Charon's Landing - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  Khalid was appalled by the woman’s callousness. Two people were dead, and she was bothered by the inconvenience of the situation. He would never understand Westerners, and for that he was grateful. Looking at his watch and trying to remember what time his plane was supposed to take off, he realized that he didn’t know how long they had been stuck on the ground. He asked the woman.

  “Four hours now,” she complained after looking at the slim diamond-encrusted watch she wore.

  Khalid’s mind began to come around, letting him think clearly, at least for a little while. The pain in his back and shoulders was no more than a dull ache that he could almost ignore. He caught the attention of a nearby flight attendant. “Is there a reason why we haven’t been allowed to deplane?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. This is part of the terrorists’ demands. None of the planes on the taxiways are allowed to move. A second communiqué from them came shortly after the first one. They said that if any aircraft attempted to move or let off the passengers, they would detonate all the bombs simultaneously. They claimed to have the airport under observation. I’m very sorry for this, Minister Khuddari. I’ve heard what you’ve been through. Is there anything I can do for you? I’m afraid that I don’t have anything stronger than Midol, but maybe you’d like a drink?”

  “Nothing right now, thank you,” Khalid demurred quickly.

  For the first time in his life, he was tempted to break the dictates of the Koran and have liquor. It wasn’t to dull his pain but to deaden the realization that Rufti was going to win.

  Khalid realized that fat bastard must have known that he was trying to get back to the United Arab Emirates, probably had him tailed from the hospital. He didn’t even want to consider the consequences if Rufti knew that Trevor and Millicent Gray had helped him. Both were in grave danger. Considering the four hours he’d been asleep, it was probably too late to help them.

  Khalid thrust aside his concern for the lovers and considered what was really at stake. Rufti was surely well on his way back to the UAE. Once there, he would immediately start his plan to overthrow the government. The Crown Prince was vulnerable right now, trapped between appeasement of the United States and the militancy of more reactionary forces within the Gulf, old enemies made newly volatile by the shifting world oil situation.

  Rufti could take the Emirates so easily that the coup would certainly be called “bloodless” by the international media. And then, Iran and Iraq would advance, and the Gulf would fall under a tight dictatorship. Using oil as an economic weapon, the conspirators would bring Europe, Asia, and America to their knees in a matter of weeks.

  “I need a phone.” Khalid didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until the woman next to him looked at him strangely.

  He called the stewardess again and explained that he needed to make an important call. She said emphatically that no phones could be used while the aircraft was on the ground. The authorities feared that any outside electronic interference, such as a radio or a cellular phone, might detonate the explosives.

  “There are no more explosives, I assure you. I must have a phone, now.”

  Again she shook her head and turned away.

  “Then let me talk to the captain,” he demanded harshly. With more stability than he thought he possessed, he pushed himself from his seat and faced the young attendant.

  “I’m sorry, Minister, but that isn’t possible, either,” she replied as strongly as she could in the face of Khalid’s insistence.

  “Now, goddamn it!” he shouted. She backed away silently as Khalid moved into the aisle, his feet thudding against the deck like Frankenstein’s monster. The stiffness of his wounds had robbed him of nearly all coordination.

  Deferring to his ministerial status, she led him to the flight deck. The crew sat in their starched white shirts, black ties, and trousers and looked suitably impressive even in their impotent positions. The captain, a silver-haired man with deeply tanned skin and calm eyes, twisted to see who had intruded on his sanctum sanctorum. When he saw Khalid in the ill-fitting clothes with barely healed scars on his face and hands, he tightened his hold of the aircraft’s control yoke.

  “Captain Darson,” the stewardess said formally, “this is Minister Khuddari, that passenger that was brought aboard at the last moment.”

  Darson continued to scrutinize Khalid from behind a veil of suspicion. “Yes, Minister, what can I do for you?”

  “The attack at the airport was meant to delay me reaching home, Captain. There are no other explosives and no terrorist plot. A rival of mine is trying to overthrow my government, and I’m the only person aware of his intentions. By closing the airport and stalling this flight, he may succeed in wresting control from our legitimate leader.” It was a struggle for Khalid to speak clearly. His mind was beginning to swim again, his vision to blur.

  “Am I to assume that you wish to leave the aircraft?”

  “Yes, sir, and if that’s not possible, then at least allow me to make a call and send a warning.”

  “I understand your situation, sir, but you must understand mine. I am under strict orders not to use my radios until the authorities determine that there are no more bombs in the airport or on any of the planes. Despite what you say, the government is taking this threat seriously, considering what happened last night at the British Museum.”

  “Captain, I was the target of that attack. It was me they were trying to kill, don’t you understand? This” — he waved his arm toward the view through the cockpit windshield — “this whole elaborate plot is intended to delay only one person, myself.”

  “I’m sorry, but my hands are tied. The antiterrorist police should have everything checked out in another few hours. They’re being careful in case the terrorists really do have the airport grounds under surveillance. I’ll make sure you are taken off the plane as soon as we’re vetted. I’m sorry, but that is the best I can do.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Khalid yelled. The copilot stood quickly and began moving toward him, a grim expression on his face. His intentions were clear, and Khalid allowed himself to be shepherded from the cockpit, realizing that he had nothing more to gain.

  The stewardess led him back to his seat. Khalid sat, his mind working furiously, not only against this dilemma but also the pain that threatened to overwhelm him again. He had to get off the Boeing, contact Colonel Bigelow, and have him warn the Crown Prince. Nothing else mattered.

  Slumped over, with his head cradled between his hands, he felt the first waves of defeat washing over him. Despite his own Herculean endurance, his sacrifices and stamina, Rufti was going to win. He had little option other than sit here in the first-class section and wait until his country was destroyed by a power-crazed maniac.

  Like hell. Khalid was in motion before he was fully aware of what he was doing.

  The main cabin door of the aircraft was only a couple yards away. Lurching drunkenly, Khalid made his way toward it, tripping over his startled neighbor but ignoring her protests. From the corner of his eye, he saw a stewardess a quarter way down the aircraft’s length turn to look at him, but she didn’t register alarm until she saw his hand reach for the pressure door handle. She shouted a warning, dropped a bundle of blankets onto the lap of a coach-class passenger, and started running forward.

  Another attendant, the only steward on the aircraft, ducked his model-handsome face around a bulkhead, his eyes going wide when he saw the ragged passenger heaving at the handle.

  With what little strength he had remaining, Khalid pulled on the door handle until finally the seal broke. The door, as perfectly balanced as Boeing engineers could make it, pivoted easily, folding back on itself and leaving a wide aperture beckoning to freedom. Frightened passengers began screaming, several of them leaping from their seats and running toward the tail of the aircraft, fearing that Khalid was part of the terrorist threat. Some people watched in horrified awe as Khalid braced himself for the drop to the tarmac.

  The steward lunged t
o grab onto Khalid’s clothing in a vain attempt to stop him, but he fell short by a few inches, his outstretched hand grasping empty air. He had to clutch at the door frame to keep from tumbling after Khalid.

  For a brief instant, as Khalid dropped the ten and a half feet to the taxiway, his mind and body felt as one again, both of them seemingly weightless, adrift in a sensationless void. And then he hit the ground, his legs folding completely, his head smacking against the asphalt like a heavy melon. He kept his body loose, never once thinking to tense for the impact.

  Lying on the taxiway, he could hear the shouted protests from the crew of the aircraft. It meant nothing. He was free. He could call Bigelow, end this charade, and hopefully restabilize the Middle East. As he tried to stand, he realized he couldn’t move. His legs lay quietly as his mind screamed orders for them to get moving, to lift him up and carry him away. In a sickening rush, he remembered hearing a dry cracking sound when he hit the ground, almost like a piece of timber snapping in a high wind. He was certain he’d broken his back on impact. The belly of the Boeing 767 curled above him like the abdomen of a pregnant whale, a solid swell reaching almost to the ground. He struggled to roll under the hull’s curvature, but he simply couldn’t move.

  A tanker truck, its drumlike sides emblazoned with the logo of a septic company, pulled up to the 767, stopping under the sewer outlet of the big Boeing. With practiced competence, three men leaped from the truck and hooked a heavy rubber hose to the plane’s underbelly, while secretly four other men dodged from under the diesel truck and raced to Khalid. After one look, it was clear to these members of the SAS, Special Air Squadron, Britain’s most elite fighting force, that moving Khalid could kill him. However, they were under specific orders to check every aircraft on the apron for anything suspicious and report back to the terminal.

  Every second the airport was shut down cost tens of thousands of pounds, and the quicker they could secure the area, the quicker that debt meter would stop spinning. Two men grasped Khalid under the shoulders and dragged him back to the septic truck they were using as cover. They had orders to vet four other aircraft before returning to the terminal, but with Khalid as a possible suspect, the non-com in charge decided to return to base immediately.

  Fourteen minutes later, a near-dead Khalid Khuddari was dumped into a spartan office within the terminal, two commandos taking up position just inside the office door. Another ten minutes passed before Geoff Wilberforce strode into the room, his heavy eyelids hanging so low they almost obscured his eyes. His face, florid in the best of situations, was livid, red blotches raised on his throat, cheeks, and forehead. In twenty-eight years of airport management, he was facing the worst day of his life, and he was looking for someone to blame. Rightly or wrongly, it didn’t matter. He was not taking the fall for this situation.

  “Hey?” Wilberforce said, slapping Khalid on the cheek as he lay on a steel desk in the abandoned office. “Wake up now or forever hold your peace.”

  His body pummeled far beyond human endurance, his mind stretched so tautly it resonated with internal tension, Khalid ratcheted open his eyes and craned his head to regard Wilberforce. His expression was dulled and lifeless, arranged like a mask by the pain, yet he still managed to capture Wilberforce with the power of his eyes, obsidian-sharp and focused.

  “I need a phone,” Khalid croaked.

  “You may get one,” Wilberforce gloated, “in about fifty years when you’re let out of the gaol. International terrorism is about the only crime this country takes seriously anymore and you’re going to get the full brunt of the law on this one, mate. Your friend shouldn’t have killed a teenager and a priest. Bad mistake.”

  “I’m the target,” Khalid said lamely. He struggled to reach his passport and establish his credentials, but his stamina had finally deserted him. “They were after me.”

  “Tell it to the bloody judge, you wog bastard.”

  A police ambulance carried Khalid Khuddari away from Heathrow, its siren honking like a foghorn as it tore along the route back to London. He was sedated by the paramedics, two veterans of some of the most gruesome scenes in all of England. Neither of them could believe the struggle their newest patient had put up. To the last possible moment before the new round of drugs knocked him out, Khalid was demanding a telephone and trying vainly to explain who he was.

  One Hundred Eighty Miles North of Puget Sound

  The sea was as dark as a slag heap belched out of a blast furnace, hard and relentless. The waves were undulating furrows arching westward, pushing aside everything that got in their way, including the fishing boat Suzy’s Pride, a bow-heavy purse seiner. The thirty-year-old boat was out well beyond her limit, chasing fish so far into the Pacific that her antiquated radar system could no longer see the jumbled coastline of the mainland.

  It was the black hour, the lowest ebb of the night between one and five when everything except the desperate slept. For nearly seventy hours, Steve Hanscom had guided his boat behind a school of feeding sea bass in hopes of coming across a large shoal of Pacific sardines. Such was his luck, he’d had two possible catches scattered by a pod of orcas that had decided to shadow his tired boat.

  While at first delighted to point out the killer whales to his young son, Hanscom now cursed the capricious mammals for their dogged loyalty to Suzy’s Pride. A fourth-generation fisherman who realized that there would not be a fifth, Hanscom still tried to make a living from the sea that had provided for his family since the middle part of the last century. With a mortgage on his boat and one on his house and a car that used more oil than gasoline, he knew all too well what a big catch meant to him and his family. Two, possibly three, more runs out into the open waters beyond Puget Sound and he would be bankrupt if he didn’t come up with a big haul.

  That was why Steve had pulled his eleven-year-old son, Joshua, out of school for the month and put him to work on the boat. In the few weeks they would have together, Steve hoped to teach the boy what it meant to work for yourself and to in-still the pride that his own father had taught him. In a few months, surely by spring, Steve would be just another guy putting in his time for someone else, but right now, he was his own man, and by God his son would know what that felt like.

  Though others would suffer by Steve losing his boat, particularly old George Boudette, the grizzled sea dog who’d forgotten more about fishing than most men would ever know, Steve Hanscom worried most about his own son. Josh had been raised by the lore and lure of the sea. It was simple economics — and the harsh reality that the Pacific Northwest was being over-fished — that was driving him out of business, yet Steve still blamed himself for not being able to pass on the legacy that had been passed to him. He saw it as his own personal failure.

  The ship’s wheel moved effortlessly under Steve Hanscom’s gentle touch, the varnished oak made smooth by generations of constant contact. Standing alone in the wheelhouse as he had since Suzy’s Pride had left Seattle, Hanscom watched the depth finder, hoping to see the shoal of sardines pass under the boat again, signaling him to throw the big purse net back over the flat transom.

  “I’ll spell ya.” The voice penetrated his personal world, startling Hanscom so that his fists tightened on the wheel.

  He turned. “No thanks, Georgie. Get some sleep.”

  “I’m eighty years old. I don’t need any more sleep. I’ve had my share until the big one comes.” George Boudette’s eyes were alight with the last spark of life, like a lightbulb burning brightest before it faded forever. George had crewed with Steve, Steve’s father, and, as a boy, Steve’s grandfather.

  “How’s Josh?” Steve asked. His son was below.

  “Asleep at the radio like Marconi’s assistant,” George said fondly. “You shouldn’t have sent him to bed and told him to listen to the set at the same time. He took your second order a lot more seriously than the first.”

  “We aren’t going to catch any fish, so he might as well feel like he’s doing something on this trip. L
istening to the chatter of the big container ships heading to Seattle is better than sitting on the deck and twiddling his thumbs.”

  “We’ll hit fish before dawn,” George said with undeniable confidence.

  One deck below, Josh Hanscom was coming awake again, gripped by the same excitement that had held him enthralled since his father had told him that he didn’t have to go to school this month. It was like Christmas morning in the quiet hours before his parents woke. Yet behind it was a stronger emotion. He had been given a job to do. His father had told him to keep listening to the radio and that was exactly what Josh intended. He didn’t realize that his task was more to keep him occupied than for any legitimate purpose.

  Ashamed that he’d fallen asleep on duty, Josh rubbed at his eyes and yawned before concentrating on the transceiver. This was the third straight night that he’d been in the same clothes, and like his dad, he’d gotten into the habit of spraying frigid deodorant under his arms as soon as he woke. Josh even mimicked his father’s shocked expression when the aerosol hit his tender skin. After hosing himself with Right Guard, Josh scaled up through the frequencies listening for anything that might help his dad find fish. He worked the twin dials with delicate fingers, easing from one frequency to another so subtly that the transition was unnoticeable unless one really listened to the pitch of the static coming through the speaker.

  He nearly missed it. In the lower band of the VHF there was a quick squawk of white noise, different from the background static but so much the same that Josh almost ignored it. Yet he dialed back, and suddenly there it was again. Someone was definitely transmitting, but the signal was too far away to get in clear. It was just garbled noise, a harsh squelch much like what the older kids at school called music. Not knowing the consequences of capturing a signal at 2182 MHz, Josh listened intently until a voice emerged from the static. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the VLCC Southern Cross posting an All Ships Signify.”