I crouched low and shuffled closer. Christ. These men were nuts. Carter grabbed my wrist and pulled me close to them. “Give me the Versed.”
I handed over the syringe without thinking. Before I even realized what he was doing, Carter had stepped up and jabbed the pilot in the arm.
“What are you doing?” I cried. “We need him to fly the plane!”
Carter looked back at me in shock. “I thought you knew how to fly the plane!”
I lunged forward and grabbed the handgun out of the pilot’s hand as he began to slump forward in the pilot’s seat. “Fuck, fuck,” I hissed, yanking at his seat belt so I could pull him out of the chair. As soon as I got him out, I shouted for Carter to tie him up in case he regained consciousness, and then I climbed into the chair and grabbed the yoke.
“Fuck,” I repeated under my breath. All of the controls were in a Cyrillic language. I recognized the brand of plane as an Antonov, which was built in Ukraine. “Fuck.”
Carter appeared over my shoulder. “I… shit. I… oh my God, are we going to crash? I’m sorry! What do I do?”
I tried to stay calm. “I know the basics of how to keep us in the air, but I’m going to need help navigating us somewhere and figuring out how to land. See if they have a phone or something.”
The minute I tried radioing anyone official in Venezuela, we’d be at the mercy of the corrupt government and who knows who else around here.
The guard on the ground started moaning. “¡No íbamos a lastimarte! Gianluigi dijo que te llevara a un lugar seguro. Quería que te dejáramos ir!”
“Uh. You guys get that?” Buck asked. “My dude says Gianluigi wanted to let us go. They was takin’ us to safety.”
Carter clapped a hand over his mouth, and I knew from looking at him that he was torn between feeling sentimental over Gianluigi having mercy on us in the end and even more guilt over unnecessarily drugging the pilot… and potentially causing us to crash.
“We can deal with that later,” I said sharply, jolting him out of his guilt spiral. “First things first. Phone?”
“No, but I have my Horn!” Carter said. “Hang on.”
“The Turnip Blight,” I reminded him. “We’ve got another seven hours and something. We’re fucked.”
“Do what now?” Buck said. “You talking about the HOG Turnip Blight?”
No, jackass, we’re talking about another turnip blight. Christ.
“Yes,” Carter said. “I have a sat-enabled Horn, but we can’t communicate while it’s down for maintenance.”
“Aw, well, that’s easy. Just tap the strawberry in the logo, and then slide your finger between the corn husk and the grapes in the cornucopia. It’ll give you access to your message page.”
Carter and I both turned to stare at the man.
“Are you some kind of Horn prodigy?” Carter demanded.
“The original Horn prodigy,” Buck agreed.
“Hmm.” Carter frowned.
Fortunately, Carter was too preoccupied to connect the dots at the moment and realize who Buck was, but I knew he’d be annoyed later. I planned to explain the situation—a version that wouldn’t get me in trouble for spilling client secrets—to him once we were on the ground.
Assuming we survived the landing.
“Focus. You can force the Horn’s chat function to work even during the Blight?” I demanded.
“Sure. What’s that look for?” Buck asked, blinking innocently. “The only reason HOG don’t want people using the message app while we’re doing maintenance is because they’ll inevitably contact support, and we want all our resources on the upgrade. There ain’t no reason you can’t message your buddies so long as you don’t open a support ticket.”
“Yeah, we don’t need a support ticket,” Carter said, quickly tapping the Horn awake and trying the trick with the logo image. “It worked!”
“’Course it worked. I didn’t just fall off a turnip… truck. Hey, that’s pretty funny, considering.”
It really wasn’t.
Carter glanced back at Buck. “But how will my friend know the messaging trick?”
Buck reached for the Horn and clicked a few buttons before handing it back. “There. That’ll wake up his Horn and make it yodel. The message page will appear instead of the Turnip Blight newspaper.”
Yodel. For fuck’s sake.
I began barking orders. “Tell Hux I need translation for the cockpit controls of an Antonov An-2. I need help navigating, and I’ll sure as shit need help landing in Socopó.”
Carter climbed into the copilot’s seat and belted himself in before reading Hux’s response. He looked up at me with all the fear in his eyes again.
“He says we can’t go to Socopó. The military is doing exercises there.”
Carter tapped messages back and forth. “He can’t be serious,” he muttered under his breath.
“Why? What’s he saying?”
Carter looked up at me again. “He says we need to fly into Colombia. Isn’t that illegal?”
This situation was so ridiculous, I wanted to laugh. “More illegal than hijacking a drug lord’s plane, drugging our pilot, and flying without a license?”