“Gillian,” Walker said firmly, “take a breath. There’s food and water waiting. It’ll be delivered before an hour’s up. The deaths are on them, not you.”
She tried to relax, but she couldn’t. Something else occurred to her. “I don’t know how it works, but the toilets are all backed up. They’re full or something. This isn’t one of their demands, but please, if it’s possible, can they be cleaned out?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Walker reassured her.
“Hang on,” she told him, then looked up at Isaac. “He says they have food and water coming.”
“And the fuel?”
“Walker?” she asked into the phone. “He also wants this plane fueled.”
“Since that’s a new demand, it has to go through several layers of approval, but I swear I’ll work on it.”
It wasn’t what Gillian wanted to hear, but she found herself nodding anyway. “All the fuel trucks were moved away from the airport,” she told Isaac, making things up as she spoke. “I don’t think they have a problem refueling the plane, but it can’t happen immediately.”
Isaac growled and gestured to Carlos, another hijacker nearby. They spoke in Spanish to each other for a quick moment, then Isaac nodded. “Fine, but tell them that not fueling us up isn’t an option. The longer it takes, the more people we’ll kill. Ten, fifteen…maybe more…depending on how I feel.”
“I heard,” Walker said in her ear. “Tell him it’ll be done.”
“He said okay,” Gillian told Isaac shakily. “He’ll get the plane refueled.”
“Good. Give me the phone,” he ordered.
In the past, Gillian hadn’t had any issues giving up the cell phone after she’d passed along their demands. But for some reason, this time she hesitated. Walker Nelson felt like a lifeline. Like if she hung up with him, she’d be signing her own death warrant. Her fingers tightened on the cheap plastic.
“Don’t give up,” Walker said into her ear. “We’re here and watching. You’re doing an amazing job and you’ll be out of there before you know it. I can’t wait to meet you face-to-face.”
With those words ringing in Gillian’s head, Isaac—obviously tired of waiting for her to comply with his order—swung his fist forward, punching her in the side of the head.
She cried out and went flying sideways. In the confined space in front of the cockpit, she didn’t have far to fall. Her head bounced off the wall.
Gillian curled into a ball on the floor, holding her head in her hands, both sides throbbed, from Isaac’s fist and from smacking against the wall.
The hijacker leaned down and picked up the phone she’d dropped and clicked it off, putting it in his pocket. He turned away from her without another word and headed for Luis, who was standing in the middle of the airplane.
Gillian crawled back over to where the other women were huddled in the first-class cabin and did her best not to cry.
“What’d they say?” Andrea asked. “What’s going on?”
“Hopefully they’re going to fix the toilets,” Gillian informed the others.
“And food and water?” Alice asked.
“That too. The hijacker also said that some of us might be released.”
There were gasps of excitement from the women around her, and Gillian wanted to feel happy that some of them would hopefully get out of this horrific situation…but all she could think about in that moment was Walker.
She’d heard his outraged curse when Isaac had hit her, right before she’d lost her grip on the phone. And he’d said he wanted to meet her.
As much as she tried to remind herself she was just connecting with another stranger because of the stress of the situation, she couldn’t make herself care. She wanted to live through this awful situation, if only to meet the man who’d somehow made her more determined than ever to survive.
Trigger gripped the table in front of him so hard it felt as if he was going to break it. He’d been impressed by Gillian before, but now that he’d spoken to her, he was even more so. There was no doubt she was afraid, but she was hanging in there. She was clever, and even under the horrible circumstances she’d found herself in, she’d stayed strong, determined to help him as much as she could. He’d expected to have to explain how to give him clues without letting on she was doing so, but she didn’t need any explanation.
They’d learned there were six hijackers onboard, and the men and women had been separated, with the women toward the front of the plane and the men at the back. The hijackers had also claimed some hostages might be released, and he had a hunch that was because of Gillian negotiating on their behalf. The request for the plane being refueled was new, but not entirely surprising. However, if the hijackers thought they’d survive their little stunt and be allowed to fly off into the sunset, they were more idiotic than they seemed.
But at the moment, all Trigger’s thoughts were on Gillian. He recognized the sounds of someone being hit, and he wasn’t happy at all that the woman on the other end of the phone had been the recipient of violence. He wanted her and the other innocent civilians off that plane. Now.
“Brain?” he asked his teammate, who’d been sitting next to him listening to his conversation with Gillian. “Did you get anything?”
The other man shook his head. “Not yet. I need to play back the recording and isolate the conversations in the background. It’ll take a bit.”
Trigger nodded. Brain was a language savant. He was fluent in at least thirty languages and he could pick up new ones without too much difficulty. His job was to listen to the background noise and glean any intel from conversations the hijackers were having with each other.
“The food and water is ready to be delivered,” Grover informed him. “And we’ll tell the authorities about the request for fuel.”
“I’ve already got the waste people mobilizing,” Oz added.
“It’s got to feel like hell on earth inside that plane,” Lucky muttered. “Between the heat, the toilets, and the fear…” His voice trailed off.
Trigger was more than aware of what the people inside the plane were going through. He hadn’t been in their exact situation, but close enough.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and knew Lefty was standing behind him. “She’s going to be okay,” his friend said quietly.
Trigger shook his head. “We don’t know that. I said the same, but I have a feeling she knows as well as we do that there are no guarantees here. This whole thing stinks to high heaven.”
“I agree,” Doc said. “On one hand, this is a textbook hijacking, but it seems like overkill. The Cartel of the Suns is run by the Venezuelan government. Why would they have to resort to hijacking a plane from Costa Rica?”
“Right?” Lefty asked. “They could just get one of their contacts in the military or prison system to arrange for Lamas to escape.”
“Regardless, our job is not to figure that shit out,” Trigger told his team. “We were called in strictly to rescue those hostages. Not to solve the world’s political issues. We need to concentrate on how we’re going to get into that bird and save as many innocents as we can.”