Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller (36 page)

This had led Storm to conclusion number one: Volkov had him already.

Any thought Storm had of this ending the easy way was now over. Volkov was no idiot. If he went to the airport alone—and there were ten bodies in a factory in Bayonne testifying to the fact that he had—he would be checking in periodically with his team. They would have reported their distress or just stopped reporting altogether. Either way, he would know they had been compromised. And he would not return to the factory.

Conclusion number two: Volkov was now in the wind. From Newark Airport, he could launch himself anywhere.

So even though Cracker’s family was safe, nothing had really been settled. Volkov could go anywhere with Cracker. And, yes, he no longer could hold harm to Cracker’s family over the banker’s head. But Volkov was resourceful and knew more ways to torture
a man than Storm cared to think about. The sadistic bastard would find a way to make Cracker do his bidding.

Conclusion number three: For all his effort, Storm really hadn’t done a thing to neutralize the threat.

Volkov was still just as dangerous with those MonEx codes in hand. One way or another, Cracker would do exactly what Volkov told him to do.

Storm had left Strike with the Cracker family. She was in the midst of calling the authorities as he departed. The Bayonne Police would be able to respond within minutes. The FBI would follow shortly thereafter. He no longer worried for their safety. As for the future of Storm and Strike? That would have to sort itself out some other time.

For now, Volkov and Cracker were all that mattered.

As he negotiated the tangle of ramps and roadways that led from the New Jersey Turnpike to Newark Airport, there were two scenarios going through Storm’s head.

In one, Volkov had collected Cracker and was now driving. Somewhere. Storm didn’t like that scenario. There were probably two hundred thousand black SUVs in the tristate area. Good luck finding the one with Volkov in it.

In the other scenario, Volkov and Cracker were boarding a plane to… somewhere. That scenario wasn’t much better. But at least it gave Storm something to grab on to. Volkov would surely be traveling under an alias: The man had more fake IDs than a crowd of college freshmen. But he didn’t have an alias for Cracker. That’s why it had been necessary for the man to bring his passport.

Storm called Bryan.

“What do you want now?” Bryan said in a whisper. “The credit on your Bahrain card is running out, you know.”

“I need one of the nerds to check all the airlines to see if they can find Graham Whitely Cracker V on any flights out of Newark Airport.”

“Hang on.”

While he waited, Storm reached Terminal B. He pulled Strike’s van to the curb outside the international departures area and left it there. Let the authorities sort out why a van full of surveillance gadgets and weapons was abandoned there. Maybe they’d do him a favor and shut down the airport.

As he got out, Bryan returned to the line. “He’s on Air Venezuela flight nineteen to Caracas.”

“When does it depart?”

“It was scheduled to leave Gate 53B two minutes ago. You know Venezuela is out of our—”

Storm knew he didn’t have time to listen to the rest. It wasn’t news to him. The United States had an extradition treaty with Venezuela that dated back to 1922, but it was shot full of exceptions and oddities. More to the point, the Hugo Chavez government seldom cooperated with extradition requests, particularly when the party to be extradited had the means to pay bribes. As soon as Volkov was out of U.S. airspace, he would be beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Not that the U.S. government was trying to detain him anyway, what with the way Jones was playing things. Maybe Storm could get on the phone with his new buddies at the FBI and convince them Cracker was being kidnapped. But that would take time, something he no longer had.

The fact was, there was no legal or diplomatic mechanism to prevent Gregor Volkov from slipping out of the country; no high-placed phone calls or favors called in or well-reasoned pleading with the right bureaucrat could stop Volkov or his plot. He would slide from Caracas to Moscow, or Brazil, or wherever it was he felt like going to launch a financial meltdown that would consume the world’s economies.

There was only one way to stop him now.

Brute force.

Which brought Storm to conclusion number four: He had a plane to catch.

He stuffed the phone in his pocket and sprinted into the terminal. He charged up the stairs, toward the morass of switch-backing humanity that was the security area. The line for crew and airport personnel was on the left side. Without breaking stride, Storm charged past two confused flight attendants, through the metal detector—setting it off in the process—and past a quartet of TSA employees who were so concerned about whether or not people had their shoes on that they didn’t immediately react to the most brazen security breach any of them had seen outside a training exercise.

Finally, one of them had the wherewithal to yell, “You! Wait! Stop!”

Storm was already gone. The sign for Gate 53B told him to keep going straight. Arms and legs pumping, he blitzed by curious travelers, all of whom turned to watch this madman’s dash through the terminal. Somewhere, well behind, TSA had sounded its alerts.

Gate 53B was at the end of this terminal branch. Storm ran up to a woman who was head down in a computer screen.

“Excuse me,” he said, breathlessly. “I’m with the CIA. Did a man wearing an eyepatch just board flight nineteen?”

“Yes, sir, but that flight has already closed. If you’d like—”

Storm didn’t hear the rest. He was already charging down the Jetway.

“Hey! You can’t go down there,” the woman called after him, as if that would somehow stop him.

Storm reached the end of the Jetway. There was no airplane there, just an opening at the accordion-like end of the ramp. He dropped down to the tarmac, where he found a man in a jumper with earmuffs still fixed to his head. The man was stowing directional wands in the back of a small motorized cart.

“Excuse me,” Storm said. “I’m with the CIA. Did you just direct flight nineteen out of this slot?”

“Yeah.” He pointed to a white-and-red Air Venezuela 747 lumbering away in the distance. “That’s it right there. But you can’t be—”

Storm resumed his sprint. The aircraft had turned right out of its gate but now was heading left toward a runway. It was perhaps four hundred yards away. If Storm went straight, he might be able to catch it.

As he sped toward it, he watched the 747 come to a stop at the head of the runway. There were no other planes ahead of it. It was number one for takeoff. Storm was now three hundred yards away.

Having braked, the pi lot was now calling for full power from the four Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines at his command. The plane responded immediately. A 747 was a big, heavy piece of machinery, but those Pratt & Whitneys were capable of pouring out more than fifty thousand pounds of thrust.

Two hundred yards out. Storm was still gaining on the plane, but he could go no faster. The plane, meanwhile, was accelerating. From somewhere behind him, a phalanx of TSA personnel had reached the end of the Jetway that Storm had exited. Storm dared not turn to look. But if he had, he would have seen the guy in the earmuffs pointing toward him.

A hundred yards away. Ten point two seconds of all-out sprinting. Storm was coming in at a nearly perpendicular angle. He picked the point where—he hoped—he and the plane would intersect. He aimed at the front landing gear.

With sixty yards to go he thought he might not make it. The plane was picking up speed too quickly. It was now going faster than him. At forty yards, he adjusted his course and aimed for the back landing gear. It was now his only chance.

At twenty yards, the plane was really starting to pull away. At ten yards, Storm thought his lungs were going to burst.

He closed in, leaping for the strut above the 747’s tire. His outstretched hands grasped on to the metal. His body swung to the side of the tire, then slammed into it. The downward force being exerted by the back side of the spinning tire was working to pry Storm off, but it was not yet rolling quickly enough. Storm was able to hoist himself up the strut, then into the landing gear compartment.

The scream of the engines was deafening. Storm hung on against the increasing g-forces as the plane gained speed, then was able to wedge himself against the side of the compartment, hanging on to a pair of pipes that ran along the top. And that’s where he still was as the 747 lifted off the ground.

Derrick Storm was now, quite unofficially, the last passenger aboard Air Venezuela flight 19.

The 747 ascended rapidly, first over a patch of Jersey swampland, then over the suburbs of the Garden State. Storm had found good purchase in the landing gear compartment, but he didn’t dare look around—or do anything that might cause him to lose his grip—until the wheels retracted.

When they finally did, Storm retrieved the Maglite from his jacket, turned it on, and assessed his situation. With the wheels up, there was little room for him to move around. But claustrophobia was far from his biggest problem. Climbers who ascended the world’s tallest peaks started having serious problems with oxygen deprivation above twenty thousand feet. Above thirty thousand feet, the air would become too thin to breathe and deathly cold. Storm was uncertain whether he would suffocate or freeze to death first, but he wasn’t especially keen to find out. He had read news articles about stowaways found dead in wheel wells. He had to get to a pressurized part of the aircraft before it reached that altitude. He guessed he had about twenty minutes.

He looked up at the roof above him. If there was one thing that favored him, it was that airplane engineers preferred lightweight materials, for the simple reason that a lighter plane was easier to get off the ground. Sure enough, there was only a thin layer of sheet metal over his head.

He took out his KA-BAR and thrust it above his head. It punctured the metal, burying itself to the hilt. Storm yanked it out, then thrust again, in a spot just to the right of the first hole he had made. The gash had now doubled in size. He jabbed again.
There would eventually be a mechanic who would wonder what the hell had happened here and have to repair the mess. But Storm knew a small hole in an interior compartment would do nothing to destabilize a 747 in flight.

He could feel the plane turning, perhaps heading south—it was a little hard to have a good sense of direction in a fully enclosed metal box. It was not his concern at the moment. Working steadily over the next five minutes, he continued to perforate the ceiling. When he got about 270 degrees of his way around a jagged circle, he was able to peel a metal flap down and crawl upward through the man-sized hole he had created. He quickly reached a flat metal surface. But this wasn’t a ceiling. It was a floor—specifically, the floor to the aft baggage compartment.

Storm sheathed the KA-BAR and hoisted himself into the gap between the bottom of the airplane and the floor of the baggage compartment. Other than the occasional support beam, it was an empty space, the bottom of which curved. At the lowest point of the parabola, there were a few feet in which Storm could crawl.

Storm wriggled into the space, then flipped himself so he was now staring at the underside of the baggage compartment floor. It was made of steel, far more formidable than the aluminum Storm had just carved his way through, and it was resting on metal joists that ran the width of the plane. There would be no cutting through this with the knife. It was too thick. He pushed at it with his hand. It didn’t budge. It likely had several hundred pounds of luggage on top of it.

Storm began working his way forward. Baggage compartments were loaded back first. If there was any part of the floor without cargo on it—and Storm prayed that Air Venezuela was one of those airlines that charged a fee for checked luggage—it would be all the way forward.

It was slow going, but he inched his way until he was up against a series of supports that told him he had reached the front of the aft baggage compartment. He looked up and studied the
way the floor was attached to the joists. There were steel rivets every two inches. Impossible.

Storm was not the kind of man who panicked. But he did get concerned when the situation warranted. And this was growing into one of those situations. He didn’t know, precisely, how much time had passed or how much time he had left before the under-belly of the plane became his coffin. But he knew his ears had popped twice. The plane was gaining altitude fast.

He tried to think rationally. Airplanes needed repairs. There had to be some way for an aircraft maintenance person to reach this part of the plane without carving holes in the superstructure like Storm had. He swept the flashlight on the underside of the floor.

As he did so, he had the strange feeling the plane was no longer climbing. He couldn’t tell if that was some kind of a misperception on his part. He knew for sure the aircraft was turning again. And he also knew his ears weren’t popping anymore.

Still, it was not his first dilemma. Finding a way out was. Finally, he located a rectangular-shaped hatch on the starboard side of the vessel.

Now a new problem: There was no clear way to open it. Storm recognized that it was meant to be accessed from the other side, then propped open. Still, it was a more vulnerable spot than a solid steel floor. He picked one corner and pounded it with his palm.

The first blow did nothing. So he struck again. Storm was lying on his back. He was able to generate a fair amount of upward force with his pectoral muscles and triceps. They were muscles he used often—Storm could bench press over three hundred pounds.

But after four more tries, he realized it wasn’t enough. His bench press wasn’t sufficient. Maybe his squat—six hundred and sixty pounds, last time he maxed out—would be better. He positioned himself so his feet were on one corner of the hatch, then gave it all he had.

There was a whoosh of air. The difference between the baggage compartment pressure and the outside pressure was not as great as it would be at cruising altitude, but it was still considerable.