Shepherd One

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They had lost all concept of time. The only way Basilio, his mother and sisters could tell the difference between night and day, was the change in humidity. Tolerable levels meant night; unbearable, day.

Basilio watched his mother lying on the mattress on the floor with her arms enfolding her daughters, pulling them into an embrace. Although their eyes were closed, he was not convinced they were actually asleep.

With his back against the corrugated tin wall and his knees drawn up into acute angles against his chest, Basilio determined the time to be night, since his skin was no longer tacky with sweat. Now he had the cover of darkness.

Grabbing the metal framing, Basilio hoisted himself to his feet. For more than a day he had searched for structural weaknesses such as a fissure in the wall or a loose rivet. But he found nothing. And then he turned ceilingward, his eyes fixing on the pilings of tin sheets not riveted to the crisscross of metal framing. The corrugated slabs of tin were weighted there, resting on top of one another, loosely.

After glancing at his mother with a momentary look, Basilio quietly began to climb the metal framework, the framing itself providing good foot- and handholds.

“Basilio?” His mother sounded tired, as if on the boundary between wake and sleep. “What are you doing?”

Basilio ignored her, one hand striving upward for a metal framing while his foot sought for the purchase of a metal foothold, each action propelling him upward.

“Basilio?” And then more harshly, a loud whisper to capture his attention. “Basilio.”

He turned and looked downward, his limbs spread across the framework like an insect frozen while in the middle of scaling the wall.

“Get down here,” she ordered. “Now.”

He nodded. “If I don’t do something, then we will die. You know that.”

“Basilio, please.”

“Mama, if papa were here—”

“You’re not your father,” she interjected. But to Basilio it sounded more like a criticism, the tone of her words biting painfully deep. “Basilio, please. Even your father would not do this, if he was here. He would use better judgment.”

“Papa would never sit by and wait for his family to die.” He turned and began to climb, one hand over the other, his feet finding the ridge of the framing, and pushed himself upward.

“Basilio, please.” Now she sounded desperate. “Basilio!”

At the top he placed the flat of his palm against the tin sheets and tested its weight by pushing. Nothing, the piled sheets were too heavy. So he moved to his left, and then to his right, testing, pushing, looking for a weakness, finding nothing. Watching him carefully with her hands nervously fisted against her chest, his mother realized the futility of her appeals.

At the rear edge of the wall, when a tin sheet lifted beneath his efforts, Basilio hesitated as if caught off guard. A moment later he lifted the tin sheet, his arm and shoulder straining with effort, the cords of his neck sticking out, as he carefully lifted and deposited the sheet to a point that gave him marginal access to slip through.

Looking down at his mother, he assured her would return with help before the sun was up.

“Basilio, please. They’ll kill you.” Tears were streaking down her cheeks, the courses of wetness shining silver from the minimal light filtering through the hole.

“Please, Mama, you know I have to do this.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. Another rites-of-passage for a boy becoming a man, she considered. She just didn’t think she would have to let go of him so soon.

Quietly, Basilio was through the access and gone. And then there were the slight footfalls traversing along the metal sheets overhead before they disappeared.

Basilio was on foot.

Kimball was strapped to the armrests of a seat in the rear of the plane by common plastic ties, not flexcuffs. Flexcuffs needed cutters to free the subject because escape was virtually impossible. Plastic ties, on the other hand, were far more doable to break or bend or squeeze through since they were the industrial ties used to bind the trash bags after a commercial flight. Nevertheless, the ties that bound him were cinched so tight they chafed the flesh around his wrists until the pins-and-needles effect raced along both arms. The blood flow was becoming stymied.

To his left, buckled into his seat across the aisle, was his captor, a man with hardened features and eyes as black as a midnight sky. The man did not register Kimball at all. He merely sat with his eyes forward as the plane ascended at a thirty-five degree angle.

With his opposing hand that was shielded from the view of his guard, Kimball began to work the wrist of his right hand to break the binding tie. But the tie did not break or give. In fact, the industrial ties turned out to be a high-grade quality, which concerned Kimball. The pins-and-needles effect was dramatically increasing, meaning the blood flow of fresh oxygenation was decreasing. Soon his muscles would weaken and desist function altogether, rendering his limbs useless.

Immediately he began to flex the fingers of both hands, trying to stimulate blood flow. It was not working, his arms starting to take on that “falling asleep” effect. And then he worked his right wrist against the sharp edges of the tie, slicing the flesh, his blood providing a lubricant.

He continued to work his wrist back and forth, cutting, chaffing, slicing, red rivulets running and soaking into the fabric of the cushioned armrest. And then he began to torque his hand in such a way that the motion of trying to free himself nearly cost his flesh to peel back in a sickening avulsion. But Kimball had no choice. His limbs were growing weaker, the muscles starving for oxygen.

In an effort to free himself Kimball pulled back and his blood-slicked hand slipped free. Immediately he could feel the blood rushing back into his hand, which had grown cold and blue, as well as the accompanying heat that coursed through every minuscule fiber and nerve ending.

The problem was he still had one hand to go, a hand that was beginning to blacken under the constraints of the tie — his left hand, which was within his captor’s eyeshot.

If seen, Kimball chanced a bullet to the brain. But then again, Kimball determined he was marked for death anyway.

They all were.

He knew he needed to make a move and make it quick.

And then it happened.

Instead of making a move, the move made him.

The moment Kimball slipped his hand free of the binding tie, Shepherd One achieved a milestone: It had reached the point of no return.

The plane ascended at a constant grade and reached a level of twenty-four thousand feet, the atmospheric pressure reaching 5.45 pounds-per-square inch, when the pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds-per-square inch. The moment Shepherd One reached the twenty-five-thousand-foot level, then the altimeters in the payloads would sense the radical pressure change, and initiate a one-time signal to the mother boards that would immediately recognize the additional memory space used, and engage the nuclear weaponry as ‘activated.’ Adversely, however, once Shepherd One reached the descending altitude of ten thousand feet, the altimeters would again measure the change in atmospheric pressure, recognize the conditions of the new altitude change, and begin to deliberately shut themselves off. Once the mother board recognizes the shutoff connection and sudden loss of memory, the devices would, by program design, acknowledge the immediate change, and detonate within a nanosecond of the shut-off point.

In the cockpit, as the aircraft rose, Hakam never took his eyes off the cockpit altimeter. The moment the aircraft reached 25,000 feet, he visualized the weapons activation, could sense them being born.

And in all his praises to Allah, he never felt so complete or contented.

Al-Khatib Hakam, born in Dearborn, Michigan, had succeeded.

And in his mind’s eye he could imagine what was going on one level below him.

In the cargo bay the payloads began to whine in a high-pitch resonance, the computers accepting the sudden immergence of its online resuscitation before tapering off to a mild hum. If Shepherd One should ever fall below the ten-thousand-foot mark, then the payloads would go off in a six-kiloton flash of white-hot fire and devastation.

Shepherd One was rigged to never land again.

And al-Khatib Hakam was pleased.