But then he thought about the water tanks in the belly of the plane and the load of microbots he suspected they were carrying. He decided it would be better to move sooner rather than later.
He went to the seating area, pulled out his knife and began working on the item he’d liberated from the crate.
“I’m not even going to ask,” Leilani said, looking away.
When he was finished, he slid the knife back into his boot and covered it with the leg of his pants. Next he took one of the 9mm Lugers and popped the clip out. He quickly unloaded all the shells, including the one in the chamber, and then jammed the clip back in.
He handed it to Leilani with the safety off.
“I don’t like guns,” she said.
“Don’t think of it as a gun.”
“But it is a gun,” she insisted.
He was already moving toward the front of the plane. “Not without the bullets, it’s not. It’s just a big, crazy bluff, and you better wield it like Dirty Harry”—he saw the blank look appearing on her young face and changed references—“like Angelina Jolie, if you want them to believe you’re going to shoot it.”
“But I’m not going to shoot,” she said.
As he approached the ladder that led up to the flight deck, Kurt hoped his own bluff would be sufficient because he didn’t think Leilani quite had the concept down.
“Just stay behind me and to my right, and point the gun at them,” he said.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Try to look mean.”
Kurt climbed the ladder, which was canted sideways to the flight deck.
The pilots snapped their heads around at the commotion and saw Kurt. The captain shouted. The copilot reached for his seat belt release. And Kurt showed them what he was carrying.
They stopped in their tracks, staring at a pineapple grenade in Kurt’s hand. He pulled the pin in an exaggerated manner and held the safety lever, or spoon, down tight.
Leilani came up beside him, aiming the empty gun nicely. “Everybody freeze!” she growled.
The pilots had already frozen, but he appreciated the effort.
“That’s right,” he said. “Let’s just assume that the seat belt sign is on and you’re not free to move about the cabin.”
The captain turned back to the controls, the copilot stared. “What are you talking about?”
“Hands on the yoke,” Kurt ordered. “Eyes forward.”
The copilot complied, but also mumbled something in Arabic to the captain.
“Are you trying to take her?” the captain asked. “To rescue her? You’re a fool to throw your life away for this puny woman.”
“Shut up, jerk!” Leilani growled. “Or, so help me, I’ll fill you full of lead!”
She looked at Kurt, smiling proudly. “How’s that?”
“We need to work on your dialogue a bit, but not bad.”
Kurt glanced out the window. The horizon to the east was starting to sharpen, but the sky was still inky purple, and for the most part it was hard to tell where it ended and the sea began.
He could see the other two jets ahead of them, but only because of their navigation lights. The closest plane looked to be a mile away and maybe a thousand feet lower. The lead plane might have been three miles out and a thousand feet below the other one. The whole squadron was descending. He heard no transmissions and assumed they were operating under radio silence.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
“Don’t say anything,” the captain ordered.
Kurt figured that was a dead end, he could hardly threaten to blow up the plane if they didn’t tell him. He checked the altimeter and saw they were dropping through eight thousand feet. Another ten minutes like that and they’d be in the drink. He strained his eyes forward but still couldn’t see a speck of land.
He decided they’d waited long enough. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If you two want to live, you’re going to do what I say.”
“What if we don’t?” the copilot spat.
“Then I’ll blow up the plane,” Kurt said.
“It’s a bluff,” the copilot said. “He’s a weak American. He’ll never have the—”
Before the man finished his sentence, Kurt backhanded him across the temple. The man’s head snapped sideways, and he put a hand to the fuselage wall to steady himself.
“You think I want to end up back in Jinn’s hands,” Kurt said, “would you?”
The guy held the side of his face and looked back at Kurt like a scolded animal. The two pilots exchanged a look. Kurt was counting on the fact that both men knew what kind of a lunatic Jinn was. He guessed the bodies at the bottom of the well weren’t the only employees he had dispensed of in his day.
An argument broke out between them in Arabic.
Kurt backhanded the copilot again. “English!”
The man glared at him and slowly began to reach for his seat belt lock once again. “You’re right,” he said. “Jinn will make you beg for death if he catches you. But if we let you go, it will be worse for us.”
The seat belt clicked loose, and the man turned in his seat and stood, looming taller in the small cockpit.
“So blow us up,” he said. “Take us all to paradise.”
Kurt looked at the man, trying to stare him down. The man didn’t blink, and while Kurt didn’t blink either it was a standoff he couldn’t win.
“So be it,” Kurt said.
He let go of the spoon and flung the grenade at the copilot. It hit him in the center of his suddenly shocked face. He grabbed for it like a man in a shower trying to catch a wet bar of soap. He knocked it toward the captain.
With eyes as wide as saucers, he lunged for it, only to be intercepted by a mighty right cross from Kurt.
Kurt had put his whole body into the swing, pivoting from the hip and shoulder, pushing off with his right foot and firing his arm forward with every ounce of muscle fiber in his body.
The man went limp and fell backward on the captain and the control yoke he held, sending the aircraft into a steep dive.
Weightless for a second, Kurt collided with the ceiling. When he crashed to the floor, he lunged forward, grabbing the unconscious copilot by the belt and yanking him backward. As he pulled the dead weight off of the captain, the dive flattened out a bit, but a small pistol appeared in the captain’s hand.
With a swing of his left arm, Kurt knocked the captain’s hand sideways and the gun discharged. The bullet plugged the copilot in the side. A second shot hit the seat.
Kurt tried to hold the captain’s arm away, but the leverage wasn’t with him. The captain yanked his arm back, pulling it free and aiming at Kurt again.
Kurt ducked and shoved the yoke with his palm, pushing it over. The aircraft rolled hard as the captain fired again.
The shot missed, hitting the panel above them. It exploded in a shower of sparks. A group of warning lights came on accompanied by alarms sounding.
The plane went into a rolling dive, dropping toward the sea. It became difficult to do anything but hold on. Kurt managed to slug the captain once before being thrown back by the centrifugal force of the turning aircraft.
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 Jinn’s goons, did not qualify for the benefit of the doubt. They weren’t coming for a tour of the facilities. They were an attack force, operating under radio silence, planning to hit and take over the island at the break of dawn.
“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 Jinn’s frequency,” he said. “Can you find me one of those headsets?”
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 Jinn’s men boarding the other aircraft,” he said. “They’re commandos. I’m pretty sure they’re about to storm the island.”
“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.
With no answer on the radio, Kurt realized the time for warnings had passed, it was time to make a move.
IN THE CENTER OF AQUA-TERRA’S communications room, Zarrina stood with Otero and Matson, listening to Kurt Austin as he tried to warn his friends of the imminent attack.
Otero looked sick. “I thought Jinn said Austin and Zavala were dead?”
“Apparently he spoke too soon,” Zarrina said.
“Where is it coming from?”
“It could be anywhere,” she said, glancing out the
window. She saw no boats on the horizon, but she did see the three aircraft approaching. One of them was well out of formation. It all but confirmed the worst of her fears.
“He’s taken over on one of the jets,” she said. “We need to warn Jinn. And we need leverage. Get the woman up here. Now!”
KURT PUSHED THE THROTTLES to full, and the one-hundred-and-ten-foot aircraft surged forward with surprising power.
As it accelerated, a plan formed in Kurt’s mind. He watched the other jets slowing almost to stall speed as they dropped toward the water.
They’d be vulnerable as they flew along the deck, discharging their commandos, and Kurt could force them into the drink like a stock car racer wrecking his competition by putting them into the wall.
The two aircraft ahead were spaced a half mile apart at less than three hundred feet. Kurt and Leilani were closing in rapidly when suddenly Kurt heard shouting in Arabic over COM-1.
Both jets reacted instantly. Their pitch changed from nose down to nose up, and the heat distortion trailing out behind their engines intensified rapidly.
“Damn,” Kurt said. “So much for the element of surprise.”
The jets began to accelerate, but Kurt was barreling down on them rapidly, moving at least a hundred knots faster. He chose the aircraft to the left and headed for it, pointing his nose down like a madman.
Kurt’s aircraft charged like a hawk swooping in for the kill. The other jet was coming up, struggling to climb and pick up speed like a big, slow pigeon.
It grew larger and closer, filling the window and then disappearing from Kurt’s view, flashing under them.
JINN SAT IN THE FLIGHT ENGINEER’S chair in the lead aircraft, shouting instructions to the pilot. The throttles were at full, the aircraft was straining to climb and accelerate.
“Look out! He’s right above you!” Zarrina shouted over the radio.
A wave of thunder and turbulence shook the aircraft. A shadow raced across the windshield, and the captain shoved the stick forward. Smoke, heat and exhaust from Kurt’s engines blasted the cockpit, but the planes did not collide.
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