The Last Hostage

by Nance, John J. ;

  Immediately, the 737 began a roll to the right and a sharp pull.

  “Want to change your mind, Annette? Or do you want me to fly us into the hills? I don’t get him up here, I have nothing to live for anyway.”

  “Okay, OKAY!” she stammered. “I’ll bring him up.”

  The roll reversed itself.

  She replaced the handset and moved back into the first class cabin, feeling like an unwilling executioner.

  “Rudy …” she said quietly, irritated by the cornered look on his face. Wasn’t he supposed to be a big, brave prosecutor? She could use a little show of bravery from him right now, not the pitiful, cringing image of a cornered animal she saw before her.

  “What … what does he want?” Rudy stammered.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, but he did say he wasn’t planning to hurt you.”

  “I can’t bring his daughter back!”

  “It was a daughter? What happened to her?”

  His right hand waved aimlessly at the ceiling. “I—it’s a long story. Someone killed his daughter and … and the police ruined the case, and he blames me for not filing federal charges.”

  “Rudy, I don’t know anything about it, but if he wants something you can promise, for God’s sake, promise it!”

  He sat motionless, his eyes darting from her to the cockpit area and back until Annette decided she’d had enough.

  “Okay. Come on. On your feet.”

  “You can’t do this! Aren’t you supposed to protect your passengers?” he asked in a strained whine.

  She felt herself grimace at that. Was she walking a passenger to his death to save the rest, or just complying with what she couldn’t change?

  If they were going to survive, maybe Rudy Bostich could figure out what to say that Ken wanted to hear. She wasn’t an executioner. This was the logical thing to do.

  “Come on. It’s up to you to talk him down.”

  “Up to me?”

  “He says you’re the cause of this, Rudy. That means only you can rectify this. You’ve got to try.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Annette looked him in the eye and tried to answer the same question for herself. If he refused, would she look for some burly passenger to help her push him, kicking and screaming, into the cockpit? Or would she just wait for Ken to get mad enough to really fly them into a mountain?

  “Rudy? Now. Let’s go. I can’t reason with him. Maybe you can.”

  “I … can’t.”

  She leaned down to speak directly in his ear.

  “Rudy, you’re supposed to be a leader. We need you to lead and show some confidence. You’re acting like a coward.”

  The words stung him as she’d hoped, and slowly he got to his feet and moved into the aisle beside her. She pointed toward the cockpit and he moved with a leaden gait to the door. She knocked three times and heard the electronic lock release click, and saw the door swing open.

  “Come in, Mr. Bostich, and have a seat,” Ken said. The electronic trigger was evident in his left hand.

  For a second Bostich stood there, motionless, as Annette thought about grabbing the crash axe, or kicking Bostich forward into the cockpit, or falling on Ken Wolfe with a stranglehold around his neck. All pointless ideas, all born of the panic she had to control.

  Slowly, Rudy Bostich moved into the cockpit and looked at the empty copilot’s seat.

  “Close the door, Counselor,” Ken ordered.

  Bostich turned and looked at Annette with a trapped, haunted expression, his face a pasty white, as he pulled the door closed behind him.

  Million Air Executive Terminal, Salt Lake City International Airport. 1:04 P.M.

  Kat Bronsky pointed to a sleek Gulfstream IV business jet sitting in front of the Million Air terminal on the east side of the airport.

  “There! Pull up right in front of him.”

  “That’s the one?” the officer at the wheel of the airport police car asked as he checked the taxiway they were about to cross.

  “November-Five-Lima-Lima is the ‘n’ number. That looks like her.”

  Kat folded the cell phone and stuffed it into her handbag with the note on which she’d scribbled Frank’s relayed information. “They’re supposed to be ready to start as soon as I can dive in the door.”

  The officer negotiated a turn onto the Million Air ramp and stomped on the accelerator. “You FBI folks have some awesome power if you just reach out and snatch up a Gulfstream at will.”

  “I think we’re chartering them,” she answered. “I just hope I don’t have to put it on my Visa card.”

  He brought the car to a near skidding halt fifteen feet in front of the jet as Kat snapped off her seatbelt and yanked open the door, hurling a last thank you over her shoulder as she grabbed her handbag and the portable aviation radio and leapt from the right seat.

  There was a uniformed pilot with three stripes on his shoulders standing by the stairway to the aircraft, and she waved at him as she ran in his direction.

  “Five-Lima-Lima?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “I’m Agent Bronsky. Let’s go ahead and start.”

  He hesitated. “You’re … the FBI agent we’re expecting?”

  “You were expecting Elliot Ness?” she asked with a slightly sarcastic smile.

  Jeff Jayson chuckled as Kat bounded up the stairs to the plush interior with the copilot on her heels. She paused at the top and looked to the right, startled to see an impeccably groomed man in a gray business suit sitting in a large swivel chair.

  “Ah, hello,” Kat said.

  “Hello to you,” he replied, getting out of the seat with his hand outstretched. “I’m Bill North.”

  “Agent Kat Bronsky of the FBI,” she said, taking his hand. “Are you one of the pilots?”

  He smiled and arched a thumb in the direction of the cabin behind him.

  “Nope. I’m the owner.”

  Kat glanced toward the cockpit momentarily, aware that the copilot had retracted the stairs and was locking the door. She looked back at North, who had shoved his hands in his pants pockets and was leaning against the side of the galley. His eyes were a smoky blue, and they were studying her with a calm intensity.

  “I’m sorry,” she began. “I guess I’m confused. I thought we were chartering this jet.”

  Bill North shook his head no. “One of your people called over and said there was a major emergency, you needed a corporate jet fueled and ready to go almost instantly, and here we were on the ramp getting ready to go to Colorado Springs,” he shrugged. “I’ll send your director a bill for the costs later, but, no, this isn’t a charter. Just a concerned citizen.”

  The sound of the left engine winding up whispered through the heavily soundproofed cabin.

  Kat smiled back. “I’d better get up there with your pilots, but, thank you. We’ve got a hijacked airliner I need to stay in contact with.”

  North was nodding. “So I was told.” He straightened up. “Look, you make yourself at home, tell my guys what you need and where you need to go, and I’m going to sit back here and stay out of the way.”

  Three minutes later, the sleek Gulfstream was lifting off runway 35 and turning east into a clear blue sky.

  Kat knelt on the cockpit floor behind the center pedestal as the copilot offered his hand.

  “I’m Jeff Jayson, Agent Bronsky. This is Dane Bailey.”

  “Hi,” the captain said, his eyes remaining on the instruments.

  “I appreciate you guys, and Mr. North back there, responding so quickly. What’d I take you away from?”

  The young pilot in the right seat glanced at Dane, then grinned as he swept back an unruly lock of sandy hair with his right hand. “Just a last-minute trip to the Springs.”

  “Besides,” Dane Bailey added, “this is the most excitement we’ve had since Cindy Crawford flew with us last month.”

  Kat smiled, then sobered. “Okay guys, we’ve got a deadly serious situation
here. I’m going to need to talk on one of the two radios just as soon as we get to altitude. The whole point of this exercise is to try to maintain contact with a seven-thirty-seven that’s been hijacked.”

  Both pilots nodded, and Dane asked, “How do you want to handle this, Agent Bronsky? Departure control says Salt Lake Center will give us any heading and altitude we want, and they’re standing by to relay information from a couple of Air Force fighters who’re apparently trying to find the seven-thirty-seven. It is a seven-thirty-seven, right?”

  She nodded. “First item of business is, please call me Kat. Not ‘Agent.’”

  The two pilots exchanged a glance and smiled at each other.

  “Glad to, Kat,” Jeff said.

  “Second,” she continued, “we’re chasing him in order to let me stay within radio range so I can talk to him. Let’s take up a heading of zero-nine-zero for a few minutes and climb to twenty thousand. I need as high a radio footprint as possible to reach him. I think he’s flying through valleys and trying to stay hidden. He’s had a pretty good head start, about twelve minutes, and I figure that would put him a maximum of forty-eight miles ahead, and, maybe, with enough turns and twists to his flying, as little as thirty.”

  Dane nodded. “If we take her on up to flight level three-five-zero or so, we can get her up to around five hundred knots on the ground speed, and basically close the distance in about fourteen minutes.”

  Kat shook her head. “Too high. He could be going north or south, not just east. If we can’t raise him at twenty, then we’ll go higher and I’ll give you kind of a search pattern to fly.”

  “You don’t know where he’s headed?” Jeff asked.

  Kat shook her head. “We don’t even know if he knows where he’s headed. How much fuel do you have in hours?”

  The two pilots glanced at each other before the captain turned back to Kat.

  “Kat, this is a Gulfstream and we’ve got almost a full load of fuel, so we’ve got more than eight hours at altitude. But if we stay low, that could be as little as five hours.”

  “That’s great. That’s more than the seven-thirty-seven has.”

  “Basically, we could almost get you to London.”

  “Understood,” Kat said, inclining her head toward a sectional aviation chart the copilot was unfolding. “Is that Utah?”

  He nodded. “Utah’s full of mountains and valleys leading right into Colorado. If he’s down there flying what the Air Force calls nap of the earth, it’s going to be pretty hard to find him.”

  Kat tapped the chart with her index finger. “I don’t expect to find him visually. I’m just praying we can get him to talk, and I’m pretty sure he will, because of what he wants.”

  Dane Bailey turned to look at her. “Kat, truth is, this was all so sudden we don’t really know what’s going on here, except that it’s a hijacked AirBridge flight.”

  She studied the center pedestal for a few seconds wondering how much to tell and whether to be vague. This was FBI business, but they were potential assets—professional pilots who could understand what she was dealing with and maybe contribute the right idea at a critical moment.

  She sighed and looked at both of them in turn.

  “Okay,” Kat began, “this is all privileged information, but let me tell you what we know so far, and then I’ll brief your boss back there.”

  Dane nodded, as did Jeff.

  “Okay,” she began. “We’re in the middle of one of aviation’s worst nightmares, guys. We’ve got an airline captain holding his own aircraft and passengers hostage and making demands we don’t understand. Right now, I haven’t a clue as to how it’s going to end.”

  THIRTEEN

  Aboard AirBridge Flight 90. 1:16 P.M.

  “Bad choice of flights this morning, eh Rudy?” Ken Wolfe banked the 737 sharply to the left and slid around the promontory shape of a bluff rising several hundred feet above their altitude as he glanced to the right at the terrified prosecutor.

  He heard Rudy Bostich swallow hard and try to speak, his voice a rasp until he cleared it and tried again.

  “What, Rudy? I can’t hear you above the sound of your lying hypocrisy. Speak up.”

  “I asked,” Bostich began, “what, exactly, do you want from me?”

  Ken yanked the control yoke to the right suddenly, causing the 737 to roll rapidly back to the right, forcing a gasp from the right seat.

  “What do I want from you? Well now, I can’t imagine. It couldn’t be justice. That would be too damn simple. And I guess it couldn’t be something as old-fashioned as prosecuting my daughter’s murderer and putting the animal on death row. No, that wouldn’t do, because that might hurt Mr. Rudy Bostich’s career, right?”

  “Captain, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know what you want me to do, but you’re frankly scaring the hell out of me flying this low. Can’t we climb? There are innocent people riding in this airplane, too.”

  Ken rolled the yoke back to the left to guide the Boeing down another valley.

  “I’m glad you differentiated the folks in the back as being innocent, unlike yourself. What do I want? I want a confession.”

  “A confession? A confession about what?”

  Ken snorted at him. “You sack of shit. Whatever you do, Bostich, don’t try to play innocent with me. The name Roger Matson sound familiar?”

  Rudy sat in silence for a few moments, then nodded his head. “Matson is a detective, I think, in Stamford, Connecticut.”

  “As if you had to think about it. That’s right. Good. And Roger Matson’s a good man, right?”

  Rudy shrugged, his raised eyebrows betraying his alarm. “I wouldn’t know. He’s a detective. My office deals with many detectives.”

  “Yeah, well you’ve dealt with Roger Matson, all right, because Roger and his partner got hold of me and spilled the whole story.” He looked over at the frightened man in the right seat and glared. “I know what you did, Bostich, and you’ve got a choice. You’re either going to sign a confession up here with all the details and dates and places, or I’m going to take you to hell where you belong.”

  Rudy Bostich drew a ragged breath and tried to straighten his posture as he looked Ken in the eye.

  “I’m not confessing to anything I didn’t do, and I haven’t done anything. You, on the other hand, are in commission of so many felonies right now I’ve lost count. Do you realize you can get the death penalty for air piracy?”

  Ken’s head jerked around to the right, his eyes boring a hole in the side of Rudy’s face.

  “HEY, shithead! Let’s get this straight. I died when that animal killed my daughter. You’re looking at an angry corpse that doesn’t give a damn. That’s point one.”

  “And point two?” Rudy asked quietly.

  “Point two is a question. Can you fly this aircraft?”

  Rudy’s eyes shifted back to the forward windscreen.

  “Probably, if I had to.”

  Ken suddenly let go of the controls and folded his arms with the Boeing descending slightly into a valley, a thousand-foot bluff standing several miles ahead of them beginning to fill the windscreen.

  “Go ahead, Bostich. You’ve got it. Let’s see what ‘Probably, if I had to’ means.”

  Rudy looked at the pilot in disbelief.

  “WHAT? Look, I don’t have any experience with something this big.”

  “Whoa, another lie, Rudy? You said you could probably fly it.”

  “With proper instruction, maybe, but—”

  “Tough luck, Rudy. You think you’re in control of this situation? You, who can’t even help convict a murderer! Hey, Mr. Testosterone, the yoke’s right in front of you. Put your slimy hands on it.”

  Bostich pushed himself as far back in the seat as he could, both palms up and away from the yoke.

  “Okay. Okay, I admit I can’t do this, Captain! Does that make you happy?” Sweat was breaking out in beads on Rudy’s forehead as the airspeed increased
slightly and the rate of climb showed a descent rate of five hundred feet per minute, the bluff coming up fast in the window.

  “You’d better do it, bastard. Either that or confess what you did to Matson to set him up.”

  “What … what do I do here! What do I pull? We’re going to hit that mountain, you jackass! WHAT DO I DO?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, Rudy. If the big federal prosecutor and cabinet nominee can’t remember the basics of truth and confession, then I guess I can’t remember how to help you fly.”

  Rudy closed his hands around both arms of the control yoke. He looked out frantically, then pulled too hard, causing the nose to rise alarmingly as the G-forces pushed them down hard in the seats.

  The bluff was disappearing, the nose coming up, and the airspeed was decreasingly alarmingly, but Ken sat with his arms folded and watched.

  Rudy pushed the yoke forward sharply, throwing them up against the seatbelts with zero gravity as the bluff once again reappeared.

  “I CAN’T DO THIS!” Rudy yelled. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!”

  “Sorry. No confession, no flying lessons,” Ken said.

  Rudy Bostich’s eyes were huge as he pulled again and inadvertently rolled the Boeing to the left. Once again, the airspeed began dropping as the two-engine jetliner entered a steep climbing left turn. Ken watched the speed diminish through one hundred and eighty knots as the roll increased to nearly ninety degrees, the bluff now passing beneath them by a thousand feet.

  “You planning on doing a barrel roll, Bostich?” Ken asked.

  “WHAT?” Rudy fairly screamed the response as he struggled to roll the yoke back to the right and once again pulled too hard.

  Suddenly both control yokes began vibrating furiously as the stall warning kicked on. There was nothing but blue sky showing in the windscreen as Ken’s hands came forward, sweeping the power levers full forward as he nursed the roll back to the left, letting the nose drop to the horizon before rolling back wings level and checking the increasing airspeed.

  When the 737 had reached two hundred fifty knots in level flight again, he pulled the power back and resumed flying.

  Rudy Bostich was covered with sweat and breathing hard, his eyes wide with fear, his hands still holding the copilot’s yoke with a death grip.