Desert crash
“I’m already dead. What about you?” DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 9
From Episode 8: Penny, wounded, grabs what she needs from Kasym and survives a second assassin, but she’s still trapped in the Burj…
She planted the Beretta against the flat of her tummy, beneath the T-shirt. Then she opened the door, the second Smith & Wesson in hand, and peeked out. The corridor ran along the open atrium. Empty. She stayed in a crouch but risked inching her eyes over the railing.
A commotion about three floors down—staff, butlers, maids, hotel security, men in suits on cell phones. The sound of gunshots would have quickly drawn attention. Lev and Stack’s bodies were in there. Further down, all the way down to the lobby level, security men and cops converged.
No way she’d be leaving through the front door.
Keeping low, she scurried toward the elevator bank and a fire stairwell, which she had checked out earlier in the day. She opened the door to the stairs and looked down, Smith & Wesson first. Concrete steps. She paused to quietly shut the door behind her and listen. Footfalls echoing, something jangling. But she couldn’t see beyond the two sets of stairs connecting her landing to the other levels.
Nowhere to go but up.
Viktor and his men would have known they’d make a commotion. They had come in messy. There was only one way to escape from the Burj al Arab beyond the causeway linking it to land. It must have been how Viktor had arrived.
The helicopter pad was only two flights up. She sprinted the stairs. Below her she heard the same door open, close. Someone was following her.
She burst into the corridor along the hotel’s top floor, where there was a waiting room for the helipad.
A hotel concierge, a heavyset woman bundled into a crisp uniform, seeing her—the pistol, the blood, and who knew what in Penny’s eyes—screamed.
Penny didn’t have time for this, and she was getting pretty good at delivering a pistol whip. She stepped over the silenced woman.
The helipad awaited at the far end of the hallway.
The door to the waiting room opened again. Two men. But not what she expected.
Elderly white men, one tall, the other medium height, both slender and elegantly dressed in matching tan suits with silk striped ties, pocket squares and boutonnieres, marigolds pinned to their lapels. The shorter one had a square face and haphazard gray hair, and his lips pulled on a cigarette in a long holder, like an aristocrat from another century. The tall one was bald, with professorial wreaths of hair around his ears, and wore the sort of glasses an accountant might squint through. He leaned on a cane, his arching frame sheltering his smaller colleague.
“I say,” said the tall man with glasses and the cane.
“Indeed,” said the other, the cigarette never leaving his mouth.
Penny ran past them. Something caught her ankle. The floor rose up to smack her in the chest. She looked up and behind her.
“Ever so sorry,” said the tall man, freeing his cane from her ankle.
“We do apologize,” said his companion.
Viktor emerged at the far end of the corridor, his crisp white shirt patterned with someone else’s blood. His wide, Slavic face seethed redly and the harelip burned like a white slash.
The heavy door slammed behind her as she charged up the rooftop.
Bullets pinged as she ran to the top of the stairs.
The Eurocopter was there, waiting in the center of the lights, its three-bladed rotor spinning, the engine whining. The passenger door was open, inviting, and the pilot was too slow to realize she was a threat.
Penny jumped into the chopper.
“Go. Now.”
The pilot turned and stared at the mouth of her gun. He was an Arab. Maybe not part of Viktor’s organization, just rented. He looked scared.
“You will die,” he said.
“I’m already dead. What about you?”
She slid the door shut as a bullet punched the Eurocopter’s flank.
The pilot protested in Arabic but his hands gripped the controls and the chopper lifted. Viktor ran onto the helipad, followed by a second man—the wounded butler she had left behind in Kasym’s room. Flames leapt from their fingers, and a syncopation of bullets struck the chopper as it veered over the abyss.
The pilot shrieked.
“What? Keep going!”
They were in space. The neat squares of streets were etched in orange. Ahead loomed the dark glitz of skyscrapers.
The pilot mewed and the patchwork of streets below blurred as the chopper gyrated. She stuck her head forward but all she saw of the pilot was his back, slumped over, his hand frantically reaching for something.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m hit!”
Blood smeared the Plexiglas beside him as he kept up with his furtive motion.
“Give me control,” she said.
“I’m shot!”
“Join the club.” She pushed herself into the co-pilot’s seat and straddled the cyclic. The pilot sobbed. As she strapped on her harness the chopper entered a spin. They were falling.
She searched for the control switch.
The pilot wailed a prayer in Arabic. She found the switch and pushed her feet on the anti-torque pedals while her hands gripped the control joystick between her legs.
“Where’s the collective?” The pilot didn’t reply.
The spinning had slowed and she muscled the joystick against the direction of the rotation. But they were still falling.
“Is this it?”
No response. She pulled on the lever. The chopper buckled and began to ascend. Suddenly the towers were before them. She rammed the stick as they avoided a skyscraper.
The black tower was lit like an impossibly tall set of cylinders, each illuminated from below in ever narrowing increments. She was hurtling into the Burj Khalifa, in a macabre replay of the chopper tour with Timur.
She jerked the collective as hard as she could, pushed the stick to the left, and pumped the anti-torque pedals to set a new direction. The obsidian façade of the great tower filled the cockpit’s view.
That sound she heard was her own scream.
The cabin whispered past the smooth glass wall, but as the chopper turned, its fantail clipped the edge of Burj Khalifa and jerked them into a tornado. She worked the pedals, found the collective, nudged the chopper up while Dubai whirled below, Burj Khalifa winking on and off in her view like a blinking black knife.
The helicopter was going down—she didn’t need the flashing dashboard alarms to tell her that. Her stomach filled her mouth. She tried to arc toward the darkness of the desert. Glass towers zoomed up around her. She saw airplanes and lamp-lined runways, and made one final adjustment to veer away from everything and towards empty land.
Then she shut off the engine to the main rotors, RPMs dialed all the way, velocity fading. She pitched the nose up until she was facing the blank night sky. The tail whacked the ground first and the skids landed with a bang. The nose touched the earth and she burst forward.
The seat belt held her an inch away from kissing glass.
Stillness.
Penny checked her limbs. The bullet wound burned, but she didn’t seem to have added new ones. She patted her torso and ribs. Nothing broken.
The landing had likely smashed off the skids because the cabin was now snogging the ground. The craft was tilted so that she was low, almost buried, with the dead pilot hovering above her, strapped to his chair. She heard the patter of blood from his wounds drip onto her blazer. She undid her buckles and moved back into the main cabin. She checked the pistol, pocketed it, and used her good hand to open the door.
The hardscrabble ground was aligned on an angle. She hopped down and fell. Everything was trembling.
Scrubland stretched into blackness, but after a moment she realized there were a series of metallic posts in the distance. Some kind of fence. She picked herself up, found her footing, and peeked around the wreckage. She beheld an array of lights, giant warehouses, forklifts and airplanes.
She was probably at a distant corner of al-Maktoum International Airport, judging from the scale of the compound and the visible lights of nearby skyscrapers. Penny hadn’t gotten very far.
Ambulance lights flashed.
She closed the chopper’s door, entombing the pilot’s corpse. She had to hope the ambulance crew would assume he had flown alone.