Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller

by Richard Castle

  “So who are the civilians?”

  “Cracker’s wife and kids. Volkov kidnapped them. He’s using them as leverage to make sure Cracker does as he’s told. I worry any large-scale operation—by one of Jones’s teams, by the police, by the army, by anyone, no matter how well trained they are—will not end well for them. If Volkov is in charge, his men won’t be the type to surrender easily. And they won’t show any mercy to their captives. We have to hit them quickly and quietly and incapacitate them before they even know they’ve been hit.”

  He shared his thought that the thugs inside would soon split up, and his belief that that would be their best opportunity.

  “We just need to get inside the building without being spotted,” Storm finished.

  “The problem is there’s so much open land surrounding the factory on all sides. If they have a lookout, we’ll be spotted. If the lookout is quick with a rifle, we’ll get shot.”

  The car went quiet for a minute or so. Then Strike said, “We could play it like we did in Sarajevo.”

  “No good,” Storm replied, thinking back on that mission. “There’s not enough of a crosswind. And, besides, where are we going to get all the fertilizer we’d need on such short notice? This isn’t exactly farm country.”

  “Good point,” she said. They lapsed into silence again. It was interrupted by Strike saying, “I’ve got flashbangs and gas masks in the van with me. There are enough windows in that place. We launch flashbangs through the windows and then move in.”

  Storm was shaking his head halfway through. “Too much smoke. Too much confusion. Too much of a chance one of those kids catches a stray bullet.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Do you have night vision goggles?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That’s not part of my standard party kit.”

  Another pause for contemplation. “What we need is some kind of a distraction so we can get inside the building,” Storm said. “From there we can pick them off one at a time.”

  “How about an explosion? I’ve got some C-4 with me.”

  “Yeah, but what are we going to blow up?”

  A wicked grin spread across Strike’s face. “Well, that depends. How attached are you to Becky here?” she said, patting the dashboard.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would. Come on.”

  They didn’t need more words than that. In this world, there were two places—and, sadly, only two places—where Storm and Strike were always in perfect sync. One was the bedroom. The other was on a covert operation.

  Twenty minutes later, they had wired Becky for detonation and pushed her to a run-down auto repair shop that bordered the factory to the north.

  If a lookout saw them, they would just look like a husband and wife pushing their derelict car to a place where it could get fixed. They retreated north, going back to Clara Strike’s van.

  There, they equipped themselves for the coming confrontation: bulletproof vests; KA-BARs, the combat knives preferred by the Marines; and some extra firepower. Strike went with a .40-caliber Colt and a 9mm Sig Sauer. Storm chose an ankle-holstered Compact Glock G38 with a silencer. It made for a nice complement to his Dirty Harry gun. Plus, he was able to grab several extra magazines. Having a few more bullets suddenly seemed to be a good idea.

  “Kevin just sent a schematic to my phone based on the infrared,” Strike said, holding out a 3-D image displayed there. “This is their position a half hour ago.” She touched the phone and a new image appeared. “And this is their position five minutes ago. Obviously, this is subject to change if Volkov and some of his thugs roll out—as you suspect they will—but at least it tells us a little bit.”

  Storm studied the second image, went back to the first, then returned to the second. The way Agent Bryan had colored the image, the building itself had been made largely translucent, the walls and floors appearing only as gauzy, blue outlines. Human beings appeared as blazing chunks of orange and red.

  The lookouts were in different places in each image, suggesting roving patrols rather than guards at fixed stations. The hostages were on the fourth floor, in a room toward the middle of the building, and they had remained stationary. Two guards were in the room with them in each photo.

  There were stairs at either end of the building, but not the middle. Whatever manufacturing the building had been constructed to accommodate had relied on a long stretch of uninterrupted assembly line. Stairs in the middle of the building had been deemed superfluous by some ancient architect. In the building’s subsequent uses, before its abandonment, those open floors had been cut up into more discrete spaces. There was now a long, straight hallway bisecting each floor, with rooms of various sizes on either side.

  “Obviously we’re going to be approaching from below them,” Storm said, when he was done analyzing the floor plan. “It probably makes sense for you to take one stairwell and I’ll take the other. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Sure. You want the north stairwell or the south?”

  “North. That’s the side the explosion will be on. They’ll likely all flock to that side. I’d rather have them coming at me.”

  “Always the gentleman,” Strike said, giving him a coquettish smile and a curtsy.

  They departed the van, jogging as they went two streets up, eight blocks south, then two streets back over, allowing them to approach the factory on foot from the opposite side of where Becky was now waiting for her explosive final act.

  Without a word, they crossed into the lot immediately to the south of the factory, finding shelter behind a concrete wall—all that was left of what had once been a building.

  From there, they each peeked out what had once been a window, taking a brief glance at the approach to the factory—a hundred-yard obstacle course of urban flotsam.

  “There?” Storm whispered, nodding at a spot where the bottom of the fence had been pried back, creating a semicircular opening perhaps two feet high, enough for any reasonably flexible person to clamber under.

  “Then there,” Strike replied in the same hushed tone, using her eyes to point toward a tall pile of asphalt chunks that some paving contractor had dumped there to avoid the tipping fees at the local landfill.

  “I’ll take the lead,” Storm said, gathering his legs underneath him to make the run. “If anyone here is going to get shot, it’s going to be me.”

  “Storm, wait.”

  “Wait?” he said, because the only noun that wasn’t in their shared dictionary was patience.

  “Storm, I just…,” she started, and he saw she was having difficulty coming up with the words. “In the bar, we didn’t really… I didn’t really get the chance to say some things that have been on my mind, and…”

  “Is now really the right time for this?” Storm asked, keeping his tone muted. He cast a wary eye toward the building.

  “They’re not going anywhere for a little while yet. Besides, there’s never a right time with us. Our last meeting started with you pointing a gun at me.”

  “Fair point,” he said, relaxing his legs, leaning against the wall, keeping one eye on the building and the other on Strike. “Okay. So what’s on your mind?”

  “I guess I just… Look, I died once and didn’t tell you. You died once and didn’t tell me. I know I’m still the bad guy, because I’m the one who hit first. But I guess I was hoping we could, I don’t know, call it even. You forgive me. I forgive you. Maybe try to start fresh?”

  A fresh start. With Clara Strike. Was there really such thing? Or was she the forever spider, with him as the fly?

  “Clara, I don’t know, I… We have all this history, and sometimes it’s the best thing about us. Other times it’s like this lode-stone around our necks. So it’s easy to say forget it all and begin again. But, one, I’m not sure I want to forget it all—because if you make yourself forget the bad stuff, you risk forgetting the good stuff. And two…”

  “Think about it,” she sai
d before he could finish. “Just think about it before you answer, okay?”

  With that, she disappeared around the wall and ran in a low creep toward the hole in the fence. He knew that he and Clara Strike would likely continue some version of their flawed, volatile relationship, one based on sex and spying and deceit. He would always welcome her back into his bed, always admire her talent as an agent. And she would always understand, better than any private citizen could, the peculiarities of his line of work.

  Did that mean they had a real future? Were they too similar to ever work out in the long run? Or were they too different?

  He looked down at his left wrist. He was still wearing the SuperSpy EspioTalk Wristwatch Communicator. He knew, eventually, the hurt would dissipate and he would be able to take it off. And he knew he would someday throw away the ridiculous toy, because he didn’t have a lifestyle that allowed for the collection of sentimental keepsakes.

  He just couldn’t do any of that yet. He missed Ling Xi Bang. He wasn’t ready to let go. She might have been all the good things that Clara Strike was, but without the lodestone of past sins. Yes, it was a near-impossible relationship—a pair of secret agents for nations whose interests seldom aligned in this way. All he knew was that she had never betrayed him, and he had liked living with a certain version of the future where she never did.

  Except now he would never get a chance to know.

  Strike had taken her position behind the asphalt and was motioning for Storm to join her. Storm let a large gust of air escape his lungs. It was time to prioritize the mission. He emerged from his hiding place and made a quick, low dash toward her.

  He was limping. Just not in a way anyone could see.

  As trained agents, Derrick Storm and Clara Strike could stay like this for hours: coiled, waiting, ready to spring; relaxed, yet focused; fully deflated, yet one instant away from being fully pressurized. Two packages bursting with potential energy.

  After they had spent approximately forty minutes in this condition, the event Storm had predicted took place. A black SUV with tinted windows emerged from around the back of the building and exited through one of the missing fence sections. The darkness and the distance from which they observed the vehicle made it impossible to tell how many occupants it had. It was large enough to seat eight, but Storm doubted he was going to get that lucky.

  Storm looked at his watch. They were fifteen minutes from the designated rendezvous time. Newark Airport was perhaps ten minutes away. This lent credence to Storm’s suspicion: Volkov’s men planned to swoop in, collect Cracker, and return to their Bayonne base.

  There wasn’t much time to wait. He nodded at Strike. She pulled a small detonator out of her pocket and held down two buttons.

  Becky played her part beautifully, creating not one but two percussive explosions in rapid succession. The first was when the C-4 went off. The second was when the gas tank caught and added to the fireworks.

  There was yelling from inside the building—loud, sharp voices barking orders in Russian. Storm couldn’t quite make out the full sentences, but he did note, with satisfaction, that the words seemed to express a general sense of confusion.

  He held up three fingers, then two, then one. When he dropped the final finger, he and Strike burst from their hiding place, sprinting toward the building. There were no shouts of alarm, no gunshots to greet their approach. All the attention from the Russians was focused on Becky and her death throes.

  Strike disappeared through the south entrance. Storm ran along the back of the building toward the north entrance, staying close enough to the brick wall that no one on the fourth floor would be able to see him without sticking his head out of the window.

  He paused when he reached the northwest corner of the building, taking a cautious glance around the edge. It was clear. He whirled around the corner, then flattened himself against the brick, stealing toward the entrance with the silenced Glock in his right hand. He didn’t know if the Russians would send a man to give the exploded car a closer look, but he didn’t intend to be caught unawares.

  He was halfway to the door when a man with buzz-cut brown hair appeared and began walking down the short set of brick steps that led from the building to the parking lot. His head was turned away from Storm, toward the burning car.

  It was the last thing he ever saw. When the man hit the bottom step—ensuring Storm’s satisfaction that there was only one man coming to inspect the car—Storm pulled the trigger twice. The Glock emitted a soft thwump thwump. The only other sound was that of the man’s body dropping just to the right of the stairs.

  Storm scampered quickly to the body, dragging it against the stairs so it would be at least somewhat out of sight. He did not look at the man’s face. This was a kind of coping mechanism he had developed years ago. While killing was occasionally a necessary by-product of Storm’s work, it was not something he relished. He learned that if he looked at a dead man’s face, it stayed with him forever. If he didn’t look, there was at least a chance he wouldn’t be seeing this Russian in his dreams for the rest of his life.

  With the body at least somewhat out of the way, Storm climbed the front stairs and entered the building. It was even darker inside than it had been outside, but Storm could make out the opening to the stairwell on his left. Storm once read that World War II bomber pi lots who flew night missions munched carrots to sharpen their night vision. He often did the same, and was now glad for it. It gave him an edge in this murky world.

  The shouting voices from the fourth floor had stilled themselves. The only sound was now the distant crackling of a Ford Fiesta burning itself out.

  Storm made the left turn and passed through the door frame—if there ever had been a door, it had been busted off its hinges and discarded. He entered the stairwell. It was windowless and made of concrete, which to Storm meant one important thing: It would be like an echo chamber. He holstered the Glock. Even silenced, it would be too loud. He could not risk drawing notice of his arrival. It could spell death for Melissa Cracker or one of her children.

  To one side of the stairwell landing, in the corner, Storm could make out the dim outline of a pile of trash, probably left there by a vagrant who had once made that spot home. Storm walked over to it, feeling—and, worse, hearing—the grit of broken glass under his shoes. He crouched and groped gently around until he touched cloth. It was an old T-shirt. Perfect.

  He pulled out his KA-BAR and sliced the shirt up the middle. He tied one half around his right foot, one around his left. With the cloth softening his footfalls, he started creeping up the stairs. He counted the treads as he went. It was twelve steps up to a turn in the staircase, then twelve more steps up to the landing for the second floor.

  He had just passed that landing and was climbing toward the third floor when his ears told him another Russian was approaching him from above. The man was descending quickly, perhaps going to check on the car, perhaps going somewhere else on patrol. It didn’t particularly matter. Point was, he was coming. And fast.

  Storm retreated back to the landing. There was a door to the second floor, still on its hinges. Storm couldn’t open it without making too much noise. Likewise, he couldn’t make it all the way down to the first floor in time. The Russian would overtake him before he got there. Staying mouse quiet was just too slow.

  Storm looked around the landing as best he could in the limited light. There was no place to hide. The only concealment he had was the darkness. Storm wedged himself in the corner nearer to the third floor, pressing his back against the wall, trying to make himself part of it. It was not a perfect arrangement by any means. It was merely the best he could do. His hope was that the man would be feeling his way down the stairs in the darkness and looking down at his feet, not at the wall; and that he could jump the man from behind and clamp one hand on his mouth to muffle any screams, while he used his other hand to slit the man’s throat with the KA-BAR.

  Those hopes were dashed when Storm saw that the ma
n was being preceded by a thin shaft of light that was growing brighter as he approached. He was carrying a flashlight. It was only a matter of seconds until it illuminated Storm. What happened in the seconds that followed would determine the fates of countless people.

  Storm stayed still, the KA-BAR firm in his right hand. It was possible the man might not see Storm until he was close enough to attack. That was now the best scenario.

  But no. When the man rounded the bend in the stairs between the second and third floors, the flashlight was pointed down at the stair treads, but some of it spilled onto Storm. First the beam struck Storm’s feet. Then it climbed up to his shins and knees. When it reached Storm’s waist, it stopped, as did the man on the stairs. He was halfway down, a full six stair treads away from Storm.

  Storm didn’t wait for what came next. He threw the KABAR, aiming it just to the left of the flashlight. His thinking was that the Russian likely had the device extended in his right hand, and therefore the middle of the man’s chest would be slightly to the left.

  It proved to be good thinking. The KA-BAR buried itself, blade first, between the man’s ribs, piercing his heart. The small moan that followed was quickly drowned out by the sound of his body tumbling down the stairs. He landed at Storm’s feet.

  “Corporal, are you okay?” a man said in Russian from somewhere up above. Storm had spent enough time in Russia to recognize the origins of the accent. The man was from Moscow.

  Storm summoned his best impersonation of a Muscovite and replied, in Russian, “I stumbled. I’m fine.”

  “You’re as clumsy as an ox,” the man said.

  Storm replied, “And you’re as ugly as one.”

  The man laughed. Storm pulled his knife out of the dead man’s chest, then took his flashlight. It was a full-size Maglite, a big, weighty steel thing, made heavier by the four D-cell batteries that powered it. Thinking quickly, he said, “I think I bent the firing pin on my gun when I fell. I’m going to have to come back up and get another one.”