Page 20 of Final Approach

“Do you hear me, Torres? You. Are. Still. My. Prisoner.” The suicidal man pushed a finger into Torres pec, which was the wrong move. Torres snapped his face down to the detective’s level, a few inches shorter, and the psychopathic scowl made me shuffle back a few inches, even though I was nowhere near them.

“You are not so big when you can’t drug me, Detective,” he spat, in a low, gravelly voice that could’ve commanded a prison yard in the movies. “Touch me again, and I will snap your fingers one by one and feed them to a jaguar.”

The detective’s sneer was all ego clearly, no substance, because he backed off a foot as Torres stared him down with an intensity that would make most men piss their pants.

Whatever we had to do to survive, I was not fucking with this guy.

A shuffle behind me drew my attention back to the plane. Nicolas—I’d heard the captain call him Nikki——was clambering carefully out of the hole much more elegantly than I had. He gently tossed his bag onto the sand and reached back up. Captain West handed him another bag, a fire extinguisher, and a metal first-aid kit, along with an entire bucket of snacks and drinks. He carefully placed every item off to the side, then reached back up through the space to guide the captain through it.

Her exit wasn’t nearly as graceful. She couldn’t maneuver through the awkward space in her tight pencil skirt and as she angled her body sideways, her chest caught on a jagged ridge of metal. The rip of fabric was almost as loud as the detective’s bullshit threats. Nikki swooped in to catch her when she tumbled toward the ground.

Not a professional catch either. His hand lingered on the back of her thighs when he lowered her to the ground, like she was precious cargo. Was she fucking him?

The way she immediately moved away from him said otherwise. Intentional distance, like Theresa and I at work parties. Well—any parties. Life.

So, unrequited then. I couldn’t blame him in the looks department. Our dubious captain was beautiful, even with tear-stained cheeks and covered in soot. Dark hair, full lips, curves to grab and hold on to—a younger Sofia Vergara in uniform. A uniform that now had a gaping hole in it, exposing her bulging breasts to the world. Perfectly round, perky breasts.

She didn’t seem to give her exposure any attention at all. Her blood-shot green eyes turned their focus on us.

On me.

They were large eyes, eyes you could easily get lost in and share all your truths to. I didn’t want to look at them, but they’d captured me in a moment of weakness.

“Thank you for getting everyone out safely, Ambrose.” The earnestness, the gratitude of her tone conflicted with everything I knew about her. This woman was certainly not our savior. Why did she keep acting like this? Guilt?

Before I could respond, she surveyed the others—people I hadn’t paid much attention to before now, other than the dickhead detective and the convict.

“Emilia has decided to stay with the plane,” she said with a note of finality. “So, we are all that’s left. Our plane has what’s called an ELT – an emergency locator transmitter. As long as we stay close by and visible, we have a chance of being found.”

All that’s left … so the second pilot hadn’t made it either. This savior complex of hers was definitely from guilt.

I had to look away as the acid roiling in my stomach threatened to become hateful words. As justified as it was, I wasn’t stupid enough to eviscerate the one person who seemed to know what she was doing. Nikki’s calm reminder had stuck. I didn’t trust her, but he seemed trustworthy enough. He hadn’t abandoned his post.

She turned her attention to the rest of the group and confirmed my suspicions. “I have survival training, and I’ll do my best to keep us safe, but we’re going to have to work together. First, we need to address our injuries and bandage them up as best we can, and then we need to assess what we have—food, water, medicines. It’s going to get dark soon, and we’ll need to make a fire.”

Nighttime in the jungle. Despite the disgusting heat, a quiver of fear racked through my body. Fuck.

“Is it safe to be around the plane?” One of the women with the rhyming names asked – the brunette one.

The captain—no, I wasn’t calling her that anymore—Marley’s face fell. “I don’t know for certain,” she admitted, running a hand through her knotted hair. She pointed beyond my back, and like the others, I turned to see what she was pointing at. “The riverbed is narrow but long. We can set up camp farther down the bank to reduce our risk, but we don’t want to be too far away for a rescue.”

So, still within range of a deadly blast? Fantastic. My hands shook as I held them tightly by my sides, drawing in small gulps of air to mitigate the pain from basic breathing.

Breathe, Ambrose. Breathe. There’s an ELT—they have to know we’ve crashed already, right? Just a day or two and you’ll be home. Breathe. Breaaaaaaaaaathe.

Three years of pranayama breath practice and I couldn’t keep a rhythm whatsoever. Fucking useless.

“Do we know where we are?” Brooks spoke from behind me, their voice quiet and despondent.

Marley pushed up her sleeves and exposed a black, chunky, military-style time-piece. “I can’t be sure,” she admitted. “My memories leading up to the crash are a little fuzzy.” She raised her wrist to highlight the out-of-place watch. “We’re a couple hundred feet above sea-level and pointed northwest. But Nikki believes we were over northern Colombia when we dropped altitude. So, we’re likely somewhere in the Darién Gap.”

My stomach dropped farther than it had when the plane fell out of the sky. The Darién Gap. The most treacherous territory in the world, controlled by cartels and one thousand other creatures that could kill us in a heartbeat. No cities, no civilization.

The panic I’d been trying to stifle flooded my chest with obnoxious adrenaline. Even if we were found, it would take weeks—right? There weren’t even roads in the Darién Gap, for fuck’s sake.

And I was going to trust the captain who’d gotten us into this shitty situation to take us farther away from the one place we could be rescued? Fuck that.

Eyeing the destroyed plane, I assessed my chances. All engineering designations weren’t created equal. I could design and program one of the most intuitive algorithms on the planet, but I knew fuck all about planes. Was it actually a ticking time bomb, or a way for this woman to cover her ass?