Contracts by Matt Rogers (i like reading txt) 📕

Phaplu was close. Incredibly close. The airport, as far as he could tell, was less than five minutes away if they maintained their current speed. Slater figured it’d be the longest five minutes of his life, but he was confident the old Dornier could tough it out.

Then the nose dipped violently.

If he hadn’t been strapped in, he would have hit the roof. Luckily King had deemed it prudent to find a seat, because he might have been thrown out of the plane entirely. They each jerked against their seatbelts and crashed back down into the seats in twin heaps.

Slater coughed, fought the urge to lose the contents of his stomach, and squinted hard at the controls.

Everything was falling apart. He didn’t know what exactly had caused the chaos — one of the bullets striking something vital, obviously — but now the situation was growing more dire with each passing second. The plane jerked again, and Slater had to fight to prevent it dive-bombing into the peak of the nearest mountain.

Sweat beaded on his forehead, and ran off his nose.

He gritted his teeth and fought for control.

Then he spotted Phaplu. The village was barely visible in the valleys below, but he made out the roofs of buildings and, alongside it, the tiny runway. He dove for it, abandoning all hope of a smooth landing.

Because they were running on borrowed time.

The Dornier whined and shook and rattled in its descent, but it was rapidly approaching the village, and if Slater could touch down in one piece, they’d be at the home stretch—

Then one of the turboprop engines faltered.

There was a pop to their left and the plane jerked brutally to the right.

Slater’s brain screamed, Emergency landing.

Only option.

But that wasn’t even an option. They were screaming toward Phaplu, perhaps a minute out at best, but there was no way he could touch down on a runway that short with the engines in their current state. He swore at the top of his lungs, and heard King unbuckle his seatbelt behind him.

King fought his way into the cockpit doorway.

‘Was that an engine?!’ he shouted over the roar.

‘Sure was.’

‘Can you land?’

‘I don’t think so.’

King went white as a ghost. ‘What do we do, then?’

Slater’s brain was going haywire as a dozen different thoughts fought for his attention. He could barely concentrate on the landscape, let alone—

The landscape.

He spotted the bright blue glacial river running parallel to Phaplu, less than half a mile from the village. He thought he recalled a name he’d read on a guide map days earlier, but it was deep in the recesses of his mind.

Solu?

He wasn’t sure. It sounded right. It didn’t matter either way.

He aimed for it.

Which mattered plenty. He was committing to it. There’d be no room for an alternative plan.

It was this or nothing.

An emergency landing, or a fiery crash.

No Plan B.

King realised too. ‘Oh, shit.’

Slater didn’t have time to respond. He was zoned into a tunnel, like he’d taken the entire planet’s supply of Adderall at once. There was the river, and nothing else. He could see the position of every rock, every trickle, every sliver of dirt on the riverbanks. He got a sense of the depth of the water, the flow of the streams, the rising and falling of the land beneath it.

Then, in the blink of an eye, he realised a landing would be impossible.

And the only feasible option for survival presented itself.

‘No,’ Slater said. ‘No, no, no, no…’

‘What?!’ King shouted.

Slater steeled himself.

‘Leave the bags,’ he said, his voice ice, his demeanour ice. ‘We don’t need them anymore. Go to the exit and get ready to jump.’

‘What?!’

‘No other option.’

‘You can’t land?’

‘It’ll tear the plane apart.’

‘Holy shit,’ King said to himself, backing out of the doorway. ‘Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.’

Slater heard the cursing fade as King went down the fuselage toward the open doorway, bracing himself against the wind the whole time.

Then he zoned in even harder on the river.

He flew lower.

Lower…

Lower still…

Lower.

Then he pulled up at the last second and the Dornier levelled out perhaps twenty feet above the river. The speed was ludicrous, the wind deafening, the fuselage rattling, the whole plane threatening to shred to pieces at the slightest provocation.

They wouldn’t make it thirty more seconds.

Slater employed every ounce of concentration he had available and let impulse take over. He opened his gaze wide, expanding his peripheral vision, and waited for the right moment.

Then he saw it.

A couple of hundred feet ahead, the light blue of the glacial water was a shade darker.

There was enough depth there.

He figured out trajectories fast, calculating when to jump and—

NOW.

He twisted in his seat, unclasped the seatbelt, and yelled, ‘Jump!’

King obliged. Anyone else would have hesitated, but both of them were keenly aware of the importance of timing in a world like this. King heard the command and threw himself out the door without a moment’s hesitation, his body pummelled by the wind and the G-forces. He whipped out of sight and was gone.

Slater leapt out of the pilot’s seat, scrambled out of the cockpit, and flat-out sprinted for the exit door.

Every stray thought in his brain, every instinct, every ounce of common sense — it all banded together and urged him to stop, screamed for him to stop.

He felt the nose of the plane dip with no one behind the controls, and knew the Dornier would impact the water at any moment.

He fought against the wind and clawed his way out of the plane into the open air.

83

He only fell ten feet before hitting the water with horrific intensity.

Still travelling at the same speed as the low-flying plane, he had the sensation of shattering every bone in his body as he broke through the surface. There was a single moment of impact, and then absolute silence.

He floated in the glacial water, barely conscious, barely clinging onto his sanity and his life.

If he passed out now, he’d sink to a watery grave.

He floated gently downward a couple of feet, and his feet touched