Page 7 of Savage Reckoning

I swing around at Rome’s voice. Then grind my jaw when I see Ed sauntering along behind him, pushing Rome’s hospital-issue wheelchair.

“Are you still here?” I mutter.

“Seems so, darlin’.” He deposits Rome at the foot of the bed then drags another chair over and places it on the other side of the bed, opposite me. “Gabe Sawyer, ma’am.” He flashes his million-watt smile at Magda. “How’re you doin’?”

My eyes narrow. What the fuck is he doing, giving a false name? Before I can call him out, Rome chips in.

“Magda. Do you feel like talking?”

She drags her gaze from Ed and forces an unconvincing smile. “I think so.”

“Okay.” He sees her hesitancy, appreciates that she’s more than little fragile right now. “We’ll just take it slow. Can you tell us, in your own words, what happened? I was there, I heard and saw a lot of it myself, but it would be great if you could just go through it, from your perspective, from when you first realised something was wrong.”

She nods and takes a few moments to collect her thoughts. “We were maybe forty-five minutes out of Brussels, cruising at an altitude of twelve and a half thousand feet. There was a sudden jolt to the starboard side. Not a lot, and no damage according to the instruments, but enough to worry about. Something had hit us. Too high to be a bird strike. Drone, maybe… Some idiot messing about. I decided to lose altitude as a precautionary measure until I could be sure what was happening. At nine thousand feet, I spotted something coming at us, again from starboard. There was a trail of vapour streaming from it. It was too fast to be a drone. Obviously a missile. I evaded it, just, and carried on dropping. I thought if I could get us on the ground…”

She pauses, takes a shuddering breath. “The next thing, we were hit. I’d just triggered the alarm, I think…”

“You did. The distress call reached Caraksay.”

Magda nods. “Good. I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up in here.”

“You actually saw the missile?” Rome presses her. “No mistake?”

She shakes her head. “Not the one that hit us. I never saw that coming. But the other, definitely. They fired at us three times altogether, scored a direct hit on the third.”

“That’s a lot of firepower,” Ed murmurs. “You have powerful enemies.”

Rome ignores him. “You might as well share all of this with the police. There’ll be explosives residue on the wreckage, so they’ll know we were deliberately attacked. What were your coordinates when the first strike connected?”

Magda rattles off a string of numbers that Rome jots down in his phone. “Casey may be able to calculate a possible location for where it was launched from.”

Casey Savage is our resident IT geek. I’m not sure if GIS mapping is a speciality of hers, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

“Is there anything else? Anything at all?”

Magda shakes her head. “The flight log will be in the wreckage somewhere.”

“Yeah, it will. We can get Casey to hack into that if the investigators don’t release it to us.” Rome suddenly changes tack. “What’s the story on this?” He tips his chin at the cage suspending her bedclothes above the mattress.

“I’m down for surgery as soon as a theatre is free. I think… I think they’ll remove the leg. It’s too badly smashed…” She chokes back a sob. “I’ll be a cripple…”

“No,” I say, determined to scotch this right away. “No, you won’t. You may lose the leg…” I’ve seen the preliminary reports, I know that’s a near certainty, “and if you do, you’ll be fitted with a prosthetic. Not ideal, but you’ll walk again just fine.”

“I’m a pilot. What use is a one-legged pilot?” she sobs. “And a prosthetic will cost a fortune. I don’t have that sort of money.”

“Do you think we’d let you pay for it?” Rome’s expression is fierce. “No way. The firm will cover everything you need. And if you have to retrain to fly with one leg, or we have to adapt the chopper to suit, that’ll happen, too. Shit-hot pilots are few and far between, do you think we’ll let you slip away?”

“I thought—”

His gaze hardens. “You thought wrong. Let this lot do their job and fix you up, then we’ll take over and see you back on your feet. And in the air. Is there anything else you need right now?”

She manages to conjure up a trembling smile. “Do you have grapes?”

Rome grins back. “Do I fuck have grapes. Might be able to run to a bar of chocolate if it’s comfort food you’re after.”

“Here. Have these.” Ed digs in the pocket of his leather jacket and produces a pack of Skittles. He hands them to Magda. “Get well soon, ma’am.”

CHAPTER 2

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