The Storm (NUMA Files 10)

“I figured you might know that better than me,” she said. “I’m a prisoner, remember?”

“And I’m a stowaway. We make a fine pair.”

Kurt moved to one of the tiny circular windows in the side of the plane. It was still dark outside, but as he looked down below he could see a smooth gray surface with a slight shimmer.

“We’re out over water,” he said. “The moon’s come up.”

He glanced toward his wrist to check his watch. Never again would he trade his watch in as collateral. A kidney maybe, the deed to his boathouse perhaps, but not his watch. At least not without grabbing another one along the way.

“You don’t happen to have the time do you?”

She shook her head.

He and Joe had made their way to the staging area around eight p.m. As near as he could tell, loading the trucks and then the aircraft had taken a total of three hours. The plane had sat on the ground for another couple of hours after that, which put takeoff sometime around one a.m.

He went to the starboard window to see if he could see anything out that side. The view was the same: nothing but water.

It was slightly possible that they were over the Mediterranean, a couple of hours’ flying time would have crossed Saudi Arabia, but with everything else that had been going on Kurt guessed they were headed south, out over the Indian Ocean, with a cargo of microbots in the tanks beneath his feet. Two and a half hours from Yemen in a jet aircraft would put them all but smack-dab in the middle of it.

He wondered where they were headed. He wondered if Jinn had a secret base hidden on a deserted island somewhere. Staring out the window again, he strained to see forward as far as he could but saw only more waves.

Leilani watched him go back and forth. “What do we do next?” she asked. “Look for parachutes? I heard them talking about some.”

Kurt had already spotted the chutes she was referring to. “They’re not for people,” he said. “They’re attached to the boats so they can fly low and dump them out the back without having to land. They call it LAPES, Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System.”

She looked confused.

“You ever see a drag race?”

She nodded.

He pointed toward the two nylon packs that sat beside each ribbed boat. “They’re drogue chutes,” he said. “They pop out the back like the ones that slow down drag racers or the space shuttle after it lands. Not exactly made for jumping.”

“Okay,” she said. “You got any other plans?”

He smiled. “You sound just like someone else I know. A good friend of mine, actually.”

“Is he on the plane?” she asked hopefully.

“No,” Kurt said. “He’s probably sitting in the first-class lounge at Doha by now. Looking over the menu from Citronelle and getting hungrier by the minute.”

She tilted her head like a child or cocker spaniel might. “It could be me,” she said. “But you don’t make a lot of sense.”

“I’ll be more clear,” he promised. “We’re not jumping out of this plane, we’re taking it over. We’re going to force our way into the cockpit, order the pilots to fly us somewhere safe and make a dinner reservation under the name Zavala at a place called Citronelle as soon as we touch down.”

“Can you fly it?”

“Not really.”

“So we make them fly it,” she said, smiling, “like we’re the hijackers.”

“Exactly.”

She looked toward the front of the plane. “I didn’t see any kind of armored door,” she said. “Just a ladder. Breaking in should be easy.”

“The trouble comes on the other side,” Kurt said. “We’re at high altitude. The plane is pressurized, and that cockpit’s draped in acres of glass. A struggle and an errant shot through one of the panes and we end up with rapid decompression.”

“Which is?”