"Then we don't shoot," Elena said. She reached down into the galley service kit beneath the coffee maker, her fingers wrapping around the cold, heavy handle of a commercial carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher. "We use the ship."
Chapter 13: Tactical Maneuvers
The aircraft plummeted another hundred feet in a sudden downburst, the sound of the storm screaming against the windshields like tearing metal. The cabin lights flickered, dimmed to emergency amber, and surged back to blue.
The man in the windbreaker pushed through the heavy blue curtain with his left hand, his right hand emerging from his jacket holding a ceramic-bladed tactical knife—a non-metallic weapon engineered specifically to slip through TSA millimeter-wave scanners undetected.
His eyes immediately locked onto Agent Vance, who stood seemingly off-balance against the cockpit door, her arms raised in an instinctive defensive posture.
"Don't move," the man hissed in accented English, stepping forward to close the distance before she could draw a sidearm. His blade was angled upward, aimed for the femoral or subclavian arteries—a professional assassin's stance designed for quick, silent termination.
He never saw Elena.
Stepping out from the blind alcove behind the beverage cart, Elena didn't swing the fire extinguisher like a club; she knew the confined space would sap the momentum of a swing. Instead, she drove the flared nozzle of the heavy carbon-dioxide canister straight into the side of his knee with the full, desperate force of her body weight.
The man gasped, his joint popping with a sickening crunch as his leg buckled beneath him. He twisted with feral speed, slashing the blade horizontally through the air where Elena’s throat had been a split-second prior, the ceramic edge whispering through the polyester of her collar.
Vance capitalized on the opening instantly. She surged forward, her left hand striking down on the man's wrist with an open-palm redirect, while her right elbow drove into his temple with the force of a piston. The assassin’s head rebounded against the reinforced composite frame of the R1 door, his vision blurring, but he remained upright, thrashing with desperate, adrenaline-fueled ferocity.
He lunged for Vance’s throat, his fingers digging into her lapel.
"Elena! The cart!" Vance gasped, grappling with the man's knife arm, pinning the razor-sharp ceramic blade against the bulk of the emergency slide housing.
Elena didn't hesitate. She grabbed the handle of a fully laden, three-hundred-pound meal cart, depressed the foot brake with a sharp kick, and seized the rear stability rail. Utilizing the downward tilt of the Boeing’s descent angle, she launched the steel-framed cart down the narrow galley corridor.
The heavy, four-wheeled cart struck the assassin square in the lumbar spine with crushing momentum. The breath exploded from his lungs in a ragged choke. Pinned between the mass of the metal cart and the door frame, his fingers went limp, and the ceramic blade clattered onto the rubberized runner.
Vance swept the knife away with her boot, locked her forearm across the back of the man's neck, and drove him face-first onto the deck. With practiced, violent efficiency, she retrieved a pair of high-tensile plastic ties from her interior pocket and wrenched his wrists behind his back until the nylon clicked into its final, unyielding notch.
"One down," Vance panted, her forehead beaded with sweat, a smear of grease marking her jawline. "Where’s Lind?"
A sudden, sharp series of electrical pops erupted from the ceiling above the Business Class aisle, accompanied by the acrid, unmistakable scent of burning wire insulation. Overhead, the primary cabin displays died instantly, plunging the entire forward section of the aircraft into absolute blackness, save for the floor-level emergency escape path lights that cast long, ominous red shadows across the carpet.
"He’s in the avionics chase," Elena said, her voice dropping to an intense, rapid whisper. "He’s cutting the SATCOM cables. If he severs the secondary multiplexer, Marcus will lose all instrument landing guidance for the runway."
"Can I shoot through the ceiling panels?" Vance asked, retrieving her Glock, her eyes tracking the dark overhead line.
"No! The bleed air ducts run directly above those panels at four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. If you puncture one, you’ll blow superheated air into the cabin and trigger a catastrophic fire suppression dump." Elena grasped Vance’s arm, pulling her toward the Door 2 cross-aisle. "There’s a maintenance access hatch in the ceiling, but it only opens from the outside using a standard square-drive latch key."
"Do you have one?"
"Every senior attendant carries one on their key ring," Elena said, unclipping a heavy brass ring from her belt loop.
They moved through the business cabin like shadows. The passengers were terrified, several of them clutching each other, weeping silently as the turbulence slammed the wide-body jet through the storm clouds, completely unaware of the silent war being fought within their midst.
At the second door cross-aisle, Elena looked up. One of the overhead composite panels was dropped open by two inches, hanging loose on its maintenance hinges. A pair of rubber-soled designer shoes protruded slightly from the dark cavern of the avionics bay above.