Chapter 5 - The Final Sabotage
“Stop him!” Grandma Brooks screamed, swinging her heavy wooden walking cane with surprising velocity.
The curved handle cracked sharply against Gerald’s shin, sending the lawyer sprawling across the carpet. But as he fell, his hand lashed out, slamming into the master emergency dump-valve lever located on the bulkhead wall behind the service cart.
A loud pneumatic hiss tore through the fuselage.
Warning: Fuel Dump Active. Port Engine Starvation Imminent.
“No!” Malachi yelled, hearing the alarm chime through the open cockpit door.
Gerald scrambled to his feet, pulling a small, secondary pocket-knife from his trousers, brandishing it like a maniac. “If I’m going down for corporate manslaughter, none of you are making it to the runway! We burn together!”
Before Gerald could lunging toward the flight deck door, a towering airline mechanic—who had been traveling incognito in row 32—tackled the lawyer mid-air, slamming him into the beverage cart with a thunderous metallic crash. Glass bottles shattered, ginger ale and tomato juice splattering across the floor as Gerald was pinned into unconsciousness.
But the damage to the plane was catastrophic.
“Malachi!” Grace yelled, rushing back to the flight deck. “The fuel dump valve is jammed open mechanically! We’re bleeding out our remaining reserve in seconds!”
Malachi checked his fuel flow meters. The needles were dropping like stones. Left engine: 12 percent. Right engine: 15 percent.
“We’re losing thrust,” Malachi whispered. The aircraft shuddered as the port engine coughed, choked, and sputtered out entirely.
Flame-out. Engine one is dead.
The massive Boeing 777 yawed violently to the left, nose dipping toward the jagged coastline of western Ireland below. The Irish Air Corps fighters flanking them instantly flared their afterburners, flashing warning lights.
“Flight 782, you’ve lost an engine! Pull up! Pull up!” Commander Hayes screamed over the open emergency satellite link.
Malachi didn’t hesitate. He kicked the right rudder pedal hard, compensating for the asymmetric thrust, and pulled back on the yoke with every ounce of his twelve-year-old strength. His muscles strained, his knuckles turning stark white.
“Grace, help me hold the trim!” he yelled.
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Grace threw her weight onto the yoke alongside him, her hands trembling over his small ones. Together, they fought the dying giant of the skies, wrenching the nose back onto a gliding descent vector as Shannon Airport’s illuminated runway finally appeared through the gray sheets of rain below.
It looked like a tiny, shimmering thread in the dark. And they were coming in way too fast, with only one engine left to catch them.
