Chapter 5
Granville James Corbin: Rub’ Al Khali
Our helicopter took off from Riyadh with a clatter of rotor blades. Otherwise it was quiet.
The situation had caught me off guard. No, that’s not right. It was my own swelled head. I had come to the pad thinking that the company was treating its newest Harvard acquisition with the proper respect. Two Saudi pilots—though one turned out to be native American—had been detailed to chauffeur me on a private tour of the northern oil fields. And then this incredibly full-bodied Arabian stewardess, sans veil, was coming over to tuck me in.
The price of oil had been inching back up toward thirty dollars a barrel so Petramin was starting to flex its fiscal muscles again. Sending the American brass and top staffers out to the field on orientation trips was part of the company’s good-times consumption pattern. “Visiting the money,” our senior counsel in Houston had called my trip which, he’d hinted, would spotlight me as an important player in the organization.
It’s a wonder my head fit through the helicopter’s sliding door. I was so smug that I forgot to avert my gaze politely when the stewardess lifted one long, nylon-smooth leg over the door’s sill. My eyes took a bite out of her exposed thigh. Then I saw her sawed-off shotgun.
The social dynamic in the cabin changed immediately. She and the American pilot argued briefly about destinations, which I could follow only from the maps I’d seen pinned to the wall in the airfield’s office. The Saudi pilot seemed to be backing her; so the American shrugged and lifted off with a clatter.
And by that time, my moment had passed. If I had been more alert, watching her hands instead of her legs—and if I hadn’t already buckled my lap and shoulder belts—I might have broken her wrist, on the hand holding the scatter gun, with a flying side kick while she was busy climbing aboard. Or taken her with a straight kick to the throat: she wouldn’t have had time to bring her weapon to bear and fire if she were busy strangling.
But the little conference up front ended too quickly and we were fifteen feet in the air before I woke up and remembered all those good karate moves. By then she was settled in and ready, and a single shot from her would have blown out both pilots and the nose of the aircraft. But for the rest of the flight my eyes never stopped measuring distances, angles of fire, the tension in her hands, the focus of her attention. My hand never strayed far from the quick release on the seat harness.
I wasn’t too worried about the Saudi pilot who was displaying a NATO-issue Beretta 9mm automatic pistol. If he tried to get a shot at me moving from between the cockpit seats, he only had about a one-in-ten chance of hitting something vital in my anatomy. Of course, he had about nine-in-ten of drilling the turbine engine, which was aft of the bulkhead behind us. But if that happened, I imagined they could autorotate down to some kind of landing.
Still, the situation was frozen up right then, a bad time to move. So I decided to lie back and enjoy the inevitable.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice on the line between adult casual and kid smartass.
The woman looked at me for, it seemed, the first time. Her eyes were wide-set, deep, a liquid-black that in other circumstances I could stare into for hours. They showed a flash of nameless recognition—that same instant of sexual understanding that sometimes passes between strangers in a waiting room or on a bus. Then the veil of private purposes, other aims, fell across her eyes.
“We are kidnapping you, Mr. Corbin.” Her English was perfect, slight British accent, education and polite society hinted in the tone and syntax.
“Really? What for—money? You’ll find my family doesn’t have all that much and the company will probably care more about getting their helicopter back than saving me. They paid more for it.” I thought I was lying smoothly; later I found out what a helicopter can cost.
“Not money,” she said. No trace of a smile at my humor. Her grip on the scatter gun never varied. “This is an act of terror directed against the fanatical regime that has seized my country and seeks to return it to a state of feudal peonage. They slaughter our youths and squander our national wealth in a futile war against Marxist—”
“What country are you—?”
“Persia.”
“And you seek to restore Queen Farah Diba?” My years among the books of Harvard hadn’t shut out all of the current world situation. I could guess that this reverse tide of imperialism had already fired debates, revisionism, and schisms back at the Commune—if it was still in business.
“Of course,” she said. “Our aim is a return to the course of modernism and enlightenment begun by her husband, the late Shah.”
“I see. And taking an American hostage is going to bring the ayatollists to their senses? I’m hardly a bargaining chip. They’ll pay you a bounty for my dead hide!”
“Why do you Americans always think of money?” Her mouth curved around in an ugly bow. “It is not ransom we propose, but cooperation. Your company holds contracts, through third parties, for twenty-eight percent of Persia’s oil production. If Petramin refused to take delivery, even for a week, the backup would exceed the Ministry’s storage capacity anywhere along the line. As you may be aware, the last four attacks at Kharg Island were targeted on tank groups and pumpage. A slowdown in the take will strangle the oil fields. They will have to cap wells and lose pressure. It will take the Ministry months to recover.”
“Do you really believe Petramin would damage an oil field just for me?”
“You are a senior official, are you not?” Even as she said it, her eyes clouded. It must have been obvious even to a terrorist that I was still a green kid in my twenties. Maybe they mature early in the Middle East. “Anyway, your company will cooperate,” she said, “when we begin sending pieces of you to your family.”
“And you call yourselves modernists?”
“Terrorist pressure is a very modern concept. If we were truly barbarians, we would be offering you the hollow consolations of martyrdom and an easy way to Paradise.”
“Yes, well, I do appreciate that.”
I turned away from her and stared out the window. My attention focused on the small of my back, where the gun still pointed.
The helicopter had crossed the outskirts—or at least the narrow fringes—of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, some minutes ago. The last tended terraces and lines of palms around cloistered villas had given way to the near desert. The land rippling below us was gray rock and gravel, with here and there a clump of scrub that showed dusty green. If you looked long enough, you could begin to pick out the dry watercourses, deep S-curves cut in the gravel where desert storms had poured out a rush of water. Every five years or so.
Luckily, I had come dressed for a field trip: khaki shirt, denims, gray-suede Italian climbing boots. I tried to picture myself walking out of that countryside in a wool three-piece and wingtips—looking something like a new ad video for men’s cologne. Except for the sweat stains.
The woman’s position, theirs if she represented any real organization, was incredibly weak. She had thought she was kidnapping an American beegweeg, someone she could trade for concessions, but she ended up with a small fish, really, a nobody and no use to her. It said so on my traveling papers: No deposit, no return. In about five minutes, she was going to figure out that her winning strategy was to shoot me and the American pilot, dump the chopper, and set us all ablaze. … To fight again another day.
My winning strategy was to keep her talking, to find a way to strengthen her bargaining position, and so my prospects for continued breathing.
“What’s your name?” I said quietly—or tried to. Actually, I was still facing the window and, even in the insulated cabin, the clatter of rotor blades tended to drown out whispers; so I had to shout it.
“That is not important.”
I turned and looked at her, a long measuring stare straight in the eyes.
“Of course it’s important. We’re about to fly out into the Great Sandy.” I jerked my head toward the even, brown horizon ahead of the aircraft. “That makes us traveling companions. People who must depend on each other in a land of thirst and cold and blowing dust. That land can kill us all, no matter who is holding the guns. … Now, what is your name?”
She seemed to wilt for a moment. “Sybil Zahedi.”
“And where do you come from, Sybil? You obviously haven’t been home to—Persia—in many years.”
“London, and before that Cairo.”
“Educated there?”
“In London, yes.”
The gunman in the front seat was watching this closely.
“And you?” I said to him.
“Faisal Ibn Mehakim.”
“Are you something royal?”
He actually smiled. “No, my father is a sheikh. One day I may be sheikh, too—if I survive this adventure.”
“But you’re not Persian?”
“Only a sympathizer.”
“And the man who’s doing the flying?”
The American glanced back at me. “Billy Birdsong. I work for the company, same as you.”
“So you’re not in on all of this?”
“Just caught in the crossfire. I fly the bird for Petramin, but nobody will have any tears if they get a piece of my finger in the mail.”
“All right. Where are you from, Billy?”
“California.”
“Hey, so am I. You know the Bay Area?”
“Too rich for me, Boss. I come from down near Needles.”
“High desert man?”
“No, just Injun.”
I marked him for about two notches less hostile than the people wielding the guns. No way to tell, yet, how he would jump if an opportunity came along.
“You said we were going to Oman, Miss Zahedi? And that’s a long flight, Billy says, over eight hundred miles. What’s that in time—about eight or nine hours?”
“Yes.” Her gun drifted. Hesitation.
“Do you have a refueling stop planned along the way?”
“Why do you ask all these questions?”
“My life depends on your good planning. We’re traveling companions, remember?”
“Wrong. You are my hostage.”
At a nudge from Faisal’s gun, Birdsong veered off on a long arc to the south. I looked out along our original course and saw the squared-off edges of rooftops in the heat haze. Jabrin, it had to be, according to my memory of the map. In the landscape below us, rock and sand turned to pure sand, and the sand built into the standing lines of dunes, regular as waves of the ocean. This sea of sand, the Rub’ al Khali, was fully as large as the Black Sea or the Caspian.
“Do you think I’m trying to escape? Into that?”
“You ask questions. … And you are not afraid. That is bad in a hostage.”
“Hey! I’m an American, remember? Tourists want to see everything there is to—”
“Shut up!” Her hand whitened on the grip of her gun. I could see that the rough-sawed edge of the walnut grip was dark with sweat, even though the cabin was air-conditioned cool. I shut up.
The sand below went on and on. So did the pulse beat of the rotors. My mind drifted and, after a minute or an hour, my chin slid forward and my eyes closed.
I was awakened by a change in the pitch of the engine. We were dropping past, then circling back toward, a cluster of blocky houses in a thin grove of date palms that hid a flash of open water, with the dunes all around like hills. That would be Abaila, the one permanent settlement the map showed in the northern, or Ar Rimal, quadrant of the desert.
A welcoming committee waited for us on the only flat place, west of the date palms. About fifteen men and women in green fatigues stood in a well-spaced semicircle with Uzi submachine guns at parade rest. They squinted but didn’t flinch when the rotor wash kicked up a blast of dust and sand.
Sybil Zahedi was first out of the ship, followed by me, Birdsong, and Faisal. Sybil spoke a little abracadahra-kush-kush—which I assumed was Farsi—to a yard-wide, hard-bitten man with a graying moustache, a scar across his chin like a bad weld, and two pistols stuck in his web belt. He nodded and Sybil walked off alone toward the buildings. At a word from him, the team moved on Birdsong and me, separating us, handcuffing us, and walking us off in different directions—me toward the buildings, him toward the open desert.
“Hey, uh, wait a minute.” I twisted in their grip to look over my shoulder, back at Birdsong. “Where are you taking him?”
Shrugs. Blank looks.
“No. No, this isn’t right.” I stopped my feet, but their hands just swept me along. “No! Stop this! Miss Zahedi!” She was ahead of us by fifty yards. “Sybil!”
She turned, waited for us to catch up.
“Where are they taking the pilot, Birdsong?”
“To dispose of him.”
“Wha—? Why?”
“He said himself he is of no use to us.” She tipped one shoulder in a shrug. “No one would grieve for him.”
“Yes, well, but, ah, think of what that will do to your bargaining position with Petramin.”
“Our bargaining position?”
“If you have already killed one of your two hostages—not for effect, but just on a technicality—before you even start negotiating, they’re going to figure you for a loose bunch of amateurs. Lightweights. Unstable. Unpredictable. Unable, probably, to close a deal.”
I watched her eyes change as she heard this, from a cynical squint to an offended glare to a cunning glint. She finally nodded and said a few words to the man nearest. He raised his Uzi in the air and fired a measured burst, then whooped something and raced off toward the other party.
Sybil turned and started trudging on toward the buildings. The others brought Birdsong up and took us both to a tiny hut made of whitewashed clay—or maybe concrete, I meant to find out which—like the rest of the settlement. It was a storage room, twenty feet on a side, with just the one door of rough boards, no windows. A quartet of horizontal slits, six inches wide, were cut below the roof for ventilation. And it still smelled as if the Arabs had stored camel dung in there.
Without a word, Birdsong and I prowled this gloomy cell—he moving left and I right—tapping the walls, scuffing the rammed-dirt floor, fingering the edges of the vent slits. I felt around the door hinges and the bolts of the hasp, trying to judge the effect of a straight heel-kick on the dry wood. Three kicks, maybe four, would pop the door right off its hinges. Then we could rush out and overcome half a dozen guards who were holding machine guns. … I needed a new idea.
The room was empty except for fourteen one-gallon cans stacked in a corner, the labels all alike. I couldn’t figure out the Arabic scribble-squig on them; my command of the language was just first-grade conversational.
“What they got?” Birdsong asked.
“Paint.. ... Pink paint,” I said, seeing the dried stuff around the edge of one lid.
“Hey! You can read Arabic?”
“No.” That left him puzzled, but my mind was working too fast to explain. Now if I only had a cigarette lighter, we could burn the paint, call for the guards, and when they rushed in … I still needed a new idea.
Birdsong faced me in the dark middle of the room. “Hey, tell me … what was all that, out at the landing site? First they split us up, then put us together. What happened?”
What should I say to him? “Conflicting orders. … For the torchbearers of the new Shahdom of Iran, these people do not exactly have the details worked out.”
“Bad news for us.”
“Not necessarily. … You remember that little piece of paper you signed, before coming into the country?”
“Which one? I signed about sixty of them.”
“The one that legally acknowledged International Travel Order 6263.”
“Oh, yeah, the Dead Meat Clause. Some of the pilots were joking about that one.”
“What’s the joke?”
“Just that declaring political hostages legally dead did not apply to George.” He caught my blank stare. “He is one of the company’s pilots—and also our nickname for the automatic pilot on an airplane.” I was still blank. Birdsong waved it away. “Professional joke. But why is that order not bad news? These people will kill us if no one will bargain.”
“But they obviously don’t know that. Or don’t believe it. The situation gives us an opening.”
“To do what?”
“Don’t know yet. I’m working on it. How long does it take to refuel that chopper?”
“Not long. But no more flying today.”
“Why not?”
He pulled a hand out of his jumper pocket, cupping half a dozen fuses in his palm. “Technical difficulties.”
“You don’t think Faisal will spot what’s wrong?”
“Him? That one is ballast. Never flown before.”
“How do you know?”
“Any copilot knows to keep his hands off the stick and his feet off the rudder bars when he is not actually flying. Faisal screws around. Had to fight him for the controls all the way out here. I will disable my bird before leaving it with a guy who thinks four hours of watching qualifies him.”
Birdsong walked over to the far wall, put his back to it, and sank down to the floor. I began to wonder if he knew how close he had come to taking those fuses into a desert grave. He was a sensible man; he probably did know.
The Iranians were going to leave us overnight, apparently. I settled in against the other wall and, in the dark, Birdsong and I talked. At least we tried to, but our backgrounds were too different. Places, foods, women, tech stuff, company politics, the price of oil. The topics rose and fizzled out almost immediately. We ended up dozing in the cold. Come the feeble light of dawn, with my muscles in knots and a taste like sour slime in my mouth, I felt mean enough to begin poking our captors.
“Hey! Hey, out there!” I shouted, pounded on the door, kicked it for the noise value. “Up the Shah! Down with Khomeini!” Birdsong roused and squinted at me. The guards were right outside. They slammed the door open and leveled their burp guns.
“I want to talk to Sybil Zahedi!” They just stared at me. I tried some of my halting, phrase-book Arabic: “Laish hel intidhar? Wain Zahedi?” [Why are we waiting? Where is Zahedi?] And when they still didn’t move: “Mumkin tesa’idnyp” [Will please you help me?] Finally, with my hands I pantomimed breasts, hips, ass—then talk-talk with my fingers. The one on the left got the message and smiled. He jerked his gun to show I was to come out.
He took me to a two-story house down by the shallow pond at the center of the oasis. The building had generator power, air conditioning, moisture seals on the doors, windows that faced out on green plants. And it didn’t smell of camels. Sybil was sitting at a small table, smoking, drinking coffee out of a tiny cup, and looking out at the water. Even with all this luxury, she appeared to have spent a night no better than mine. The guard pushed me through the door, then stammered an abracadabra explanation of why he had brought me. Sybil looked up at me with tired eyes.
“What is it that you want?” She took a drag on her cigarette.
“To keep you from making a mistake.”
“Your companion has sabotaged the helicopter. We cannot move or call for help. Do you know what he did?”
“No, but I can find out—and convince him to fix it—if you will listen to me.”
She motioned the guard to move closer. I felt the muzzle of his machine pistol brush my kidneys. My hands were not bound and this bumpkin had actually brought his weapon inside my range. Well, well, karate hero. … But not now.
“Just for two minutes?” I pleaded.
“All right. What mistake am I making?”
“You must have guessed by now that Birdsong and I are no prizes. He’s just a pilot, one of a dozen on staff out here. I’m a very junior attorney, not even passed the bar yet. I’ve been with the company less than three months.”
“What you are saying is not likely to prolong your life.”
“I know. And I want to live. I want to help you do that. You see, I know all the Petramin officials here in the Kingdom, know where they’re staying, their itineraries, their plans. I can take you to them, help you capture someone important, someone Petramin will really care about getting back.”
“Are you such a coward that you would do this to your own people?”
“I don’t want to be killed.”
“You will write all of this down.”
“No, I’d have to go with you.”
Her eyes darkened. She started to signal the guard.
“I’m not sure of the place names! But I’d recognize them and I could identify the men for you. So there would be no mistake!”
That stopped her. “We would need the helicopter,” she said slowly, working it out.
“I promise you, Birdsong can fix it.”
“But the Security forces will be looking for it, of course. They would shoot us down.”
“Not if we camouflaged it.”
“How?”
“With paint.”
“There is paint here?”
“Yes, in our cell.”
“We could do it. …” While she came to a decision, I shut up. Hell, I held my breath. “Yes. … You will fly with us back to the north. The others hold Birdsong here as a hostage to your honor—if you have any.”
“Of course I do!”
“That remains to be seen.”
When I told him, Birdsong wasn’t happy about it. Not about Faisal doing the flying. Nor about painting over his chopper’s Petramin colors, which were an overall midnight-ice blue with orange striping. Very snappy. He was even more unhappy about using a water-based paint that had mostly gone over to gummy glue. Especially using pink water-based paint.
“You think this is going to be inconspicuous?” He whispered to me an hour later, still angry, as we went about the job. Birdsong took another swipe with his rag, leaving a smear of pink with streaks of dark blue underneath. In the hot sun, the gluey coat dried almost before he ended the stroke. We were using rags because there had been paint in the cell but no brushes. He was whispering because the guard on our work detail, which included two of the terrorist band and us, was giving orders in broken English punctuated with clouds of Arabic and Farsi, and we couldn’t tell how much more English he might understand.
“I didn’t say that,” I hissed back at him. “Just that it won’t look like the same helicopter we took off in.”
“Sure, man. And do you know how many 101 Mixmasters there are in Saudi Arabia? Three counting this one. All flown by Petramin. Ten seconds after we take off, the Saudi police are going to be telling each other, ‘Look for the pink one.’ ”
“Shhh! And it’s only pink up close. You know how camouflage colors work. Get this out in the desert, against the sand, in the bright sunlight, and it will look more ... .beige.”
“Pink—hey, watch it!” He was shouting at one of the work party, a boy about thirteen, who was dribbling paint into the intake screens over the engine cowling. “No, stop! Hey, tell him if he clogs them up the engine will flame out. Tell him just to leave them blue.”
I waved at the head guard and pointed. “La el-loun! La!” [No color! No!]
“No?” he asked.
“No. Muharrick neffath. El-mirwaha ’atlana.” [It’s a jet engine. The airvent will jam.]
“Ahh.” He nodded pleasantly and cuffed the boy for his stupidity.
“Color its feet, please?” The guard pointed down at the landing skids, half-buried in the sand.
“No, better not.”
“Ahh, not. And wings?”
“Wings?” I asked.
“Jinah?” He pointed up at the clusters of rotor blades.
“La! No, no.”
“Hookay.” More smiles. He went about the plane, telling the others exactly how he wanted it painted, reinforcing his orders by banging on the fuselage with the muzzle of his gun.
I turned sideways to Birdsong and spoke out of the corner of my mouth. “Did you get the fuses back aboard?”
“Sure,” he whispered. “Made it look like they had been jarred from their brackets and spilled out when I pulled the access. Faisal thinks I am a mechanical genius. … Now, what is your plan?”
“Fly back to Riyadh for bigger Petramin fish.”
“Do you know any?”
“Not really.”
“Then what point ... ?”
“The idea is to get us separated from this crowd of disciplined and heavily armed crazies. Then we work it out from there.”
“Are you going to get us killed?”
“Maybe. But it beats getting our brains summarily blown out when Princess Zahedi discovers that Petramin conforms to Travel Order 6263.”
“Hunh!”
The head guard came around and smiled again. “No talk.”
His submachine gun was strapped casually over his shoulder, the barrel level and pointing toward us. I could see that he had somehow managed to pack the muzzle tightly with clay or sand. The other guards’ weapons were twenty yards away, leaning against the building. ...What a temptation!
Looking him straight in the eye, I said, “Feeh atal.” [There’s something wrong. ] I reached slowly but smoothly for the barrel of his gun.
“Ish? Gif!” [What? Stop!] The man started to pull back on the weapon and I tipped the muzzle up so he could see. “Ahh!” he exclaimed. “Shukren jezeelen!” [Thank you very much!] His face, which had clouded up, was all smiles again. I began to think Birdsong and I might have a chance.
Four hours later, when the aircraft was properly painted a smeary pink with faint blue stripes, we were ready to go. Then Sybil had a big fight with her lieutenant, Scar Face, who was hearing about our plan for the first time. Their fight worked to my advantage, because his opposition forced her to argue for the idea, which closed her mind to any rational assessment of the risks. They screamed Farsi at each other in the main avenue between the houses of Abaila while the rest of their force looked the other way and toed the dirt.
Finally, at midafternoon, Sybil herded Faisal and me into the helicopter. She was holding an Uzi in a rigid, angry grip. It would have been a perfect time to hit her except for the dozen people standing around with their own machine guns. It took fifteen seconds to find out that Faisal was a worse pilot than Birdsong had described. He flunked the start-up sequence three times and on the last try even Sybil was telling him which switches to pull. The engine roared to life just once and then the plane bucked three feet into the air, stalled, and dropped with a bang.
“Out! Out!” Sybil screamed, pointing her gun more at Faisal than at me. We all climbed out of the cabin.
“You stay here, you worthless Wahabi weasel!” She pointed the gun at Birdsong and at Scar Face. “Get in! Get in!”
We all quickly climbed back aboard. Birdsong settled into the pilot’s right-side seat, Scar Face on the left. Sybil and I in the back. The same relative positions as yesterday. Except that Scar Face, caught by surprise, did not have a weapon, at least showing, although there could be a pistol holstered under his fatigue blouse. And Sybil, instead of her sawed-off scatter gun, had the big, two-handed, awkward Uzi. Better and better.
Birdsong wound up the engine and we lifted off fast with a head-snapping bounce. That was the time to hit them. In one motion, my right hand went out to pin the barrel of the machine gun while I rolled my hips toward Sybil, bringing my left leg up and over, cocking my knee to clear the backs of the front seats, arching my foot, and then releasing all that muscle tension and kinetic motion into a point on her forehead. Her head struck the rear bulkhead with a thunk that could be heard above the rotors. Continuing my body twist, I flipped over almost onto my stomach, catching myself and pushing up with my left hand against the seat cushions. Bracing a foot somewhere on Sybil’s neck and shoulder, I dove forward over the back of Scar Face’s seat, drawing in my right fist and then pistoning it, with my whole moving weight behind it, into his quickly turning face. His body recoiled into the control stick and the instrument panel.
By this time, Birdsong had the helicopter about thirty feet in the air and moving forward. He had instinctively pulled back on the stick when I erupted in the cabin, and that motion saved us from nosing in when Scar Face’s body pushed the stick forward.
“Fly!” I screamed at Birdsong.
My hands scrambled across the front of Scar Face’s fatigues trying to haul him off the controls and also to kill him. The blow had just barely stunned him; he was blindly fighting me and working his hands under his blouse to get that holstered pistol. I would have climbed into the front with him, except my belt buckle had caught against the seat’s back frame. I was stretched across the length of the cabin and could feel Sybil stirring down near my feet.
Sensei Kan had always warned us about head shots. The face is full of small bones and teeth, he’d say; they cost your opponent nothing in losing them except pain, but these sharp little bones damage your hands when you strike against them. The skull, fragile as a porcelain vase, is still well protected by cushioning layers of muscle, cartilage, and hair. Also, a blow to the head is too variable: The same force that will kill one man may not even distract another. Better to go for the body structure, the joints, and the nerves, Kan would say.
I would have, Sensei, I really would have, if human bodies sitting in a confined space offered any better—more structural—targets. So here I was, caught on my stomach between two half-stunned terrorists who still had their guns.
The other thing Kan had always said was: When you run out of options in the middle of a fight, don’t stop moving.
And my internal battle computer said that, based on elapsed time alone, Sybil needed to be hit again. I slid down off the seat back, twisted to face her, and let fly with a one-two-three-four-five series of straight punches to the base of her throat. I then snatched the Uzi from her loose fingers and whirled to see what Scar Face was doing.
He was crouching behind the seat cushion, exposing just the top of his head, two eyes, and the muzzle of the biggest pistol I had ever seen. Clearly he was afraid: The whites of his eyes showed all around as he tracked my movements. His gun jerked right and left trying to get a bead on me without hitting Sybil. I pulled the Uzi’s trigger and unloaded a full clip through the back of his seat. The roar drowned out all the noise of rotor wash and engine. The inside of the windshield fogged up with star cracks and blood.