SIXTY-THREE

Andrei’s grip was crushing, as though someone had parked a truck upon Elias’s wrist. He cried out and let go of the wing strut as Andrei jerked him towards the open hatchway and within range of his stun gun. He brought it down to bear and was about to jolt him with it when he paused and looked irritably down at Anna, who’d finally managed to free her right hand. She grabbed her keyring from her pocket and brought its fob to her mouth, clamping it between her teeth to pull the rubber cap off a box-cutter blade that she then thrust straight upwards into the fork between Andrei’s legs. He gave a grunt of shock and pain. She stabbed again, and this time dragged the blade down his inner thigh in search of an artery. Blood spurted, staining his trousers dark. He swatted her hand away. The keyring went flying out the hatchway. Then he reached his stun gun down for her face, its nodes spitting blue.

It was Elias’s chance. He threw his shoulder at Andrei’s arm. It was like trying to tackle a lamppost, yet he managed to deflect the gun so that it brushed Andrei’s own calf for a moment, giving him enough of a jolt that he let go of Elias altogether and dropped the stun gun to the cabin floor. He recovered almost immediately, however. He swung his arm backhanded across Elias’s face, catching him on his cheek with the force of a sailboat boom, sending him staggering back along the platform, from which he’d have fallen for sure had he not thrown out a hand to catch Andrei by his sleeve and so save himself.

Andrei was still off balance from the stun gun. The sudden tug now dragged him from the cabin too. Worse, he misjudged where to place his foot on the platform step, so that his ankle turned beneath him. He went lurching sideways, flapping his arms to save himself. But it was no good, he reached and then passed his tipping point, only to twist around in the air with surprising agility and catch Elias by the knee as he went, his hand sliding down his calf to his ankle, clutching it so tightly that he pulled him off the platform step with him, forcing Elias to grab it with both hands before the pair of them fell to their deaths, leaving them swinging from it like some bizarre trapeze act, while also giving the Twin Otter such a jolt that it banked sharply to its right, forcing de Bruin to take corrective action.

The platform step was cold and slick with cloud, and Andrei was so heavy that it was all Elias could do to cling on. Indeed, his grip on it kept slipping, little by little, even as he tried to kick Andrei off. But Andrei grabbed his other leg too, then began climbing him like a pole.

The Twin Otter had stabilised enough for de Bruin to leave the cockpit and come back into the cabin. He saw the stun gun lying on the floor and made straight for it. But Anna finally freed her legs from the gorilla tape and she dived to reach it first. De Bruin tried to wrest it from her. She gave him a squirt with it instead. He grunted and fell hard, hitting his mouth against the edge of the bench as he went. She pressed the gun to his throat for several seconds as he lay there, putting him completely out of the fight before hurrying to the hatchway. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped out onto the platform.

Andrei had by now clambered all the way up onto Elias’s back. His left arm was around his chest and his right hand was upon his shoulder. Anna knelt down on the step. She reached the stun gun for his face. He tried to draw away but she stretched out after him and touched it against his cheek. It was only for a moment, but the shock still robbed his arms of their Samson strength. With a dull grunt of surprise, he let go of Elias and began to fall in slow balletic rolls until suddenly he recovered, howling and clawing at the air as if he could still somehow save himself. But then he was swallowed by a cloud and was gone.

Elias was utterly spent. It was all he could do to cling on. Anna grabbed him by his arm and then his belt to help haul him back to safety. He lay on the step for a few moments, breathing hard as he regathered his strength. But then the Twin Otter began to bank once more under their combined weight. They scrambled back into the cabin, on whose floor de Bruin was still lying, unconscious from the stun gun. ‘Can you fly?’ asked Elias.

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘Can you?’

‘Sure,’ he said. He had to lean against the growing camber as they made their way to the cockpit, stepping over de Bruin’s pilot, the back of his head sticky with blood from an ugly-looking gash. He slipped into the pilot’s seat while Anna sat copilot. He stared in dismay at the Twin Otter’s complex array. His experience of flying was a single lesson on an adventure weekend the best part of ten years ago, in a much smaller aircraft that hadn’t been about to tip into a dive. But he had to try something. He took the stick in both hands and began to draw it towards him when a man spoke softly from behind.

‘No,’ he murmured.

Elias looked around. De Bruin’s pilot was still lying on the cabin floor but looking at him with a pleading face. He tried to push himself up onto an elbow and say something else, but he couldn’t manage it. The plane tipped further, filling Elias with a dizzy, heady sensation, with the certainty that they were about to stall. Maybe he could have worked out how to save them in time, but time was exactly what they didn’t have. He came to a decision. He hurried back to take the pilot beneath his arms and lift him bodily into his seat. But he just sat there with blood leaking down his forehead into his glazed eyes. ‘Talk to me,’ said Elias desperately. But the man just shook his head.

The Twin Otter finally stalled. There was a moment of floating lightness and then they began to dive and spin at the same time, slowly at first, yet still enough to send Elias tumbling onto Anna in the copilot’s seat. He cried out in fear and threw his arms around her, he couldn’t help himself. She hugged him back every bit as fiercely, muttering prayers into his ear as they hurtled out of control, glimpses between the clouds of the sea beneath, its rippled surface drawing ever nearer as rays of thin afternoon sunlight glinted off the huge white blades of a wind turbine away to their left.

The way they rolled made Elias nauseous. He couldn’t have taken the controls even had he wanted. But it seemed to have the opposite effect on the pilot, slapping him from his stupor at last. He took hold of the stick. The Twin Otter spun even harder for a moment but then somehow straightened out. They were still in their dive, however. It was pull up now or hit the sea and die. Yet the pilot pushed the stick forward instead, steepening their angle of descent, plunging them at the sea below, which now completely filled their view. This couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be. The man had chosen death over disgrace and prison. And it was too late to do anything about it.

Elias cried out again. He clutched Anna to him and buried his face in her neck. But now the pilot finally pulled the stick towards him, and the Twin Otter instantly responded, so that Elias belatedly realised he’d simply been getting traction back into the wings, like steering into a skid on an icy road. And finally their nose began to lift and they pulled up out of their dive to skim bare metres above the water, passing so close to a gorgeous blue-and-gold pleasure yacht that he could see the breeze rippling in its sails and the open mouths of the crew in their orange life-jackets as they gaped at the Twin Otter, not entirely sure what it was that they’d just witnessed.