35
* * *
MANO A MANO
When I wake up, I’m hypothermic and gasping for air because we’re almost at cruising altitude. I quickly throw on my breathing apparatus and hungrily devour some oxygen. My hands and extremities are numb, and the black spiders of frostbite are starting to inch down my skin. If I could feel it, I would be in excruciating pain from my cracked collarbone. I can tell it’s cracked because it has a golf ball-size lump on it. What else? Definitely some broken toes and maybe a sprained ankle, but again, the numbness is masking any pain of injuries I might have.
My watch is telling me I have about one minute of air left in my breather, so I get my ass in gear. I pull my tools from my zips with shaking hands and go to work on the panel I was trained to be able to remove with my eyes closed. It’s open within a couple of seconds. A blast of warmth hits me in the face but I don’t linger because I know that this hull breach will eventually trigger an air pressure drop alarm. So, I shove myself through the three-foot-square access panel and find myself crouching in the aft baggage compartment. I quickly replace the access panel and seal it with marine repair cement.
With the panel secured, I take a moment to enjoy the finer things in life: oxygen, heat, light, etc. In the end, my midbrain tells me, this is all we need. Everything else is just window dressing. Hypoxia is still getting the best of me so I gobble up some more Acetazolamide. Right away, the foggy feeling is gone and I feel like I have full possession of my physical and mental faculties.
According to my specs, there should be a transformer box that controls the lighting in the passenger cabin somewhere in the wall between the aft lavatory and the baggage compartment. I cut into the molded plastic wall until I find it. It also supplies the heat and AC controllers with juice, so I have to be careful not to cut those. If I did, all of us would freeze to death before the captain could descend to a more hospitable altitude. I tape those to the wall and cut the wires that power the lights.
The plane goes dark.
I hear them out there calmly discussing the problem. I put on my night vision goggles. I have a few seconds to get some work done before they find the emergency lighting switch, which is back here by me. I wait for the first guy with any brains to come back here for that. He is massive. A three-hundred-pound Samoan with his prodigious mop of hair trained into a lunch-lady bun on the back of his head. I am ready for him, holding pretty much the only gun that is safe to use on an airplane. It’s composite and has a range of one foot. Remember what I was saying about the slaughterhouse? This is just like a slaughterhouse stun gun. In fact, it is based on an actual device called a free bolt stunner. Most modern stun guns have a pointed, retractable spike that pierces the skull but retracts. The free bolt was designed for emergency, in-the-field euthanasia of large farm animals that can’t be restrained. Kind of like my new friend, Mr. Samoan. The bolt can actually release from the pistol so you can use it at short range, and it does not require contact. I designed this one to have a cylinder like a revolver, and since the bolts are thin, it can hold fifteen.
POP!
The first large animal, Mr. Samoan, is euthanized. He falls face-first onto the floor. One of his friends comes running to see what happened and POP! He falls on top of the Samoan’s body and I duck as one of the security thugs starts chucking knives in my general direction. I pull one out of the wall and, like the true circus freak I am, I whip it about twenty feet right into Mr. Knife Thrower’s forehead. He points to his head as if to say “Do I have something here?” and falls into a tray of cocktails. The boys are all taking cover, so it’s hard to count them, but I estimate there are now nine security types left and my target is nowhere in sight. That’s fine, because these guys have protocol to follow and Locke is probably hidden in some custom-built panic room.
I push my way into the passenger cabin. It’s a fucking mess in there, broken glass all over the place, three dead bodies, and the fun has only just begun! One of the thugs pulls a water-based stun gun. It fires a stream of highly conductive water, made up mostly of salt and other minerals, and juices the stream of water with an ungodly amount of electricity. He shoots me in the nuts. I am wearing Kevlar, which wicks water almost completely and is not conductive at all, but it’s still pretty painful to get shot in the junk with a few thousand volts. The disadvantage of these weapons is that, unlike the Taser I’m carrying, they don’t shoot the razor-sharp barbs that sink into the skin like fishhooks and allow you to volt fuck some poor bastard for as long as your batteries last. I fire these into his balls to see if he likes it. Then I cram a wine cork in the trigger guard and the bro gets juiced until his head starts to smoke.
Now it’s time for the thug that has “had enough of this shit” and wants to—you guessed it—“take me on mano a mano!” He is also a man mountain. His strategy is to rush me. I immediately go into bullfighter mode. Instead of taking any of the force that this heavier, stronger, and more insanely angry bull wants to deliver, I stylishly sidestep like a matador and POP! He gets a bolt in the back of the head.
Now there is more electrified water coming at me and the stream gets me under the neck guard. It knocks me back and I fall right on top of the dead Samoan. I roll off him and land in the galley and another thug is instantly on me. This is what he wanted, a close quarters grappling match where he can suffocate me with his muscles and manhood. I see his face as he puts one of my arms in an exotic hold and pulls a combat knife that he intends to bury in my throat. My free hand stops it but not for long. He has leverage, weight, and strength on his side. I have half frostbitten fingers and I am totally exhausted.
There is something about his sadistic smile that fills me with uncontrollable rage. It travels under my skin like a wave of liquid heat. I am instantly sweating, and my ears are roaring from what I’m guessing is an adrenaline surge. Without hesitation, I move his knife hand and pull the blade into me. It sinks into the flesh above my cracked collarbone and goes right through to the floor. The pain is earth-shattering, but manchild’s knife is stuck in me and in the floor and he now has no weapon. That’s when he frees my other arm to reach for something. Big mistake. I grab his hair and shove my two fingers deep into his eye socket. He attempts to jump up off me but I use my knees to flip him over the top of my hand and onto his back. I pull the knife out of me and shove it in the spot behind his ear, severing his brain stem.
“Who’s smiling now, asshole?”
I leap to my feet and rush the other three as they rush me. Instead of hitting them head-on, I dive into the knees of one of them with all of my body weight. Both knees buckle and I hear the telltale snap of ligaments and tendons. As the guy lies there whimpering, I laugh out loud at him.
“Oh, did that hurt fat ass?”
I pile drive his neck with my knee, crushing his windpipe and breaking his neck. Two left, and they pull guns. They are thinking that if they just fill me full of the low-velocity rounds that don’t pass through, they can dispatch me quickly without endangering the aircraft and Locke.
“Go ahead, you stupid fucking meatheads. Shoot. You’ll pop this plane like a shaken soda can and kill us all.”
They say nothing, just quietly stalking me, pushing me back to the galley wall, which is thick enough to stop a bullet. I have to move quickly, so I pull my second Taser and fire it into the chest of one of the thugs. The juicing I give him causes him to jerk and fire his weapon into the floor. Oops. As he shakes and twitches, the other guy grabs a chair and braces himself for the plane to lose cabin pressure and plummet to the earth. I wrap the wires from the Taser around him and shove him to the ground. Then I see one of their water stun guns and I snatch it up.
“You ever play that carnival game where you shoot the clown in the mouth with the water pistol and blow up the balloon?”
I unload the fucking thing into his and his buddy’s face, penetrating their nostrils, mouth, and ears. They fry like death row cons sitting on Old Sparky, their eyeballs bursting into flam
es. I cover their heads with a blanket to keep from setting the plane ablaze and assess the situation. The thugs are all dead. Locke is nowhere in sight. Then all of the plasma screens fire up and Locke appears.
He’s piloting the plane.
“Hello, asshole,” he says cordially over the intercom.
I say nothing, my head buzzing from near total exhaustion.
“The intern. Very clever. Who do you work for?”
“Judge Judy.”
He smiles.
“Have you ever heard of the vomit comet? It’s an airplane that they use to simulate antigravity environments for shows about space, et cetera. People get into what is essentially an empty fuselage and the plane does steep climbs with zero gravity stalls. Basically, they let the engines stall and the plane just plummets.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Fasten your seat belt in case we encounter some turbulence.”
He guns the throttle and we start rocketing straight vertical. I fall back into the galley wall and it cracks under my weight.
“Oops. That looked like it hurt.”
Then he stalls out and the jet drops like a stone. I am instantly floating weightless in the cabin. I try to grab on to whatever I can and make my way to the cockpit door. Then he hits the gas again and climbs. I lose my grip and fly through the main cabin like a bullet, hitting every sharp or hard object along the way. I protect my head with my arms as I slam into the little cocktail bar and obliterate it. Glass shards explode in all directions.
“This is what you get when you fuck with someone like me.”
Bam! Back to the plummet, but this time he is doing rolling turns at the same time, so I am like a fucking extra sock in the spin cycle. I don’t know what is up or down but I do know I can’t take much more of this. I feel the blood coming out of my nose and ears and know I have a very bad concussion and maybe even a burst eardrum.
I pull two knives from the dead guards and stick them into the floor. I use them as metal talons so I can claw my way to the cockpit. If Locke pulls more moves, I can quickly sink one or both of the blades into other surfaces. I am like a spider, inching my way along, so dedicated that my hands are bleeding.
“That door you’re thinking about breaking down is quadruple reinforced titanium with a thick Kevlar sheath in the middle. Good luck opening it.”
“I don’t need to open it because you’re going to open it for me.”
He laughs and tries to shake me but I am dug in like a tic and getting closer to the cockpit door.
“Why would I open it for you?”
“Because your daughter is locked in the fucking bathroom and if you don’t open it, I’ll think up another carnival game.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You really are an asshole, Locke. I saw her take cover in there when I dropped your first goon.”
“How do you know she’s my daughter?”
“Really? That’s how you’re going to play it? She was on your passenger manifest, tough guy.”
“That’s my admin. And don’t bet on me giving a fuck about her.”
I claw my way back to the lavatory and kick the door open. Locke’s little rich girl daughter is strapped to the jump seat inside. I pull her out of there and sit her down in a chair.
“Okay, I’ll bet on this.”
I take up one of the guns from the dead goon squad and point it at the back of her head.
“Daddy!” she screams.
“Looks like we have a winner!” I yell.
Silence from the cockpit.
“I think she has something on her mind. Let’s see what it is.”
I cock the hammer back for effect, and the cockpit door opens. Locke stands there looking at me, a gun in his hand.
“Lay the fucking gun down. Now.”
“Fuck you.”
He fires at me but misses and puts a hole in the fuselage floor, a few feet behind the left wing. Alarms go off. The autopilot drops the oxygen masks and dives down in a very steep descent. I roll down the aisle and into the wall near the cockpit door. Locke is waiting for me, his gun pointed at my face.
“Stupid motherfucker,” I spit.
“Sometimes doing what’s necessary seems crazy but it’s the highest form of sanity.”
“Tell that to your daughter over there, asshole.”
When he looks at her sobbing in the chair, screaming and unable to breathe, he’s struck by his actions. Then he’s struck in the balls by my foot. He goes down, holding his crotch and gasping. I pull him up by his collar and drag him into the cockpit.
“Now you are going to land this fucking plane and I am going to kill you. But if you fuck with me, I’ll kill her too, right in front of you. Understood?”
He nods and takes the controls. The plane is shaking like a motherfucker as he attempts to stabilize our descent. After fifteen or so harrowing minutes, we settle into an altitude of around 18,000 feet.
“Where are we?”
He looks at his satellite positioning system.
“About a hundred miles south of Miami. Looking for a private airport in Grand Cayman or maybe Barbados.”
“Change course for Honduras. There’s an airfield outside Puerto Cortés.”
“Honduras? We may not make it with that hole in the fuselage.”
“Just do it.”
36
* * *
“LA CUCARACHA”
Two hours later, we’re landing in Honduras. Locke taxis to the single building on the airfield and sees that it is empty.
“Stop here.”
He stops the plane. I shove him out into the passenger cabin and sit him next to his daughter. I put the gun to his forehead and cock back the hammer.
“No! Daddy!”
“Quiet,” I tell her.
“Please don’t kill my dad.”
“Do you know who your dad really is? Do you?”
She whimpers.
“He’s been selling the names of people in witness protection to the highest bidders—mob, cartels, Aryan Nations, you name it.”
She shakes her head and sobs.
“Leave her alone and get it over with!”
“Shut up!” I yell.
I pistol-whip him across the face, cutting a deep gash across his cheeks and nose. I turn to his daughter, who is sobbing.
“I’m sorry that you had to see this, but you need to know what kind of man raised you. You need to know he is a lowlife piece of shit and he has innocent blood on his hands. You need to know that he deserves to die.”
I press the gun to his forehead.
“I was sent here to kill him. It’s my job. . . .”
I press harder for a beat . . . then I take the gun away from his head.
“But I’m not going to do it.”
Locke and his daughter look up at me, stunned.
“Because I just retired.”
I grab what ammo and weapons I can from the corpses of the thugs and pop the passenger door.
“You have enough fuel to get you to Mexico. I suggest you get the fuck out of here now before the cartel army finds out an $80 million private jet is parked on their airfield.”
Both of them are completely speechless as I lower the airstairs and walk out of the plane into the hot, humid morning. I am speechless too, just trying to navigate my way into uncharted territory. You’re probably speechless because I allowed Locke to live. Don’t worry. It wasn’t because I found Jesus or saw the light or anything. It was because of the first commandment in my own personal bible: survival. With Locke alive, Bob will most certainly end up dead, cashed out by his clients.
Bottom line is: by leaving Locke alive, Bob is out of my hair for good and I am now officially retired. Disappointed? I’m sorry if I didn’t deliver the Disney/Pixar ending you were expecting. It’s like I’ve been telling you, you have to be prepared for anything. You never know where the bottle will spin and you’ve got to kiss the princes and the frogs no matt
er what. Those are the rules. If you don’t respect them, then you have less than nothing and that’s a lot of nothing for people like us. I may not be walking away from HR, Inc. with my gold watch and pension, but I am walking away. And the closer I got to this moment, the more I realized the unlikelihood of that happening. Why would I trust someone like Bob? That’s just plain stupid.
As for you, my advice is to formulate an exit strategy quickly. The shit is about to hit the fan, and you don’t want to get hit by the spray.
* * *
Rule #14: Know the fine art of the exit strategy.
On my tenth job, I was working a global shipping CEO who was big into human trafficking. He was bringing cargo ships into the ports of Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Oakland filled with exports from Asia: rubber dog shit, back scratchers, and indentured servants. You’ve heard the stories before, so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that this motherfucker was supplying 90 percent of the sweatshops in the U.S. with cheap labor and making a lot of money. Butt fucking the American dream so you can buy cheap T-shirts at Old Navy. Isn’t life beautiful?
So I weaseled my way into this guy’s inner circle as an intern at his New York port. Then Bob threw a wrinkle into the equation. He told me he wanted to give a new recruit some “on-the-job training.” He also blew sugar up my ass and told me that I was his protégé and he wanted the greenies to learn from the best. At first, I enjoyed the ego boost. But that faded quickly when I started spending time with a young woman I will call Juno. Oh, you’ve seen that movie, huh? Well, then you know that Juno is an annoying twerp who never shuts the fuck up. That’s what I was dealing with. Bob got her into the gig as an intern too, and I showed her the ropes. She was probably nineteen at the time. In addition to making me want to strangle her, she had all of the office workers wanting to join me in a gang-strangle. But the thing was, this chick was a star when it came to combat. I’ve never seen anyone shoot, slash, or fight better than she did. So I instantly became paranoid that Bob was going to have her whack me.