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?”