“I never got to thank him for the invitation to this event.”
“Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here. He had an urgent matter to attend to in Dubai.”
The elevator opened, and Carlton escorted her out into a small storage area before showing her through the door into the main hold. He froze at the sight that met them.
The vast cargo area was completely empty.
Carlton wheezed a couple of times, then yelled, “Where is my car? I saw it loaded onto the plane last night before we took off from England! When I find out who—”
Without warning, the airplane suddenly plunged into a dive, sending both of them soaring toward the ceiling. Floating ten feet above the floor, they flailed for a few moments. Then the jet rapidly reversed course, slamming them down.
Lyla landed on flat metal, but Carlton wasn’t so lucky. His head smashed into a bare stanchion that should have been holding down his car.
She got to her feet and rushed over to him. Blo
od pooled around his head. He was unconscious but breathing.
With a frantic search of the storage area, she found some cloth towels and took them back to the cargo hold. She propped up Carlton’s head with two towels before pressing the third against the wound.
Yelling for help was useless. The hold was too isolated for anyone to hear her. She would have to leave him alone so she could get him medical attention.
She ran back to the elevator and had to wait for what seemed like forever for its return. The glacial ascent was agonizing.
When she reached the main deck, she sprinted forward through the rear lounge, past the conference room and into the piano bar, which was eerily silent. She gasped when she saw why.
All of the passengers were seated with emergency oxygen masks over their faces. Each of them was slumped over, their eyes closed.
Lyla approached the nearest woman with dread. She put a finger to the woman’s throat and sighed with relief when she felt a pulse. She tried two more passengers. Though comatose, they were all alive.
She nearly panicked, then it occurred to her the situation might have been caused by an explosive decompression, which would explain the plane’s sudden dive.
But she quickly dismissed the idea. Not only would she have felt the frigid air from outside even if the tear in the fuselage had occurred on the upper level, she would have also fallen unconscious herself seconds after reaching the main deck.
She checked two more rooms and found the same chilling sight: all of the passengers and crew with masks on and out cold.
Lyla wasn’t an expert on large airliners. Flying was just a hobby—her only one—a chance to get away from the stress of her job for a few hours a week where work emails couldn’t reach her. Even better, her mother couldn’t call to berate her for not having a husband at the advanced age of thirty-one.
She knew everything that could go wrong with a Cessna twin-prop Corsair, but the Airbus was far more complicated. Something might have malfunctioned in the emergency oxygen system, but she had no idea what that could be. A better question was why they were wearing the masks in the first place if the air in the plane was breathable.
Lyla looked out a window and saw nothing but the sun shining through scattered clouds on the calm water below, but they should have stayed over the Saudi Arabian Desert for the duration of the flight. They were out of range for an ordinary mobile phone, and the odds of finding a satellite phone on board were minuscule. She had to get into the cockpit. If the pilots were on the same oxygen system, they might be unconscious as well, but she could radio a Mayday and get help from someone on the ground. She couldn’t land this plane, but the controls were so highly automated these days that someone at air traffic control in Dubai should able to talk her through getting them back to the airport safely.
When she got to the cockpit door, it was closed and locked. No one answered her pounding fist. She desperately tried to wrench it open, but it was a secure door. Since 9/11, all aircraft had been built with stronger cockpit doors and locking mechanisms controlled by the pilots to prevent terrorists from gaining access. It also meant that if the pilots were incapacitated, no one could get inside.
Lyla examined the door. She noticed a keypad with a red light beside it and realized there might be a way inside. She remembered reading that there was a code the flight attendants could use to access the cockpit in a medical emergency as long as the pilots hadn’t disabled it from inside, as they would during a terrorist event.
They had to keep a code like that nearby so all the flight attendants could find it quickly. She rooted through the food lockers in the front galley and found what she was looking for: a piece of paper taped to the inside of the cabinet door with a six-digit number written on it. The Arabic text above the number was unreadable, but it had to be it.
Lyla punched the number into the keypad, and the light turned green with a beep. She was overjoyed as she flung the door open.
Her happiness vanished when she saw the pilot slumped back in his chair, a small bullet hole in his right temple.
The copilot, however, was very much alive. She flinched and instinctively put up her hands when he turned around and pointed a small pistol at her.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“No . . . no one,” she stammered. “Just a passenger. Lyla Dhawan.”
“Where did you come from?”