Unaccompanied Minor by Hollis Gillespie Read Free Book Online Page B

and gentlemen, the plane is still on an active taxi,” she announced. “Please stay seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten-seatbelt sign.” Once she finished her announcement she immediately re-engrossed herself in the tabloid opened on her lap, a total violation of federal regulations, by the way.
    I kept my eyes expectantly on Officer Ned.
    “What?” he finally asked.
    “You know there’s a tailcone exit on this plane, don’t you?” I said.
    “Really? Well, I doubt my prisoner can open it,” he chuckled.
    “It tells you how to open it right here in the safety card,” I told him. I pulled the card out of my seat pocket and unfolded it. “Right here,” I pointed. “And there’s no flight attendant manning the back of the plane right now.”
    When I say Officer Ned moved in a flash, I am not exaggerating. It was like,
whoosh!
, and he was halfway to the back just as the prisoner opened the aft door, which the flight attendant had already disarmed—another
total
FAA violation, seeing as how the plane had not come to a complete stop yet. Because of this the tailcone did not drop and deploy the slide, as it would have if it was armed like it should have been. What happened instead was worse.
    I got up and followed right behind, because I did not want to miss this. When you open the tailcone exit of an MD-88 in the disarmed position, it enables you to lower the aft staircase, the one reserved for the ground crew so they can enter the plane from the back and begin cleaning the cabin before the passengers are even finished disembarking through the front door.
    In this case, the prisoner, who had unlocked his handcuffs (not surprising, since there are hundreds of tutorials on YouTube showing you exactly how), was already at the end of the catwalk along the interior of the tailcone by the time Officer Ned dove through the back door and missed the man’s ankles by about a nano-inch. The other passengers had jumped up from their seats, thinking all the activity meant it was okay to start gathering their carry-ons and lumber toward the exit, oblivious to the fact that one, the plane was still moving, and two, anything was wrong. The flight attendant at midcabin, equally oblivious, kept repeating her PA admonishment for everyone to remain seated or she’d have to tell the captain to stop the plane on the tarmac, which would actually have been a good thing to do, but she never did it.
    The attendant who should have been manning the aft door was still holed up in the side galley. He did not so much as peek through the curtain, not even when the fire started.
    Because it turns out that when you drag a metal staircase along asphalt behind an airplane in the hot California sun, it causes sparks. And sparks cause fires. Luckily I’d grabbed the Halon extinguisher from the bracket behind the last seat on my way back there. I didn’t expect to use it to actually put out a fire, because a Halon extinguisher happens to be a great weapon in case you need to throw it at the head of an escaping car thief, but then the sparks ignited the brake pad on one of the landing gears, and, well, there was nothing for it but to pull the pin on the extinguisher and begin spraying it in a fan formation as the flight attendant manual instructs.
    Before the smoke obstructed my view, I saw Officer Ned overtake his prisoner right as he was about to reach the chain-link fence along the runway. It was a pretty impressive sight, considering the head start the thief had on him. But Officer Ned has legs like rockets, he really does. I’m glad he’s one of my few friends.
    Regarding the fire, all I had to do was pull the inflation handle of the escape slide. Once it deployed and came in contact with the fire, which hadn’t grown that big (it takes ninety seconds for a fire to grow out of control), the slide popped and the ensuing burst of air extinguished the flames. I snuffed any residual