Above him, more warning lights came on. Static and feedback came through the headphones.
“I look forward to it,” Zarrina replied. A shot rang out, the transmission ended and the COM panel went dark. Kurt flipped the switch a few times and got nothing.
“Radio’s down,” he said.
“What are we going to do?” Leilani demanded.
“Head southwest and follow the original plan.”
He hoped he hadn’t just sacrificed the Trouts, but he had no choice. They had to make it to the Seychelles or at least to a vessel in the shipping lanes. They could signal a ship and ditch nearby, but either way they had to get away from Aqua-Terra.
THE FURY IN JINN AL-KHALIF’S eyes burned hot enough to melt steel. The distance between his aircraft and Austin’s continued to grow. Austin was escaping, and carrying with him both a woman Jinn desired to have and, more important, the secret of his whereabouts, a secret he needed to maintain.
“Why are they faster than us?” Jinn demanded to know.
“He dumped the cargo,” the pilot replied. “They’re six tons lighter than us. Thirty knots faster at least. If you want to catch them, we have to jettison our cargo as well. Otherwise we lose a mile every two minutes.”
Jinn considered this. He’d suffered a major defeat already. One plane down, another in the hands of an enemy he wanted to see dead. Two cargos gone, there was no telling what percentage of the microbots had survived either impact.
“Even if we dump the cargo,” the pilot said, “we’ll only be able to match his speed. We’ll never catch him.”
Jinn had a better idea. He unlatched his seat belt. “Land,” he said. “Immediately.”
CHAPTER 37
KURT HELD THE JET ON A COURSE DUE WEST FROM AQUA-Terra. He pulled back on the stick slightly, bringing the aircraft into a shallow climb, nursing every bit of speed he could from it. He was bitter, angry and oblivious to any thought beyond escape and informing the authorities of Jinn’s actions. A stinging sensation in his eyes snapped him out of it.
“Smoke,” Leilani said.
Kurt glanced around. The cockpit was filling with it. Banks of new warnings lit up. The plane began to shake, the controls got heavy. Kurt fought it for a while but it felt like the hydraulics were going out.
Stall. Stall. Stall. The computer voice was talking again, this time a warning instead of advice.
Kurt leveled off and the stall warning ceased, but the problems did not end there.
In a moment it seemed like every device in the cockpit was either flashing or beeping or chirping an alarm. Kurt had no idea what any of it meant aside from the obvious.
“Time to go,” he said.
He stabbed at the autopilot button and jumped from the seat. In a blink he and Leilani were down the ladder and racing through the cargo hold.
“Get in the boat!” Kurt yelled, pointing to the rigid inflatable near the tail end of the plane. With the plane shaking, he found a lever for the cargo hatch and threw it over. The ramp began to drop, the wind whistled in and around them. Smoke and kerosene fumes swirled in.
“Turn around,” he shouted to Leilani. “Feet forward.”
As Leilani turned, the plane began to shudder like it was encountering heavy turbulence, Kurt guessing the hydraulics were going and the autopilot was struggling to compensate.
He released the straps that held the boat to the floor and clambered in, landing on top of Leilani and, to his surprise, the guard he’d knocked cold an hour ago.
“Hold on!” he yelled, wrapping his arms around Leilani and latching onto a handhold in the transom with a death grip that left his knuckles white. With a flick of the wrist, he released the drogue chute.
A small “leader” chute was sucked out first. It yanked the others from their packs. The boat shot backward and then slammed to a stop a few inches from the edge of the ramp.
Kurt looked up. A third strap he hadn’t seen led from the nose of the boat to a tie-down in the center of the cargo hold. It was stretched taut like the leash on an angry pit bull and it showed no signs of breaking.
BY THE TIME JINN’S AIRCRAFT touched down on the water, Jinn was already in the cargo bay, hoisting a rocket launcher onto his shoulder and aiming it at the small dot that was Kurt’s aircraft.
He activated the sight. The system locked onto the heat coming from Austin’s fleeing aircraft. A green light and a high-pitched tone confirmed that the target had been acquired.
“No!” the pilot warned.
Jinn pulled the trigger. The missile leapt from its case and shot out over the water. The propellant ignited and a streak of orange fire raced away from them. Jinn watched as the brilliant flare from the tail of the missile closed in on Austin’s fleeing aircraft. He counted the seconds.
KURT’S PLANE WAS BURNING and coming apart around them. The renegade strap held them in place. A two-thousand-foot drop awaited, but the parachutes that might lower them down safely would be shredded in seconds if he didn’t act.
He rose up, pulled the pistol from his belt and wedged his foot under the thug who was tied down. Holding tight to one of the boat’s grab handles with his left hand, he fired the gun with his right.
The bullet pierced the nylon. The belt snapped in two and the boat was yanked backward again as if pulled from the plane by a giant hand.
For an instant they were in daylight, but the smoke that trailed the plane engulfed them, and then the flash and concussion wave of an explosion shook the sky. A billowing cloud of burning kerosene mushroomed in all directions ahead of them, filling the air with thick black smoke.
The boat—fortunately, still attached to the chutes—plunged into the smoke, traveling forward and down like an arrow.
JINN SAW THE MISSILE hit Austin’s aircraft. The initial flare of impact was followed by two other explosions, each bigger than the last. Black clouds of smoke expanded in all directions. Flaming debris arced through it, curving downward like a series of falling comets, drawing smoke trails across the dark morning of the western sky.
The explosion was at least five miles off. Jinn’s only regret was that he hadn’t been able to see Austin burn up close where he could have watched his skin peel and blacken as the fire engulfed him. Still, it was a satisfying display, and one he was quite certain even Kurt Austin could not live through.
DESPITE JINN’S BELIEF, Kurt was alive. He’d felt the heat of the detonation and knew instantly that the plane had exploded, though he knew nothing about Jinn’s missile. Nor did he care. His only concern was holding on as he, Leilani and their prisoner dropped through the air in the inflatable boat.
When first yanked out of the cargo hold, the small boat flew almost flat on its keel like a dart flung at its board. But the parachutes were attached at the back of the boat, designed to slow it as it launched from a few feet off the deck, not to drop it safely from a great height. As the speed and momentum of the boat slowed, the nose began to pitch down.
By the time they entered the cloud of smoke, they were pointed downward about fifteen degrees, with the chutes trailing out behind them like feathers on a dart. It felt nothing like the smooth drop of a normal skydive. It was more like riding a toboggan down a black-diamond ski slope.
The boat shook and shuddered and the angle grew steeper. Out behind them, one of the chutes seemed to have been hit with debris and was fraying in the middle. Up ahead Kurt saw only smoke and darkness.
Suddenly, the surface of the ocean appeared. The nose of the boat hit the water, submarined for a second and then burst free. Kurt was actually flung up into the air, but he gripped the handle like a bull rider in the rodeo and managed to land in the boat.