Page 102 of The Wolves Come at Night
“You, Jackson. Push off the stairs and shut the door. Do you know how to secure a plane’s doors?” When she shook her head, Angelie snapped her fingers at the pilot. “Help her. I’ll get the engines going. We must leave now. Santiago has everything ready. The hangar doors are open, we will not be stopped.”
“Go? In this?”
Angelie tossed her a pirate grin. “It is a plane, Taylor. It will fly.”
“We’re stealing the sheik’s 747? Is that wise?”
“You promised no questions.”
Fuck.
The set of boarding stairs they used was against the plane’s fuselage. Taylor pushed it away hard, grateful it was on wheels, then slammed the door into place. The pilot reached for the lever and locked it. Well, that was easy enough.
Taylor watched out the porthole window—somehow, no one had caught wind of their actions outside of the two hangar guards. Would that stand as they moved the big plane onto the tarmac and took off? This is utterly insane. Her adrenaline was pumping, and she barely noticed the pilot had left her, running up the stairs to join Angelie in the cockpit. Taylor was torn—go for the painting? Or head up and see what other nonsense Angelie was going to get them into?
The latter won. She had no idea how to use the micro explosives properly anyway.
Taylor climbed the stairs as the engines roared to life. She made her way forward in time to hear the pilot call, “We’re ready.”
Angelie appeared by her side. “Come,” she said to Taylor, pulling her by the bicep into the cockpit. Angelie took the copilot’s seat and gestured for Taylor to take the jump seat behind her, buckling herself in.
Taylor didn’t want to think about the lack of preparation—she knew pilots always checked out their planes from top to bottom before they took off—just hoped like hell they were going to get lucky. The plane had been getting standard maintenance, which was allegedly finished, but still. If she died in a plane crash stealing a 747, she thought Baldwin might just march into the afterlife and kill her himself.
The pilot and Angelie spoke in a shorthand Taylor didn’t understand but sounded official. The engines rumbled excitedly as the pilot got the plane moving. How they’d gotten lucky enough that the hangar doors were open, she didn’t know.
The plane went right onto the tarmac like a dog off its leash, heading for freedom. They taxied to the queue of planes waiting to take off, Angelie cursing under her breath or calling on the gods for help, Taylor didn’t know which.
She picked up a pair of headphones, set one speaker to her free ear. Now Santiago was speaking on one headset, the air traffic controllers on another. The plane taxied, moving down the row. Three to go. Two to go. One. And then it was their turn.
“Prepare for takeoff,” the pilot said, lining up the plane, and gunned it.
Taylor had always loved flying , and especially the moment when the engines revved into a higher gear and the plane starts to leap forward. It normally gave her a sense of hope and excitement. Now, she found herself chanting little prayers in time with the deep thwapping of the great tires on the tarmac. Forty seconds. That’s all it would take for them to get in the air.
She counted down backward in her head. When she got to one, the plane soared into the sky.
They’d made it. My God, they’d done it.
She was still grinning when the gunshots rang out.
Fifty-Two
It was bedlam immediately. The plane still rocketed toward the sky, but the pilot was now slumped forward, blood spraying from a neck wound on the windscreen in front of him. Angelie was fighting with the controls, screaming at Taylor to “find him, find him!” as the plane dipped right, then left.
Taylor flung off her harness and palmed the borrowed Glock 40 that she’d stuck into the holster in the back of her jeans. Angelie had plenty of guns, but this was the one Taylor knew best. She dove through the now open cockpit door into the body of the plane, yanking the reinforced steel closed behind her.
The pilot hadn’t bothered turning on the plane’s interior lights—one less thing to draw attention—so it took her a second to get rid of the imprint of the runway lights burning in her vision. She wasn’t exactly excited about shooting at random into the darkness, either—she didn’t think planes took well to bullets.
Her thoughts were answered by a roar, extremely loud in the close air, that gave a supersonic whistle by her ear and slammed into the cockpit door. Thank God she’d thought to pull it closed or that bullet would have gone right out the front window. Or into the back of Angelie’s head. She heard a clatter of feet, then silence.
Unlike the commercial jets she was used to, with rows of seats and compartments, this plane was broken into living areas, and she could see the width of it now that her eyes were adjusting. This upper deck was more of the same from downstairs—casual living that ended in a staircase. Chances were whoever was shooting at them had fled back to the main level of the plane. The private area, Angelie had said. That’s where they’d been heading before all hell broke loose. The lower deck housed the bedrooms, a private living room, a conference room…and the painting they were trying to steal.
This is crazy, she said to herself as she made her way carefully down the stairs, weapon up and at the ready. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Each step gave her a moment to assess what was happening.
Someone had shot their pilot as they were taking off.
Whoever that was must have a death wish, because if Angelie hadn’t jumped on the controls, they would all be very, very dead now.
Does Angelie know how to fly a damn airplane? That brought her up short for a moment. It would seem so; the plane was still climbing, the angle of ascent steep enough that Taylor was bracing her arm against the railing as she went down the stairs.
