Wild Storm (32 page)

CONVENTIONAL FIGHTING WISDOM
says it is actually quite difficult to kill someone with a knife. It requires the ability to overpower one’s opponent, and even then it’s hard work. Stabbing victims will often have dozens of knife wounds, and what kills them is not any one of them—it’s the blood loss.

Then again, conventional fighting wisdom didn’t have to face an enraged Swedish woman of Amazonian proportions in a hurricane-tossed helicopter.

Ingrid did not hesitate to begin her attack. She slashed at Storm’s head, missing only because Storm rolled out of the way at the last nanosecond.

He hopped to his feet and immediately assumed a crouch, both hands out in front of him. Ingrid was no idiot. Yes, the knife gave her an edge—as it were—but Storm had advantages in size, strength, and speed. She had to stay out of his grasp.

Storm feinted to his right, seeing if Ingrid would go after him in that direction and get herself off balance; but she didn’t go for the fake. He lunged for the knife, but she stepped back, then countered by stabbing toward his belly. Storm narrowly dodged it.

She brought the dagger high and chopped downward. Storm tried to step back but ran into the far side of the helicopter. He brought his arms up to shield himself. Ingrid’s knife opened a gash in his right forearm. She slashed again. Another wound, this time near his elbow.

Storm planted his left leg and kicked with his right, catching Ingrid in the solar plexus and propelling her backward into the other side of the narrow chopper, the side closest to the door. From that distance, about ten feet, they considered each other for a brief moment.

“Jones and I had a deal,” Ingrid said through ragged breath.

“I’m sure you did,” Storm said. “It doesn’t apply to me.”

“You’re a fool. Don’t you see that by trying to stop me you’re standing in the way of history? Nations and the lines they scrawl across the globe are going by the wayside.
Th
e governments of the world are impediments to a better way of life for all humanity.”

“Why don’t you let humanity decide that for itself?”

“Because most people are too stupid to know what’s good for them,” she snarled. “They need a real leader who can show them the way. I’m that leader.”

“You’re deranged.”

“What? You think your American president is really someone who can make the planet a better place the way I can? You think your vice president or your secretary of state can do it? I was thinking about it when I ordered Air Force One to be shot down, how very un-tragic that crash would be. A plane full of the world’s most powerful leaders, and yet there wasn’t one person who could really make progress happen the way I can. It’s just a shame that turned out to be a fake. You Americans would have eventually seen I was doing you a big favor.”

“Don’t you see the fallacy of your approach? Revolutions don’t happen because one person believes something. That’s how you get despots. Revolutions happen because thousands and millions of people come to believe something. You can’t force your version of the future on people.”

“You just don’t get it,” she said. “Your vision is clouded.”

“No, it’s actually working perfectly. And where I see you heading next is jail.”

“That will never happen,” she said, before following her assertion by charging at Storm, who deftly eluded her.

The result was nothing more than a switching of sides. From behind him, he could feel the rush of air from the opening where the cargo door had once been.

He crouched again, ready for Ingrid’s next charge, which came quickly. But this time, Storm held his ground. As she closed in on him, he grabbed the blade of the knife with his left hand, roaring as it sliced his palm. But the pain had a gain: he managed to grab her left wrist with his right hand.

From there, it was just a question of using her momentum against her. Like a seasoned bullfighter, he shuffled his body to the side at the last possible second.

Suddenly, there was nothing separating Ingrid from the outside of the helicopter but moist tropical air. She hurtled into the space behind Storm and began the sickening drop into the sea hundreds of feet below.

All that saved her was that Storm had not relinquished his grip on her wrist. As she fell, he dropped to his belly, spreading his legs out wide to give him some purchase on the floor of the chopper and not get carried out the door himself.

For a few seconds, Ingrid just dangled high above the waves, her legs kicking pointlessly. The skid on that side of the helicopter had been shorn off by the earlier collision with the ship’s smokestack. There was nothing for her feet to find. She soon stopped struggling and hung there, with Storm keeping a tight grasp on her.

She still had the knife in her right hand. The way Storm was gripping her, the interior of his right wrist was fully exposed. The ulnar and radial arteries on his wrists—the one suicidal people will try to sever—bulged.

At more or less the same moment, both Storm and Ingrid knew what she was going to do.

“Ingrid, don’t do it,” Storm yelled.

Ingrid was looking up at him with pure hatred.

“Ingrid, there’s no way you’ll survive the fall or the swim,” he pleaded. “I might or might not die, but there’d be no question what would happen to you. You’d be dead.”

She curled her lip, showing him her teeth. There was a lot of noise at that particular moment. The driving rain. The crackling wind. The churning rotors. But Storm could still very easily make out the words that came out of Ingrid Karlsson’s mouth:

“It is my nature,” she said.

The knife flashed toward Storm’s wrist.

“No,” he bellowed.

He blocked the knife with the back of his left hand. The knife point plunged in for a moment, then hit some bone. The unexpected resistance caused Ingrid to lose her grip on the weapon. It quickly disappeared into the sea below.

Storm began the slow process of pulling her up. He was bleeding, and the wounds would require stitches. But none of them was fatal.

The only fatality was Ingrid’s twisted ambition. Storm got her up into the chopper. She struggled a little, but ultimately, for all her fitness, she was a fifty-something-year-old with limited strength and energy. Storm subdued her easily.

Straddled atop her, he used his plastic restraints to bind her hands, then her feet. She yelled and cursed as Storm trussed her up, but eventually she quieted. Storm located some rope and tied her to one of the back-passenger chairs, lest she get any ideas about throwing herself out the open bay.

Storm located the chopper’s first aid kit and dressed the worst of his wounds until they at least stopped bleeding.

Then he settled into the pilot’s seat and began flying them toward The Hague.

The chief clerk at the International Court of Justice would be more than happy to receive Storm’s passenger.

CHAPTER 33

BALTIMORE, Maryland

he first Major League Baseball game Derrick Storm ever attended was at the old Memorial Stadium, deep in a crumbling, blue-collar neighborhood of this town, far from the gentrification that was beginning to take place down at the harbor.

If Storm ever started to lose his mind to Alzheimer’s disease or any of the other maladies of old age, he knew for sure this would be the last memory to go: him as a seven-year-old, walking up the ramp at Memorial Stadium, seeing the field stretched out before him like an impossibly perfect emerald blanket, gripping his father’s hand tightly the whole time.

This particular Orioles game, which Storm attended with his father about two weeks later, was a close second. He didn’t hold Carl Storm’s hand this time. But he did put his arm around the old man before they walked down to their seats. By that point, Carl had heard all he wanted and more about his son’s most recent adventure.

“It’s great to be here with you,” Derrick said. “Sorry we had to delay it a little bit.”

“Come on,” Carl Storm said. “We don’t want to miss the first pitch.”

The last two weeks had been hectic, a nonstop stream of investigators and lawyers and judges, all asking for the story “from the beginning.”

Eventually, Storm had left Ingrid Karlsson in the custody of the International Court of Justice, where she, her assistant Tilda, and more than a dozen of the people she had hired to carry out her orders on two continents would face more than a thousand counts of murder in the first degree. Among the coconspirators was Nico Serrano, the director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama, who was currently being extradited from Panama for his role in the plot.

William McRae had been found, safe and sound, by a team of CIA agents, who were being called a hostage rescue team as a result of Jones’s relentless spin operation. Before he was reunited with his loving wife, Alida, McRae happily sold his designs for the laser to the U.S. government. Without the promethium to fuel it, the designs were nothing more than drawings on paper. Still, it funded an ambitious garden expansion for the McRaes, to say nothing of their grandchildren’s college educations.

The day McRae was rescued, another arrest was made: the Hercules police moved in on a man with a wine-stained face and slapped him with a variety of charges; among them were breaking and entering, possession of an unlicensed firearm, trespassing, and invasion of privacy—the result of a camera found to be filled with pictures of an elderly woman gardening.

Storm, meanwhile, had received no less than four banana cream cakes from a local bakery during his time in The Hague. All of them also contained thank-you notes from Alida, each note growing in length until Storm finally had time to acknowledge her, thank her, and ask her to stop.

Storm had returned home in time to catch the image of Katie Comely being splashed across the front page of the
Washington Post
—and scores of other newspapers around the country—for what was being hailed as one of the most significant Egyptian finds of the last two decades. Her mummy turned out to be Narmer, the ancient pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom. She was currently deciding between tenure-track positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College, though she was thought to be leaning toward Dartmouth.

As they walked down the stairs toward their seats at the game, Storm’s phone rang. Recognizing the number as coming from the Pentagon, Storm answered it.

“Yes?” he said.

He listened for a moment, then said, “So it’s done, then? Good. Thank you very much for letting me know. I appreciate it.”

“Who was that?” Carl Storm asked as his son ended the call.

“That was the former Lieutenant Marlowe. He’s now General Marlowe, third in line at the air force. He was just calling to tell me about the terrible error the air force just made. They mistakenly dropped a thirty-thousand-pound bunker-buster bomb not far from Luxor, Egypt. You may or may not know it, but bunker busters like that get incredibly hot when they detonate—many, many thousands of degrees. Good thing they dropped on an empty piece of the Sahara Desert with no significance whatsoever.”

“Good thing,” Carl said, grinning.

They reached Row B.

“You want the aisle?” Carl asked.

“No, that’s okay, you take it,” Derrick Storm said. “Seat 2B has been pretty good to me.”

RICHARD CASTLE
is the author of numerous bestsellers, including
Frozen Heat
,
Deadly Heat
, and
Storm Front
and the Derrick Storm eBook original trilogy. When he’s not writing bestsellers, Mr. Castle consults with the NYPD’s 12th Precint on New York’s strangest homicides. For his contribution to law enforcement, he was recently honored by the Allonym Institute with their Brad Parks distinguished service award.

Mr. Castle lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration.