Chapter 15
CHAPTER 15
T efere smiled to himself. It had been two weeks since he’d tried to kidnap the red-haired American woman pilot. With five hundred soldiers at his fingertips, the ones that had been either killed or captured earlier were easily replaced. Zere, a thirty-five-year-old Somalian he’d grown up with, had come in to be his new second-in-command. Never giving up on getting that American woman, they watched the flights the two female pilots flew in and out of the Bahir Dar airport. From there, on the south side of Lake Tana, they transported the supplies needed for the construction projects to Addis Zemen airport, located on the east side of the lake. Sweat trickled down Tefere’s bearded face constantly over the long hours he spent hiding inside the airport’s huge supply warehouse at Bahir Dar, learning and listening. The beard was new. He had grown it over the last two weeks to conceal his identity somewhat, and it still itched and annoyed him, especially with never-ending perspiration running through it. His inside man, Zere, had been hired by the manager of the warehouse facility to load construction materials onto the two women’s Otter airplane, and had been doing so for nearly the past two weeks.
Zere kept as low a profile as possible, blending in among the workers, keeping his ears open and his mouth shut. Why, he’d even brushed elbows with the red-haired American pilot Willow Chamberlin and her copilot, Dev Mitchell. He’d noted down the pilots’ daily, grueling schedule. Another key point Zere had discovered was the presence of a male security guard who always flew with the two pilots and was, in essence, their constant bodyguard, and a fly in his side’s collective ointment. Tefere knew that the operator was more than likely an ex-SEAL, based on what he’d heard from Zere. The man carried a particular type of pistol, a Sig Sauer P226 MK25, that only SEALs utilized. An intimidating weapon indeed. It didn’t even have a safety on it so, in the right hands, it was deadly. A cartridge was always chambered and all the operator had to do was draw, point and shoot, in one smooth, unbroken motion. No doubt about it, this bodyguard was ex-SEAL as far as Zere was concerned. This made him maintain a very low profile to not draw any unwanted attention to himself as he memorized the layout of the plane, its daily routine, flying hours, and its loading and unloading schedule.
He was much less identifiable now, especially if spotted briefly by chance. He was betting that the Delos people had provided photos of Tefere not only to that security operator, but also to the two pilots. The new beard would throw them off from a distance. But this was largely a backup precaution; in any case, his leader wasn’t about to show his face to anyone; remaining hidden within the many rows and stacks of crates lining the warehouse. He was ensconced, sitting pretty. No one knew Zere’s face or his background. Now, all he had to do was remain inconspicuous and wait for the right opening to put his leader’s plan into action.
Terefe saw Zere’s worried expression. A lot was riding on his young lieutenant to carry off this charade. Saying nothing, he watched Zere leave and walk down the main aisle toward today’s work assignment. Mind turning to the future, he knew there were hills of various elevations on the eastern side of the lake, and therein lay the small town of Zegye, nestled within the thick pine forest, hacked from which was a short dirt runway the perfect length on which to land the Otter. This was the village where the Delos construction team was currently working, and where their equipment was being flown into. Tefere already had his two Toyota Hilux’s in place nearby, packed full of his soldiers armed and ready to take either one or both pilots as prisoners. He would like nothing better than to get both women and escape via the main highway out of Bahir Dar, and then drive the straight into Somalia. There, he’d present them to his adoptive father. In a Zoom session with the warlord yesterday, Cumar Hanad had been excited because two of the most prolific sex traffickers in all of Europe and Asia were visiting him. Tefere desperately wanted to parade the red-haired American woman before them all, thus boosting his ego, his power, and his wallet. If he could get the second pilot, the brown-haired American woman as a bonus, that would be an unexpected and incredible coup! The sex traffickers already wanted to buy one or both of them. Although Cumar had originally planned to livestream the red-haired woman’s beheading on the internet, the two sex traffickers were already in a bidding war to buy her for their own needs, so she had to be kept alive and useful to them. Someone like this woman, the warlord had told Tefere, would go for millions of U.S. dollars on their dark web marketplace. Cumar would make a fortune on the deal, and of course, having captured them, Tefere would be handsomely rewarded, too.
Tefere didn’t care what happened to the women. He only wanted the money and the power status that would come with a successful abduction. His star would rise with Cumar, and that meant more money pouring into his efforts here in Ethiopia. The tempo of the construction materials’ transfer from the warehouse to the Otter, the loading time, and the time it took the Otter to fly from Bahir Dar to either Addis Zemen or Zegye and back, were all scribbled down in his notebook. They were making six to eight flights a day, feeding the demands of the construction work at the two villages. For now? He would wait for an opportunity to pounce. And, sooner or later, it would come.
***
Willow missed Shep being in her condo, in her life. It was a Tuesday in early December, and the demands of the work had been grueling. He was gone five days a week, sometimes six or even all seven, depending upon how construction was coming along at the Addis Zemen and Zegye sites. She was preparing to leave her condo, dressed in her blue one-piece flight suit, grabbing her go bag, when her cell phone rang.
“Willow here.” Only a very few people had her personal number.
“Dev here. Hey, I’m sicker than a dog. That new security woman who’s staying with me? Ginny Long? She’s got a fever of one-hundred-four and I’m one hundred and three. I’m calling the doctor, and I’ll get him to come out here and see what the hell we have. I can’t fly today, Willow.”
“Bummer,” she muttered. “So, your new security detail is down, too?”
“Yes. We think it’s from food poisoning. I bought some Ethiopian food from a street vendor last night, and I think that’s what nailed us. We’re heaving our guts out and have uncontrollable diarrhea. Maybe the doctor can give us something for it. You aren’t going to have a copilot for today, sorry.”
“No worries. Call the doc, Dev. I can do the flights today and handle all the rest on my own, no problem.”
“Are you sure? Is that safe?”
“Absolutely. Shep needs what we’re bringing in today more than ever. I can’t sit on the tarmac and not fly because of a sick security guard. You know how this goes.”
Sighing, Dev said, “Yes, I do. I’m so sorry to leave you in the lurch. Can Luke fly with you as security?”
“He’s at Addis Zemen full time now. Shep is back and forth between that village and Zegye. There’s been a couple of incursions by, he thinks, Tefere David’s soldiers, trying to steal the material that’s been flown in. So, he’s busy with his security people, stopping the steal before it happens.”
“Bummer, I forgot about that angle.”
“I’ll be fine,” Willow said confidently. “We’ve got the whole system down pat now at the airport. You two just rest, drink lots of water and keep hydrated, get that doctor out to help. I’m sure by the time I come home at dusk, you’ll feel a lot better.”
“I hope so,” Dev grumbled. “Just take care, Willow. Stay alert. You got your .45 on you?”
Laughing, she said, “Yes, oh great Mother Hen of the Sky, I’m armed to the teeth. Stop being SUCH a worrywart!”
They both laughed.
“I’ll call you tonight,” Willow promised, grabbing her sack lunch and stuffing it into her go bag. Locking the condo door, she headed for the elevator, the dawn barely visible on the eastern horizon, a thin strip of gauzy golden color against the black night sky. In no time, she was in her vehicle, speeding toward the airport. There were layers of security to go through and she kept her identification around her neck so she could get waved through quickly by the Ethiopian gate security people.
The Otter was out of the hangar after going through its one-hundred-hour flight inspection by trained engine mechanics last night. She saw the warehouse truck backed up to the rear hatch, and four men offloading materials from it and placing them in the long storage space of the workhorse plane’s interior fuselage. After pulling up on the side of the hangar and parking, grabbing her gear, she walked quickly to the plane, recognizing all the men who were doing the offloading. She smiled and halted.
“Hey,” she called, holding up a sack, “pastis for all of you,” and she handed it to the foreman of the truck. “There’s one for each of you.” Pastis was a beloved Ethiopian pastry made of fried bread, looking somewhat like a donut without the hole. She always bought them a sack from a nearby bakery before the first flight out of the day, knowing how hard they were going to work until dusk for Delos. The foreman, a man in his fifties with steel-gray and black hair, took the sack, smiling. He had three front teeth missing.
“Thank you,” he said in stilted English. He held up the bag to the other three, hollering in Ethiopian that there would be pastis waiting for them after they got the plane loaded. The foreman turned back to her, nodding his thanks, his dark-brown eyes sparkling. “You take good care of us, Miss Willow.”
She grinned and pulled herself up into the rear of the plane. “Well, you guys always earn them. Hey, can I have one of your men come along with me? I’m short two people today. I’ll need someone to help offload at the other end. Maybe give the guy a little extra money for today?”
“But,” the foreman said, looking around, “where is Miss Dev and her woman friend?”
“Sick with food poisoning,” Willow told him. “She’ll be okay by tomorrow most likely, though. I just need an extra pair of hands to help unload the supplies at the other end, is all.” Usually, Ginny and Dev helped with that on each trip. There wasn’t anything on this trip that two people couldn’t lift and carry to the rear hatch door and hand off to the awaiting construction workers.
“I DO!”
Willow saw a tall man, ropy-muscled, come forward, raising his hand. “Okay,” she said.
The foreman said, “Willow, this is Zere. He is big and strong. He is originally from Somalia. Doesn’t speak much else. But he knows work. He can do the work of two women,” and he laughed, slapping the workman on the back good naturedly.
Nodding to the tall man, she said, “Please get those fence posts in here, Zere,” and she pointed where to place them behind the co-pilot’s seat, next to the hatch. They were the main staves for the ten-foot-tall cyclone fences. Normally, they would be placed horizontally across the deck of the plane for safety, but it was already piled with too many boxes. There would be nobody in harm’s way on this trip anyway, so it would have to do. This was the heaviest load she’d carry today; weighty items had to sit in the center of the Otter, and in this case, near the hatch so they were balanced against all the boxes on the left side of the fuselage deck. Last on, first off.
“Yes… ma’am,” Zere struggled in halting English, giving a quick bow of his head.
Smiling, she nodded. “Come on board when you get done, Zere. I’ll go through my pre-flight check list right now. Just find someplace to sit in the back, behind me.”
Willow didn’t know exactly how much of what she said Zere actually understood, but he seemed to get the gist and nodded obediently, beginning to handle the thirty staves with his thickly gloved hands, carefully stacking them, sliding them in from the rear hatch. His eyes narrowed as he watched her weave between the gear, going to the pilot’s seat and strapping in. Smiling to himself, sweat dripping off him from the hard work, he looked back and saw the foreman and the remaining worker going to the truck cab near the hangar entrance, to sit and eat their pastis. Once they had disappeared inside, he pulled out his cell phone, moving outside the plane, back behind the truck, to send a quick text to David with the details of this fortuitous change. Once done, he continued to slide the heavy iron staves carefully into the cabin.
Glancing back, Willow saw Zere was half-finished with the last of the load. She made a call to Luke Gibson, letting him know her status.
“I’m flying without Dev and Ginny today,” she told Luke, giving him the details.
“You’re alone?”
Hearing alarm in Luke’s voice, she said, “Zere, one of the foreman’s men, is flying in with me. He’ll help offload all this stuff and I’ll keep him with me all day for the rest of the flights.”
“I don’t have his name on my roster of personnel cleared to fly with you. Do you know this guy?” Luke demanded.
“He’s worked for our foreman the last two weeks. Quiet, very respectful and a hard worker. He doesn’t know a lot of English, but enough. Seems like an okay dude to me.”
“Damn,” Luke muttered. “I don’t like this, Willow.”
“It’ll be okay,” she breezily assured him. “It’s a twenty-five-minute flight to where you are at Addis Zemen. You can buttonhole him all you want once we land. Fair enough?”
“Do you have his last name?”
“No, and he’s originally from Somalia, and speaks only very basic Ethiopian and English it seems. I don’t speak much Somali, nor could I spell his last name probably, even if he understood what I wanted,” she said. “He’s fine. He’s been very nice. Besides,” she joked, “I bring this team a bag of pastis every morning so it’s in their best interests to look out for me. Seriously though, they’re a reliable, hard-working crew.”
“Somalia, Willow?” said Luke, his voice grating. “That’s where Tefere is from!”
“Luke, a bunch of the laborers here are from there. It doesn’t mean they are all in with Tefere.” replied Willow.
“Okay, fair enough, but I don’t have him on my cell phone list, either,” Luke muttered unhappily again.
Willow could hear his frustration as he returned to flipping through a sheaf of papers, on his ever-present clipboard. “I’ve put his name in my cell phone security app, but there’s nothing coming up on him. Without a last name, I’m screwed.”
“He’ll give you his last name in about half an hour,” Willow promised. “I’ve got a clear blue sky, no wind.” Willow knew that flying in the cool early morning like this is always easier than later in the day when they get bounced all over the place with air pockets formed by the afternoon heat rising off the lake. “I should arrive right on schedule.”
“Okay…,” Luke grumbled unhappily.
She heard concern in his tone. “Relax. Things will be fine. Hey, is Shep around?”
“He’s down below with the well-drilling crew right now.”
“Oh… okay.” Willow wanted to talk with him, but it wasn’t possible. And as soon as the materials were offloaded at the airport, she’d have to turn right back around and return to Bahir Dar. She wouldn’t see him until tonight. “Gotta go, Luke. See you soon.”
“Roger that,” he said.
Just after she was finished on the phone, it suddenly rang, and she answered it. The foreman was calling, telling her that they were going back to the warehouse for the next shipment’s load. She thanked him and saw the truck drawing away from the airplane hangar.
“Uhhhh….ma…madam?” Zere called from the hatch.
Willow turned. “Yes?” So, Zere knew SOME English, although the way he said it, it took her a moment to realize the English word he’d struggled to speak.
He motioned toward the fully packed cargo and then to the wheel chocks with a questioning, pulling gesture.
“Great. Yes, remove the chocks. Thanks, Zere!” and she turned, pulling on her earphones, making a call to the tower for a runway clearance and designation.
As she waited on instructions, she kept busy, finishing up the pre-flight list and saw Zere removing the chocks. Focused on her work; checking the gauges, making sure there was plenty of fuel in the wings, the weight of the plane, that the oil was at the correct setting, she heard the rear hatch slam closed. She felt the familiar pressure that followed and kept checking off each item with her pen.
Cold metal pressed into the side of her neck.
Willow froze.
“Do not move, Willow Chamberlin.”
The voice was raspy, near her ear, and she could smell garlic and fish.
“Hands on the yoke,” the man ordered. He leaned down, unsnapping the leather safety around her pistol, removing the .45 from its holster.
She left the kneeboard in place on her right thigh, letting the pen drop, placing her hands on the yoke. Her heart thudded harshly in her chest. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the hulking shadow and shape of the man. He was bearded, unlike Zere, and the voice was different: deeper and chilling. His pistol pressed hard into the side of her neck. Pain radiated from around the point of contact. “Who are you?” she demanded, although she was afraid, she already knew the answer.
He chuckled. “I will ask the questions, woman, not you. But you can call me Tefere.”
Willow gasped; her fear confirmed. He pressed the barrel into her neck even harder.
“I didn’t catch you those many weeks ago, but now? I have you.” He turned, speaking in Somali to Zere, who sat down in the rear, drawing his own gun, sitting by the bulkhead in the rear, behind the copilot’s seat, aiming it at her. “Now,” he said triumphantly, “Zere has his pistol trained on your head. I’m going to remove mine and I am going to sit down in this seat, next to you. Listen carefully.” He pulled out a piece of note paper. “You are to put these GPS coordinates into your plane’s computer. We aren’t going where you’d planned. Do it now ,” and he handed the paper to her.
Willow’s throat was tight with terror. She took the paper, seeing the GPS numbers scrawled across it. “I have to know where this is,” she said, punching the numbers in. “I have to know what I’m looking for on my screen. I have to adjust altitude, so we don’t fly into a mountain.”
“Zegye, Ethiopia.”
She swallowed hard, the map coming up on her screen. Half the construction crew was at another small village northeast of Bahir Dar, roughly twenty minutes away from Addis Zemen by helicopter. Shep was there with them. Her mind whirled with terror, trying to think through the situation. She was glad the barrel of his pistol was off her neck. She heard Zere settling his back against the rear bulkhead, sitting atop the cardboard boxes that ran the length of the plane. Zere had to be one of David’s soldiers! Which meant he would be a cold-blooded killer, too. “Why are we going there?” she demanded, giving David a challenging look.
Tefere smiled hugely, relaxing in the copilot’s seat. “Take off for Zegye and I will tell you on the way there.”
She looked hard at the screen. “There’s only a one-thousand-foot dirt runway outside of that town. This load is so heavy I need a much longer runway, or we risk a crash. This load was supposed to go to Addis Zemen.”
“Easy for your Otter to land on. Yes?” he asked.
Nodding, she muttered, “A dirt strip is a dirt strip. But it’s not as long. This is the heaviest load of the day. I may not be able to land and stop before the end of the strip.” She switched the button, the screen now showing a satellite view of the general area. The strip sat at around twenty-five hundred feet, surrounded by heavy forest at the top end and scrub brush at the bottom. It was in the hills, if they could be called such, tall as they were. She saw a main road leading into Zegye, a lakeside village, and it hooked up directly with a main highway. Trying to put it together, she asked, “Why not let me go to Addis Zemen?”
“I want this plane in the air, heading for Zegye,” he snapped. “Now! Or Zere will shoot you where you sit.”
Willow believed him. She heard the tower give her clearance to take off. “Okay,” she grunted. “Put your seatbelt on.”
“I don’t do anything a woman tells me,” David growled. “Take off!”
Her U-1A DeHavilland Otter was one of the toughest utility aircraft in the world. It had two landing wheels up front and a smaller one near the tail of the craft. It could carry eight-thousand pounds, fly a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and go as high as seventeen thousand feet, although Willow rarely flew above thirty-five hundred. It had a long narrow nose, a single propeller, and its rugged power plant was a Pratt and Whitney Wasp radial engine that, at its full six hundred horsepower, charged the plane along through the air at a thundering pace. It wasn’t a flashy plane by any means, but it was the greatest workhorse in the sky, used around the world. It could take a beating and keep on going. Its wingspan was fifty-eight feet, longer than a greyhound bus by almost half. Willow wondered why they were flying to this fishing village. What was waiting there? What was David going to do with her? She tried to keep the idea of being decapitated away from her, but it was impossible.
For the next ten minutes, she was trundling the Otter out of the apron area and onto the side runway that would get her to the take-off point. The tension in the cabin felt both fragile and hard to her. How could she alert Luke that she was being kidnapped?
Anchoring the Otter at the end of the runway, she received final permission for takeoff, and pushed the throttle gently forward, the engine growing louder and louder, the craft shaking and trembling. She lightened the contact her flight boots had with the rudder pedals, and the Otter lurched forward, moving ever faster and faster, everything becoming a blur outside the cabin. She was heading into a nightmare and knew it.
The Otter’s engine thundered, the craft vibrated and shook, hauling the plane with its eight-thousand-pound cargo up into the humid morning air. The sun had just breasted the horizon and Willow put on her aviator sunglasses. She made a dogleg turn at the end of the airport, gaining altitude, paralleling it. Eventually, the Otter flew past its perimeter and she banked the plane to the northeast, toward Zegye. She saw David pick up the other set of earphones and settle them over his head, pulling the microphone close to his lips.
“Very nice takeoff. You are a good pilot for a woman.”
Willow said nothing, her gaze constantly moving right to left across her controls. She had both hands on the yoke, the pedals now becoming the rudder for the craft as she lightly eased her boots onto the rubber surface of each.
“Originally,” David said, leaning back, smiling, “I had great dreams of kidnapping you and selling you to my adoptive father, Warlord, in Somalia.”
Willow jerked a look in his direction.
“Keep flying,” he snarled.
She turned her face forward, her heart beginning a slow pounding of dread.
“But…,” and he laughed, turning in the seat, speaking Somali to Zere, who then burst into laughter with him. Turning back to her, he said, “Instead, plans changed for you. Two of the most powerful and richest sex-traffickers in the world, one from Europe and the other from Pakistan, heard that I was going to capture you. They wanted to buy you instead of having my father decapitate you on the internet. They too, know the value of an American white woman with red hair.”
Willow felt terror. She gulped, her throat dry and pinched feeling. She forced a swallow.
“Without even having you in my hands as my prisoner, they began a bidding war with each other. Zakir Sharan, a Pakistani billionaire from Punjabi, and Valdrin Rasari, born and living in the country of Malgar, near Albania, want you, instead. Now, the bidding is still going on very briskly. Right now, Rasari has bid ten million dollars for you.”
She gasped, giving him a startled look.
“Fly!” he roared, sitting up, curling his hand into a fist, threatening to strike her.
Jerking her head forward again, her heart crashing in her chest, she felt terror as never before.
“You see,” David said, relaxing and sitting crossways in the seat, staring at her, enjoying the fear he saw in her expression, “you had better hope that Rasari wins this bidding war for your body. If, on the other hand, Zakir Sharan is the top bidder, he will use your body for as long as it pleases him, and then? He will have you decapitated on a livestream that I’m sure will go viral.”
Willow couldn’t think. Her mind blanked out momentarily. David and Zere were laughing uproariously. She studied the changing landscape below her; the plains had become foothills as they climbed in elevation. Zegye sat next to Lake Tana, but the airstrip was up in the hills above it at twenty-six hundred feet. She took the plane up to thirty-five hundred.
“Now,” David said pleasantly, a finger on his lower lip, looking out at the blue sky in front of them, “Do not think you are getting off lucky. As your American slang goes? What is the saying? Leaping from the frying pan into the fire? Yes, I think this suits the situation perfectly. Rasari is a sadistic sexual monster, even by my standards. Did you know? He lives in the mountains, has his own village, only the village consists entirely of women he breeds to excellent male studs from all countries, and then he puts the resulting children up for auction all around the world. If you are from Africa, you will want a black child. If you are from Asia, a Chinese child, or if from South America, a Latino child, and so on. And of course, white children are in highest demand. He traffics in babies bred at his breeding facility. Only they are humans instead of horses being bred and sold.” He laughed deeply, slapping his knee.
Her stomach turned. She wanted to vomit. Her fingers tightened around the yoke.
“Rasari, of course, is the top stallion of the place and he personally impregnates the most beautiful teen girls who are brought to him, whom he refers to as his ‘broodmare band.’ Now with you? I wonder what he’ll do with you. He also makes the most interesting pornographic videos in the world. Sells them for thousands, sometimes millions of dollars, to very rich men who enjoy watching what can be done sexually with a child or young girl’s body. And then, there’s this other side to him. He likes rough sex. He likes women who fight back, and I think you fall into that category. He really likes red-haired women. Or,” and David laughed, sharing a quick joke with Zere, “perhaps he will free you in the mountains, then he will stalk you, chase you through the woods, tiring you until he hunts you down, and he has his men strip you naked, hold you down while he rapes you. And of course, this will be on video to be sold. And, he could possibly impregnate you, see if you throw red-headed children, which, by the way, are in the highest of demand because they fight and possess a warrior’s heart, and he always gets the highest price for them, no matter what their age is.”
Willow thought she knew fear, but this pulverized her emotionally. Looking around casually, as if she were not shaken to her core, she kept a sharp eye on the terrain below. They were now flying over a thick carpet of forest. Up ahead, less than ten minutes away, was Zegye. She punched several buttons on the console.
David grabbed her wrist, hard.
She cried out, trying to jerk away.
“What are you doing, bitch?” he snarled.
“Nothing! I have to prepare for landing. Let me go!” and she wrenched her wrist out of his fingers.
David glared at her. “Oh, I’m hoping that Rasari bids the highest. He beats women like you into the ground. He’ll torture you. You’ll wish you could die every day you wake up in his concubine building. You will become a hollow shell of yourself, your eyes dead and glazed over, no fight left in you, only whimpers and pain every time you move.”
Lips thinning, she bit back a curse. David didn’t realize it, but she had hit the locator button that would continually broadcast her GPS to any airport within range. Not only that, but she had also engaged an SOS emergency call that her plane was going down and would crash. That would alert the Addis Zemen airport tower where she was supposed to have landed that she was way off course at least. Would Luke Gibson be aware of this? Was he hooked up to the tower there? Even if so, would they immediately alert him of her SOS call? She had no way of knowing but prayed that it was so. If they received the signal, a search and rescue helicopter would be sent out immediately to her last known GPS location. She prayed that Luke was a man of infinite details and would have their course monitored closely on every flight. But she couldn’t be sure. Nothing was for sure, anymore.
Willow racked her brain for ways to escape. It was a thousand-foot runway. Her pistol was gone, but she kept a spare in her go bag. However, that was stashed behind her seat and she couldn’t reach it. There was also her cell phone in the bag, as well as a satellite phone, all encased in waterproof bags and charged. If she could get to her go bag? Escape? She could call Luke. And he would instantly alert Shep. Could they save her? Was there anywhere to run and hide from David? Could she survive a crash? Or was it better to die in a crash than be taken by these heartless monsters who saw her only as a sub-human to be bid upon and sold?
She had bare minutes to come up with a plan. Any plan was better than none. She cobbled one together and locked it in. She told David, “There’s the airstrip. I’m going in for a bush landing.”
“What is that?” David demanded, scowling.
“A short landing, drop in hard and anchor it quickly, because it’s such a short landing strip.”
He waved his hand. “Fine, whatever you need to land there.”
She looked down to the far end of the runway. There were two white Toyota Hilux pickup trucks stopped there. She saw at least three men in the back of each, standing behind the cabs, and even from this distance, something about their outline and stance told her they were heavily armed. There appeared to be a single driver behind the wheel of each truck.
A thousand feet…
She saw a lot of scrub brush and trees that were probably around twenty feet tall at the near end of the runway where she needed to touch down. Below, on either side of the plane flowed by mature woods, some of the trees fifty to seventy feet tall. It was a thickly wooded area, and that gave her hope. Now? All she had to do was survive what she was going to do next.
David sat languidly, looking at her, no harness on. Zere had his gun always on her. Could she, do it? Could she pull this off?
Willow didn’t know, but she sure as hell was NOT going to be taken prisoner!
As she dropped the Otter suddenly, the nose pointing down at the very end of the approaching runway, the engine shrieked. She dropped the plane hard, slowing the trundling beast, its tail suddenly flipping skyward.
David was thrown against the console. He cried out in rage, flailing around, arms akimbo, nose bloody.
Zere screamed and held on. He fired the gun.
The cabin boomed with the report.
Something buzzed by her ear. The cockpit Plexiglas fractured but held, the impact of the bullet spiderwebbing cracks all over it, partially obscuring Willow’s view.
But she knew well enough where they were! She brought the tail down sharply, flinging David back into his seat, screaming curses.
The instant the tail cleared the edge of the dirt runway, she suddenly raised the nose of the Otter high into the sky.
The stall buzzer started shrieking throughout the plane’s interior.
The nose of the Otter swung higher, then stopped abruptly.
David was slammed headfirst against the ceiling, and he cursed and cried out.
Zere was thrown into the air. His gun flew from his hand as he hit the back of the copilot’s seat with an “OOF!” and clattered away as he collapsed to the metal deck.
A split second later, Willow shoved the yoke forward just as the rear wheel slammed into the dirt. The fuselage of the plane fell forward like a felled tree, the force of their impact buckling both front struts, blowing their tires, the propeller ploughing into the dirt. Dust exploded all around them, pluming hundreds of feet into the air. The aircraft augured into the runway like a D10 Caterpillar plowing a wall of dirt before it. Everything in the cargo area rushed forward from the massive deceleration.
She heard Zere scream out, collapsing behind the co-pilot’s seat.
Suddenly, three more of the pointed iron posts shot forward from the rear of the cargo hold, slamming out through the front of the copilot’s seat. They didn’t hit David, but what they did do was imprison him. His gun flew from his hand, disappearing beneath the cockpit console. He was trapped in the seat! There was no way for him to reach her!
The Otter slid fifty more feet, tearing metal screeching against the dirt runway, and jerked to a stop.
Yanking off her harness, Willow whipped around, diving through the space between the two seats. To her horror, she saw Zere impaled through the torso by two of the fence stakes, eyes staring at her, dead.
Grabbing her go bag, Willow knew she had only seconds or less before David’s soldiers would start their Toyotas and race to the crash site. Breathing hard, she yanked the bag’s strap across her shoulders, stepping through the tangle of equipment, striking the opening with her flight boot, the hatch jerking open. Leaping out, she sprinted toward the rear of the plane, still not seen by the soldiers through the thick, swirling cloud of dust surrounding the Otter’s crash. Leaping off the edge of the strip, she found herself in the woods, coughing and gagging from the dust.
Hurry! Hurry! She raced downhill, leaves, branches and rocks racing by all around her. It was rough and hard running. She had to hide! She had to make those soldiers think she was still somewhere inside the Otter! She had to have those precious moments to disappear into the thick, tall bushes and heavy woodlands, and escape their eyes.
Hurry!