Chapter 54 Mehar
Mehar
We’d been in the air for about two hours.
Somewhere over open ocean between the coast and whatever Caribbean island Quest had booked for us.
The sun was out, the sky was clear, and the last thing I remembered before falling asleep was Quest humming something under his breath while he checked his instruments and me thinking that this was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him.
No phone calls, no meetings, no security updates, no brothers needing something.
Just him and the sky and his pregnant fiancée snoring in the passenger seat.
The first thing I noticed was the sound changing.
Or actually the sound disappearing. The engines had this steady hum that I’d gotten used to on the Sedona trip, a constant vibration that became background noise after the first twenty minutes.
That hum stuttered. Then it came back. Then it stuttered again, longer this time, and the plane shifted slightly to the left before correcting itself.
I opened my eyes and looked at Quest.
His face told me everything I needed to know before his mouth said a word. His jaw was locked, his eyes were scanning the instrument panel rapid-fire, and his hands were moving across switches and gauges with a speed that didn’t match the calm voice he used when he finally spoke.
“Peach, I need you to sit up and put your seatbelt on.”
“What’s happening?”
“Just put your seatbelt on. Tight.”
I sat up and buckled in and watched him work the controls while my brain tried to process what was going on.
The instrument panel had lights I’d never seen before, red ones, flashing in clusters near the fuel gauges.
Quest was tapping one of the gauges with his finger like he was hoping the reading was wrong and the glass was just stuck.
“Quest. Talk to me.”
“Fuel pressure is dropping on both engines. Simultaneously.” He said it without looking at me, his eyes locked on the gauges. “That doesn’t happen from mechanical failure. Both lines don’t lose pressure at the same time unless the problem is at the source.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means somebody tampered with the fuel system before we took off.”
My stomach dropped and it had nothing to do with the altitude.
I looked out the window and all I could see was ocean.
Blue and endless in every direction with no land, no boats, nothing.
Just water stretching to the horizon like the world had run out of everything solid and left us hanging above what was left.
The left engine coughed, then died. The plane lurched sideways and Quest corrected it with both hands on the yoke, his arms flexed, his breathing steady even though every alarm on the panel was screaming at him in red.
The right engine was still running but the sound coming from it was wrong, sputtering and uneven, fighting for fuel that wasn’t coming fast enough.
“Quest.”
“I’m working on it.” He grabbed the radio.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is November-Seven-Two-Quebec-Bravo, dual engine failure over open water, requesting emergency assistance, two souls on board, six months pregnant passenger.” He rattled off coordinates from the GPS and repeated the transmission twice and I sat there listening to the man I loved tell a stranger on a radio that we were falling out of the sky and the way he said “two souls on board” broke something inside me because he wasn’t counting the baby and I wanted to scream at him that it was three.
The right engine quit. The cockpit went quiet except for the alarms and the wind outside and the sound of my own heartbeat pounding so loud I could feel it behind my eyes.
Without engines the plane started dropping, not fast at first but steady, the nose tilting forward degree by degree like the sky was slowly letting go of us.
“Listen to me.” Quest’s voice cut through everything.
He looked at me for the first time since this started and his eyes were clear and focused and more terrified than I’d ever seen them, not when he killed Rios, not when he found me in that warehouse, not ever.
“When we hit the water I need you to brace. Cross your arms over your belly and tuck your chin. Do not let go of that seatbelt until we stop moving. Do you hear me?”
“We’re going to die.”
“We are not going to die. I’m going to put this plane on the water and we are going to walk away from it. Both of us. All three of us. Do you hear me, Mehar?”
All three.
I put both hands on my belly and felt the baby kick against my palms, hard, like our child already knew something was wrong and was fighting against it from the inside.
It seemed to take forever to fall out of the sky.