Contracts, Matt Rogers [phonics reading books TXT] 📗

rear of the airport. It seemed no one was wearing seatbelts — bodies went everywhere, some still alive as they were hurled from the vehicle.

Slater finished reversing and King heard him talking to himself as he worked the controls. King didn’t blame him. It was a logistical nightmare — figuring out how to fly a specific type of plane whilst under attack.

So King focused on taking the heat off them.

He lined up his aim with the second jeep, and unloaded the last five rounds. The plane was bouncing and shaking, throwing his concentration and focus off. Although he didn’t hit any of the insurgents, he blew out the two front tyres when his aim drifted low. The jeep dropped forward on its nose and sparks flew off both exposed wheels. It slowed drastically, nearly taking out the vehicle behind it as its speed plummeted.

The two remaining jeeps avoided the collisions narrowly, and surged forward.

King fell back behind the seats as eight gun barrels floated in his direction.

Bullets tore through the open doorway, blowing out some of the windows.

That’s fine, King thought. As long as the engines stay intact.

He reloaded and threw caution to the wind by crab-crawling back out into the line of fire.

He had to. The longer he spent cowering away, the more time the insurgents had to fire at the turboprop engines.

He tried to line up his aim, but it was chaos. Slater was roaring forward out of the loading bays, and the plane careened out onto the start of the runway. King almost had one of the jeeps in his sights, but then the floor lurched beneath him again, sending him tumbling and rolling several feet down the aisle. When he righted himself, he realised Slater had lined up the nose of the plane with the end of the runway.

‘Hold onto something!’ Slater roared from the cockpit. ‘We only get one shot at this.’

King stared down the length of the aisle, through the cockpit, out the windshield. He saw the runway stretching down the mountainside, uncomfortably short for a standard takeoff, and then he saw it plummet away into nothingness.

Hence the need for a fast start.

If you don’t build up enough momentum, you don’t generate enough lift to get the plane off the ground before the runway simply ends.

Fuck, King thought.

The end of the runway sent shivers down his spine.

Then more bullets tore through the open doorway, blowing out the opposite porthole windows.

‘Do it!’ King yelled. ‘No time.’

He could already hear the chorus of the turboprop engines rising. Slater was charging them up, building power through the propellers, preparing for—

King saw him slam the controls.

The plane lurched off the mark. King nearly went head over heels as the floor shifted underneath him, and then his stomach was dropping and they were racing into the plunge. They gained more and more speed as the nose dipped and they raced downhill, and more bullets hit the fuselage, and King fought and clawed his way to the open door frame and emptied the rest of the P320’s magazine at the pursuing jeeps. He could barely keep the contents of his stomach down, let alone control his aim in any meaningful way, and he was pretty sure the entirety of his shots missed. There was no way to tell, though — the wind was roaring in his ears and bringing involuntary tears to his eyes, and when the gun was empty he snatched hold of the nearest seat and held on for dear life.

Then he turned all his attention to the front of the plane.

They were gaining speed faster, the whole fuselage rattling and shaking and groaning. Slater was hunched over the controls like a man possessed, every morsel of his attention seized by the view out front. Wind howled in through the open portholes, deafeningly loud in the fuselage, and King roared, ‘Are we going to make it?!’

The end of the runway was impossibly close.

Do we have enough speed?

His heart was in his throat. Slater was by no means an experienced pilot — King knew he’d be relying on the archaic remnants of his brief Air Force career. This was one of the most dangerous airports in the world, and only seasoned STOL-capable pilots made regular flights in and out of Lukla…

The whole plane suddenly bucked violently, the whole fuselage bouncing up and down at once, nearly throwing King head-first into the wall. He went pale and clammy, convinced one of the engines had blown out. By now, there wasn’t enough room to stop. If they didn’t lift off, they’d plummet to their grisly deaths and—

The view of the runway disappeared, replaced by sky.

King gripped the back of the seat with white knuckles as the floor rose underneath him, nearly taking him off his feet.

The nose had lifted off the tarmac.

But what about—?

The whole plane jerked and bucked and went airborne, and the floor suddenly dropped away, and King thought he’d get flung out the open doorway as his vision rattled and frantic noise screamed in his eardrums and—

They were in the air.

Not falling to their deaths.

The back of the plane had nearly bottomed out as it came off the runway at the very last second, but they’d made it.

King collapsed in relief.

Lukla fell away almost immediately, already a tiny blip through the portholes, and King let his wobbly legs recover before stumbling his way to the front of the plane.

He stopped in the cockpit doorway and said, ‘How close was it?’

Slater’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Which told him everything he needed to know.

‘Fuck,’ King said. ‘Let’s never do that again.’

‘You read my mind,’ Slater mumbled.

Then King noticed the multitude of warning symbols flashing across most of the screens.

As they levelled out above the mountains, Slater said, ‘I think we might have a problem.’

82

Slater coasted for close to ten minutes.

The controls screamed at him, desperate for manual intervention. They might as well have been hieroglyphs. He could handle a standard flight path, but this…

This was way above his pay grade.

But