Page 53 of Shadow Target

Cold metal pressed into the side of her neck.

Willow froze.

“Do not move, Willow Chamberlin.”

The voice was raspy, near her ear, and she could smell garlic and fish.

“Hands on the yoke,” the man ordered. He leaned down, unsnapping the leather safety around her pistol, removing the .45 from its holster.

She left the kneeboard in place on her right thigh, letting the pen drop, placing her hands on the yoke. Her heart thudded harshly in her chest. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the hulking shadow and shape of the man. He was bearded, unlike Zere, and the voice was different: deeper and chilling. His pistol pressed hard into the side of her neck. Pain radiated from around the point of contact. “Who are you?” she demanded, although she was afraid, she already knew the answer.

He chuckled. “I will ask the questions, woman, not you. But you can call me Tefere.”

Willow gasped; her fear confirmed. He pressed the barrel into her neck even harder.

“I didn’t catch you those many weeks ago, but now? I have you.” He turned, speaking in Somali to Zere, who sat down in the rear, drawing his own gun, sitting by the bulkhead in the rear, behind the copilot’s seat, aiming it at her. “Now,” he said triumphantly, “Zere has his pistol trained on your head. I’m going to remove mine and I am going to sit down in this seat, next to you. Listen carefully.” He pulled out a piece of note paper. “You are to put these GPS coordinates into your plane’s computer. We aren’t going where you’d planned. Do it now,” and he handed the paper to her.

Willow’s throat was tight with terror. She took the paper, seeing the GPS numbers scrawled across it. “I have to know where this is,” she said, punching the numbers in. “I have to know what I’m looking for on my screen. I have to adjust altitude, so we don’t fly into a mountain.”

“Zegye, Ethiopia.”

She swallowed hard, the map coming up on her screen. Half the construction crew was at another small village northeast of Bahir Dar, roughly twenty minutes away from Addis Zemen by helicopter. Shep was there with them. Her mind whirled with terror, trying to think through the situation. She was glad the barrel of his pistol was off her neck. She heard Zere settling his back against the rear bulkhead, sitting atop the cardboard boxes that ran the length of the plane. Zere had to be one of David’s soldiers! Which meant he would be a cold-blooded killer, too. “Why are we going there?” she demanded, giving David a challenging look.

Tefere smiled hugely, relaxing in the copilot’s seat. “Take off for Zegye and I will tell you on the way there.”

She looked hard at the screen. “There’s only a one-thousand-foot dirt runway outside of that town. This load is so heavy I need a much longer runway, or we risk a crash. This load was supposed to go to Addis Zemen.”

“Easy for your Otter to land on. Yes?” he asked.

Nodding, she muttered, “A dirt strip is a dirt strip. But it’s not as long. This is the heaviest load of the day. I may not be able to land and stop before the end of the strip.” She switched the button, the screen now showing a satellite view of the general area. The strip sat at around twenty-five hundred feet, surrounded by heavy forest at the top end and scrub brush at the bottom. It was in the hills, if they could be called such, tall as they were. She saw a main road leading into Zegye, a lakeside village, and it hooked up directly with a main highway. Trying to put it together, she asked, “Why not let me go to Addis Zemen?”

“I want this plane in the air, heading for Zegye,” he snapped. “Now! Or Zere will shoot you where you sit.”

Willow believed him. She heard the tower give her clearance to take off. “Okay,” she grunted. “Put your seatbelt on.”

“I don’t do anything a woman tells me,” David growled. “Take off!”

Her U-1A DeHavilland Otter was one of the toughest utility aircraft in the world. It had two landing wheels up front and a smaller one near the tail of the craft. It could carry eight-thousand pounds, fly a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and go as high as seventeen thousand feet, although Willow rarely flew above thirty-five hundred. It had a long narrow nose, a single propeller, and its rugged power plant was a Pratt and Whitney Wasp radial engine that, at its full six hundred horsepower, charged the plane along through the air at a thundering pace. It wasn’t a flashy plane by any means, but it was the greatest workhorse in the sky, used around the world. It could take a beating and keep on going. Its wingspan was fifty-eight feet, longer than a greyhound bus by almost half. Willow wondered why they were flying to this fishing village. What was waiting there? What was David going to do with her? She tried to keep the idea of being decapitated away from her, but it was impossible.

For the next ten minutes, she was trundling the Otter out of the apron area and onto the side runway that would get her to the take-off point. The tension in the cabin felt both fragile and hard to her. How could she alert Luke that she was being kidnapped?

Anchoring the Otter at the end of the runway, she received final permission for takeoff, and pushed the throttle gently forward, the engine growing louder and louder, the craft shaking and trembling. She lightened the contact her flight boots had with the rudder pedals, and the Otter lurched forward, moving ever faster and faster, everything becoming a blur outside the cabin. She was heading into a nightmare and knew it.

The Otter’s engine thundered, the craft vibrated and shook, hauling the plane with its eight-thousand-pound cargo up into the humid morning air. The sun had just breasted the horizon and Willow put on her aviator sunglasses. She made a dogleg turn at the end of the airport, gaining altitude, paralleling it. Eventually, the Otter flew past its perimeter and she banked the plane to the northeast, toward Zegye. She saw David pick up the other set of earphones and settle them over his head, pulling the microphone close to his lips.

“Very nice takeoff. You are a good pilot for a woman.”

Willow said nothing, her gaze constantly moving right to left across her controls. She had both hands on the yoke, the pedals now becoming the rudder for the craft as she lightly eased her boots onto the rubber surface of each.

“Originally,” David said, leaning back, smiling, “I had great dreams of kidnapping you and selling you to my adoptive father, Warlord, in Somalia.”

Willow jerked a look in his direction.

“Keep flying,” he snarled.

She turned her face forward, her heart beginning a slow pounding of dread.

“But…,” and he laughed, turning in the seat, speaking Somali to Zere, who then burst into laughter with him. Turning back to her, he said, “Instead, plans changed for you. Two of the most powerful and richest sex-traffickers in the world, one from Europe and the other from Pakistan, heard that I was going to capture you. They wanted to buy you instead of having my father decapitate you on the internet. They too, know the value of an American white woman with red hair.”

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