Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller (37 page)

Storm had bent the hatch fifteen degrees upward. It allowed him to see that the hatch was secured into place by several plastic catches. Now that he knew where they were, he could make short work of them. He removed Dirty Harry, slid the gun’s grip into the gap he had created, then used the barrel as a lever to pop off the remaining catches, one by one.

He had soon hoisted himself up into the baggage compartment and replaced the hatch, putting some luggage on top of it to keep it down so the plane wouldn’t further depressurize.

He shined the flashlight upward to study the next barrier facing him. The ceiling consisted of flimsy looking panels that Storm had no doubt he could punch through one way or another. He just had to get himself up there.

He went to work, perching the Maglite in a place that gave him some illumination yet also allowed him to use both his hands for his task. He began stacking some of the sturdier pieces of luggage on top of one another, creating a pyramid that would allow him to climb up.

He was nearly done when the plane suddenly lurched hard to the right, assuming a steep angle that no commercial airline pi lot would ever attempt, sending both Storm and his pile of bags toppling over. Storm landed heavily, bruising his shoulder and slamming his head against something hard and metal—in the darkness, he couldn’t tell what.

The plane straightened, allowing Storm to stand for a moment. Then it tilted just as radically to the left. He fell again.

Storm had no idea what was going on. But he could hear the screams from the passengers above him.

Lying on the floor of the baggage compartment, Storm could taste blood in his mouth and feel more blood leaking from a cut in his scalp. He was woozy and perhaps concussed from the blow to the head he had suffered.

The plane was gaining altitude again, and quickly. Whoever
was now at controls of this aircraft—and Storm had a sinking feeling he knew all too well who it was—wasn’t trying to impress anyone with his smooth flying.

Storm got himself to his feet and began rebuilding his luggage ladder. He was working by feel. His flashlight had rolled away and had either broken or buried itself under something. Storm couldn’t take the time to go look for it.

His tower completed, he climbed to the top, picked a ceiling tile, and hit it with a powerful upward blow from the butt of his hand. It yielded easily. There was another foot between that ceiling and the floor to the main cabin. Storm retreated back down, hoisted up one more suitcase to give him a little more height, then climbed back up.

He groped around the underside of the cabin floor. He could tell where the seats had been bolted in and, more importantly, where they hadn’t been. That was an aisle. And the aisle was where he wanted to be.

He repeated the move he had just used, giving it all his strength. The floor section was thin and no match for Storm. It buckled off the small screws that held it in place. He moved the displaced section to the side, sliding it above one of the other sections. He used the KA-BAR to cut a hole in the carpet, and hoisted himself up.

To the terrified passengers in rows 29 to 45, in the seats along the starboard side of the airplane, it was not a comforting sight: a bloody man with a knife emerging from the floor.

“It’s okay,” Storm said, reading their faces. “I’m here to save you.”

They looked unconvinced. No one spoke. They were ashen-faced.

“I’m with the CIA,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

Finally, a man in a seat near him said, “They probably need you up front.”

Storm nodded, parting the curtains on his way into the middle cabin, then proceeded into business class. He kept walking by
passengers who appeared both stunned and submissive. The sound of human suffering grew louder with every forward step: moans, wails, groans. As he approached the front of the plane, his ears were joined by his nose in telling him that something was very wrong. He smelled gunpowder. And blood.

It was when he entered first class that he understood why. Storm had seen war zones in his life, and this qualified as one. There was blood splattered against the ceiling, the bulkhead, the seats, the floor. There were at least seven dead passengers, all missing parts of their heads. Several more were lying in the aisle, wounded badly. Flight attendants were hunched over them, attending to their wounds.

A dark-skinned man in pi lot’s clothes was on the floor, leaning against the door to the cockpit. His close-cropped salt-and-pepper head was caked with blood. He was holding a gauze pad to the right side of his head. His name badge identified him as “Capt. Montgomery.”

Storm approached, identified himself, crouched next to the pi lot, and asked what had happened.

“It started right after takeoff,” he said. “TSA notified flight control that we had a stowaway in the wheel well.”

“Yeah, that was me. Sorry about that.”

“Well, I still had to follow the flight plan for a while. You can’t just pull a U-turn in the busiest airspace in America, you know? So flight control was coming up with a new route. They were going to have me stay low and then make an emergency landing in Philly. In the meantime, they were going to have two F-18s escort me in as a precaution. But it’s not like I had squawked a seventy-five hundred or anything.”

“A seventy-five hundred?”

“Sorry, that’s the hijack code. You squawk a seventy-five hundred on the transponder and the air force knows to send in the cavalry. These were just supposed to be escorts, but not long after they showed up was when I heard the gunshot. My first officer
was looking at me like
What the…
when one of the flight attendants called me on the intercom. She told me that some guy with an eye patch had blown one of the passenger’s heads off with a gun that was made of
wood
of all things. He had told the flight attendant that he was going to shoot one person every thirty seconds unless I opened the door to the cockpit. Regulations say I can’t open that door under any circumstances, but goddamn… Every thirty seconds I heard another gunshot and I… I just couldn’t…”

The man stopped, needing to compose himself. Storm glanced out the window and saw the blinking lights of an F-18 not far off the 747’s wing. Volkov hijacked the plane because he thought he had been caught, never realizing it was actually Storm’s actions that had sent the fighter jets flying.

This was not an irony that Storm enjoyed.

Montgomery had regained enough poise to continue: “So we opened the door. He pistol-whipped me and told me to get out of the seat. He told Roger to get out of the seat”—Storm assumed “Roger” was the first officer—“but Roger wouldn’t budge. He said something like, ‘Who’s going to fly the plane?’ And the guy just said ‘Me’ and then he shot him…. He shot him….”

Montgomery needed another moment. Storm stood and looked around for Whitely Cracker. He was three rows back in first class, huddled under a vomit-stained blanket, not looking at anyone or anything.

Storm crouched back down.

“I’m armed,” Storm said quietly. “If we can get that cabin door back open, I can end this.”

“Great. I’ve got a code that’ll open the door.”

With great effort, Montgomery stood, turning toward a narrow keypad next to the door.

“You ready?” he asked.

Storm pulled out Dirty Harry. The pi lot punched some numbers.

“Okay, here goes,” Montgomery said as he hit the pound sign. Then he frowned. Nothing was happening. He typed the code in again. Still nothing. A red light was illuminated.

“Damn it,” Montgomery said.

“What?”

“He found the button that allows the pi lot to deny access from the inside. We can’t get in.”

Montgomery had slumped back down. He was checking his blood-soaked gauze pad. His eyes appeared even more sunken than they had been minutes before. He was the picture of defeat.

Derrick Storm knew he could not allow himself to be beaten.

“There has to be some way,” Storm said.

“Maybe before 9/11, but not now. Those things are like bank safes.”

“Trust me when I say bank safes can be cracked,” Storm said. “What kind of lock is it?”

“It’s electromagnetic. You’re talking about something like twelve hundred pounds of holding force. Not even a moose like you could break that.”

“I don’t need to break it. Electromagnetic locks require a power supply. I disrupt the power supply, I disrupt the lock.”

“You don’t think the airlines thought of that?” the pi lot said. “There’s redundancy upon redundancy in these planes. In addition to the main power supply, there’s a battery backup that lasts twelve hours. The battery is in a steel case, imbedded in the door. You’ll never get to it.”

Storm stared at the door for a long moment, as if he had Superman’s heat ray vision. Alas, he did not.

But he suddenly realized he had something that would work just as well.

He looked down at his left wrist. The phrase “Variable Frequency Dial Allows Multi-Channel Communication!” was flashing in his head.

“What frequency is the lock set at?” Storm asked.

“What…? I have no idea.”

“No problem. Do the flight attendants have a small tool kit? I’m also going to need a piece of electronics with a nine-volt battery and someone’s laptop. Ask around among the passengers.”

Montgomery summoned two of the flight attendants, who soon produced the items Storm requested.

He took one last look at the SuperSpy EspioTalk Wristwatch Communicator. “Sorry, Ling. Gotta do it,” he said, then pried off the facing.

Inside, he found a circuit board that was, in its basic premise, like the Westing house in his father’s garage. It was just a lot smaller. He went to work. Changing the toy into a device that would send out an electromagnetic pulse at the proper frequency was just a matter of pirating parts from the laptop, combining them with the transmitter from the wristwatch, and powering it with the nine-volt battery.

It just took time, which, Storm was soon to learn, they were running out of even more quickly than he thought. The problem was no longer leaving U.S. airspace. It was staying in it that could kill them.

“I don’t mean to rush you,” Captain Montgomery said. “But how’s it coming?”

“Just a little longer. Why?”

“Because an old airline pi lot like me has an altimeter built into his head. Mine is telling me we’re at about eight thousand feet. And I don’t think those F-18s just off our wings are going to be very patient. They’ll get orders to shoot us down if we get much lower than five thousand feet. One of them just did a head butt.”

“A head butt?” Storm asked as he screwed a wire into place.

“It’s a maneuver they attempt with a nonresponsive aircraft. They soar vertically upward to within a couple hundred feet of your nose, trying to get you to point it back up.”

“I’m almost done,” Storm said. “While I’m finishing, I need a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Get these passengers out of first class,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get that door open. The fewer people to get hit by any stray bullets, the better.”

“You got it,” Montgomery said, rising to his feet. The man was clearly energized by having a sense of purpose. So Storm added one more thing:

“Oh, and Captain? Don’t go far. I’m going to need someone to land this plane after we take back control of it.”

“I like your style, Storm,” he said.

“Thanks, Captain. By the way, I never got your full name.”

“It’s Roy. Roy Montgomery.”

The men exchanged stiff salutes. Montgomery began herding passengers farther back in the plane, while Storm put his head back down in his task. He wasn’t going to tell Montgomery this, but he was only about 50 percent certain his jury-rigged gadget was going to work. The variable frequency dial only operated within a certain range. If the lock was set to a frequency outside that range—which was always possible—it wouldn’t respond to the pulse.

Storm finished around the time Montgomery had succeeded in emptying the first class cabin. The captain was slightly out of breath as he approached Storm.

“Okay. That’s done. Do you mind if I ask: What’s your plan once you get the lock to release?”

“Pretty simple: I open the door and shoot the guy flying the plane.”

“How’s your aim?” Montgomery asked.

“Pretty good. Why? Is there anything on the instrument panel that can’t be shot?”

“Yeah, pretty much all of it.”

“Then I guess I better not miss,” Storm said.

“Okay. Just remember, these babies all have cameras throughout the front part of the cabin,” Montgomery said. “It’s another thing we owe to 9/11. It lets the captain know that it’s safe to open the door.”

“In other words, he’s going to know I’m coming.”

“Yeah.”

“Great. Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” Montgomery said. But Storm thought he noticed a small head shake as Montgomery retreated back to business class.

Storm put it out of his mind, concentrating on the tiny dial on the side of the wristwatch. He had reengineered the device so it now had several extra wires coming out of it. Two of them led to the nine-volt battery. He connected the final wire—thus turning the contraption on—switched the dial to the lowest frequency, and focused on the door.

Nothing happened. He began turning up the dial, moving steadily through the multichannel communicator’s range of frequencies. He had to go slowly. The connections in his device were far from perfect. He didn’t want to risk going too fast past the proper frequency and not delivering a strong enough pulse to trip the lock.

He was midway through the dial, not allowing himself to feel pessimistic, and still wasn’t hearing anything.

Then, three-quarters of the way up, he heard a click and a whir.

The magnets holding the lock had been released.

Storm drew Dirty Harry and depressed the handle. The door opened inward, and he pushed against it, using its bulletproof bulk as a shield. The 747 cockpit is one of the largest in the sky, and it has a short, narrow hallway leading to the two front pi lot’s seats. At first, all Storm could see was the right side of that hallway.

He shoved the door farther in. His vision now extended to the end of the hallway. If they hadn’t been in an airplane, he could simply have stuck his gun hand around the crevice and started firing blindly. But, given Captain Montgomery’s warnings about the instrument panel, that seemed like a bad idea.