Or maybe she didn’t. But, in this case, Storm decided there was little danger to being wrong about assuming Ingrid was armed. At most, it would just slow him down a little. The alternative — assuming she was unarmed and being wrong — was far worse.
He reached the double doors and listened for movement. There was none. He allowed himself a quick glimpse around the edge, then withdrew. It was definitely Ingrid Karlsson’s bedroom. The dominant feature was a large canopy bed. There were also antique bureaus and wardrobes, ornate mirrors, marble statuary, and a thousand other details that Storm hadn’t been able to register in that one brief glance.
The only thing missing was Ingrid. She was obviously hiding, planning to ambush him somewhere — from a closet, from the bathroom, from behind any one of those pieces of furniture.
Storm could afford to be patient, but only to a point. He knew Jones’s teams. Middle-of-the-night and predawn raids were their specialty. Two o’clock in the morning. Three o’clock. Those were their preferred hours of operation.
It was already nearing midnight. Within a few hours, the wind would let up enough and they would be here. And then this would be their show — and, more accurately, Jedediah Jones’s show. At that point, the negotiations would begin and the only people without a seat at the table would be the families of all the people Ingrid had killed.
Storm looked around to see what he could use to create a distraction and/or provoke a reaction. He spied a vase. It was china, probably late Ming dynasty, probably worth countless thousands of dollars. He picked it up and threw it into the next room. It glanced off one of the slats of the canopy bed and onto the edge of a bureau, where it exploded into several hundred pieces.
There was no response. Storm took a chunk of ivory that had been carved into a Madonna and threw that into the room. It struck a mirror, shattering it.
Still nothing.
Storm was trying to determine his next move when, from somewhere up on deck, he heard a rhythmic sound. It was hard to make out — what with the wind still whistling through, under, around, and over every exposed crevice of the ship — but it sounded almost like a large drum beating. It started slow but quickly gained speed.
Then Storm realized it wasn’t a drum. It was helicopter rotors.
Ingrid Karlsson obviously had another way out of her bedroom. And now the former stunt-plane pilot was trying to escape by the only means available to her, hurricane be damned.
In the split second between when Storm made that realization and when he decided what to do about it, the layout of the ship appeared in his brain.
The helicopter pad was on the top deck in the aft of the ship, almost the exact opposite locale of where he was right now, in the most forward deck. The Warrior Princess was 565 feet long. He’d have to cover at least four hundred of it to reach where Ingrid was now.
Still, it wasn’t like he had a choice. If Ingrid got away from him, she had more than enough resources to disappear forever. She would never see the inside of a courtroom.
Storm sprinted out of Ingrid’s quarters and down the walkway where he had nearly had the life choked out of him. With the wind now aiding him, he flew past the door to McRae’s cell and the guard’s rooms. It was still pinned open by the wind. There was no sign of the scientist.
The rotors were getting louder now. The only thing in Storm’s favor was that it would take a minute or so for the turbines to begin pumping hard enough to allow for flight.
His legs burned as he willed them to push him beyond their maximum power. He passed Tilda’s bedroom — he would have to leave her to Jones’s people, who would surely appreciate the gift — and charged up two flights of exterior stairs on the outside of the ship. He did not look down at the waves, which had begun to subside but were still formidable mountains of water. His entire focus was on keeping his footing on the slippery steps. One stumble might cost him the time he needed to catch the chopper.
As he reached the edge of the helicopter pad, Ingrid was pulling back on the flight stick, lifting the aircraft off the ground. With one final burst of speed, Storm dashed across the last forty feet of the pad. The helicopter was now airborne. He could see the look of concentration on Ingrid Karlsson’s face as she pulled back on the stick. He knew she saw him coming. He didn’t care. At this point, he wasn’t exactly trying to sneak up on her.
Storm fixed his eyes on the helicopter skid nearest to him and timed his jump.
DUNKING A BASKETBALL requires a human being to be able to reach roughly ten feet eight inches in the air: ten feet to reach the rim, plus another eight inches to allow enough of the ball to clear the top.
By the time Storm reached the helicopter, the skid he was aiming for was eleven feet in the air.
Fortunately, Derrick Storm could dunk a basketball with room to spare. He leapt, and the outstretched fingers of his right hand grasped the slick metal bar beneath the helicopter and held tight.
The chopper lurched for a moment as Storm’s weight hit it, but it had enough lift to compensate for those extra 230 pounds. As it quickly gained altitude, the wind from the hurricane took it and pushed it back violently away from the boat.
To say Storm was hanging on for dear life was no mere expression. He was now over the frothing Strait of Gibraltar, dangling by one hand. Back when he had a dry suit and a buoyancy compensator — and a grappling hook to lift him out of it when the time came — he could handle the sea’s rage. In nothing more than Laird Nelsson’s borrowed clothing, he stood no chance of surviving until morning.
As the helicopter pitched and bucked, Storm managed to swing his left hand onto the skid. He started trying to pull himself up, but it was not easy. Whether Karlsson was intentionally flying wildly — like a rodeo steer trying to kick off its rider — or whether the hurricane made her fly that way, the effect was the same.
Under ordinary circumstances, Storm could rip off twenty or thirty pull-ups without much strain. In these conditions, it was a Herculean task just to do one.
But slowly, finally, he got himself up. It helped that Ingrid had finally secured the helicopter and that it was under better control; she now had a better feel for the stick as she ascended into steadier, more predictable winds — as opposed to the gusts that bounced chaotically off the huge waves.
Storm expected she would continue climbing, perhaps even until she was above the hurricane. Altitude was definitely her friend, Storm’s enemy. Helicopters had a ceiling above which the air got too thin for the rotors to maintain their lift, but it was a high one. Ingrid just might go for it.
Instead, she did the last thing Storm expected: she flew back over the ship, traveling beyond its bow so she was actually out in front of it. She was flying lower, plunging back into turbulence that could kill them both if she crashed. Storm could not guess what she was up to.
Then she began circling around, and he figured it out: she was flying straight toward the top of the Warrior Princess’s superstructure. She was going to bash Storm against some piece of it. Perhaps the tallest part, a large smokestack located three-quarters of the way back.
Storm’s arms were wrapped around the skid, but his legs were still hanging down. He redoubled his efforts to pull himself up as the helicopter plunged toward the ship. He wrapped one leg up and over, and then the other.
Hazarding a glimpse above him, Storm saw the chopper’s cargo door. Its handle was his goal, perhaps his only salvation, depending on how good Ingrid’s aim was.
He managed to get himself in a sitting position, his legs straddling the skid, one hand braced against the belly of the chopper. It got him closer to the door handle, but it was still out of reach.