Chapter 7 - The Midair Mutiny
The aircraft banked sharply, climbing rapidly into the turbulent night sky. In the dark cargo hold, Jack and I sat bound loosely by plastic zip-ties the guards had carelessly tossed around our wrists.
“You got a plan, old man?” I whispered urgently, testing the tensile strength of the zip-ties against the metal edge of a supply crate.
“Always do, girl,” Jack muttered, working his thumbs against each other with practiced ease. With a sharp snap, his zip-ties parted—he had looped them loosely enough to slip out when needed. He quickly crawled over to me and sliced my ties with a small folding knife he kept hidden in his boot lining.
I rubbed my wrists, my adrenaline surging. “The cockpit door is locked from the inside, and Owen has two armed guards stationed in the forward galley.”
“We don't need to go through the cockpit door,” Jack whispered, pointing up toward the ceiling hatch—the emergency jump and maintenance egress used by paratroopers. “We go around.”
“You’re insane. We’re at twelve thousand feet in a pressurized cabin doing two hundred knots,” I whispered back.
“And you’re a Vale pilot,” Jack grinned grimly. “Are you going to let that snake steal your birthright, or are you going to take your plane back?”
The fire in my veins ignited. I stood up, steadying myself against the rolling motion of the cargo floor.
Jack popped the overhead manual release valve, equalizing the cabin pressure just enough to crack the egress hatch without ripping the seal off completely. A torrent of freezing, roaring wind blasted into the cargo hold, chilling us to the bone.
Using the handholds along the ribbed aluminum ceiling, Jack scrambled up first, slipping out into the freezing slipstream. I followed right behind him, pulling myself out onto the curved roof of the fuselage.
The wind shrieked past my ears like a thousand howling demons, trying to tear my grip away from the metal seams. Below us, the dark, jagged peaks of the Black Ridge mountains looked like jagged teeth waiting to swallow us whole.
Crawling forward on our stomachs against the blinding gale-force wind, we reached the forward cockpit observation windows.
Inside, the co-pilot was monitoring the autopilot while Owen sat in the jump seat behind him, talking on a satellite phone. The two guards were dozing off in the galley just behind the cockpit bulkhead.
I reached for the emergency exterior maintenance latch—a rarely used manual override designed to vent the cockpit in case of electrical fires. I flipped the safety toggle, turned the locking handle, and pulled hard.
The sliding window popped open with a deafening bang.
Owen and the co-pilot whipped their heads around in sheer terror as freezing air rushed into the cockpit, blowing loose charts and coffee cups everywhere. Before Owen could even draw his sidearm, I lunged through the open window, grabbing the co-pilot by the collar and hauling him out of his seat.
“What the hell—!” Owen screamed, scrambling backward as Jack dropped down right behind me through the overhead ceiling vent.
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I slid into the pilot’s seat, slamming my hands onto the yoke and disengaging the autopilot.
“Welcome back to Vale Air, Owen,” I shouted over the screaming wind, banking the aircraft hard into a steep, aggressive dive that sent Owen crashing into the instrument panel.
