CIA Jet A415
Mexican airspace
March 29
0630 hours
Both pilots were wearing parachutes. Along with the guns they had pointed our way, I took this as a bad sign.
The plane continued flying normally, indicating they had activated the autopilot.
I raised my hands, trying to stay calm. Zoe and Mike did the same thing.
Murray didn’t. The smug grin he’d worn all morning grew even wider. “It’s about time,” he said to the pilots. “I was wondering when you were going to show.”
“Murray!” Zoe screamed. “You scumbag! You set us up!”
Murray shrugged. “I am evil.” He unbuckled his seat belt and returned his attention to the pilots. “Where’s my parachute?”
“Oops,” the male pilot said. “We must have forgotten it.” He and his partner laughed, enjoying watching us squirm. Cyrus Hale might have vetted them himself, but it appeared he had made a very serious mistake.
Murray’s grin faded. “That’s not funny. C’mon. Where’s my parachute?”
“Parachutes are for SPYDER agents who don’t get caught,” the female pilot said. She grabbed the emergency release for the external door, despite the fact that we were several miles above the earth.
At that height, the air pressure outside the jet cabin would be far lower than the pressure inside it. Once the door was opened, we could get sucked right out. However, since both pilots had guns trained on us, there didn’t appear to be much we could do to stop them.
“I knew we shouldn’t have trusted you, Murray!” Zoe shrieked. “You are the worst person ever!”
“Me?” Murray asked, now on the edge of panic. “These guys are about to kill all of us!” He spun back to them. “SPYDER won’t be happy when I don’t show up alive!”
The pilots broke into laughter again. “SPYDER?” the man asked. “That’s who gave us the order to kill all of you.”
His finger tensed on the trigger of his gun.
Erica suddenly lashed out a foot, kicking the man’s hand so hard we heard the bones crack. He howled as the gun flew from his grasp.
Erica really had been faking being asleep. Now she sprang from her seat and slammed into the man. Both of them crashed into the female pilot, driving her into the door so hard that her head clonked off the metal frame.
Zoe was on her feet in a second, catching the gun before it hit the floor. She spun it around and aimed it at both pilots—just as the woman yanked the emergency release on the door. It popped open, instantly depressurizing the cabin. Both pilots were sucked out in the vortex.
In the split second before the door opened, Erica had dived for the cockpit. If her reflexes had been the tiniest bit slower, she would have been plummeting toward Mexico, but she made it to the relative safety of the tiny room.
Those of us in the main cabin were in trouble, though. Mike and I still had our seat belts on, but I was yanked against mine so hard that it felt as though my body might rip in half.
Zoe threw herself against the back of my seat so that it blocked her from being pulled out. The gun was ripped from her grasp and tumbled out the door.
Murray was so stunned by SPYDER’s betrayal, he didn’t act to save himself. He would have been sucked right out of the plane if his foot hadn’t got caught in the strap of his own pack. The pack jammed underneath his seat, holding him on board while his body was tugged toward the open door.
I felt my mind clouding almost immediately from the sudden lack of oxygen. My vision began to tunnel, shadows creeping in around the edges.
Then oxygen masks dropped from the overhead compartments. I quickly strapped mine on. Zoe, pinioned to the back of my chair, was able to get one too, as was Mike.
Despite the incredible suction trying to drag her out the door, Erica hauled herself into the pilot’s seat and strapped on a mask as well.
“Do you know how to fly this plane?” I yelled to her.
“Not this one in particular,” she called back, seizing the controls. “But I’ve taken flying lessons, and I read the pilot’s manual for this jet yesterday afternoon, just in case of trouble.”
It was preparation like this that made Erica the best partner on earth.
Meanwhile, Murray was still being pulled toward the door, held back only by the strap wrapped around his ankle. His survival instincts had finally kicked in, and he was desperately trying to find something else to grab on to, while still freaking out about SPYDER’s double cross. “They set me up!” he whined. “They used me! After all I’ve done for them, they tried to kill me just like I’m one of you losers!”
“How is this a surprise to you?” Zoe asked. “They’ve left you for dead before!”
“But this time they promised they wouldn’t!” Murray wailed. “I had them put it in my contract—and they welched on the deal, those jerks!”
Out my window, I could see the pilots in the distance. They had deployed their parachutes and were gently drifting to the ground.
We had crossed over the Yucatán peninsula from the ocean. Directly below us was a huge green swath of tropical jungle, fringed by white-sand beaches and vacation resorts. Unfortunately, it was still very far below us, given that we were in a crippled airplane.
In the cockpit, Erica was pushing the stick forward, slowly lowering us toward the ground. The pressure outside the plane was gradually equaling the pressure inside the cabin—but Murray was still in serious danger of being sucked out the door. The strap circling his ankle was starting to tear. He was now straining to fold himself in two so that he could grab the seat, but despite his new physique, this was incredibly difficult given the forces working on him. It was like trying to do a sit-up with a gorilla sitting on his chest.
I leaned toward him, extending my hand toward his.
“Let him go,” Zoe said bitterly. “He set you up! He was never going to show you where SPYDER was hiding! This was only a ruse by SPYDER to get rid of you and Erica.”
“And me,” Murray sniveled. “Obviously I’m just as expendable as they are!”
“How did SPYDER engineer this?” I asked him. “Did they get word to you in the jail?”
Murray pointedly didn’t answer. But he kept straining for my outstretched hand.
So I pulled away from him. “Fine. You can help yourself.”
“Okay!” Murray screamed. “You’re right! Somehow, SPYDER slipped a coded message into my food a few days ago. I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they have someone in the school cafeteria.”
“That would explain the food,” Mike observed. “It certainly tastes like SPYDER has someone working in the cafeteria.”
“Anyhow,” Murray went on, “the message told me to cut a deal to bring you to them.”
“What about Adam Zarembok?” Erica yelled from the cockpit. “Was he even a real mole—or was he just a patsy?”
Murray hesitated, like he didn’t want to admit the truth.
I crossed my arms over my chest, making a show of refusing to help him.
The strap of Murray’s pack tore some more. Only a few stitches were now keeping him inside the plane.
“All right!” Murray cried. “Yes! Zarembok’s clean! SPYDER knew I had to give you someone to sell the story, but they didn’t want to cough up a real mole. So someone planted the documents in Zarembok’s room.”
“Who?” Zoe demanded.
“I don’t know!” Murray dug his fingers into the plane’s grimy carpet, desperately looking for something to hold on to, but found no purchase. “They barely told me anything about what was going to happen.”
“But you knew Erica and I were supposed to die, right?” I asked. “You thought the plan was for you and the pilots to bail out and leave Erica and me to crash?”
Once more, Murray hesitated before answering.
Erica tilted the plane to the left, so that gravity was now tugging Murray toward the door as well. Some of the few remaining stitches in the strap popped.
“Okay! Okay!” Murray yelled. “Yes, I knew the pilots and I were going to bail out. But I swear, the plan was never for you to die in a plane crash!”
I got the sense that he was telling the truth. Which concerned me even more than his lying.
“Heads up back there!” Erica called from the cockpit. “We have a slight problem!”
This was also concerning. When most people said they had a slight problem, it meant they’d done something like burn the toast. For Erica, it was most likely something far worse.
For example, a missile attack.
A kid my age really shouldn’t have known what an incoming missile looked like. But sadly, I had seen one more times than I’d seen Star Wars. And so I instantly recognized the shiny silver object racing toward us outside my window.
I instinctively traced its smoke trail to see where it had launched from. It led down to a tract of jungle near the coast.
Zoe wheeled on Murray. “Erica and Ben weren’t supposed to die in a plane crash because they were supposed to die in a missile attack?”
“Yes,” Murray conceded softly.
“You are the worst!” Zoe screamed at him. “Let him die, Ben! He deserves it!”
To be honest, I was tempted. It was infuriating to know that almost everything Murray had said over the past day was a lie designed to lure me to my death. My first impulse was to grab the fraying strap and tear it loose, sending Murray tumbling out of the plane.
But then I would be just as bad as he was.
So I reached for him again.
“Ugh,” Zoe groaned. “Ben, you are way too decent for your own good.”
“Erica?” Mike called up to the cockpit. “Any chance you can ditch this missile?”
“I’ll do my best,” Erica replied. “Make sure you’re all buckled in tight. This is going to be rough.”
Zoe shoved off the back of my seat with all her strength and landed in her own seat, then quickly fastened her belt.
Murray was still hanging by what remained of the strap.
Outside the window, the missile grew bigger and bigger, glinting in the morning sun. It was now close enough for me to make out Cyrillic letters on the side. I was pretty sure that made it a Russian DX380: heat seeking.
“Everyone ready?” Erica asked.
“No!” I said, but it was drowned out by Zoe yelling “Do it!”
Murray made a last-second lunge. He clamped his hand around my wrist, and I did the same to him.
Erica pushed hard on the stick. The plane suddenly banked to the right and dove.
We were all thrown toward the left-hand wall.
The strap ripped. Murray flew toward the open door. I held on to his arm as tightly as I could, and since he had been working out a lot, he held me even tighter. His body was whipped around so that his feet were almost at the door. My muscles screamed in pain, but I didn’t let go.
The missile screamed through the air above us, missing us by fifty feet, then arced around to give us chase.
The ground was coming up fast. We were suddenly close enough to make out individual trees.
And then close enough to make out individual branches.
“Erica!” Mike called out. “Anytime you want to pull up would be good with me!”
“I’m trying!” Erica yelled back. “The pilots dismantled some of the controls before they bailed!”
And just when my day was going so well, I thought.
Mere seconds before we smashed into the forest, Erica managed to right the plane. We swooped out of the dive and rocketed along above the treetops.
We were now low enough that the pressure inside the plane was the same as that outside, so there was no longer much danger of getting sucked out the door. Instead, we only had the dangers of crashing or getting blown up to worry about.
Murray thudded to the floor and let go of my arm. He’d grabbed me so tightly, I had red craters in my flesh from his fingertips.
I couldn’t see the missile out the window anymore, but I could hear the flare of its booster rocket, meaning it was still homing in on us.
“Get to the luggage!” Erica ordered. “There’s a grenade launcher in my duffel bag!”
There was a time, back before I had come to spy school, when a statement like that would have struck me as unusual. Now it was music to my ears. We no longer needed the oxygen masks, so I tore mine off, unbuckled my seat belt, and scrambled for the storage room at the rear of the plane.
Mike and Zoe were doing the same thing.
Murray merely lay on the floor, gasping for breath after his near-death experience.
An unending expanse of green jungle stretched below us in every direction. There was nowhere to land the plane.
Mike reached the storage room first. He yanked the door open, unzipped the duffel bag, and yelped in concern. “Erica! There’s no grenade launcher in here! Only a bunch of T-shirts, bras, and makeup!”
“That’s because you’re looking in my duffel bag,” Zoe informed him. She then unzipped the bag next to it.
Sure enough, it held the stubby, silver tube of a grenade launcher.
Mike and I let her have it. We both knew Zoe could use it better than we could. Mike was still new to spy school and, thus, hadn’t used much heavy artillery, while I simply didn’t have much aptitude with it. I had received an F on my last exam in weaponry, along with a comment from my professor that read This kid is so incompetent, he shouldn’t be allowed to use a fork, let alone a gun.
“Come steady me,” Zoe ordered, then slung the launcher’s strap over her shoulder and raced back through the plane to the open doorway.
Mike and I followed her. We had to leap over Murray, who was now curled up on the floor in the fetal position and bargaining with God. “Please don’t let me die,” he whined. “If you save me, I’ll be good. I swear!”
Zoe sneered at him. “If you don’t want to die, why don’t you try helping us fend off the missile instead of crying about it?”
“Because it’s a missile!” Murray exclaimed. “A giant heat-seeking weapon of doom! You might as well be firing a peashooter at it!”
“That attitude is not helping,” I told him.
“Steady me, guys,” Zoe instructed. “Ben, I need you to make some calculations really fast.” She edged toward the open door.
Mike grabbed the wall by the cockpit with one hand and the back of my waistband with the other. I then wrapped my arms around Zoe, who braced herself against the frame of the open door and shouldered the grenade launcher.
From this position, I could see the treetops hurtling past right below us. The leaves shuddered in the wake of the jet.
“Hey!” Mike exclaimed. “I think I saw a monkey!”
“Mike!” Zoe snapped. “Focus!”
“Sorry,” Mike said. “I’ve never seen one in the wild before.”
Behind the jet, through the shimmer of its exhaust, I could see the missile closing in on us. It was narrowing the gap with disturbing speed. And to make things worse, the tail of our own plane was blocking a direct shot at it.
Murray was still on the floor, praying to any god he could come up with, covering all his bases. In short order, I heard him run through the religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, and a few I’d never even heard of before.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, it occurred to me that Zoe smelled amazing. Despite having been friends with her for so long, I had never held her this tightly before. I was pretty sure that, with death approaching, I reeked of sweat, but Zoe smelled like she had just been traipsing through a rose garden.
I shook my head, wondering why that had even occurred to me, and focused on the missile. My mind filled with numbers as I calculated and recalculated the possible trajectories of a launched grenade, taking into consideration the speed of the jet, the speed of the missile, the ambient heat, and a dozen other factors. “Erica!” I yelled over the rush of air. “In exactly five seconds, I need you to cut hard to the left! Starting now!”
“Roger,” Erica replied coolly.
“Fire on my command,” I told Zoe.
“Okay,” she agreed.
The missile was now only a few feet from the tail of the plane.
“Fire!” I yelled.
Erica jagged to the left a split second before Zoe pulled the trigger.
The grenade launcher boomed. The recoil was so hard that it threw Zoe and me backward into Mike. We sailed across the cabin and slammed into the far bulkhead.
The sudden turn of the plane had given us a slightly wider angle on the missile. Zoe’s shot was perfect. It nailed the warhead full on. The missile erupted into a fireball right behind us, so close that we were buffeted by the shockwave. Our tail tipped upward, and the jet slewed wildly as Erica fought to get it under control.
Several trees below us were charbroiled in the blast, but we escaped it.
Except for the shrapnel.
Large chunks of missile scattered in all directions. Several hit our plane, punching holes through the walls like they were made of tissue paper. One whistled right past my head, then left a gaping exit wound on the far side of the cabin. Within seconds, the jet looked like a flying piece of swiss cheese.
Our tail caught the worst of it. Red-hot debris nearly sheared it right off.
The jet shuddered worryingly. The controls trembled in Erica’s hands. “Crash positions everyone!” she announced. “I need to land this thing now!”
“Land it where?” Murray howled. “There’s nothing around us but jungle!”
“Not quite,” Erica said.
Through the cockpit window, I saw what she was looking at. In the midst of all the greenery, a slash of dark blue was quickly approaching.
“Um, Erica,” Mike said warily. “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think this plane is designed for water landings.”
“Maybe not,” Erica agreed. “But I don’t see any other options. Hang on!”
We scrambled back through the perforated plane, threw ourselves into our seats, buckled up, and folded ourselves into crash positions. Even Murray stopped praying to do this.
Erica pushed the stick forward, bringing the jet down in as flat an angle as she could. Through a brand-new hole in the floor, I watched the terrain change from green to blue as the jungle ended and the lake began.
Zoe reached across the aisle. I took her hand in mine and held it as we quickly lowered toward the water.
Murray was reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
We skimmed across the surface of the water, then dropped down onto it. The plane jolted abruptly, as though Erica had slammed on the brakes. We were thrown forward against our seat belts once again. Anything that wasn’t bolted down flew toward the front of the jet and clanged off the bulkhead.
A wave exploded over the front window, and the jet shuddered to a stop.
We were alive.
We had a good three seconds to be thankful about that. Then the plane started sinking.
Water gushed through the numerous holes in the floor and sloshed through the open doorway. Within seconds we were ankle deep in the lake.
We hastily unbuckled our belts and scrambled from our seats. “Get my gear!” Erica ordered. “We’ll need it to survive!”
Mike hustled to the rear of the plane, opened the door to the luggage compartment—and found nothing there at all. The entire tail of the plane had snapped off during landing and was now twenty feet away, quickly disappearing beneath the surface. “The gear is gone!” Mike reported, then came running back up the aisle.
There was now more than a foot of water in the jet. It was going down fast.
“Abandon plane!” Murray announced. “Abandon plane!” When he got to the cabin door, however, Erica was standing in his path, blocking the exit. “Why aren’t you abandoning the plane?” Murray demanded.
“I’m a little concerned about the crocodiles,” Erica replied. She said it very calmly, as though she was talking about a pack of stray dogs, rather than a bunch of enormous, prehistoric man-eating reptiles.
I glanced out my window. We had skimmed all the way across the lake and almost made it to the far bank, which was lined with dozens of very large crocodiles. Until a few seconds before, they had been basking in the sun, but the plane crash had jolted them out of their stupor. Sensing easy prey, they were slithering into the lake and coming for us. It turned out, hungry crocodiles could move much faster than I’d realized. They raced toward us through the water, their beady little eyes poking just above the surface.
“Crocodiles?” Murray gasped, then turned his eyes to the heavens. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”
“Attempted murder, for one,” Zoe answered, then ticked more things off on her fingers. “Plus terrorism, assassination, destruction of public property, and being an all-around jerk. The question is really, what haven’t you done to deserve this?”
We were now up to our knees in water. The plane was tilting down and toward the left, where the lake was surging through the open door.
Erica scrambled to the opposite side of the plane and opened the emergency exit. Because of the tilt of the plane, this side was drier, with the right wing jutting up above the lake’s surface. Erica swung through the doorway onto the wing.
The rest of us followed her without hesitation. After all, Erica seemed to have a plan while we didn’t. (Well, I did have a plan, but it was simply swimming away from the crocodiles as quickly as I could and hoping they’d eat Murray first. Plus, I wasn’t sure it would work.)
More crocs were closing in on the right wing, but there was also a large tree with vine-draped branches extending out over the lake. The vines dangled seven feet above the tip of the wing, tantalizingly out of reach.
However, since the left side of the plane was sinking faster than the right, the right wing was slowly tilting upward. Erica edged out to the tip as it rose a few more inches, then leapt up and grabbed a low-hanging vine. She quickly shimmied up it into the branches of the tree, well out of crocodile range.
As she jumped, though, the wing trembled ominously. It had suffered serious damage in the crash and seemed ready to pop off. If we didn’t want that to happen, we’d all have to be very calm and careful.
Which was exactly the opposite of how Murray behaved. “I’m next!” he yelled, shoving the rest of us aside and racing up the wing. “Me me me me me!” Then he bounced on the wing like it was a diving board and grabbed a vine himself.
The wing shook wildly from his actions. Part of it tore from the hull of the plane with a sickening screech of rending metal.
Erica glared at Murray as he scrambled up into the branches, looking like she had half a mind to send him back down and tell him to wait his turn. Only, that wouldn’t have done the rest of us any good, and we were running out of time.
The broken wing dipped back down toward the surface of the lake. A crocodile the length of a car bobbed up only a few feet away from me, its mouth gaping open like a bear trap.
I heard some guttural reptile noises from behind me as well. Several crocs had swum through the open door of the plane and were now inside the cabin. One was gnawing on the grenade launcher.
Zoe and Mike went next. Since Zoe was short, Mike gave her a boost to get to the vines. Then he leapt up himself. He tried to do it carefully, without putting too much force on the wing, but it still quivered dangerously. More metal tore along the joint where the wing met the plane.
There was a sudden roar and a roiling of water inside the jet. Two big crocs were fighting each other for dibs on me.
I scurried out to the end of the wing, hoping it would hold long enough for me to jump off it.
It didn’t.
I had almost reached the tip when the wing tore from the jet hull and dropped back down to the lake’s surface with a resounding slap. The enormous crocodile who had been lurking close by wasted no time. It lunged from the water, dug its claws into the metal, and began hauling itself up. The two crocs who had been fighting inside the jet immediately put aside their differences, squeezed through the door of the plane, and flopped onto the wing as well.
Their added weight pulled it even farther down into the water.
A dozen more crocs surfaced around me.
When you chose to become a spy, in the back of your mind, you always knew there was a chance you could get killed by various things: guns, knives, bombs, missiles. Up until that morning, I had never considered crocodiles to be a possibility. But now it looked like Death by Crocodile was increasingly likely.
“Ben!” Erica yelled.
I tore my attention from the advancing reptiles to find Erica dangling upside down above me. She had hooked her knees over a branch, braced her feet below another one, and was reaching down to me like an acrobat hanging from a trapeze.
The closest croc was now only a few feet away and moving fast.
I leapt up and grabbed Erica’s hands. In the branches around her, Mike and Zoe struggled to pull her and me up into the tree.
As they lifted, the big croc lunged for me. I did the only thing I could think of.
I kicked it in the nose.
I gave the kick everything I had. It barely fazed the croc at all, but it prevented the beast from biting my legs off. It dropped back to the wing, sneezed, then sprang at me again.
Thankfully, my friends hauled me out of range just in time. The croc’s jaws snapped shut right beneath my toes. It plopped back into the water, then angrily turned on the other crocs nearby, roaring so loud it shook the tree. The smaller crocs quickly swam away in fear.
I found myself clustered with Zoe, Mike, and Erica in the branches, clinging to them with all my might, my heart thudding in my chest.
Below us, there was a final blorp of air as the jet sank beneath the surface of the lake. It quickly vanished into the murky depths.
Murray was picking his way through the branches ahead of us, working on saving his own skin without any thought for anyone else. Sensing our angry stares, he turned back to us with a sheepish smile. “Well, that sure was exciting, wasn’t it? Glad to see you all survived.”
“No thanks to you!” Zoe snarled. “You are the lowest, most despicable, slimiest weasel who ever walked the earth!” She swung through the branches as nimbly as a gibbon, quickly catching up to Murray. Even though he was bigger than her, she was amped up on anger and adrenaline. She slammed into him, grabbed him by the neck, and prepared to fling him into the lake, where several hungry crocodiles waited below.
“Stop!” Erica yelled.
Zoe reluctantly paused her attack. “Why?”
“We need him.”
“For what?” Zoe asked bitterly. “This whole thing was only a trick to get us on a plane and blast us out of the sky.”
“Not quite,” Erica insisted. “It wasn’t a lie that SPYDER is holed up somewhere down here.”
“How do you know?” Mike asked. “Murray’s lied about everything else.”
“But not this,” I said, realizing what Erica meant. “SPYDER fired that missile at us. And those pilots are certainly heading to rendezvous with them as well.”
“Exactly.” Erica turned to Murray. “You really thought you were going to SPYDER’s headquarters, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Murray mewled. “I thought I’d meet up with them after bailing out of the plane. I had no idea they wanted to kill me. Man, you can’t trust anyone these days.” Even though it made sense that he might only be saying this to save his skin, I believed him. Murray’s reaction to his betrayal had been too real.
“Good.” Erica picked her way through the branches, heading toward Murray, oblivious to the man-eating reptiles below us. “Okay, team, here’s the deal: We are in serious trouble. We might have survived for now, but we are still stranded in the middle of the jungle, and all our supplies just sank into the middle of Crocodile Central. I estimate our chances of survival at around fifty percent. And if we actually succeed in getting back to civilization, we still have to confront an adversary who obviously wants to eliminate us.”
“Excellent,” Mike said sarcastically. “Good pep talk, Erica.”
Erica ignored him. “There is one bright spot, though. SPYDER thinks we’re dead, which gives us an advantage against them.” She reached Murray, grabbed his wrist, and deftly wrenched his arm behind his back.
Murray yelped in pain.
“You know where they are,” Erica told him calmly. “So take us to them.”