The Storm

Kurt reached for his boot. The pistol swung his way as the captain lined up the kill shot.

Kurt thrust his arm forward and the captain stopped in midmotion with Kurt’s knife in his heart. His face went blank, the small gun dropped and his eyes drifted backward.

The plane began to roll over once again, and Kurt grabbed the control stick, fighting to counter the spin. Slowly the aircraft wings leveled. But by now the ground-proximity warning was going off and the computer voice was chirping, Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.

Kurt was pulling up, but he didn’t want to rip the wings off. The nose came up slowly even as the altimeter continued to unwind. Finally Kurt saw the horizon again, and a second or two later the nose of the aircraft pointed above it.

As the speed bled off and they began to climb, some of the warning lights and alarms shut down. As they passed a thousand feet on the way back up, the computer stopped telling Kurt what to do.

With the plane stable and level, Kurt looked around the cockpit. He was sharing a seat with the dead captain. The copilot lay on the floor between the two seats, looking just as dead. Someone else was missing.

“Leilani?” Kurt shouted.

“I’m here,” she said, poking her head back into the flight deck from below.

“What happened to you?”

“I fell down the ladder,” she said, coming forward and looking a little groggy. She bent and picked something up off the floor. It was the grenade. “Why didn’t we blow up?”

“I took the fuse out,” Kurt said. “It’s still got explosives inside, but they can’t go off without the fuse.”

She placed it gently in a cup holder.

“Should I tie these guys up?”

“It’s a little late for that,” he said. “Let’s get this one out of my seat.”

He stood, and Leilani unbelted the dead captain and pulled him loose while Kurt held the controls.

“You’re flying the plane,” she said as if she’d just realized it.

“Kind of.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that?”

“I should have been more precise,” he said. “I can make it go side to side, up and down, fast and slow. I can probably point it in the right direction. What’s going to be tougher is landing this thing without leaving a smoking crater in the ground or having it break into little pieces when it hits the water.”

“Oh,” she said, looking suddenly pale.

“But I’m a quick study,” he said, trying to boost her confidence. “And with those two dead I don’t really have a choice.”

Kurt had flown small planes before, never long enough to get any licenses or ratings, but he knew the basics. Most of it was instinct. Other than high-performance military aircraft, planes tended to fly themselves. They were designed to be stable and forgiving, although he found this Russian flying boat to be nose-heavy like a ship with a ballast problem.

“What about the LAPES thing?” she said. “Couldn’t we drop out the back?”

“We might just try that when we get where we’re going,” he said.

He studied the instrument panel, spotting the controls for the rear door and tail ramp. He marked their location in his mind.

By now they’d climbed back up to five thousand feet and were back on the original course. Several miles ahead of them he saw the other two jets silhouetted against the brightening sky. They were still descending, but the nosedive and spin had brought Kurt and Leilani well below their altitude.

“They don’t know what happened,” Leilani said.

“No,” Kurt replied. “Traveling on radio silence with no rearview mirrors or aft radar coverage means they can’t have seen a thing. More important, they won’t see us turn away and head for the Seychelles.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Kurt had found a navigation readout on a small computer screen. They were almost dead center of the Indian Ocean. The Seychelles were four hundred miles to the southwest, about an hour’s flight away.

Kurt smiled. “Closest bit of civilization around,” he said. “And by civilization, I mean somewhere that has a phone and a Coke machine and where people aren’t trying to kill us.”

Leilani smiled. “That sounds good to me.”

Kurt found the smile endearing. It was kind and simple and uncomplicated. Somehow, uncomplicated seemed utterly perfect at the moment.

He began to turn the Russian jet to the west, figuring he’d be a hundred miles away by the time anyone even bothered to look around. But before he got too far off course, something caught his eye. A black dot on the silver sea.

Apparently Leilani saw it as well. “You think they’re headed for that island?”

“We’re a long way from the closest island,” he said.

“Well, that’s too big to be a ship,” Leilani replied.

Kurt stared. The truth hit him as the light from the rising sun glinted off a series of tall triangular structures dotted around the perimeter of the floating monstrosity.

“That’s because it’s not a ship,” he said. “It’s a floating hulk of metal called Aqua-Terra.”

A spike of adrenaline shot through Kurt’s weary body. Three amphibious aircraft, filled with weapons, inflatable speedboats and Ji

“Strap yourself in,” he said.

“Why?” Leilani asked. “What are we doing?”

Kurt reached over and shoved the throttles to the stops. “We’re about to make our presence known.”

CHAPTER 36

KURT SCANNED THE CONSOLE, LOOKING FOR THE RADIO. HIS eyes settled on a transceiver currently set to an odd frequency.

COM-1, he thought. “That’s got to be Ji

Leilani began to scrounge around on the floor for one of the dead pilots’ headsets. She picked it up and handed it to him.

He plugged it in. He found a second transceiver and set the switches so he would still be able to hear anything coming over COM-1 but be broadcasting only over COM-2. He began to adjust the frequency to the one Nigel, the helicopter pilot, had used when they first approached Aqua-Terra.

“Can you please tell me what we’re doing,” Leilani asked. “I thought we were flying away from them, not getting closer.”

“Several friends of mine from NUMA are down there. They’ve been trying to figure out what happened to your brother. They must be getting close to an answer because they’re about to be attacked for it.”

“Attacked?”

“I saw Ji

“I agree,” she said. “We must warn them.”

Kurt continued to flick through frequencies until he’d set 122.85 in the display window. “This is the one.”

He listened for a second, heard nothing and then pressed the transmit switch. “Aqua-Terra, this is Kurt Austin. How do you read?”

Nothing.

As Kurt spoke, he kept his eyes on the descending transports. They seemed blissfully unaware.

“Aqua-Terra, come in.”

“Try another frequency.”

“No. This is the one.” He pressed transmit again. “Aqua-Terra, do you copy? This is Kurt Austin. You’re about to come under attack. Prepare to repel boarders.”

He let go of the switch.

“Why don’t they answer?” she asked.

Kurt could think of a number of reasons, the most sinister of which had to do with the impostor in their midst. She might have disabled the radio or done something worse.

The two aircraft were now dropping below two thousand feet. They’d be on the deck in a minute, probably discharging their boats using the LAPES parachutes. From the dimensions of the cargo hold he figured each plane might carry up to seventy commandos, but not with the boats and the equipment on board too. Thirty would be the max. That still meant sixty commandos against Marchetti’s crew of twenty, plus Paul and Gamay. With the robots deactivated, they didn’t stand a chance.