Deep Control

by Annabel Joseph

  A new, blaring siren on the panel informed us that engine one was shutting down due to fuel starvation. Even knowing it was going to happen, the change in thrust was a shock. The cockpit lights flickered and the plane dipped sideways.

  “Increase engine two thrust,” said Ross. “Descend to thirty-two thousand feet.” Then he stood and put down his headset, placing a finger atop his wrist as if to take his pulse. “Kids, my blood pressure is…” He wove on his feet.

  “Are you having a heart attack right now?” I asked. There wasn’t time for niceties. “Are you having a medical emergency?”

  “No, no.” Ross waved a hand. “I’m light headed. My heart is racing, but there’s no pain.”

  “Do me a favor and don’t have a goddamned stroke on top of everything else going on right now.”

  Ayal ignored my outburst and spoke to the captain in a soothing voice. “Go sit down in the back, Mike. Chew some aspirin and try to relax.” She turned to me. “Can your friends look after him? You’re going to have to help me do this.”

  “I will. Give me a minute.”

  She turned away, taking brisk instructions from Portugal’s air-traffic control officials. I held the door open and guided Ross through, watching him for signs of an impending heart attack or stroke. He kept apologizing. At least it let me know he wasn’t in active trauma.

  “I don’t want you to worry about anything,” I told him. I gestured to my friends. “Get up, please. You all have to go to the back of the plane and buckle yourselves in.”

  Fort stood, ready to help. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re having some fuel issues, so we’re going to land early. I’ll answer questions later. For now, please go. Move to the back as quickly as you can.”

  The flight attendants scurried before me, securing hatches and making quick preparations for an emergency landing. I didn’t have to tell them it was necessary. They knew from the sound of my voice that things weren’t okay. Fort and Juliet followed the attendants, and I brought up the rear with Captain Ross and Ella, who shook in my arms, on the verge of total mental breakdown. Shit, shit, shit. I loved making women scared, but not this way. These weren’t the kind of tears I enjoyed.

  “Are we going to die?” She clung to each row as we passed it, weaving like a drunken sailor. “Oh God, what’s happening? Is there a fire?”

  “There’s no fire. We lost some fuel, so we’re going to land early, but everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Land where?” she cried. “We’re flying over the ocean.”

  “Lucky for us, there are islands in the ocean.” I lowered my voice, tipped up her chin, and made her look at me. “I know I promised to stay with you the whole time, but I can’t right now. You need to be brave. You need to be a good fucking girl, Ella, and keep your shit together. Do you understand?”

  I’d said those words to her last night. You’re a good fucking girl, because she was. I wondered if she remembered. I couldn’t ask her about it now, couldn’t let on that I’d been the one tormenting her last evening while she was blindfolded, because this definitely wasn’t the time.

  I guided her into the back row and helped Ross into the adjacent seat, buckling his belt. “Sit here beside the captain and look after him, because he’s not feeling well. Keep your seat belt on, put your head down when I tell you to, and brace yourself until we’re on the ground.”

  “Brace myself? We’re going to crash?” The words choked in her throat as I checked her belt. “Are we going to crash in the water?”

  “I told you, we’re headed to some islands. It’s going to be okay.”

  “I can hear the alarms going off all the way back here.”

  I cupped her face, trying to stave off her hysteria. “Don’t be scared. Be brave. Once we land, you need to be ready to move. You need to be ready to help Captain Ross if he passes out, because his blood pressure is bothering him right now.”

  The flight attendants would handle Captain Ross if it came to that, but giving her a job might calm her a little. I stroked fingers across her tear-streaked cheeks, and then glanced at Ross, who looked stable if not healthy. “I wish I could stay with you, but I have to return to the cockpit. I’ll see you when we’re on the ground.”

  I moved back up the aisle, leaving Ella in tears. I was leaving her when I said I wouldn’t, but she’d have to find a way to cope. As for me, I was too adrenalized to be fearful, and too practical to obsess over what-ifs. There was no time for that, no time for anything but focusing on the instruments and bringing our crippled plane to a runway, or, barring that, some flat, solid land.

  I could hear the second engine strain as Ayal worked to maintain our altitude. We needed all the height we could get, although our current climb was taxing the scant fuel supplies we had left.

  “How many miles out are we?” I asked as I entered the cockpit.

  “I don’t know, I can’t see anything.” Ayal squinted out the front windows at the dark ocean below.

  “How many miles?” I repeated. If Ayal lost her shit, a difficult landing could become impossible. At my sharp tone, she pulled herself together and relayed the messages from ground control.

  “One hundred and twenty miles to Santa Maria Airport, two hundred and thirty-four to Horta.”

  She listed a few more airports I’d never heard of before, and military air traffic controllers joined the fray as the fuel indicator continued to blink.

  “Look,” she said. “We’re almost out of fuel. We’re going to run dry over the ocean.”

  “We’ll still make it.”

  She tapped the onboard monitor. “We’re going to lose engine two.” It was already operating at a lower frequency. A moment later the sputtering started, and the alarms.

  “Gibraltar 451 to ground control,” Ayal cried into her headset. “Mayday. Repeat, mayday.” Her usually quiet voice cracked with urgency. “Engine two power loss is imminent. Both engines inoperable due to fuel starvation. We’re gliding toward the Azores. Request landing assistance.”

  “Roger, 451. Stand by. Maintain altitude.”

  “Roger.”

  I pressed my lips together, keeping the plane’s nose tipped up. The only sound was the air rushing over the windshield and wings. In all my years of flying, I’d never heard anything like this silence, the lack of the engines’ rumble and hum. “Need radar backup,” I barked.

  “We’ll guide you in,” said the man from ground control.

  His voice in my ear was calm, but I wasn’t calm. The radio was powered by supplemental electricity that could blink out at any time, but I couldn’t think about that. I wondered what was going on in the cabin. Were they crying? Praying? Trusting that Ayal and I could land them safely? Was Captain Ross okay? The cabin would continue to lose pressure with each kilometer traveled. Ayal and I put on our oxygen masks, and then propped open the door and yelled for everyone in the back to do the same.

  “Taking you to LPPD on São Miguel,” said one of the voices in my ear. “Runway is five miles out. Can you get a visual?”

  “No. Bad cloud cover.”

  “If you miss it, we’ll try Lajes Airfield or Horta.”

  “Lots of choices,” Ayal muttered beside me. We worked in tandem to orient the plane according to the directions that air control fed us, staying aloft, flying by instrument only and manipulating the controls with sweating palms. Somehow, we managed to maintain the altitude we needed. The winds were on our side at the moment, but they’d become a problem when we landed, when we needed to stop the multi-ton aircraft without functioning systems.

  “Are you ready to brake?” she asked.

  “As soon as we touch down.” Without hydraulic control, I’d have to slam on the brakes, and they’d definitely lock up. The landing gear would gouge holes in the tarmac if we were lucky, or snap off completely if we weren’t. “There shouldn’t be fire,” I pointed out, the one bright spot. “No fuel left to ignite.”

  The danger would be in the impact, or
the ocean landing if we overshot the runway. I turned to the open cockpit door, yelling loudly enough to be heard in the back. “Put your heads down. Brace for a hard landing. Hardest fucking landing of your lives.”

  Silence greeted my barked orders. I finally had visual contact with the islands and we started to descend. “Okay, we’re here,” I said to the people on the ground. “We’re right near the airport. Do we have a place to lay this baby down?”

  “All cleared for you,” a sharp voice replied.

  “Do some S-turns,” said Ayal, as if in a trance. “We’re too high.”

  “I got it.”

  I’d never flown a jetliner without power before, but flying was flying, and I’d tried just about every variety of it over the years. Big planes, small planes, old planes, military jets, state of the art hovercrafts, planes with mechanical anomalies, and lightweight planes designed to glide.

  I tried to think like a glider pilot rather than a jet pilot, making measured S-turns in the air, balancing distance and speed, altitude and angle to reach the airport in the correct position to land. They’d cleared all the air traffic from São Miguel, so I picked an east-west runway and lined up the plane, letting it drop to the earth. It fell fast, but we had to land fast, or we’d shoot into the ocean.

  “We’re almost there.” Ayal yanked off her headset. Ground control couldn’t help us now. “Oh, please. Oh God. Please land us.”

  “I’m trying. No chance at a redo.”

  The runway widened beneath us as we dropped the last few feet. Ayal sucked in a breath and held it.

  “Brace! Brace!” I yelled the words a second before we touched down, and the cockpit door slammed shut from the impact. The plane bounced and shimmied, but held together, the typical noise of reversing engines and air flaps replaced by the squealing and thudding of the tires. Thup, thup, thup, thup, thup, flat tires, shuddering fuselage, high-pitched screams from the back.

  I would have screamed too, if I wasn’t so busy nursing the brakes and working the controls. The safety belt bit into my shoulders and hips as we rapidly decelerated. Ayal braced her hands on the control panel, silent and pale at my side. We passed waiting fire trucks and ambulances, zipping by them on the runway that was both too long and too short.

  Pumping the brakes did nothing. All I could do was try to hold the nose down so we didn’t lift into the air again. I gritted my teeth as the tires’ thumping died to a scrape. The plane pitched forward, then slowed to the point I could let out a breath. It hadn’t flipped or broken apart. We finally rolled to a stop about two hundred meters from the end of the runway.

  “Bless you,” said Ayal, touching her forehead, then mine. “You did it. Thank you.”

  I looked at the piles of manuals in her lap. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  While Ayal signed off with ground control, I took off my oxygen mask, feeling keyed up, angry, euphoric, overwhelmed, devastated. Fire engines pulled alongside our crippled jet, filling the air with sirens, but I barely heard them. Outside the cockpit window, the earth looked green and beautiful. I could have died, we all could have died, but we were alive.

  “Devin,” said Ayal. “Are you all right?”

  I’d think about that question later. For now, I had to look after the passengers, and get all of us the hell off this plane.

  Chapter Five: Ella

  All around the universe, things were happening all the time. I knew this from my work. Galaxies were colliding, stars were dying in supernova explosions. But right now, on this tiny island, on this tiny planet, every step I took seemed like a miracle.

  I don’t remember how we got from the airport to the hotel, only that Devin guided me into an elevator with floral wallpaper. All those flowers. Fort and Juliet were with us, clinging to each other. I felt unhinged, lost in a whirl.

  I knew Devin had somehow guided the plane to earth without engine power, had saved us from a horrific crash, because I’d lived through the rough, bouncing landing. Somehow, he and the female co-pilot had wrangled the plane to a stop, ignoring the shrieking controls. As we stumbled off the crippled plane, she’d cried. I’d cried. We’d all cried, but not Devin.

  I didn’t trust him anymore, because he hadn’t cried. There was something unnatural about his self-control.

  Another reason not to trust him: he’d lied. He’d told me before the flight that everything would be okay. I felt a sob rise in my throat, choking out like a grunt. Was the crash landing I’d experienced more or less shattering than a black hole exploding? I studied gravitational waves to make sense of the universe. Now, nothing made sense.

  When I made my choking, sobbing sound, Devin touched my elbow, perhaps to comfort me. I pulled away. Fort and Juliet got off the elevator and we continued to my floor. He’d asked me at least a dozen times if I was okay, but I hadn’t answered, because, obviously, I wasn’t okay. Physically, I was okay. We’d all survived the hard landing with minor bumps and bruises, a fact attributed to Devin’s flight experience and skill.

  But mentally, I wasn’t doing very well. My fears of an airplane disaster had nearly come to fruition. I’d pressed an oxygen mask to my face and listened to an old man in the throes of a heart attack pray to a God I didn’t believe in, asking that God to look after a list of loved ones that was so long and heartfelt, his voice had cracked and faded to a whisper at the end.

  The ambulance had come to the runway and taken Captain Ross away first. Devin assured me he would be okay, that the EMTs had stabilized him, and that he’d receive excellent medical care here on São Miguel, the largest of the Azores islands. He promised we could visit him later, maybe tomorrow before we left.

  Before we left? I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I couldn’t leave. I’d never be able to get off this island, because I’d never be able to get on another plane. I couldn’t take a boat, either, since it might sink on the way across the endless, dark water. I understood now just how vast and unforgiving an ocean could be when things went wrong and you were stuck over top of it.

  But Devin had saved us. I wasn’t dead. I was alive. Somehow, despite an eerie, twisting flight over the black ocean, I was alive.

  I must have been muttering out loud, because Devin gave me a harried look, like he didn’t know what to do with me, but he was the one who’d broken our trust. He led me into my room, shutting the door behind us.

  “Will you say something, please?” His voice sounded taut.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  He was already close to me, but he stepped closer. One of his arms came around my waist. “I told you everything would be okay.” There was anger in his voice, a rasping like dry paper about to ignite. “I landed the plane. The danger’s over, so stop looking at me like that.”

  I didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. He was beautiful and furious, and alive. Not just alive, but seething with life. His arm tightened around my waist, and he caught my chin between his fingers. I met his eyes, trapped against him. Our bodies knew each other from before, and now our emotions were melting into a tangled mess. I grasped his shoulders, afraid to let him go.

  “I don’t trust you,” I cried, not even knowing why I said it. “I don’t trust anything anymore.”

  He held my chin harder, staring at me, telling me without words that trust didn’t matter in this moment. When he pressed his lips to mine with savage hunger, I didn’t resist.

  His fingers snaked into my hair as our kiss deepened. He pulled it hard enough that I cried out, and then I was arching against him, trying to wrap a leg around his. He scrabbled at my clothes with his free hand, kissing me, devouring me, shoving up my sweater, touching my bare skin with a heat like fire.

  In my past life, before I almost died, I might have slowed things down at this point by pulling away with a comment, or a quelling look. I might have considered whether I was enjoying the kiss, and whether I wanted things to go further.

  Now, I made animalistic begging sounds, needing more passion
, more force. He let go of my hair and clamped his fingers between my legs as if to assert ownership of my body. I answered his rough assault with an encouraging gasp.

  He paused then, and took off my glasses, setting them on a table by the window. After that, it seemed he stroked and squeezed me everywhere. He spanked my ass, his large palms stinging me through the thin material of my leggings. His fingernails grazed over my skin, then dug into my spine, pulling me closer. His force thrilled me. I’d ached to feel more of it ever since Via Sofferenza.

  As the passions between us ignited, our trembling bodies communicated without words: his rough handling, my hunger, my melting acquiescence. With a growl, he shoved me against the wall and ground his pelvis against mine. His cock’s hard outline seemed impossibly huge, pressing against me with shocking force. He wanted me.

  And I wanted to forget.

  I didn’t think, I just acted. I reached for the waistband of his jeans, tugging at the closure. I wanted him inside me. I wanted him to hurt me, because that was what I always ached for at the most intense and frightening moments of my life. I couldn’t explain that to him, but he must have understood, because he didn’t hesitate.

  He pushed my hands away and released his cock, the hard length of it springing between us while I fussed at his sweater. I couldn’t get it off, which frustrated me, because I needed to feel his bare skin and muscles. He removed it instead, tossing it to the floor while I breathed in the scent of him: musk, cologne, male heat. I ran my fingers over his chest hair while he pushed my leggings and panties down and pulled off my sweater.

  Our gazes met when we resumed our embrace, our warm bodies pressing together with only my cami between us. He pulled the neckline down and squeezed my breasts, never breaking eye contact, pinching my nipples as they hardened under his touch. He had the coolest, most pale-blue eyes I’d ever seen, yet they were searingly hot. His stare dropped to my lips and we were kissing again, even more violently. I squirmed against him, whining into his mouth as his tongue lashed mine. He pulled back and bit my lower lip, giving me a delicious burst of pain.