Reaching up to the Cabin Altitude Control knob Abdullereda touched the smooth, cold plastic — he’d never killed anyone before — he’d never even contemplated it. As soon as he turned the switch five hundred people would die of Oxygen starvation. He couldn’t even comprehend that number.
“Do it!”
Abdullereda turned the packs off first, stopping the aircraft from pumping in preconditioned air. Then he shut off the engine bleed valves. Now the engines would not supply pressurized air to the ducts. The last step was to let the air pressure inside the aircraft escape into the atmosphere.
The airplane was like a balloon. The air pressure inside was greater than the air pressure outside; it wanted to get out. However, like a submarine the airplane’s hull was sealed, keeping the air pressure inside the hull and thereby keeping all of the people inside alive. People could survive at ten thousand feet or even twenty thousand feet, but there was so little Oxygen at forty-one thousand feet that most people would black out in a matter of seconds. Death would take longer but no one would be awake to experience it.
Turning the Cabin Altitude Control Switch clockwise, Abdullereda opened the pressure relief valve. He felt the lightening of pressure on his chest. It wasn’t an explosive decompression but it was noticeable and uncomfortable. At once a red alarm light illuminated and a horn sounded. The air pressure kept dropping, as the interior of the airplane spit out all of its air, naturally flowing outward through the open valve and trying to equalize the inside pressure with the outside.
The temperature dropped. An EICAS message informed him that the Oxygen masks in the back had deployed. He pointed to it and hacked his clock. The second hand started running, smoothly five hundred and forty-four people, passengers and flight attendants, had left to live.
“The passengers have twelve minutes of Oxygen,” he said through the intercom.
“We will stay up here long enough to ensure they are all dead,” the Al Qaeda terrorist told him.
The twelve minutes were among the longest of Abdullereda’s life. The chime from the back, the flight attendants desperately trying to call the cockpit, never stopped. Someone was pounding on the door. Abdullereda could hear a woman yelling, screaming, pleading through the door — Suri. Even after the twelve minutes were up it didn’t stop.
“I thought you said they only had twelve minutes of Oxygen?” Muhammad asked scathingly.
Abdullereda’s mind whirled. No answer came to him. It wasn’t until he heard the sound of metal pounding on the door that he understood. “There are walk-around bottles,” he said quickly. “There are five or six bottles of Oxygen as well as a few fire-fighting hoods. They won’t last long at this altitude though, not with them expending themselves!”
One of the terrorist got up and looked through the peep hole. “He is right,” he said, lifting his mask to shout out what he saw. “There are four or five women—” he slumped to the floor, dropping like a stone.
“What happened to Fariz?” came the surprised voice of the other terrorist in back.
“The idiot took his mask off!” Abdullereda shouted over the intercom.
“I will put it back on!” the other terrorist said, leaning over and struggling with the inert body of his companion.
“Be careful! At this altitude it only takes a few seconds to black out without your mask!” Abdullereda warned. It was no use. In his effort to save his companion, who was already turning purple, the other terrorist twisted and pulled at his Oxygen mask just enough to break the seal of his mask. He could still have saved himself when he felt the first wave of light headedness or nausea hit him, but instead he continued to struggle with the mask of his comrade.
The end result of his stupidity was that he fell out of his seat and onto the prostrate form of his partner.
“Do you want me to descend or repressurized?” Abdullereda asked desperately, thinking maybe, just maybe he could at least save Suri, who was still pounding weakly at the door.
“No! If it is Allah’s will that they die as well then they will be martyrs!”
They stayed at altitude for another half an hour. The banging on the cockpit door grew weaker and weaker and finally disappeared altogether. The cockpit grew colder. Finally, a shivering Muhammad allowed the captain to start the air conditioning packs and descend. He pressurized the cabin and descended to ten thousand feet; that would keep them out of radar coverage. Then he turned south, heading toward Indonesia.
When they finally reached ten thousand feet Abdullereda took off his mask. The stench of shit and piss from the two dead terrorists mixed with the sharp metallic smell of blood. Looking back over his shoulder, Abdullereda saw the ashen face of Jaren looking disapprovingly at the two terrorists who’d collapsed on his lap.
He threw up into the pubs bin next to his seat.
Miserable and tired, Abdullereda flew the flight plan to Soekarno International, Jakarta, Indonesia. He didn’t make a single call, but he switched to approach frequency and heard the controllers vectoring people around, clearing the airspace so that he could come in and land. He felt like a robot, not trusting himself to land the airplane but instead hooking up the autopilot to fly the ILS into the airport.
After landing he followed a truck across the field and into a hanger. At long last Abdullereda shut down the airplane. Even then it wasn’t over. It took both of them to move the rigid bodies away from the door so that they could open it. When they did open the cockpit door Abdullereda was met with Suri’s dead eyes.
She lay back against a pile of other flight attendants. They were all huddled by the cockpit door. The Oxygen mask was still on her face. She stared at the door as if still wanting an answer as to why — why?
He had to climb over her to get to the aircraft door, trying not to look back in the cabin which was eerily silent and yet stank of death. Reaching the door he had to clear another few bodies away, and then he almost forgot to disarm it, but he remembered, and threw the latch.
Abdullereda was exhausted, but unlike a normal flight he didn’t go to a hotel. He was given a cot in a cold room with a concrete floor. On the floor next to the cot was a cup of cold tea and a Quran. He collapsed onto the cot still in his uniform which was stained with sweat, blood, urine and vomit, ignoring everything.
CHAPTER 8: Rogues Gallery
The meeting took place in a nondescript brick and mud house just inside the Syria-Iraq border. There was a single large table made of local wood, old beyond knowing, with rough edges and a top worn smooth from innumerable hands, clay bowls, and the like.
The owner of the house, a large structure for the area, furnished tea for gathering and otherwise tried to play host. It was an important opportunity for his future and his family, but it had its risks as well.
There were three groups of players gathered in his dining room, chosen because of the large size and the large window overlooking the outside terrace. Light was more important than security. This far north into Iraq and this close to the Syrian border meant there were virtually no security risks.
One of the groups present, a knot of four men, strangely they were literate, even well educated, but arrogant and brutal, represented ISIS. The ISIS killers wore their loose fitting clothing with proud rusty brown stains, bragging of how many non-conforming Muslim heads they piled on the side of the road or played soccer with. They appeared to have purposefully left civilization behind; they were grimy, unwashed, their teeth were yellow and their fingernails had suspicious detritus packed beneath them.