Unaccompanied Minor (21 page)

I wanted to kiss him, but I didn’t know how long the light would last inside the bottle. So I simply swore I’d never drink Mountain Dew again (I bet chemical toilets are composed of more organic ingredients), and the three of us ventured back through the hole in the wall and into the cargo bay.

One thing I’d noticed when Malcolm was retrieving the baking soda was that the cooler door, when open, lay flat against the bulkhead and concealed the top half of the hole I’d created. So once we were through, I opened the cooler door behind us and pulled out a heavy beverage cart from the nearest sleeve and secured its brake, which in turn concealed the lower half of the hole. It wasn’t a David Copperfield illusion, but I thought it would work to cover our tracks for a bit, especially in a pitch-dark galley.

As we crept along the catwalk, Malcolm asked me, “What did Flo mean by that message she told you through the intercom?”

I stopped for a moment as the thought of Flo sent a wave of despondence through my entire body. It was literally a physical effort to push it aside in order to forge ahead.
I can’t fall apart about Flo right now
, I thought. I’d fall apart about her tomorrow, and the day after, and so on. But right now was not the time.

“It’s an episode of
MacGyver
. Other than that, I’m not sure what she meant,” I admitted.

“You don’t know the episode she’s talking about?” he asked. “Let’s get out your DVDs and read the episode summaries.”

“Actually, I know the episode she was referring to really well; I just don’t know how she meant for it to help us in this situation.”

“Well, little lady.” Officer Ned’s speech was beginning to slur a little due to the painkillers, and I could see through the glow of Malcolm’s Mountain Dew lantern that he grinned dreamily. “Why don’t you go on and tell us what the episode is about, and maybe we can put our heads together and come up with some suggestions.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “In this episode, MacGyver takes a trip to the wilderness with a bunch of gang-member delinquents as part of some probation program—”

“What wilderness, where?” Officer Ned asked thoughtfully. He furrowed his brow and stroked his goatee like Sigmund Freud.

“It’s in the mountains somewhere, at a high altitude. He travels there in a plane—”

“A plane!” Officer Ned exclaimed, like it was a big breakthrough.

“Yes, a plane. It’s a small Cessna aircraft. He and the kids are flown there by a pilot who has a heart attack and dies on the way back from picking them up—”

“Heart attack!” Another breakthrough for Officer Ned.

“Yes, the pilot dies mid-flight. Mac has to land the plane in the mountains and they all end up stranded.”

“Hmmm. What else?”

“Um… I don’t think there’s any more important information from the episode.”

“Young lady.” Officer Ned attempted to puff out his chest and sound authoritative, but the bullet wounds and the painkillers prevented that. “I am an officer of the
law
,” he continued as best he could. “I am an expert in
detection
. I am trained to look at the most minuscule of details and develop a
theory
! Now, what else happens in the episode?”

“Uh, okay,” I said, and continued to describe the details of the episode, about how the delinquents were a group of four—three guys and one girl—and how they all came from rival gangs, how one got saved from a rattlesnake when Mac used a smoldering piece of wood from the fire to create warmth to attract the snake away from the sleeping bag, and how another got saved from a mountain lion when Mac used a hollow log to divert water to splash on it because everyone knows cats hate water, and how Mac tried to dissipate the infighting of the delinquents by assigning them tasks to create camaraderie, and how, in the end, he was able to repair the damaged aircraft and fly them all to safety.

Officer Ned and Malcolm began to theorize amongst themselves. Soon they were dissecting every detail and even delving into the subliminal side of things.

“A group of four delinquents, I bet that signifies the four cabins on the L-1011 plane,” Malcolm began.

“Oooh, good one,” Officer Ned interjected, “and the mountain lion must represent the flight attendant who shot me, and the rattlesnake represents the man who shot Flo….”

“I hadn’t thought of that! Of course they do!”

“And the tension between MacGyver and the group of kids represents the struggle between innovation and authority….”

“Uh… oh-kay.”

“Like, how you could be turned down for promotion four times even though you took two bullets for your partner, who got his promotion, didn’t he? Yes he did, but me? No, not me. All I got was stuck doing these prisoner escort assignments, and why? Because I don’t bow to The Man, that’s why….”

“Officer Ned, let’s bring it back to the message in the
MacGyver
episode,” Malcolm urged patiently. I had a feeling Malcolm was experienced in bringing people back from the precipice of a prescription drug–induced rant. Remember, I’d met his mother.

“Right, yes.” Officer Ned immediately returned to the task at hand. “Uh, okay, there’s four kids, maybe that’s the number of hijackers we’re dealing with….” His previous rambling did make me remember something, though. It was an incident early in the episode in which MacGyver plucks a canister of pills from the dead pilot’s breast pocket and murmurs to himself, “Nitroglycerin.”

Nitroglycerine is famous for two things. One, it’s super highly explosive; in fact it’s the ingredient that make dynamite sticks go boom. And two, nitroglycerin, taken in minuscule amounts, can be used as a medicine that opens blood vessels to improve blood flow in order to allay a heart attack, or simply to alleviate chest pains during angina. Plenty of passengers experience chest pains on long flights—in fact, I’m sure there were plenty above us right then, clutching their chests and being ignored by the imposter-laden cabin crew—which is why WorldAir always keeps a canister containing twenty-five tablets of nitroglycerin on every aircraft located in the emergency medical kit!

“Malcolm,” I said, interrupting his and Officer Ned’s florid attempts to decipher the symbolism of every scene in the
MacGyver
episode. (“The plane, you see, represents our soaring dreams, only to come crashing to the ground.”) “Malcolm, can you hand me the EMK?”

“What’s an EMK?” he asked.

“Emergency medical kit,” I clarified. “You brought it with you, right?”

“You bet I did.” He handed it to me.

I plunked it at my feet and crouched down to rummage through the transparent pockets on the inside sleeves where all the medications reserved for physicians’ use were stowed. Malcolm situated his Mountain Dew lantern to aid me.

“Found it!” I exclaimed, brandishing the canister.

“What is that?” Malcolm asked. Officer Ned was beginning to look worried again.

“Nitroglycerin tablets.”

“So totally awesome! Are you gonna use them to blow your way through the cockpit?”

Officer Ned stepped between me and Malcolm. “Wait, hold on now, just what are you planning to do?”

“We need to blow through the hatch in the floor of the flight deck in order to gain control of the cockpit—”

“No, not on your life, no.” Officer Ned shook his head and actually wagged his finger at me. “You are not using those to blow anything up. Hand them over to me.”

I tucked the tablets into the pocket of my apron. Officer Ned was not the only one who could ignore directions. “You didn’t let me finish.” I was starting to get exasperated. “Of course I’m not gonna use these tablets to blow anything up. These are not explosive, they’re medication.” Believe me, I knew. Flo had set me straight when I’d griped that MacGyver had neglected to use the tablets to his benefit when we’d watched the episode together.

“Then what were you planning to use to blow into the cockpit?” he asked.

“These,” I said, producing the three bullets I’d collected from the bottom of Flo’s bag.

“Are you nuts?” Officer Ned asked. “Those are just bullets! You need a gun to use them.”

“We see that differently,” I told him.

We continued our progress along the catwalk in the cargo bay. I was in front, Malcolm behind me with the lantern in his hand and Captain Beefheart snuggled securely to his chest in the improvised baby sling, and Officer Ned bringing up the rear, limping along with his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. On either side of us were the passengers’ checked bags, stacked with all the order and care that big banks might give to the possessions of people evicted from their foreclosed homes.

When I reached the avionics area, I directed the others to follow me as I climbed past the shelves and crawled through to get to the platform on the other side. Malcolm and I made it through easily, even with Beefheart strapped to Malcolm’s chest, while Officer Ned ambled up and over with the grace of a wounded water buffalo. True, he was shot up and all, but still, it amounted to a moment of much-needed comic relief for me and Malcolm.

“Stop laughing!” he admonished us. “Seriously, you kids,
this is serious
.”

He was right, of course, but, and I realize I’m speaking for Malcolm here, we really could have used a little levity right then, considering the day’s events, which included the dead air marshal, the dead real Brighton McPherson, the dead imposter Brighton McPherson, the almost-dead Malcolm, Beefheart, and Officer Ned, and I don’t even want to talk about Flo, and this doesn’t even count my dead friend Jalyce Sanders. Yes, this was serious—very, very serious—but such seriousness can weigh on you like a necklace of anvils. Unless you take it off, you can’t move because you’re so paralyzed. So we laughed.

Because we had to move.

Once Officer Ned had climbed to our side, I had Malcolm raise the lantern to illuminate the ceiling above us. We were looking at the other side of the floor hatch that opened into the cockpit, the one a pilot would use if he wanted to come down and access the avionics area from the flight deck.

This was not a cockpit door. The cockpit door was an opening that led to the passenger cabin. That door had been retrofitted and fortified with enough security measures to keep a cavalcade of elephants from breaking it down. The flight deck floor hatch on an L-1011 exists for the purpose of utility, not as a formal aircraft exit or entrance. It’s accessed on the ground when mechanics and engineers need to address any adjustments in order to maintain the operational health of the aircraft. It’s accessed during flight when pilots need to address equipment failure. Officially. Flo had regaled me with stories, though, of back in the day when many a pilot and flight attendant, or even pilot and passenger, earned their “mile-high” status by descending through the hatch to engage in amorous activity. Of course, she included herself in that group.

But never in the history of aviation—and I’m not exaggerating here—has the flight deck hatch been breached from beneath during flight. To achieve that would have meant someone had cut a hole through the bulkhead wall beneath, traversed the catwalk through cargo, and climbed past the avionics area to stand where we were, looking up at it from below. So no small feat, right?

Right?

Fine. I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the enormity of what we were about to do, since we didn’t have time to while we were actually doing it.

Agent Kowalski:

Just finish your statement, please.

April Manning:

Okay, we were looking up at a watertight deck hatch like the kind you’d find on a boat. Back in the fifties and sixties when luxury airliners were being built by Lockheed and Boeing, they used nautical references all the time in their designs, because aircrafts were considered ships in the sky, kind of. That’s why you’ll hear the cabin crews use terms like “forward” and “aft,” and why some airlines refer to the cabin-crew coordinator as “purser.” The word “cabin” itself is even a nautical term.

So, again, the floor hatch was literally like a deck hatch on a boat, secured by medium-weight slip-click hardware with a single lock. The hinges were on the opposite side from us, so I couldn’t disassemble them, but I could discern from the bolts opposite them where the locking lever was located.

I produced one of the bullets from my pocket and tried to bite the base off of it, but I wasn’t doing a good job.

“What are you doing?” Officer Ned whispered.

“I’m trying to bite off the base so I can remove the gunpowder.”

Officer Ned thrust out his hand. “Give me one.” I passed one to him and continued struggling with my own. In the end, Officer Ned opened both bullets (he had really strong teeth) and I folded the gunpowder from them into a large square bandage from the first aid kit, careful to make sure the sticky edges were sealed together to make a snug little pouch for the powder, which I then crammed into the seam of the hatch directly under the lock. I shoved the remaining bullet in after it and was pleased to see it stuck in there pretty well, with the base protruding out about a quarter of an inch.

“Okay,” I whispered to Officer Ned. “Gimme one of your boots.”

“What?” He took a small, protective step back. “No! I need these boots!”