Hand of God by Jack Slater

Author:Jack Slater [Slater, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

25

The kid in the seat behind scrunched his knees to his chest, took a deep breath, then jackknifed out to ram his heels into the seatback. The blow sent a judder of pain through Trapp’s aching shoulder, a relic of an old injury that only played up these days when he sat on his ass for too long. It wasn’t the first time the boy had kicked him. He suspected that it wouldn’t be the last.

Closing his eyes, Trapp pictured unbuckling his metal seatbelt, reaching over to the row behind and grasping the child by his collar. What was he, ten? Light enough to dangle from one ankle and shake him until he agreed never to fly again.

Damn Richards, he thought grimly.

The New York to Jakarta plane route was the longest scheduled commercial flight in the world. It took a grand total of twenty-two hours, and Trapp was doing it in the back. It was the quickest route, but the Agency could at least have sprung for business class on a flight that long.

You’re getting soft.

Not soft, just old, he thought. There was a time when he wasn’t much out of his teens that he would simply have slept through the entire journey. Even with some pissant child doing his best to get himself thrown out the emergency escape.

Wouldn’t that be a treat.

He pictured the little boy tumbling head over heels, punching through clouds, imagined his terrified scream as he plunged toward the Pacific Ocean below—

“Another whiskey, sir?”

Trapp opened his eyes and nodded. Singapore Airlines was at least efficient, regularly trundling the steel refreshment carts up and down the aisles and inquiring whether the benighted passengers on board needed anything. He didn’t understand how she looked so damn fresh after fifteen hours in the air.

That gave him an idea.

He jerked his time at the seat behind. “Can you give it to that asshole?”

The flight attendant knowingly raised her eyes and glanced at the child behind, who was limbering up to belt Trapp in the back once more. She lowered her voice and said, “I’m afraid not, sir. I would offer you another seat, but we’re fully booked on today’s flight.”

“It’s no problem,” Trapp said as he accepted the liquor. In a plastic cup. “I’ve slept in worse places.”

She moved on to the next passenger. The thing was, it was true. He’d slept in many worse places. In tropical jungles with cockroaches and millipedes crawling over his sweat-soaked skin and scorpions burrowing into every open crevice in his clothing and rucksack. In Alaska on a training mission, where he damn near froze to death.

But usually he didn’t have a face on which to ascribe his misery. Fifteen hours—and counting—of dreaming up ways to kill a minor wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of healthy self-care.

He returned to the idea he’d had when the attendant was serving him. The reason she looked so perky. On a flight this long, there had to be at least two, maybe even three sets of different crewmembers so that they could rotate in and out while still complying with international crew rest regulations.

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