Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller

by Richard Castle

  “The general won’t like that.”

  “I will have to offer him my apologies,” Storm said.

  “No, Corporal. Take one of mine. I’ve got two.”

  “Thank you, my friend. If we will be alive, we will not die,” Storm said, pleased with himself for hauling out that old Russian saying. It seemed to settle the conversation for the moment.

  Storm stripped the T-shirt shreds from his feet. He had to sound like a clumsy Russian who was unconcerned about the noise he was making as he climbed back up. He began trudging noisily upward, to the third floor then up to the fourth.

  When he made it to the last bend in the stairwell before he reached the top floor, his flashlight illuminated a pair of dusty black boots. Storm quickly swung the beam upward to the man’s face, blinding him. The man reacted by turning away and shielding his eyes with his left hand. His right hand held a gun by its barrel.

  “Turn that thing off,” he ordered.

  “Sorry,” Storm said, complying with the order. But by that point the man’s night vision was thoroughly ruined.

  “Thank you again for the gun,” Storm said as he reached the landing.

  “You’re wel—” the Russian began.

  But the words were cut off. Storm had swung the Maglite at the side of his head, connecting with a crushing blow. Storm caught his body before its fall could make a sound. The crack of the Russian’s skull had been loud enough.

  Storm stayed at the top of the landing for a minute, to see if anyone would come to investigate the source of the sound. When he was satisfied no one had heard it—or that it had been dismissed as related to the strange car explosion—Storm tucked the Maglite into his jacket and eased away from the stairwell.

  He entered the long hallway that split the two sides of the building. It had doors—or, in some cases, merely door openings—scattered at irregular intervals along both sides. Small amounts of ambient light spilled from those doorways, giving the corridor a gloomy illumination.

  Storm thought back to the schematic he had studied on Clara Strike’s phone. He did not have a perfect photographic memory, but he could close his eyes for an instant and see it. From where he was standing, the hostages were in the sixth room down on the right. There were also rooms on the left to contend with. Any one of them could have men in it.

  He would have to go room by room, clearing them as he went. There was no other way to do it.

  He wondered briefly how Clara Strike was doing—what obstacles she was facing, whether she had made it up the staircase yet, how many hostiles she had encountered—then put those thoughts out of his mind. Strike was a big girl. She could handle herself.

  He drew the Glock. He inched to the first room on the left, then rounded quickly into the doorway. No one. He crept in. It was empty, save for trash.

  He was about to exit when he heard two voices coming from the hallway, talking in Russian. They were heading toward the north stairwell. If they made it there and found their colleague with the crumpled head, they would sound the alarm and this operation would instantly change.

  “I hear it’s painful,” one of them was saying.

  “Oh, it’s the worst,” the other assured him.

  “I had a gallstone once,” the first said.

  “Kidney stone is worse, the only way to—”

  The sentence became muffled. They had disappeared behind the door to the room immediately next to Storm’s. He had to act fast. He took one glance out into the hallway and, when he saw it was clear, padded silently to the next room.

  He paused at the door. It was windowless and made of a cheap wood laminate. It had a piston at the top that kept it closed.

  It presented Storm with a conundrum. Waiting for them to reemerge and taking them out in the hallway wasn’t much of an option: The hallway ran the length of the building, meaning he—or the bodies he felled—could be spotted from some distance. At the same time, the door ensured there was no way to enter this room without the inhabitants being aware of him.

  He pulled his jacket over his head and hunched over, tucking his gun in his gut. He burst through the door, moaning, immediately falling facedown on the floor in a rounded lump as the door closed behind him.

  “What the…,” one of the guards started to say.

  “Ohhhh, my kidney stone,” Storm groaned in Russian.

  The second guard laughed. The first was less amused.

  “Very funny,” the man said, walking toward Storm to either kick him or help him up. “Now get u—”

  Storm rolled over with the Glock pointed upward and put a bullet between the man’s eyes.

  The second guard stared dumbly at Storm. The computer in his head was just a little too slow to process what was happening. By the time it clicked in, Storm had rolled to his right and pumped three slugs into the man’s face.

  They were imperfectly aimed, not the neat kill shot Storm had delivered to the first man. They were enough to drop his target, but Storm wasn’t sure if they had completed the job. He leaped on the man like an angry animal, putting a knee on his windpipe and two hands across his mouth to stifle any yell or groan.

  None was forthcoming. The shots had not been perfect, but they’d had their intended effect.

  Storm got to his feet. The next problem was how to get back out of the room unseen without knowing who might or might not be in the hallway. He silently cursed the invention of solid doors.

  Then, suddenly, it became a moot point. The sound of gunfire erupted from the south stairwell. Clara Strike had obviously resorted to doing things more noisily. There was no sneaking up on anyone anymore.

  Storm burst out into the hallway, tossing the Glock to the side and yanking out Dirty Harry, happy to have its coercive powers more immediately at his disposal. He was ready to shoot anything he saw, and he didn’t have to wait long. A man appeared out of a room roughly fifteen feet away, immediately turning south, toward the noise from the melee and away from Storm.

  It was a careless mistake, one the man paid for with his life. Storm pulled the trigger twice. The bullets entered the man’s back on either side of his spine. Twin explosions of red burst from his chest. He fell forward, arms splayed.

  Storm went to the wall nearest him and crouched, gun still drawn, making himself as small a target as possible. He was ready to drop anyone else who appeared in the hallway. He waited, primed.

  A form emerged from the south stairwell. It was too distant—and too dark—for Storm to have a decent shot at it immediately.

  He watched how it moved. It wasn’t some big, Russian thug. It was Clara Strike. But it wasn’t Strike with her normal glide to her. She was hurt.

  She moved up the hallway, toward Storm. He started slinking toward her, staying low with his eyes up, his right index finger still poised on the trigger.

  But there was nothing more to shoot. Eventually, they worked their way until they met in the middle of the hallway, just outside the room where the Cracker family was holed up.

  “Are you hit?” Storm said softly.

  “Yeah. The vest took it. But, Jesus, my ribs.”

  “Broken?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “How many did you take out?”

  “Two. You?”

  “Six.”

  “Show-off,” she whispered.

  Eight down. So much for the theory that half would go to the airport while half remained here at base. Of the original eleven, there were either one or two left here—depending on whether they had sent one man or two to the airport to scoop up Whitely Cracker.

  Storm guessed there were two. It was the safer guess—better to assume you had more resistance and be pleasantly surprised when there was less. More than likely, it was Volkov and one other man inside with the family. They would know that for whatever was happening outside, two armed men barricaded in a room with a closed door would be hard to overcome.

  Storm considered his options and decided quickly on a course of action. The d
oor was the issue. The door needed to be dealt with.

  “You got any more C-4 left?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “With you?”

  She quickly rooted in her flak jacket and came up with a small, rectangular piece of a substance that looked like modeling clay.

  “Blasting caps?” he asked. And before he could even ask her to, she was already in the midst of producing those as well.

  “Keep me covered,” Storm said.

  He rose and pinched off small chunks of the C-4, molding them around the door hinges as he did so. He was guessing at how much to use, knowing that too little wouldn’t do the job but too much could harm the innocents inside. Just one more thing not to screw up.

  He set the blasting caps in the clay, then motioned for Strike to retreat down the hallway with him. There was no sense in either of them taking shrapnel.

  He nodded. She pressed two buttons.

  The explosion was small, controlled. For a moment, Storm worried he hadn’t used enough. But then there was a crash as the door fell inward.

  One of the children loosed a muffled scream. A spray of bullets, fired from an automatic weapon, greeted the demise of the door as either Volkov or his thug fired outward at anyone who might be rushing in behind the falling panel. The rounds buried themselves harmlessly in the wall on the other side of the hallway.

  Storm nodded at Strike. They began working their way back toward the door, slowly, silently, guns drawn.

  More probing gunfire erupted sporadically from the room. The men inside were smart enough to know an invasion was coming. They were just hoping they were lucky enough to guess when.

  Storm crouched when he reached the door frame. Strike stayed up.

  He held up a fist, then a finger. He wagged the finger to the right. Then he held up two fingers and wagged them to the left. This was a code he and Strike had established long ago. It meant he’d take the assailant on the right, she’d take the one on the left.

  Then Storm did a three-two-one countdown with his fingers. When he dropped the last finger, he rolled into the door frame and assumed a shooting position.

  His eyes instantly took in the scene. The family was clumped in the middle of the room, huddled against one another, bound and gagged with duct tape. Hovering over them to the right was a man pointing an AK-47. Storm killed him with one shot.

  From above him, Storm heard the report from Strike’s gun. Then he saw she had taken out her man as well.

  The last two men were dead. And that might have been a cause for great celebration, except neither of them was wearing an eye patch.

  Volkov wasn’t there.

  “Fuck,” Storm said.

  “What’s wrong?” Strike asked.

  “I should have brought cheese after all.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Just something my father once shared with me.”

  “I don’t underst—”

  “Volkov said he would be at Newark Airport, and he is. For once in his life, he actually told the truth.”

  CHAPTER 33

  NEWARK, New Jersey

  They had taken too long. The caution in the stairwell. The steady elimination of the Russian goons. The wiring of the door. It had all been too slow. The time at which Cracker was to present himself at Newark Airport had come and gone. And now Cracker wasn’t answering repeated calls to his phone.

  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.