Chapter 18

18

Somewhere Over the Gulf of Oman

Juan's eyes flittered open, but his mind was fogged by a brutal migraine headache and a throbbing pain on the side of his skull. A high-pitched roar filled his ears and his face was pressed against cold metal, cold as the air around him. He suddenly remembered Yaqoob's hammering blow against the side of his face and his lights snapping out. The burning pain in his cheek made him think it might be broken.

He shook his head to clear a few more cobwebs, but it felt like his brain was hitting the sides of his skull like a tennis ball in a can, so he stopped. But it was enough to get his bearings.

The roaring noise was the whine of jet turbines. He glanced around, still lying on the floor. His vision was blocked by pallets stacked with metal cases and wooden crates. Everything was shrink-wrapped in plastic and then covered with cargo straps. Glancing a few inches in the other direction showed the base of the pallet nearest him. It was constructed of plywood sheets with seven-inch-thick honeycombed cardboard sandwiched between them. He'd seen this kind of setup before on humanitarian aid drops over Africa. No doubt each pallet had a parachute packed on top.

He tried to raise his hands to rub his eyes, but his arms couldn't move. In fact, his wrists were zip-tied behind his back. Worse, he was wrapped up like a mummy in plastic from his shoulders to his thighs—just like the pallets. He was lying on the metal deck of the aircraft, tossed there like a sack of wet cement.

No doubt about it. He was cinched up tighter than one of his abuelita 's spicy tamales.

Adrenaline kicked in. If there was anything that Cabrillo couldn't abide, it was the loss of freedom of movement. That angry endocrine surge cleared his mind enough to get to work.

He leveraged his legs to roll onto his back. His shoulders ached and now he was crushing his bound wrists, but he had a better view of his situation. At least his ankles weren't tied up. Either they ran out of zip ties or they felt sorry for him with his prosthetic leg.

Cabrillo noticed that the ragged end of the plastic wrap ran down his front. That gave him an idea.

He looked around until he found what he was hoping for—the head of a nail sticking out of the corner of a nearby pallet. He flopped and wriggled like a catfish in the bottom of a johnboat until he was able to scooch his way up against it.

It took him ten minutes of careful twisting and turning against the nailhead for him to finally peel back the edge of the plastic several inches along his torso.

It took him several more exhausting minutes of micro-movements to get the exposed plastic edge secured to the nailhead.

He took a deep breath to replenish his reserves, then gently rolled himself over. The sibilant whisper of the unwrapping plastic lifted his spirits, but he ran into the bulkhead before he was free. He wriggled his way carefully back to the pallet without tearing the plastic, resecured the plastic to the nailhead, then rolled away again. He repeated the process several more times until he was finally free of the sheeting, emerging from the cocoon of plastic film like a crippled snake shedding its translucent skin.

Drenched in sweat despite the cold and fighting through the burn of lactic acid eating into every muscle fiber in his body, Juan rolled onto his back once again. Planting his boots on the deck he thrust his hips upward, forming a high-angled bridge from the top of his knees down to his shoulders now pressing against the floor.

He then angled his thighs closer to his twisting arms until his fingers were finally able to reach the first of three buckles securing his prosthetic leg. Since he'd already shown the Taliban his artificial limb they had no reason to be surprised by it as they were securing him—let alone suspect anything of it.

By now Juan's hands ached as if they had been crushed in a hydraulic press because of the blood flow restricted by the zip ties. But with the grace of an arthritic yoga instructor, he managed to manipulate his numbing fingers enough to unlatch the buckles beneath his trousers and pop them open.

He then lowered himself and used his left boot to leverage against his right boot until he finally inched the prosthetic free from his pant leg. With his hands still tied behind his back, he couldn't see the leg itself, so he had to open the secret compartment with his stiffening fingers like a blind safecracker.

Once opened, Juan found the razor-sharp Benchmade Infidel double-action switchblade, flipped it upside down, and flicked it open. Suffering a few cuts along the way, he finally managed to saw his way through the hard plastic zip tie.

His wrists now free, it felt like fire ants were biting the skin beneath his hands as the blood rushed back into his fingers.

Exhausted from the Houdini-like escape, Juan quickly reattached his leg and climbed unsteadily to his feet. His head was still throbbing from his beating, but all of his exertions had cleared his mind, flooding it with questions, the most important of which was Who had ratted him out?

The only people who knew about his mission were the Oregon crew and Overholt. Cabrillo would have bet his life on their discretion and loyalty and, in fact, had done so on numerous occasions. No, it was somebody else. That was a leak that needed to be found and plugged as soon as possible.

Juan also didn't understand why Yaqoob hadn't killed him outright or at least tortured him for information about his identity and mission. Apparently whoever was on the other end of that phone call had told the murderous Pashtun to save those pleasures for himself when Cabrillo would arrive on his doorstep trussed up like a Christmas goose.

He might have been better off with the bloodthirsty Taliban giant.

As bad as things had gone so far, they could have been a whole lot worse if a guard had been posted in the plane's cargo bay. Cabrillo scanned the area. He saw several CCTV cameras posted up high, but apparently no one was monitoring them since no armed crewman was appearing.

Cabrillo did a quick inventory of the aircraft. He estimated at least five hundred thousand rounds of 7.62x39 ammo, along with five hundred crated AK-47s, several pallets of cased M67 fragmentation grenades, and a hundred boxes of Kevlar body armor. It was enough gear to equip a small insurgent army.

The question was, where was it all going?

Juan ducked down behind one of the pallets and fished around in the compartment of his combat leg, pulled out his Thuraya X5-Touch, the world's smallest satellite smartphone, and powered it up. The screen indicated several missed incoming calls from the Oregon . He punched a saved number and after a series of electronic squawks and beeps an encrypted voice came on the line.

"You had us worried there, buddy," Max said. "We've been watching your tracker flying through the air for the last two hours. Wasn't sure if that was you or Superman. You good? By the way, you're on speakerphone."

Every member of the Oregon crew including Juan had a GPS tracker embedded in their hip or thigh for just this kind of scenario.

"Got my clock cleaned pretty good, but I'm still in it to win it. My Taliban friends tossed me into the back of a flying milk wagon, only it ain't milk I'm staring at."

"You just crossed over the Pakistani coast. You're about fifteen thousand feet above the Gulf of Oman."

"Not far from where I started."

"Fortune favors the bold, or so I've heard."

"What's my flight path?"

"You skirted south to avoid Iranian airspace. Could still be headed for the Saudi peninsula or maybe Africa on the other side. No telling just yet."

"Have Eric pull up flight logs for a Tajik Air flight out of Kabul. Takeoff would have been, what did you say? Two hours ago, give or take."

"On it," Eric Stone said.

"What's your situation?" Max asked.

"They bundled me up pretty good, so they must not think I'm a threat back here in the cargo bay. Neither the pilots nor the crew have come back to check on me."

"No indication of any Tajik Air flights out of Kabul yesterday or today," Eric said.

"What's our radar show?" Juan asked.

"No IFF, if that's what you're getting at. We married up an aircraft blip with your tracking GPS, so we've got a pretty good fix on you. The cross section on our screen is a little fuzzy. We're guessing there's some kind of radar-absorbing coating on the plane's skin, but it looks something like an Airbus A320."

"That's correct, but trust me, it's no ordinary Airbus. I wish I knew where this rig was headed."

"It will be out of our radar range pretty soon," Max said. "Maybe we can hack into local ground radar and track it as it moves."

"Unless it decides to fly below or around ground radar range," Eric added over the speaker. "African air traffic control isn't exactly up to speed in that regard."

"Mark, any chance you can hack into this thing's computer?"

Juan had read enough security briefs to know that the National Security Agency had developed sophisticated hacking tools to break into enemy aircraft avionics in order to either crash or hijack them in times of war. Most militaries had taken defensive precautions against such cyberattacks, but this was a civilian plane. If Mark could breach the system, he could rifle through the plane's avionics to determine its flight path and final destination.

"That's a long shot, Chairman. If I can find its GPS guidance signal, I might be able to sneak in through the back door, depending on the chipset. Give me a sec."

What seemed like an eternity to Juan abruptly ended as Mark Murphy came back on the line. "Looks like your plane isn't using GPS."

Juan was surprised. "Inertial guidance? That's pretty old-school."

"Yeah, but it prevents exactly the kind of shenanigans we just tried to pull off."

Juan blew out a long breath. He really needed to find out where this flight was headed. Without any electronic means he only had one other option.

"Gentlemen, the service on this airline is the pits. I'm gonna have to file a complaint with the captain. I'll be in touch."