Kennedy Stern Christian Suspense Complete Box Set (Books 1-9)

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Once two or three dozen phone cameras were pointed at him, General started his monologue.

“My name is Bradley Strong. Until this morning, I resided at 324 Trenton Street in Detroit, Michigan. I have here as hostages one hundred and seventeen passengers and five crew members of Flight 219 ...”

The speech was interrupted by some kind of metal music screaming from the PA system. Kennedy threw her hands over her ears to dampen the sound.

“Turn that off!” General yelled. He stared at the cabin ceiling, as if the speakers themselves could understand him.

“Once more, this is your captain.” He spoke over the sound of the death metal with a hint of amusement in his tone. “I’m sorry for the interruption, but we have a strict no-feeding-the-lunatics policy onboard, which means that we won’t allow this cabin to become a soapbox. I’d ask all you sane, reasonable passengers to please put your phones away and ignore empty threats from ...”

“How’s this for an empty threat?” General asked in a chilling monotone.

Kennedy had time to shut her eyes and scrunch her body into an even smaller ball before the shot cracked through the pressurized air. She didn’t see BO Dude fall or hear the thud his body made when he dropped.

“I hope some of you were recording that.” General spoke more quietly now that the horrific music had stopped streaming over the speakers.

She waited for the captain to speak.

Silence.

“What did I tell you earlier?” General shrugged. “All I want is a little respect and cooperation.”

“Are you ok?” Ray whispered.

Kennedy tried to nod, but she wasn’t sure if her muscles actually worked. For a brief second, she felt an uncontrollable urge to giggle. She imagined the captain flooding the cabin with nitrous oxide, pictured how General would look as he tried to fight it but finally gave into the irresistible urge, like Patrick Stewart playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and learning to laugh for the very first time when he woke up on Christmas morning.

Kennedy glanced around the cabin. So many people. She didn’t know much about guns, but knew there couldn’t be that many bullets, right? What if they all took their chances, all stormed General at once? There might be a few injuries, but nearly everyone was guaranteed to survive. If the plane were full of Vulcans, they would have made the logical decision by now.

She felt another almost irresistible urge to bust her gut laughing when she pictured Leonard Nemoy playing Spock and incapacitating their assailants with his Vulcan death grip. If this were Star Trek, the smelly man would have worn a red uniform instead of a Seahawks sweatshirt.

Thinking of the fallen passenger forced stark reality into Kennedy’s cerebral cortex. This wasn’t a sci-fi show. This wasn’t a comedy or staged melodrama. There was no laughing gas. There was nothing humorous at all here.

She trembled even harder, certain now she was about to throw up. She saw a barf bag in Ray’s seatback pocket and pointed. “Could you ...”

She didn’t get the rest of the question out. Ray moved his foot out of the way, but some of the spray still landed on the leg of his pants. Kennedy wanted to apologize but was too scared to talk, scared that if she drew attention to herself, she’d be the next person General chose to turn into a sacrificial example.

General stepped over the crumpled man’s body and addressed the cabin again. “Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s try this one more time. I want you all to get your cell phones out. Now.”

Ten seconds later, at least a hundred cell phones were pointed at General, who smiled for the cameras before he began his speech one more time.

CHAPTER 10“My name is Bradley Strong. I reside at 324 Trenton Street in Detroit, Michigan. For all you law officers listening in, I wouldn’t bother sweeping the place if I were you. Everything’s scrubbed.”

His voice was smooth, confident, as if he’d been born to speak into video cameras at forty thousand feet.

“You might be interested to know that I’m on Flight 219 and have here a hundred and seventeen passengers ...” He glanced down at his feet. “Actually, correct that. I have here a hundred and sixteen passengers and five crew members as my hostages. I’m with my lieutenant, who for the time being shall remain nameless.”

He nodded at Hawaiian Shirt and smirked at the cameras. Kennedy wondered how many of the recordings were streaming to a live audience. How long until the news channels picked up the feed? How long until her parents learned where she was? She wished she had her phone with her, not so she could immortalize General’s morbid oration but so she could call her mom and dad.

She had slumped down in her seat as far as she could go. She didn’t want to see General. Didn’t want to think about the dead man at his feet. Ray wasn’t recording the video either. “Do you have a phone?” she asked him, trying to figure out how to call her parents without having their number memorized.

“I’m not going to raise publicity for terrorists.”

Kennedy wanted to shut her ears. No. He couldn’t use words like terrorist. Terrorists were men from the Middle East who strapped bombs to their chests and hoped to die with their victims. This was different. A skyjacker. A mentally deranged criminal, but one who wanted to stay alive. Which meant he wanted to keep the plane in the air.

Kennedy thought back to all her dad’s stupid crisis training. He hadn’t ever mention skyjackings, but he’d given her advice about other sorts of hostage situations. The first rule he always drilled into her head was that the typical abductor didn’t want to harm his hostages. He needed as much leverage as possible. Well, her dad could spout off rules and generalizations all day long, but that wouldn’t change the fact that a man had been shot in the head no less than twenty feet from where she now cowered in fear.

She shouldn’t even be here. She should be in the back of the plane with Willow. Willow. What if this was it? What if General had a bomb and was planning to bring the whole plane down? What if he was going to shoot hostages one at a time, starting at the back of the plane? Kennedy might never get another chance to talk to Willow again. Never tell her anything about the Lord.

God, I’m so sorry.

What use did her apologies serve? Man is destined to die once. She knew that verse from Hebrews. Destined to die once and after that face judgment. If something happened to Willow, if she died without knowing Jesus because Kennedy had been too uncomfortable to ask the most important question ...

And after that face judgment. It was Kennedy, not Willow, who deserved to be judged.

Please, God. Help us survive. She’d never thought very highly of folks who made bargains with God when their lives were in danger. Men like Martin Luther who would have never joined the monastery if he hadn’t uttered a rash promise seconds after lightning struck the ground beside him. But now here she was, begging God for one last chance. Like Jonah drowning in a storm-tossed ocean, pleading with God for mercy and another chance to preach repentance to the wicked city of Ninevah.

One more chance.

If for no other reason than that Kennedy would never forgive herself if Willow died today. She thought about Gladys Aylward, who was sent to stop a murderous prison uprising with nothing but the power of the Holy Spirit defending her, protecting her. For a moment, she pictured standing up with that same degree of faith and conviction, telling General to drop his weapon. It was possible, wasn’t it? But her body refused to move, and her only hope was to stay as inconspicuous as possible.

That and pray for Willow’s protection.

She’s not ready to die yet, Lord. Kennedy had lived her entire Christian life believing in a literal hell. She knew there were some theologians who doubted the existence of an actual lake of fire, but Kennedy had never given their unorthodox hypotheses much credence. But as she looked back, she realized she’d spent the past nineteen years living as if hell weren’t a real, physical place where people she knew and loved would spend eternity separated from God if they never learned about his grace and forgiveness. If she actually believed in hell as the Bible described it, was there any way she would have lived with Willow for the past year and a half without even attempting to broach the subject of God’s love and mercy?

She’s not ready to die yet, Lord, Kennedy repeated, and realized the same went for her. She hadn’t seen her parents since last summer. She had so many plans for her life. College graduation. Med school. Just think of all the things I can do for you if you let me live longer. There she went again, bargaining with God. If she’d been so concerned about serving him with her life, maybe she should have made better use of the past nineteen years. Maybe she should have focused more on her own spiritual growth so she wasn’t terrified to share the gospel with others. Was getting a 4.0 GPA worth seeing her roommate and those around her condemned for all eternity?

It couldn’t happen. God loved Willow. Just as much as he loved everyone else on this plane. He couldn’t let them all die, not without a chance to hear ...

A chance to hear ... Could it be that God was giving her that opportunity now? She remembered the story of John Harper, a Christian evangelist from Scotland who found himself crossing the Atlantic Ocean for a speaking engagement at Moody Church. Unfortunately, the ship he was travelling on was none but the Titanic, and when it started to sink, he gave up his own life vest to a passenger who wasn’t a Christian, certain that the atheist needed it more than he did.

When the boat capsized, John Harper floundered in the freezing water, swimming from one frantic survivor to another, praying with all of those he met before he himself succumbed to the cold and surrendered his soul to eternity.

Was it possible God was calling Kennedy to be that bold? It couldn’t be. John Harper had been an evangelist even before the Titanic’s fatal voyage. He had practiced sharing the gospel his whole life. That wasn’t Kennedy’s spiritual gift, her area of expertise. And so, just like the reluctant prophet Jonah, she begged God to send someone else. Someone like Grandma Lucy. She’d been a missionary and told people about Jesus all the time, including the son of the Afghani man with pneumonia. If God would call anyone to tell the passengers on this flight about the way to salvation, he’d assign the task to Grandma Lucy.

If she was even awake.

Kennedy thought about the man who’d been shot just moments earlier. Had he been a Christian? Would she ever know? And if he died unsaved, was there anything she could have done to change his fate? No. She couldn’t handle that sort of liability. She didn’t want it. Let her be the one to pray quietly in the background or offer moral support while others went out and shared the gospel. Kennedy couldn’t live with the weight of someone’s eternal destiny on her conscience. It wasn’t her responsibility.

“I suppose some of you are wondering why I’m doing this.” General’s words snapped her back to reality. To the fact that a madman with a gun was addressing the world via a hundred different recording devices and was about to explain his rationale.

Kennedy silenced the protests of her guilty conscience. She wasn’t about to miss General’s words.

CHAPTER 11“My children attend Brown Elementary School,” General began.

Kennedy was surprised. She would never have pictured a heartless murderer as the type who would also be a father.

“Unless you’re from Michigan, you probably haven’t even heard about our little school. That’s because the media doesn’t care. They don’t care that Charles Weston has failed our kids as the district superintendent. Traded in our children’s health to save the state a few bucks by building their school on toxic land.”

General paused and stared at the cameras. “The soil’s got arsenic in it. And not just little bits. We’ve got numbers. Forty times higher than the safe amount. And that’s the level advised for adults, not little five-year-olds eating dirt off the playground,” he added. “Want an example of how bad it is? Three construction workers on the new school site got sick within one week on the job. One ended up in the ER. Breathing problems. Is that the kind of soil you’d want to send your kids to play in?”