Wild Storm (31 page)

Suddenly, Storm was losing his. Nelsson was bringing his immense weight to bear on Storm’s neck and it was staunching the blood flow to his brain. Blackness was closing in around the edges of his vision. His brain was starving for oxygen.

With every joule of energy he had left, Storm gathered his legs against Nelsson’s chest and then straightened them. It was a classic weight lifting move; for as strong as his opponent was, Storm’s squat thrust was far more powerful than Nelsson’s grip.

The huge man was propelled upward, toward the railing, which was marginally shorter than Storm’s fully extended legs. Nelsson blindly grasped for something, anything to keep him from going over—Storm’s feet, the railing, whatever. But without his eyes to guide his hands, he only succeeded in flailing at the air.

He caught briefly on the side, but his momentum kept carrying him over. Storm hopped up, raced over to the railing, and peered over. The last thing he saw of the erstwhile Alpha, Laird Nelsson, was a patch of blond hair going under a huge wave far below.

AFTER A BRIEF SWEEP OF THE DECK,
Storm located the gun the chief of security had dropped.

Storm ejected the clip and gave it a hopeful inspection. It was, alas, empty.

The only thing Storm had to his advantage was that he was the only one who knew it. He stashed the gun in his waistband and continued on toward Ingrid’s quarters.

Storm took his final turn, then went inside, grateful to get out of the elements. His chest was aching and his larynx felt like someone had put it in a vise and turned the screws.

He paused to gather himself for a moment in the sitting room, the one that had Prince George of Denmark—and his bouffant of Jersey-girl hair—keeping silent guard. He thought of Brigitte and her fondness for the painting.

“Not so easy to be married to the queen after all, is it big guy?” Storm asked.

George offered no opinion on the subject, which is what had made him a good husband in the first place.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Storm said, then went for the double doors that led to Ingrid’s inner sanctum. They opened easily.

There was no one there, at least no one Storm could see. He recognized the room. It was Ingrid’s office, the one he and millions of others had first seen on a YouTube video, with its antique rug, its mahogany desk, and all the other near-priceless baubles arranged around it.

Through another set of double doors, from the next room, Ingrid spoke a sentence or two of testy Swedish. She started with the name Laird. Then Storm heard his own name and the word
mörda
again.

He could guess at the translation:
Laird, are you
back so soon? Have you killed Derrick Storm already?

“I’m sorry, Laird isn’t here right now,” Storm said. “He decided to take a swim. But, actually, it looked like he doesn’t do that very well. So I guess I should say Laird decided to take a sink.”

There was no reply. Storm crept cautiously farther into the room. He drew the Beretta, even though it was little more than a stage prop.

Tilda had said that Ingrid abhorred guns, but Tilda had proven to be a less-than-reliable narrator. Storm fully expected that Ingrid had a cannon waiting for him in the next room.

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.
Th
e 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.

The chopper was now directly over the bow of the ship and, with the wind pushing it, was closing in on the smokestack at a murderous speed. There was no more time for caution. He had to make a jump for the handle, which meant he had to get his feet on the skid.

At that point, he’d essentially have nothing to hang on to. He could lean a little into the side of the chopper, but was mostly relying on his balance. This was like urban surfing, only it was at a difficulty level even a reckless suburban Washington, D.C., kid had never attempted.

Gripping the skid with both hands, Storm placed his feet behind him somehow, then underneath him, before standing fully. He braced himself against the helicopter’s fuselage, for what little help that was. If Ingrid had chosen that moment to roll right, Storm would have plunged to his death on the deck below.

But, with her aim set on the smokestack, she flew straight. She was now mere yards away from it.

At the last possible second, Storm jumped for the handle. He felt its rounded metal and closed both hands around it, using it to hoist himself off the skid just as Ingrid rammed it into the smokestack.

The air was filled by the shrieking of metal hitting metal, then of the skid being ripped away. The helicopter spun crazily, rotating 480 degrees and nearly losing control. Storm was now hanging on by the door handle alone.

And the handle was no longer stationary. The door to the chopper had swung open. Storm’s head, outstretched arms, and shoulders were slammed against the side of the helicopter. Storm reacted the only way he could: by gripping tighter as he absorbed the impact, like a wide receiver who is about to be mashed by an onrushing strong safety but somehow hangs on to the ball.

Ingrid was again gaining altitude. The door started swinging closed. Storm shook off the effects of what was likely a minor concussion, and unhooked his right hand from the door handle. He used it to grab whatever he could on the inside of the helicopter before the door slammed shut.

His hand hit what felt like netting of some kind. Storm grasped it. His right arm was now keeping the door open. He stayed like that for a few seconds—half in the helicopter, half outside it—until, to his horror, the door started coming off its hinge. The joint was not designed to hold the weight of a fully grown man, swinging around on it like a jungle orangutan.

As the screws popped out one by one, Storm lunged desperately into the bay of the helicopter. He gripped the leg of a passenger seat against the back wall of the chopper and placed his legs inside as well.

The door was still swinging back and forth, banging around until it sheared off for good. Storm did not bother to watch it fall into the sea below. He was panting hard, grateful for the solid floor of the helicopter.

He did not stay there long. He had just gotten to his hands and knees when Ingrid, having set the chopper on hover and activated the autopilot, emerged from pilot’s chair.

She had an ugly sneer on her face. In her left hand was a dagger. It had a blade ten inches long that was curved and cruel and lethal.