Waterkill (Dave Henson Series) Read Online Free Page B

their current rate of descent. He nosed the plane over even further to build up air speed and to hopefully gain flight control of the aircraft. At this point he knew there was no chance of making the small airfield. The best he was now hoping for was a controlled crash that he could survive.
    After pushing on the rudder pedal and control yoke for what seemed like minutes, but was instead just seconds, the directional gyro indicator began to slow its rotation. He was stopping the spin, but he knew his altitude was critically low. He glanced over at his airspeed indicator and saw that it had crept up nearly thirty knots, but the altimeter dial foretold their fate. He pulled slightly back on the yoke to decrease their rate of descent and to put them on a controlled glide path into the whiteout abyss that surrounded them.
    In a near state of panic, the pilot rapidly attempted to wipe the blood from his eyes and face with his coat sleeve while he fought to control the plane’s descent. Suddenly he yelled out in possessed frustration, “We’re going down.”  He made the statement more to himself than his passenger next to him. He glanced over at the man who was still pointing the gun at his face, though it was shaking wildly in his hand. The pilot could see his own blood dripping from the end of the gun and the man was mumbling loudly in Arabic, “Allahu-Akbar.”
    The passenger paused from his chanting when he heard the pilot cry out. “No we are not. You will continue to fly this plane to Fairbanks.” As he finished his sentence he violently pistol whipped the pilot in the side of the head with his left hand while still holding the steel briefcase tightly in the other.
    The pilot was able to dodge much of the first blow, but the second swing of the gun slammed into his nose breaking it with the force of a sledge hammer. Blood burst from his nose and face and sprayed onto the instrument panel and windshield, just before he slumped over unconscious onto the flight controls.
    The passenger instantly grabbed the control yoke handle in front of his seat and attempted to pull back on it in a wild and panicked effort to fly the plane. However, the dead weight of the pilot slumped over his control yoke handle prevented the man from pulling back on the tandem controls. The man reached over and roughly yanked the pilot’s unconscious body off of the flight controls, slamming it backwards and sideways into its seat. With both hands the passenger pulled back on the control yoke in front of him. At the same time he looked desperately out the cockpit windows and into the white void beyond. As he did, and unperceived to him, the aircraft’s airspeed dropped to less than thirty knots. A second later the passenger heard a horn go off in the aircraft and felt a tumbling feeling in his stomach. He also felt the plane lurch to its right. The passenger pulled back even harder on the yoke handle in an ignorant attempt to eliminate the horn sound and the weightlessness sensation he was feeling in the pit of his gut. Unbeknownst to him, however, the aircraft was falling from the blizzard sky at over fifteen hundred feet per minute.
    A flashing greenish/grayish hue began to form in the passenger’s field of view as he looked wildly out the cockpit windows. At first he did not understand what he was seeing, but seconds later it became horribly clear. The aircraft was spinning out of control, downwards and towards a jagged mountain ridge top below. The man began to yell again in Arabic, “Allahu-Akbar.” He had only repeated the phrase three times before the aircraft plunged straight into the side of a mountain ridge at over two hundred miles per hour. The aircraft exploded instantly into a small fireball that was extinguished within minutes by the heavy falling snow. An hour later, all remnants of the crash were completely obscured by a thick blanket of frozen ice crystals. And buried under the fresh layer of snow, in the burnt and twisted