Chapter 5 - Unholy Alliances
The jet surged forward, the sudden acceleration throwing me against the leather seats. Outside the windows, the darkened airfield blurred as the aircraft hit ninety, then one hundred and twenty knots, lifting off into the turbulent, storm-wracked sky.
David lunged forward, grabbing the frame of the cockpit door, trying to force it open. "It's locked from the inside! High-security magnetic seal!"
I ignored the impossibility of David being alive. Survival instinct took over. I pulled a breaching charge from my tactical belt—stolen from Hale's gear earlier—slapped it onto the cockpit lock, and pulled David back.
"Cover!" I yelled.
BOOM!
The charge blew the lock into molten scrap. The heavy metal door swung open.
Inside the cockpit, Victoria Whitmore sat in the pilot's seat, her manicured hands gripping the flight controls. She was wearing her bloody silk robe, her face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated madness. Behind her stood two armed mercenaries with automatic weapons aimed straight at us.
"Did you really think I’d let a federal stooge and a ghost ruin seventy years of Whitmore legacy?" Victoria screamed over the roar of the wind howling through the damaged fuselage. "If I can't have the data, nobody gets it! We're all going down together!"
She slammed the control yoke forward.
The nose of the Gulfstream dipped violently. The cabin went into zero gravity as the jet entered a steep, terrifying dive toward the ocean below.
"David! Take the guards!" I screamed.
David moved with a lethality that proved he hadn't spent fifteen years resting. He threw himself into the cockpit, driving his elbow into the first mercenary's throat, twisting the gun away, and using the man's body as a shield against the second guard's gunfire.
I grabbed Victoria by her hair, pulling her backward out of the pilot's chair. She clawed at my face, her sharp nails digging into my cheek, screaming obscenities as I slammed her against the avionics panel.
"Pull us up!" I yelled at David, who scrambled into the captain’s seat, grabbing the control yoke with both hands.
"The hydraulic lines are cut!" David yelled back, pulling back on the stick with all his strength. "She sabotaged the secondary controls!"
Altimeter alarms blared throughout the cabin.
10,000 feet... 8,000 feet... 5,000 feet...
Through the cockpit glass, the black expanse of the stormy Atlantic Ocean was rushing up to meet us at three hundred miles an hour.
In the back cabin, Emma’s gurney slid wildly against the floor, pinned against the rear bulkhead. Hale was crawling toward a parachute harness near the emergency exit.
"Anna!" David shouted, his arms shaking violently under the pressure of the control stick. "I can stabilize the glide angle, but we’re going to impact the water! Get Emma to the tail section! Now!"
I kicked Victoria unconscious, leaving her slumping onto the floor, and scrambled into the main cabin. I sprinted to Emma’s gurney, pulling the safety straps tight around her unconscious body, bracing her head with cushions.
Hale had managed to strap on the parachute and was reaching for the emergency door lever. "She’s dead anyway, Anna! Let her go!"
"Not while I'm breathing," I snarled.
I grabbed Hale’s parachute harness, pulling him back just as he yanked the emergency door open. The cabin instantly depressurized. The howling gale swallowed the alarms.
With a final, desperate burst of strength, I unhooked Hale’s main parachute release strap, hooked the harness to Emma’s gurney frame, and shoved the heavy gurney straight out of the open door into the void of the night.
"No!" Hale screamed.
"Fly," I whispered.
A second later, the rip-cord pulled automatically as the gurney cleared the jet's tail section. A massive military-grade cargo parachute deployed in the storm, carrying my daughter safely away from the tumbling aircraft.
"Anna! Jump!" David’s voice echoed from behind me.
He grabbed me around the waist, holding a dual-occupant emergency chute. Behind us, Hale scrambled for another pack, but Victoria, suddenly regaining consciousness, grabbed his leg from the cockpit floor, dragging him down into the nose-diving plane.
"If I burn, Hale, you burn with me!" she shrieked.
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David and I leapt out into the freezing darkness just as the Gulfstream slammed into the surface of the ocean three thousand feet below.
A massive fireball erupted on the water's surface, lighting up the rain-heavy clouds like a miniature sun.
