Martin"s Secret

They were untangling after a final burst of heated passion when a severe jolt of turbulence bounced the plane. Martin reconfigured the seats from the horizontal position pilots’ use for shift-sleeping during long hauls and scanned the instruments for potential mechanical issues.

“At least I won’t die a horny widow,” said Jessica between deep breaths.

“I’d wear this smile to the crash site if we were going to crash, but it was just turbulence,” Martin concluded.

She sighed relief and stared through the windshield at the hovering stars that sparkled like billions of tiny diamonds against the black sky.

“You must have read the book, What Do Women Want?”

Martin patted his chest over the heart with a hand and exhaled his own sexual gratification.

“Making love to you doesn’t require instructions any more than a meteorite requires propulsion to fall to Earth.”

Jessica combed her fingers through his hair. “Does that scar over your ear have something to do with all of this?” she asked. “Does it have something to do with your memory loss?”

“Actually, it has everything to do with it. Artificial intelligence fusion, or AI. A CIA-funded upgrade that came with the nanoscopic side effect of wiping out my biological memory.”

“I’m sorry” - Jessica gently traced the scar with her index finger - “but you’ll get it back.” She touched the finger used to trace the scar to her tongue. “And I can’t help wonder what that will do to us,” she added.

“′What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.’”

“Who said that?” she asked.

"Richard Bach.”

“A writer?”

“I think so. Must be a corrupted biological file, I don’t recall anything else.”

“Biological memories aren’t files, they’re, you know, life, a personalized review processed by the mind’s eye,” said Jessica.

“So, you think biological memories are flawed?” asked Martin.

“Don’t be silly, Martin, of course they’re flawed,” she replied. “As much as humans are flawed.”

Martin said nothing and left the autopilot engaged. The two alternated naps and he communicated with air-traffic controllers only when necessary until a half-hour beyond Tallahassee when he switched off the autopilot and put the aircraft into a shallow descent. Within moments, turbulence and thick clouds were buffeting the plane, which woke Jessica.

“Where are we?” she asked, knuckling an eye.

“We’re over the Gulf near the coast of Florida. We’ll be final approach over Brooksville Regional in twenty minutes. It’s a small town but only a forty-minute drive from Tampa - there may be company goons waiting when we land.”

“What’ll we do?”

“That depends, but once we land we’ll need to move fast.”

Martin turned to get the ACR briefcase beside his seat and noticed Jessica peering solemnly out of the side-view windshield.

“You okay?”

She paused before answering. “We were stationed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. It’s where they brought him, after....”

“Sorry. I didn’t know.”

He wished he could think of something comforting to say. Their eyes met briefly and he reached for her but she shook her head and wept silently into her hands. Martin didn’t speak, choosing instead to honor her emotional boundaries.

The cabin pressure warning light was the first sign of trouble. Martin knew that the plane’s emergency oxygen cylinders, at their altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet, would supply ample oxygen for a controlled, fifteen-thousand-foot descent. At that altitude, he could vent the cockpit with breathable outside air. However, to his dismay, the jet simultaneously developed flight control issues. At first, he thought it was a hydraulics failure but there were no servo-warning lights blinking or open circuit breakers as the plane pitched down and starboard.

“What’s happening?” gasped Jessica. “Are we going to crash?”

“I need you to check mid-cabin storage bins right now; there should be a couple of parachutes,” he said. The sense of urgency in Martin’s voice conveyed the gravity of the situation.

Jessica released her safety harness and clung to seats with one hand while flinging open cabinet doors with the other as she made her way through the cabin.

Meanwhile, Martin opened the briefcase and retrieved a red object the size and shape of a baseball and placed it between his seat and the interior of the tapered fuselage wall. The circular object bore a skull and cross-bones and had warnings listed in three languages. He pushed a sensor and red digits on a display scrolled backward in one-second intervals.

“No parachutes,” yelled Jessica from the cabin.

At that moment the plane abruptly rolled left and the nose dropped a couple more degrees. Jessica braced herself against a seat to keep from falling.

“Check under the conference table,” shouted Martin over the intercom as an automated voice repeatedly instructed him to “pull up” and cockpit warnings chirped.

Before long they could breathe, even though the cabin was fully depressurized, which offered good and bad news. The good was that they had descended far enough, the bad was they were still losing altitude. Worse, the sophisticated hacking device inside the ACR briefcase that Martin had removed from his car was useless since the flight controls were being manipulated remotely. Someone at the company had discovered the jet missing and decided to turn it into a crematory tube. Martin put the device back in the briefcase and snapped closed its hardened-steel tabs.

“My husband was Airborne but I never went skydiving,” announced Jessica who was dragging two chute-bags up to the cockpit bulkhead. Exhausted by the thin air, she dropped into the copilot seat.

“Do you have any tips for beginners?” she asked, fastening her safety harness.

“You’ll be fine, we’ll jump together,” Martin reassured.

“You’ve jumped before, right?” she inquired hopefully.

“No, but I did stay at a....”

She glared and he hushed.

“Remind me to laugh when we’re on the ground,” she said.

Jessica was somewhat relieved when he told her that, according to a card in his wallet, he was an experienced sky-diving instructor.

Martin fought for control over the spiraling jet for a while; however, when convinced his efforts were futile, he released his harness and leaned over Jessica with a hand braced against the back of her seat. Pushing aside a lock of hair, he kissed her on the forehead before releasing her constraints.

“They froze the controls. We have to get out of here.”

Taking advantage of centrifugal force, he told her to lean against the cabin-side of the bulkhead while he strapped on her chute. When both of their chutes were secure, he pilfered drawers in the sleeping compartment until he found a pair of women’s running shoes and an aviation jumpsuit.

“Put these on,” he said.

Jessica donned the jumpsuit and tied on the shoes and they clawed their way to the exit behind the flight deck where Martin put his hands on her shoulders.

“I managed to idle the engines, but you’re going to feel a blast of frigid air,” he warned. “Pull this after ten seconds.” He took her hand and placed it on the main chute’s release-grip.

With nylon rope he found while rummaging through the cabin, Martin lashed the large ACR briefcase tightly against his front-side then picked up his phone and thumbed the display.

“Are you ready?”

Jessica, trembling with adrenaline, could only nod. For the first time since she met this tall stranger, she had second thoughts.

Martin grasped a fixed handle near the bottom of the door with one hand and yanked down the emergency release handle near the top of it. The emergency exit-door released with a jolt and he pulled it inside and tossed it over a row of seats. Outside, the wind howled and whistled against the wings and fuselage as cold, swirling air formed an invisible wall at the exit. The two held onto emergency handles beside the door frame as bursts of wind scattered documents throughout the cabin. Jessica’s teeth began to chatter as cold penetrated her core but she kept a tight grip on the chute-release with her free hand.

“Use the steering handles like I showed you and flare just before you reach the ground,” yelled Martin over the sounds of the careening jet.

They kissed briefly before he pushed her out of the plane, counted to ten and hurtled himself free. A pang of guilt slapped him for telling Jessica they would tandem, but it would have been dangerous with the bulky briefcase, besides, he could maneuver to her during their free-fall if her chute failed.

After plunging through a cloud, he caught a starlit glimpse of Jessica’s white chute and heard its fabric whoosh and flap as it unfurled in the darkness. She was two-hundred feet below and to his left so he executed free-fall maneuvers so they were in proximity before deploying his own chute.