Finally over the headset came Zafar’s cracking, panic stricken voice. The man was afraid of death; afraid of martyrdom!
“Someone is shooting at us!”
It took Abdullereda a moment to register what Zafar was saying. Shooting at them; were they? He laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ve got enough Uranium to make the entire city uninhabitable!” Abdullereda yelled back. “They can shoot us down. It doesn’t matter anymore!”
The altimeter dropped precipitously through thirty thousand feet. He yelled triumphantly. There was no stopping them now. The operation was a success!
Zafar was beating on his arm — coward!
Abdullereda turned a scathing look upon his co-terrorist only to hear Zafar scream through the microphone, “No, someone on the airplane is shooting!” He pointed back at the bulkhead.
“What — it cannot be — Allah would not allow it!” Abdullereda exclaimed in panic, but looking back he saw a mass of bullet holes in the bulkhead immediately behind him. One of the guards was clutching at this arm. The other was at the peephole, looking back in the cabin. All at once his head snapped back and he was screaming. He pulled away from the cockpit door with one hand over his eye. Blood streamed from beneath his fingers.
Slade woke up to the howl of electronic equipment and cooling fans. The E&E compartment was a dim, noisy place that smelled like dust mixed with warm electronics. His head pounded. There was dried blood on the side of his temple where he’d hit the corner of an equipment rack in his fall.
Fighting off the fog of unconsciousness, Slade checked his watch. They’d been airborne for over six hours — six hours! It struck him; they were within an hour of Tel Aviv. All weariness and pain washed away in a torrent of adrenaline. Slade got up and headed for the ladder.
Quickly, but with the necessity of caution, he raised the hatch again. The galley area was clear. He could see the cockpit door. It was closed. Damn!
Slade crawled up through the hatch onto the empty passenger deck. He went straight to the cockpit door, listening. He could hear muffled voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He tried the door gingerly, but it took only a slight turn of the lever to know it was locked.
Slade retreated to the nearest exit doors. Looking out of both sides of the aircraft he tried to gauge his position. It was the middle of the night in Tel Aviv but he thought he could distinguish the dark swath of the Red Sea and the lights of Eilat.
“Damn!” Slade was running out of time.
He ran back to the cockpit door. Like most cockpit doors it was bulletproof, but Slade knew something most people didn’t know. Airlines were cheap, their CEO’s were even cheaper. They’d spend money on themselves but not on the security of their aircraft, not unless they were forced to.
He ducked into the bathroom behind the cockpit. The cockpit door might be armored but the bathroom bulkhead inexplicably was not. Slade pried away the mirror, exposing the thin aluminum skin between himself and the cockpit. He was on the point of cutting a small hole in the aluminum so that he could discover the positions of the crew when the throttles came back.
Muffled shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” reached his straining ears. He had no more time. Slade put the muzzle of the P90 against the aluminum at a forty-five degree angle, aiming down from chest level. He squeezed the trigger. The bullets cut a hot swath through the aluminum. He rotated the gun from right to left, shooting an arc from the captain’s side of the cockpit to the first officer’s side. There were screams and shouts of anger.
Slade darted out of the bathroom and behind the cockpit door just as a burst of gunfire erupted into the bathroom. It pierced the bulkhead going the other way, ripped through the opposite wall and tore through the flight attendant jumpseats by the entry door.
A light suddenly appeared at the cockpit peephole and just as quickly disappeared as someone looked through to see what was going on. Slade shoved the muzzle of the P90 against the glass and fired a quick burst. The recoil nearly knocked the light automatic rifle out of his hands, but he was rewarded with a high pitched wail. The bullets hadn’t penetrated, but they shattered the glass and drove the shards into the jihadist’s eye.
Slade ran back to the E&E door and flew down the ladder. He’d studied the schematics for the A380 and toured the aircraft meticulously in Paris. Now that knowledge came in handy. Just like his beloved Boeings, the E&E compartment went underneath the cockpit. In fact, you could see the compartment from the rudder pedal wells beneath the instrument panel; it worked the other way as well.
Standing beneath the deck, Slade fired upward through the floor, spraying the area behind the pilot seats with the remainder of his magazine. Loading the last cylindrical magazine, the buffeting of the aircraft now growing throwing the airplane around and getting so loud Slade couldn’t hear the bark of the gun, he wormed his way up beneath the first officer’s rudder pedals, only able to get his arms and the gun into the narrow space. Sticking the muzzle of the compact gun through the opening he sprayed the first officer’s seat blindly.
A sharp cry came from above.
He repeated the operation at the captain’s rudder pedals, thinking he heard a groan but no more. His hammer fell on an empty chamber.
The noise and vibration in the aircraft was now so violent that Slade could see only in a blur. Staggering back, he crawled up the ladder and bounced from wall to wall to the cockpit door. With great difficulty he entered the emergency code.
The entry buzzer was lost in the deafening sound of the slipstream, but a warning light would flash, informing the crew that someone was over-riding the lock. Slade waited. They had thirty seconds to deny him entry; if they did there was no way in short of breaking the door down.
It was the longest thirty seconds of his life.
With agonizing sluggishness the seconds ticked by until finally he felt the lock open. Slade burst through the cockpit door. Two men lay bleeding on the cockpit floor. One man was slumped over in the first officer’s seat. The captain, bleeding from several wounds, was just grasping the rotary switch that would emergency lock the door — it was on the first officer’s side of the upper panel — he had to unstrap to reach it and was a second too late to deny Slade.
With an inarticulate roar Slade lunged forward and grappled the captain’s bloody arm, dragging him from his seat. The captain screamed and struggled, but Slade pounded him in the face mercilessly, once, twice, three times with his fist. The captain was no fighter. He sank into unconsciousness.
The lights of Tel Aviv were close.
Leaping over the center console and into the pilot’s seat Slade took the stick in his left hand and eased it back while pulling the four throttles back with his right hand. The A380 protested, already hurtling fifty knots beyond the barber pole, the maximum airspeed on the electronic instrument display.
Slade ignored the warning clacker, continuing to ease the nose up. Slowly the horizon climbed up the display and the speed began to slacken. The aircraft groaned as the metal of the structure, bent by the terrific forces of air pressure, flexed. The sound of the slipstream lessened. After another thirty seconds of gingerly bringing the nose up Slade levelled the huge airplane at three thousand feet and turned it to the west; out to the Mediterranean Sea.
He breathed a sigh of relief, but then heard the unmistakable sound of fury behind him. He turned to see one of the wounded jihadist guards stirring on the cockpit floor behind him. The man was trying to get his AK-47 in line with Slade, cursing, “Die Crusader dog!”