going. Popped the top off the second chest, started loading books from it too.

  The water was now at his waist. Which meant the third chest was now submerged.

  He had to go. He had to try to seal the top off the nylon tube and get out of there. If he didn’t move fast, he’d be trapped in the cabin.

  He twisted the top of the tube around on itself, tightening it as much as he could. It wouldn’t be watertight, he knew that. But it was the best he could do. He grabbed its neck and fought the torrent of water all the way back to the cabin door.

  It was like trying to climb into a storm pipe during a monsoon.

  He took a deep breath, ducked under water, and pushed himself through the narrow opening, pulling the nylon tube with one hand, the grab bag with the other.

  He came out on the other side with the plane partially submerged, and stepped onto the wing. He scuttled across to the port engine and sat on its cowling, which was still just above water. He rummaged through the grab bag and pulled out a life jacket, which he slipped on and inflated, and a personal locator beacon, which he clipped onto the jacket and activated.

  He rode the cowling down as it slipped below the surface. The Conquest’s tail followed and went under less than a minute later, leaving him floating around with the eerily serene white silhouette of the plane disappearing into the darkness below him.

  He hung on to the nylon tube, gripping its neck as tightly as he could with both hands, fighting to keep the water out of it. But he knew it was hopeless. He could see water seeping in through the folds in its neck. The nylon it was made of wasn’t designed to be easily folded. It was designed to be tough, to withstand punctures and heavy seas. And much as he tried, Reilly knew he was fighting a losing battle.

  With every passing minute, more water seeped in. And the more it seeped in, the heavier the tube became. After about half an hour, having expended every last micron of energy that he possessed, Reilly couldn’t keep it afloat any longer. It was simply too heavy. He also knew it was probably pointless. The texts were soaking with water by now. They were no doubt already ruined, the trove of information in them lost forever. And if he kept hanging on to them, they’d soon take him with them.

  With a long, soul-wrenching howl, he let go.

  They drifted away, then went under, a yellow nylon tube of inestimable value, leaving him floating around aimlessly, one lone speck of life in an unforgiving sea.

  Chapter 66

  Reilly felt himself slip in and out of consciousness several times, the cool water lapping against his head and nudging him awake each time his mind and body tried to shut down.

  The sea was being kind to him, with nothing more than a gentle swell that made staying awake even harder. But he knew it would get colder, and possibly rougher, as nightfall approached. The vest could keep him afloat, but it wouldn’t keep him alive if the water got choppier and his body decided to surrender to exhaustion.

  He found himself thinking of Tess, thinking that she was most probably safe, which
was good, but that he’d let her down in losing the trove of Nicaea, which would be a big blow. He tried focusing on that disappointment, using it to stay afloat, thinking that at least if he kept himself alive, he wouldn’t cause her another loss, and he’d be able to tell her exactly what had happened, which would at least do away with the burden of uncertainty that would otherwise gnaw away at her for the rest of her days.

  After a while, he just let himself go, relying on the life jacket and its personal locator beacon to do its job. He just drifted along the deep water, drained beyond words, waiting for a rescue he hoped would eventually show up.

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILES due east of his position, the air traffic controller who had been tracking the Conquest’s progress after Steyl had radioed in for permission knew something was wrong as soon as he saw the plane drop below twelve thousand feet and accelerate.

  After three no-response calls and less than a minute after he’d first noticed the plane’s unusual behavior, the controller activated the emergency SAR plan. A British Royal Navy Sea King HAR3 Search-and-Rescue chopper took to the air from its base at Akrotiri in Cyprus just as Reilly’s plane was hitting the water.

  The signal from Reilly’s PLB, giving his location, was forwarded to the chopper’s pilot while it was speeding to the Conquest’s last known position. And just over an hour after he’d found himself floating in the Mediterranean, a frogman was riding a harness down to pull him to safety.

  HE WAS FLOWN BACK TO AKROTIRI, where he had his injuries looked at and dressed by military medical personnel at the Sovereign Base Area’s Princess Mary’s hospital.