The Last Hostage

by Nance, John J. ;

“In good time, Bronsky, you’ll find out.”

  “Okay, then where are you headed, Captain? Are you coming back here?”

  “Oh, what the hell. Go ahead and call me Ken instead of Captain. After today, I’ll never be a captain again, anyway.”

  “Ken, where are you headed? That’s the first question.”

  “Probably to hell, but I’m going to take a couple of real low-life animals with me, and about a hundred and twenty other innocent people if you don’t do what I’ve demanded.”

  “You still have a goal to achieve, Ken. Don’t blow it. Don’t give up on this process of talking.”

  Kat felt a hand on her right arm. She opened her eyes and looked up to see Frank holding a notebook with a note in large block print:

  LAB SEZ: THE TWO VOICES RECORDED EARLIER BELONG TO THE SAME PERSON. YOU WERE RIGHT.

  Kat nodded and focused her attention back on the desk.

  “Ken, listen to me very, very closely. I am not the President of the United States, and I’m not even the director of the FBI. I’m just an agent, and I can’t suspend laws, part oceans, or make government policy. I can tell you that if you’ll land in Salt Lake, we’ll do everything we can to bring this to an end by addressing whatever wrong you’re trying to set right, but if you just fly off, I can’t promise you anything.”

  Seconds ticked by as a voice from the hallway echoed toward the office she was occupying.

  “Departure control says he’s turned slightly toward the mountains at nine thousand.”

  Kat sighed again, long and ragged. “Ken, are you still there?”

  “Yeah, for a few more seconds.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “You give me no hope, Kat. A man must have hope. No hope, no salvation. No salvation, no airplane. Goodbye, Kat. Sorry you couldn’t listen. Maybe with the next one you might learn. Sorry. I don’t mean that. I don’t want to help hijackers. This is unique. You just screwed up this very unusual situation.”

  “What, Ken? What did I screw up, and how can we repair it?”

  “Too late, Kat. You tell the illustrious Attorney General his cowardice in refusing to act was responsible.”

  “Ken, we are acting! We’re trying to do what you said. If you do anything rash, all you’ll accomplish is help future hijackers get anything they want. You’ll be disciplining us to accede to any demand immediately. You’re a captain. Do you want airline captains flying under that sort of expectation? Anyone who wants anything can get it in the future by hijacking an airliner, all because Ken Wolfe couldn’t wait it out? You don’t want that!” Kat felt perspiration on her forehead.

  The line was still open, but Ken Wolfe was saying nothing.

  She heard a voice in the doorway softly repeating a transmission from Salt Lake City Departure Control.

  “He’s turning toward the ridgeline now, and he’s not high enough to clear it.”

  “Ken, please talk to me. At least tell me what you want.”

  Ken Wolfe’s voice came back immediately.

  “I’ll bet you aren’t married, Kat.”

  She nodded, then remembered to speak. “You’re right. I’m not married.”

  “I hope to God you never lose a child, Kat. Only then can you understand.”

  “Captain, turn back to the west, right now.”

  “No, Kat. You had your chance.”

  “Captain, you’re not a mass murderer. Don’t even threaten.”

  “You don’t know who I am, Kat. There hasn’t been enough time for your people to find out anything about me. My airline doesn’t understand what’s happened to me. The current President sure as hell doesn’t understand, or he’d never consider a lying bastard like Rudy Bostich for Attorney General.”

  Another voice came from over her shoulder. “Kat! He’s headed directly into the top of the Wasatch Range!”

  Aboard AirBridge Flight 90. 12:45 P.M.

  Annette looked again to the right, calculating their distance from the Wasatch Mountains. She felt her heart leap to her throat when she realized the position of the mountains had changed. They had been alongside and parallel. Now they were ahead at a forty-five degree angle. And the 737 was headed right at them, but at an altitude lower than the approaching ridgeline!

  Annette jumped from the seat and moved forward to the front entry way to grab the P.A. microphone.

  “EVERYONE STAY IN A BRACE POSITION! REPEAT, STAY IN A BRACE POSITION!”

  She could feel the terror in the passenger cabin mirroring her own panic, but there was nothing else to do. She could also see Elvira Gates waving her right arm frantically from her seat in coach as the leader of the fear-of-flying group leaned into the aisle, still trying to maintain a semibrace position.

  “What, Mrs. Gates?” Annette shouted.

  “Now? Stay down now?”

  Annette nodded as she pressed the microphone button again.

  “Yes. Now!”

  The thought of breaking into the cockpit and clubbing Ken Wolfe resurfaced every few minutes, but having no pilot to fly and land the plane would doom them for certain. They were utterly dependent on their captor now for life, with no clue as to what he was trying to accomplish.

  FBI “Command Post,” Salt Lake City International Airport. 12:45 P.M.

  Kat pressed the receiver to her ear and closed her eyes.

  “Ken, even if you’re planning to end it, give me enough time for you to explain what you want. What has this Bostich done? How did he lie? Do you hold him responsible for losing a child of yours? If you end it now or cut off communications, no one will ever know what you wanted.”

  The voice came back too low, the words spaced too evenly, as if he had disengaged.

  “The man you must arrest is Bradley Lumin. He murders little girls. He takes them like an animal, keeps them, rapes them, does horrible things to them, then kills them. He takes pictures of them, too, pictures he puts on computers, and probably the Internet. And he’s about to strike again if you don’t stop him. No one will listen to me. I’ve begged for nearly two years, but no one listens. Meanwhile, he’s killed twice more. I’ve begged and pleaded, but no one would listen, and the little girls keep dying.”

  Frank’s voice in her ear again. “Kat! He’s three miles to impact!”

  Sheer panic was crawling up and down her back with claws. Only her words stood between the passengers and the ridgeline.

  “Ken, damn you, LISTEN TO ME! Turn that aircraft back to the west long enough to tell me the basics. Don’t end this before we at least know what’s happened and what to do about it.”

  “It’s all in the record. Talk to Connecticut State Police Detective Roger Matson. He’s telling the truth about Bostich. Bostich lied. Bostich covered up.”

  “Ken, pull up! You’re a professional pilot, not a murderer. This is not an appropriate legacy for whomever you’ve lost.”

  He said little girls. The murderer kills little girls, and he lost a child.

  “It was your daughter, wasn’t it? How would she want to remember her father? As a mass murderer? Is that what you want?”

  Frank’s voice again. “One mile. He’s five hundred feet below the ridge.” Frank was pressing a phone to his ear, and relaying the word from Salt Lake Departure.

  “Ken, what was she like? Your daughter. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT SHE WAS LIKE. WHAT WAS HER NAME? WAS SHE PRETTY?”

  Aboard AirBridge Flight 90. 12:47 P.M.

  The sight of rapidly moving real estate in a side window caught Annette’s full attention. She moved past the wide-eyed woman in seat 1C and crouched down to look forward out the window at a rapidly approaching ridge that was above them and ninety degrees to the airplane’s flight path. They were rushing straight toward it!

  Bostich was muttering into his phone, asking for someone and demanding connection in a shaky voice.

  There would be no time. There was no way anyone below could help influence their fate now. They were too close.

  A strange calm fell
over her as she sat in the window seat next to the woman in 1C and looked through the glass at the onrushing ridge. The woman looked up at the same moment, her right hand finding Annette’s hand and squeezing hard. Annette squeezed back, fully expecting to leave life in her company.

  FBI “Command Post,” Salt Lake City International Airport. 12:49 P.M.

  Kat felt herself go limp at the sound of the cell phone being turned off in the cockpit of Flight 90. She looked over at Frank with a frantic, feral expression, pleading for word that what they all expected hadn’t occurred.

  Frank Bothell’s face had drained of all color. She saw him nod slightly and lower the receiver as he took a stunned, ragged breath.

  “Departure says … the target has merged … with the ridge … and disappeared.”

  “Oh, God!” Kat’s voice echoed off the walls of the chief’s office as her fist clamped against her mouth.

  TWELVE

  FBI “Command Post,” Salt Lake City International Airport. 12:50 P.M.

  Kat stood in shock for nearly a minute with her mind screaming at her:

  A father who was willing to end his career and his freedom to prosecute his daughter’s murderer would never be able to resist answering those last questions, no matter how intense his pain!

  Kat moved to the desk in a haze and punched up the same line Frank had used for Departure Control. She could hear the controller coordinating with an inbound United Airlines 757, asking him to overfly the same ridge. She turned to Frank and the others in the room and cleared her throat, aware that her voice was shaky.

  “Gentlemen,” Kat began, “we’ve just been conned. He hasn’t crashed, and this isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning of what’s going to be a bizarre and, probably, lengthy game of cat and mouse. And he’s the cat.”

  Frank Bothell was staring at her in disbelief. “Kat, we’d better face it.”

  She shook her head strenuously, hanging on to the logic she knew was right.

  “No, Frank. They’re safe. He skimmed the ridge, flew over it. He’s somewhere on the other side hugging the terrain, flying through valleys. It’s too soon.”

  “Kat, you don’t know this guy. You can’t be sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  The voice of the United flight crew cut into their exchange.

  “Ah, Salt Lake Approach, United Twenty-Two-Fifteen. We’re circling the area.”

  The transmission dropped out for a few seconds, then returned.

  “Ah, it appears that … there’s no crash down here we can see. There’s no sign of fire, wreckage, impact, or anything else, and we don’t hear any emergency locater beacons.”

  “You’re certain, United?”

  “Well, Approach, are you certain of the coordinates you gave us?”

  “Yes, sir. The Salt Lake V.O.R. zero-three-zero degree radial at precisely twenty-six miles.”

  “Then we’re certain, Approach. No one’s crashed anything as large as a Boeing down there. We’d see it.”

  Kat sat hard in the office chair, her heart racing, as Frank stood in stunned silence, staring at the wall.

  “Jeez, Bronsky. You were right. How on earth did you know?”

  “It didn’t fit, Frank. Someone killed his daughter. He’s hurting for her, not for himself. Crashing now would only ease his pain, not hers. That has to be the point.”

  Kat had her forehead cupped in her right hand, her mind racing ahead. She had a second chance, but she had to move fast.

  Another wide-eyed FBI agent had entered the room with a steno notebook in hand, and Frank nodded to him immediately.

  “What, Jim?”

  “Our two agents in Colorado Springs just phoned in their report. The details are interesting and the airline’s trying to hide it, but this captain has a long history of strange behavior since his daughter was murdered two years ago.”

  “Is that a case anyone recalls?” Kat asked, her head still cupped in her hand.

  Jim nodded, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I recall it, because it was so infuriating. It was a kidnap-murder near Stamford, Connecticut, and nearly eight months went by before they collared the bastard, a real sleazebag pedophile with a long record of molestation, child pom, the works.”

  Frank was shaking his head. “What was the girl’s full name?”

  “Melinda Wolfe,” Jim replied. “They had this Lumin character cold, but virtually all the evidence came from a search of his home and his computer, and when the warrant was thrown out, the case went with it.”

  Kat looked at Frank. “I’ll bet you anything that Mr. Bostich was somehow involved in issuing that warrant.”

  Jim shook his head. “I doubt it. It was a state prosecution. There was no federal prosecution, or not yet, at least.”

  Kat looked at both of them, then addressed Jim.

  “You said two years ago?”

  “I did. I checked the date. This is the second anniversary of her murder.”

  “Bingo,” Frank said under his breath.

  Kat intertwined her fingers as she sat in the chair, staring at the floor.

  “Frank, there are several corporate air terminals on the east side of the field. One’s called Million Air. I forget the others. If we don’t have a business jet standing by with FBI pilots, and I’m sure we don’t, call the Million Air terminal and beg for help. See if we can commandeer or charter a business jet, one that can keep up with a seven-thirty-seven. I need to be off the ground within ten minutes.”

  “Kat—” Frank began, a pained expression on his face.

  “Trust me, Frank. Don’t argue. There isn’t time. If I’m not airborne in ten minutes with the ability to talk to Wolfe directly by aircraft radio from above, we’ll lose him yet. I can’t do it from down here.”

  There was no sound from Frank Bothell. He was in deep thought. She was wondering what more to say when he smiled suddenly.

  “Okay, Kat. Let’s get one of the officers here to race you to the other side while I call. Keep your cell phone on.”

  “Jim, call Approach, get me a stack of frequencies Wolfe might be monitoring.”

  “Will do.” Jim grabbed a phone as Frank pushed past him headed for the hallway. He hesitated in the doorway just long enough to turn back to her.

  “Take your weapon, Kat, and don’t take any chances.”

  Million Air Executive Terminal, Salt Lake City International Airport. 1:01 P.M.

  Captain Dane Bailey emerged from the plush passenger cabin of NorthLight Industries’ thirty-nine-million-dollar Gulfstream IV and entered his high-tech computerized cockpit as the copilot looked up from the right seat.

  “Are we into Plan B now, or what?” Jeff Jayson asked.

  Dane maneuvered himself into the captain’s seat as he handed a fistful of maps to Jayson and nodded.

  “I’ve never seen the FBI commandeer a jet before, but,” he inclined his head toward the passenger cabin, “the boss says if they need help, we’ll provide it.”

  “So where are we going, Dane?”

  He shook his head and smiled. “There’s an FBI agent racing over here right now. I guess he’ll tell us. All I know is, this still concerns the AirBridge hijacking, and I’ve never seen the boss so disturbed about anything. He’s trying to hide it, but this has him really upset.”

  Jayson nodded. “It must, to prompt the vice chairman of AirBridge’s board to chase the company’s 737 across Utah rather than fly to AirBridge headquarters. I couldn’t believe how fast he got here from his office.”

  Bailey shrugged. “Hey, ours is not to reason why. The man’s got about thirty million invested in that airline. He’s got a right to worry.”

  Aboard AirBridge Flight 90. 12:50 P.M.

  Annette had expected to die as the 737 approached the ridge and suddenly pitched up. Instead, the ridge flashed beneath them and the 737 pitched over as Ken Wolfe dove down the far slope and began maneuvering along a mountain valley, hugging the trees and the terrain which were passing in an incredib
le blur.

  “What’s happening?” the woman sitting next to her asked in a small voice. Annette realized with some embarrassment she’d been squeezing the woman’s hand, and she let go as decorously as possible.

  “What’s your name?” Annette replied.

  “Louise. Louise Richardson.”

  “Stay calm, Louise. I have no idea what’s going on, but I don’t think he means to kill us. I think he’s trying to scare us.”

  “It’s working!” Louise said.

  The sound of the P.A. clicking on seemed ominous. They had no ally on the other end of the microphone, only an enemy now.

  “Listen up, people. Stay down, stay put. According to our captor, we’ve got more than one criminal aboard today. He says in first class there’s a piece of walking excrement named Rudy Bostich who thinks he’s going to be the next Attorney General of the United States. Mr. Bostich is a liar and a cheat and an unconvicted felon, and our captor requires Mr. Bostich’s presence on the flight deck. He says we’ll tell you more later. Annette, escort Mr. Bostich to the cockpit door. If he won’t come voluntarily, tell him our guest says he will detonate the bomb.”

  Annette leaned forward and looked across at Rudy Bostich, whose face was a study in pure panic. The cell phone had been open in his hand, and it dropped unnoticed to the floor as he looked back at Annette with pleading eyes, swallowing hard.

  Annette got to her feet and headed instead for the forward door area to pull the interphone from its hooks and punch the cockpit call button.

  “What the hell is it, Annette?” Ken snapped. “Weren’t the instructions clear enough?”

  “What do you want, Ken? You planning on killing him in the cockpit while trying to fly?”

  “I considered it,” Ken shot back, “but he’s got to live to face charges. Does that make you feel better?”

  She closed her eyes and metered her breathing before replying. “When are you going to drop this pretense, Ken? People already suspect. Your voice is too angry, too hateful.”

  “Bullshit. Stop stalling, Annette. Get that worm by the collar and get him up here.”

  “Do it yourself, Ken!” she snapped.