Page 18

CHAPTER 18

Diana wasn’t sure why she was so on edge. If the original information about the wrecked plane’s flight path was an error, either in the initial report or the version of it that the dispatchers had relayed to the search team, she had seen worse ones in her time working S he should have corrected me.”

“Right. I’m checking in.” Costa took out his phone. Then he hit some buttons and frowned at the screen.

“What’s wrong?”

“No signal. That isn’t right. Up here we ought to be getting a signal from any cell tower in the area. Even the emergency call option isn’t working. Check yours.”

Diana pulled out her phone and frowned at it. “No signal on mine either.”

“We’re being jammed.”

Alarm tingled along Diana’s nerves. “That would affect the airplane’s instruments as well.”

“I wasn’t sure about that, but I figured.”

She glanced towards the cockpit. The collapsible door—more for privacy than defense in a machine this small—had been drawn halfway across, but what she could see of the activity in the cockpit simply looked normal: the pilot and copilot in their seat, headsets on and heads bent slightly towards each other.

“They don’t look alarmed,” she said.

“No, they don’t, do they?” Costa unbuckled his seatbelt, but didn’t immediately move.

Diana swallowed. “What do you think is happening? Is there something, some broadcast or other signal, affecting aviation in this area?”

And maybe the pilots as well, she thought in an instant of wild panic. What if some signal was doing something to their brains? What if it did something to her brain?

“I would guess it’s affecting this plane only, and the reason why they’re not alarmed is because they’re doing it,” Costa said. His voice was level, calm, and controlled, and under its influence Diana’s panic collapsed like a pricked balloon. She was still scared, but he was right: there wasn’t some psychic wavelength or mind-control ray affecting them. It was a perfectly normal, run of the mill ... kidnapping?

“Are we being kidnapped?” she asked quietly.

“I would guess either that, or they’ve decided to conveniently lose a couple of pesky federal agents.”

“I’m not—!” Her voice rose in alarm; she forced it down, keeping it low enough to be covered by the white noise of the engines. “I’m not an agent.”

“I know.” Costa met her eyes with his level gaze. “I thought letting them believe you were one of us would work best for getting information. I’m sorry I got you into this, Di.”

“ You got me into this?” she asked, annoyance with Costa briefly washing the panic out of her system. “Do you remember who brought you the baby in the first place? Do you remember whose house burned down? I’m in this up to my eyeballs already. If you hadn’t been willing to treat me as an equal in the investigation, I’d have just gone off and done it on my own.”

The corner of his mouth twitched up briefly. “Point taken. Well, now you see the downside of investigating things.”

Diana looked over her shoulder at the cockpit again, just in time to catch probably-not-a-pilot Jim looking back at them and then away. She kept one eye halfway on him as she asked Costa, “Do you have a weapon?”

“No,” Costa said grimly. “No reason to bring it. I wasn’t expecting trouble, at least not this kind. I have my service weapon in my car, not that it helps us right now.”

“I have a multitool on my key ring.”

His lips twitched. “Let’s save that as a last resort.” Movement from the cockpit made him glance forward, and Diana looked as well, but it was only Jim looking back at them again. Seeing them looking at him, he gave them a brief thumbs-up.

“Reassuring,” Diana said between her teeth. For the sake of appearances, she gave him a perfunctory thumbs-up back.

Costa looked thoughtful. “Can you fly this type of plane?”

Her stomach lurched at all he was implying. “Not legally,” she said. “I’m certified on single-engine small aircraft and helicopters, not something this big. But well enough to land it in an emergency, yes, I think so.”

“And how long can a pilot changeover take? I mean, it’s not going to fall out of the sky the minute their hands are off the controls, right?”

“Oh no, not at all. If the autopilot’s set, it can keep going until it encounters extremely rough conditions or runs out of fuel.” She decided not to mention cases she’d heard of an airplane flying for hours with no one at the controls at all. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to test its. “Even if it’s not on autopilot, it should be fine for a few minutes, kind of like how you can take your hands off a car’s steering wheel if it’s in alignment and the road is straight.”

“Right,” Costa said. “So I guess we have a plan, sort of. I’ll take the guys, you take the plane—crap, he’s getting up.”

Diana flicked a quick glance over her shoulder and saw Jim rising from his seat.

Sudden warmth on her wrist startled her. She looked down and saw that Costa had put his hand lightly on her arm.

“Diana, I promise I’m going to make sure you get out of this,” Costa said. His gaze on her was warm and watchful.

“We’re going to get ourselves out of it,” she corrected him. She gave his hand a squeeze and then let it drop, watching Jim approach them with an awkward side-to-side roll as he navigated the aisle.

As Jim got closer, Costa stood up, although he couldn’t quite stand straight in the low cabin.

“No need to get up,” Jim said. “I just wanted to chat with you folks a bit.”

“We were wondering if you had a restroom on board,” Costa said.

“Yes, I could really use one,” Diana chimed in. “I had a lot of coffee on the drive over.”

Jim looked slightly nonplused. “Uh ...” He looked toward the rear of the plane. If Diana had any doubt about his qualifications, they were washed away; he literally didn’t even know where the bathroom was. “There’s one back there,” he said, having spied what Diana had already noticed when they were boarding.

“Why, thank you.” Diana got up. She had to maneuver around Jim in the narrow confines of the aisle, and as she did so, she put her hands on the jacket that he was wearing despite the desert warmth on the ground. There was a definite hard shape under it at about rib level, and she glanced at Costa as she finally got oriented on the other side, trying to signal with her eyes He’s got a gun.

“Watch it, lady,” Jim said sharply, pulling away. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes weren’t, and she wondered now if that was part of what had set her alarm bells ringing. Costa might not have noticed in the same way, but women had an acutely honed danger sense for men who seemed friendly but weren’t.

“No problem, there’s not much room in here.” Diana laughed a short laugh that hopefully didn’t sound as tense to him as it did to her.

She wasn’t sure how to proceed from here, because she didn’t need the restroom in the slightest and she hoped she wasn’t messing up something Costa was planning. But Costa gave her a little nod, so she started down the aisle, going slow and pretending to be having a little trouble keeping her footing.

“You can sit back down,” Jim said. “I just wanted to chat a bit.”

“Funny,” Costa said tightly. “Me too.” He remained on his feet.

Having delayed as long as she could, Diana reached the back. She opened the door to the tiny head and slipped inside, but left the door slightly cracked open so she could still see and hear. Without really meaning to, she realized, she had given Costa an opening to act without having to worry about her—and she was starting to be concerned about what he was planning.

“Look, man, we’re detouring around turbulence, so I’d sit down,” Jim said.

“Really?” Costa shot back. “Because it seems to me that it’s smooth as a baby’s butt up here. We’re flying south, and we’ve been flying south for a little while. Where are we really going?”

“Sit down.”

“Nope. I think I’ve gone about as far as I’m willing to go. This was a decent idea, but if we are really heading into turbulence, we don’t need to go to Alamagordo today. I’d like to turn around and go back.”

Oh, that’s smart, Diana thought, watching through the crack in the door. If the customer is calling the shots, they have no reason to say no.

“It’s not that severe,” Jim said. “We’ll be around it soon.”

“And meanwhile we’re flying toward Mexican air space. How about we stop doing that right now, turn around and go back to the airport.” When Jim didn’t move, Costa gave a little nod and started to push past him. “Yeah, I’m gonna go talk to the pilot.”

“Stop,” Jim snapped. He gripped Costa’s arm, and Diana sucked in a breath when she realized he’d drawn the gun. “Get back in your seat right now.”

Costa didn’t speak or react in any visible way for a second or two. Then he snapped into motion so fast that Diana flinched. Before Jim could do anything, Costa had him in an armlock, trapping the gun against the seats while hooking a foot behind Jim’s legs.

It was a display of swift, competent force, every movement purposeful, no motion wasted.

It was astonishingly hot.

But Jim was a trained fighter too, and he grappled back. Locked together, the two men stumbled against the seats as they wrestled each other. The gun, which Costa had clearly been trying to capture, instead flew from Jim’s hand and went tumbling beneath the seats.

Jim managed to fling Costa off him. Struggling over to the side, he threw the lever that operated the emergency door.

Diana had started to lunge out of the bathroom in an attempt to stop him, although she was too far away. Now she flung herself backward and grabbed a seat as the door slammed open and a tearing wind roared through the cabin. Every loose item inside the plane went tumbling toward the open door.

Clinging to a seat back for dear life, Diana looked around and saw, with huge relief, that Costa was also safely tucked between two seats.

She was abruptly glad that she had a flying shift form. Roadrunners weren’t strong flyers, so she wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if she tumbled out into a jet slipstream at 10,000 feet, but it was better than falling.

Like Costa would do.

Costa couldn’t fly, and there was no possible form in which she could carry him or do anything whatsoever to slow his fall. The relief she had felt an instant earlier evaporated in a flood of concerned panic.

The plane rocked as wind tore through it, and Farley yelled from the cockpit in alarm, “What the heck are you doing back there?”

“Getting rid of our problem!” Jim yelled back.

Diana was nearer to him now than Costa, so he reached for her. Realizing what he meant to do, she yelled and rolled back onto the seat behind her, kicking out at him.

Then Costa slammed into him, snarling in fury.

She had never seen Costa like that before, half incoherent with rage. The two men rolled around on the floor of the plane, knocking into the seats, hitting and clawing at each other.

All she wanted to do was help Costa, but she was afraid that any help she could offer would be more of a hindrance. And with Jim occupied, this might be her one chance to get control of the plane.

Diana tried to get past Costa and Jim to get to the cockpit, but the small aisle seemed to be filled with furious, wrestling men. She was afraid to accidentally throw off Costa’s resistance if she interfered, with lethal results. There was only one other way she could think of to get to the cockpit.

Diana shifted.

The world got suddenly dark as she found herself tangled up in her shirt. She wrestled her way out of her clothes and dashed up the floor of the plane, weaving in and out of the seats as if they were cactus on a desert plain. The wind tugged at her, and she realized she hadn’t anticipated how much more she would be affected by the screaming air currents at roadrunner size. As long as she kept moving, however, she was reasonably confident she could avoid being sucked out the open door.

She arrived in the cockpit, leaped up on the copilot seat, and shifted in mid-jump. She landed on the seat crouching and backwards as a naked woman.

Farley gave a startled yelp. Already struggling to control the plane, he accidentally wrenched the controls and it tilted over on one wing—fortunately away from the open door.

There were yells and thumps from the back, and a sudden crash as the door slammed shut. The screaming wind abruptly ceased, and then, as the plane rolled back the other way, started up again as the door slammed open with another crash. Diana winced; that impact might have sheared the latch right off. She wasn’t sure they could shut it again.

“What’s your plan for us?” Diana demanded.

The pilot was too rattled to lie. “Question you and throw you out if we had to.”

The words hit her and bounced off; they were too shocking. They really do plan to kill us.

Taking one hand off the controls, Farley reached under his jacket. He clearly didn’t consider a naked woman in his copilot seat too much of a threat. Well, he’s about to find out different, Diana thought grimly as the gleam of a gun emerged from beneath the jacket.

She shifted, leaped into his lap with wings spread, and shifted human again. Suddenly he had a naked woman not in his copilot seat, but materializing on top of him, her ass on the control yoke of the plane, grimly slamming both her elbows into his face.

Elbows, she had found, were extremely effective in discouraging unwanted attention from drunks in bars, and it turned out that they were just as useful at making a would-be killer decide that pointing a gun at her was a bad idea. She heard a clatter as he dropped the gun with a yell of pain, blood spurting from his nose. Flailing, he shoved her away, and her bare butt pushed the yoke all the way forward.

Suddenly the plane was tilted steeply forward, diving toward the ground.

Now that’s the opposite of positive pitch , she thought half-hysterically.

There were more yells from the back as Costa and Jim tumbled in a new direction.

“Get out of the seat!” Diana screamed, thrashing as she tried to turn around.

“Get out of my lap, you crazy broad!”

She heard a man’s panicked yell from the back, fading rapidly. Someone had fallen out, and she didn’t know who. Fury gave her new strength, and she threw herself off the edge of the seat, attempting to drag Farley out of his seat as the plane nosedived.

Suddenly she had help. Costa was there, reaching around to unfasten Farley’s seat belt while he flailed at them; Diana had completely forgotten he would be belted in. Costa dragged him out of his sea, flinging him bodily on the floor.

“Get us back in the air,” he yelled at Diana over the screaming wind tearing through the plane.

During their struggles, Farley had gotten the plane more or less straightened out, but when Diana dropped into the pilot’s seat, she discovered that they were still wobbling wildly out of control. She glimpsed a wall of rock through the windshield. They were in the mountains, and they were much too low!

Diana grabbed for the controls, and managed to tilt the wings before they slammed into a wall of solid rock. But she felt the entire plane, tilted to the side, jolt with a grinding, shuddering impact as some part of the machine—the undercarriage, she was fairly sure—ripped across the exposed boulders.

They were still going much, much too fast. As they tore down rocky valleys, Diana gave up on looking for a place to land. She didn’t think the landing gear would drop anyway after that last impact, and there was nothing even remotely long or flat enough for a runway.

Instead she decided to try to belly-flop the plane on something, anything that wasn’t rocks. Grass, sand, trees if there was nothing else.

Unfortunately there was little of the kind in this remote, rocky country. She found her chance as they sped across a sandy expanse that might have been an old dried-up lake bottom.

“Brace for impact!” she shouted at Costa.

The plane smacked the ground, leaped, and smacked again like a rock skipping on water. Control was impossible. Diana clung to the yoke desperately, but she felt it wrench in her hands as the plane slewed around. They hit something buried in the sand with a tremendous bang, which flung them wildly to the side, and out of the cockpit window she saw half the wing ripped off by a collision with another boulder buried in sand. She had the flaps fully deployed to try to slow them down, but they were still going too fast. Her greatest fear was that they’d flip and douse the entire structure in aviation fuel.

The end of the sandy area was speeding toward them in the form of a jumbled field of boulders and cactus. Flight was impossible; they didn’t have enough of their wings left to fly with. The brakes only worked on the wheels and, as she’d feared, the landing gear was stuck in the up position. They had no way to stop.

Diana did the only thing she could think of and intentionally whipped the plane around so they would hit tail-first instead of nose-first—or at least she tried. The flaps no longer responded properly either, and all she managed to do was dig a wing into the sand again and pivot them wildly in a big arc.

The nose hit first, but glancingly. The cockpit canopy exploded in a galaxy of cracks but didn’t fully burst inward. Then the side hit, there was a great rending of tearing metal, and finally, joltingly, the plane ground to a halt.

Diana threw the switches to turn everything off, although the wrecked engines were sputtering out on their own by this point. She collapsed forward on the control yoke and sprawled there for a short, quiet time as it gradually sank in that they were no longer moving and she was alive.

Then she sat up swiftly.

“Quinn? Quinn!”