Chapter 3 - The Price of Survival
The blood roared in Laura’s ears. The voice on the headset belonged to Colonel Marcus Vance—no relation, but a man who had been her commanding officer and mentor during her darkest days in the black-ops squadron, before she discovered his involvement in the illegal executions. She had watched him get sentenced to a military penitentiary in Leavenworth five years ago.
How is he out? she thought frantically. How is he on this plane?
"Captain, did you hear that?" the first officer stammered, his face turning ghostly white as he listened to the audio bleed through the cockpit speaker. "There’s a bomber—or a terrorist—in the main cabin! He’s threatening to vent the cabins! We have to turn back! We have to land!"
"If we turn back toward North America, we burn an extra hour of fuel we don't have, and we play right into his hands," Laura said, her voice remaining terrifyingly steady despite the hurricane of panic threatening to tear her apart inside. "He wants us isolated over the deep ocean. That’s why he’s using the remote relay."
"What do you mean?"
"He’s not just a passenger with a bomb," Laura explained quickly, her eyes scanning the overhead instrument cluster for auxiliary fuel lines and cabin pressure controls. "He’s patched into the central environmental control system. If he triggers a hard vent at 18,000 feet, the cabin pressure will drop to zero in three seconds. Everyone without an oxygen mask deployed will lose consciousness in thirty seconds."
"Then we have to descend lower!"
"If we descend below 10,000 feet over the open mid-Atlantic without an airfield within range, we'll run out of fuel fighting the thicker air currents before dawn," Laura countered. "We have to neutralize him before he can execute the purge command."
The first officer stared at her as if she had lost her mind. "Neutralize him? How?! We’re locked inside the flight deck, and there are three hundred panicking passengers between us and him!"
Laura unbuckled her shoulder harness just an inch, leaning forward to inspect the cockpit security panel. "There’s a secondary maintenance hatch in the floor of the galley right outside this door. It drops straight down into the forward avionics and cargo corridor, which runs the entire length of the lower deck."
"You can't go down there alone!" the first officer protested. "You’re the pilot! If you leave the flight deck, who flies the plane?"
"You do," Laura said simply. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her service-issued dog tags—the only military memento she still carried—and dropped them onto the center console. "Keep the bird level, heading ninety degrees east, speed Mach 0.78. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, lock the armored door permanently and put your faith in the autopilot hold."
Before the first officer could argue further, Laura stood up, punched the emergency release code for the cockpit inner door, and slipped out into the darkened galley before the heavy latch could click shut behind her.
The galley was empty, lit only by the faint, pulsing amber light of the coffee maker.
Laura dropped to her knees near the forward service cart, found the heavy steel floor latch labeled AVIONICS ACCESS HATCH, and yanked it upward. A wave of cold, rushing air blasted up from the lower bowels of the aircraft, accompanied by the deafening roar of jet engines echoing through the aluminum hull.
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She swung her legs over the dark opening, grabbed the cold metal rungs of the maintenance ladder, and descended into the belly of the beast.
Above her, hidden somewhere in the crowded rows of the passenger cabin, Marcus Cole was waiting. And down here in the dark, Laura realized she was walking directly into a trap designed specifically for her.
