Chapter 44
The dead captain remained strapped in his seat with a look of surprise on his frozen face.
His eyes were open, his oxygen mask hanging loosely, his frozen skin untouched by any form of decay.
Even the knife in his chest looked staged, covered as it was with bright red blood while glittering with a thin coating of frost.
The captain’s death was not a surprise to Kurt. Based on the video of the hijacking they knew the copilot had killed or at least incapacitated him. But a short distance away lay a significant mystery.
The copilot was dead as well.
His body was crumpled in a heap at the bottom of another escape ladder. The hatch above remained closed. An upward-angled gunshot wound to his back suggested he’d been blasted off the ladder from behind before ever reaching it.
The discovery felt odd. To Kurt it seemed like a clue that didn’t fit with the rest of the puzzle.
All along they’d known there were two hijackers, Ridley and at least one of the pilots, since someone had to fly and land the plane.
But if the captain had been stabbed while he was flying, it was presumably the copilot who’d done it.
That would leave Ridley to put a bullet in the copilot’s back after they’d landed on the frozen lake.
All of which begged the question: Who, then, was left to shoot Ridley in the tavern five days later?
Kurt had assumed it was the copilot. But now…
He put the idea aside, pulled the dog tag of the murdered captain, and then climbed into the copilot’s seat, looking for the electrical panel.
If they were going to do a proper job destroying the plane, they needed to get the power on and enable the self-destruct units, which Ridley and the copilot had turned off.
“Let’s see if this thing has any juice,” Kurt said. Finding the battery switches, he tied them together so they would work as one. With the batteries linked on the main bus, he flipped the switches to the on position.
In the eerie and almost unfathomable quiet, he could hear the circuits and instruments energizing as the power came back on. The tones resembled the strange high-pitched notes one heard when the pressure in their ears equalized. Almost inaudible, but unmistakable.
The sound made him think about the impact signal that had led them astray.
The fisherman’s report of a large aircraft flying low over the fjord had made everyone forget about the erroneous signal.
But it hadn’t been a phantom, the NSA had picked it up on a highly sensitive network.
With the aircraft being safely tucked away on the icy surface of the “fish-head” lake, the signal had to be a false flag, a red herring designed to lure everyone away from the true location.
But who’d put it out? It wasn’t the Chinese or the Russians; they’d been searching the ocean as well.
And it couldn’t have been Ridley or the copilot, as they’d been here on the plane.
It meant there had to be another conspirator, someone who was never part of the crew.
The more Kurt thought about it, the more it seemed like they were being led on. Little by little. Inch by inch. Not just NUMA, but the Chinese and Russians as a well. But why and by whom?
The lights on the panel flickered. The myriad circuit breakers and glowing switches came to life around him.
They bathed the cockpit in a soft glow, far warmer than the beam of Kurt’s flashlight.
Directly ahead of him, the glass panel screens that dominated the cockpits of modern aircraft lit up one by one.
But instead of maps or systems readouts or virtual versions of the instrument panel, they displayed the image of a man sitting in a dark room, posed as if he were ready to recite a poem. The face was instantly recognizable.
The image grinned with joy and malevolence. It gave Kurt the answer to all his questions at once. “Welcome to my parlor,” the man’s gravelly voice announced.
“Ahab,” Kurt whispered.
There was no response, and Kurt realized he was looking at a recording.
“I must admit,” Ahab said, “I expected you to die at sea, going down with your ship like an old captain should. But here you are, still chasing the rabbit I put in front of you. Your determination astounds even me. For the record, this trap was supposed to be the fate of your Chinese friend, Gushan, but don’t worry, he will suffer in due time.
He will suffer along with his country, side by side with yours.
“As I’m sure you’ve already realized,” Ahab continued.
“The important parts of the laser are gone. I’m almost saddened that you won’t get to see what I do with it next, but this is where you come to your end.
One step too far, a mile across the border into Russian territory.
I was tempted to let them capture you and take you to a gulag somewhere, but on the off chance they might let you go, it seemed better to have them surround you in the aircraft, where they could watch me bury you in it.
“I offer you a choice,” Ahab said. “Go face the Russians. Or stay where you are and warm up nicely. You have…two minutes to decide.”
With that a number of lights on the panel flashed yellow and began blinking. A timer started counting down from a hundred and twenty seconds. The self-destruct system had been initiated.
Kurt jumped out of the seat, ignoring Ahab’s continued pontification. He rushed toward the cockpit door and nearly slammed into Joe in the process.
“No laser,” Joe said, breathing hard in the frigid air. “Someone already pulled it.”
“I know,” Kurt said.
“How could you know?”
Kurt nodded toward the screens. “Someone’s been bragging about it.”
Joe’s eyes grew wide at the sight of a man they all thought was dead. “You’ve got to be kidding me. How is he alive?”
“We’ll have to figure that out later,” Kurt said. “Right now, we’ve got to get out of here.”
A sudden brightening of the cockpit told him it was too late. A stark white glow reached them through the blanket of snow covering the windows, courtesy of spotlights being aimed their way.
Kurt rushed to the ladder that the copilot had died trying to climb. He went up to the hatch, unlocked it, and pulled it open. A foot of snow dropped in on him, coating him in white. He was fine with that. It would be camouflage.
Climbing another step and poking his head above the snow, he looked around.
A hodgepodge of vehicles had come in from the Russian side of the lake.
Kurt saw a couple of trucks, a pair of snowcats, and three snowmobiles.
They were taking up positions around the plane.
Some of them had turned their headlights on, others aimed articulated spotlights at the jet.
The pristine snow sparkled with the illumination.
The tracks Kurt and Joe had made with the snowmobiles stood out in contrast.
A number of men emerged from the nearest truck, armed with guns and ladders. Additional men were spreading out to various points around the plane in order to prevent any escape.
“What’s the word?”
“Fifteen to one,” Kurt said.
“But there’s two of us.”
“And thirty of them.”
“Math,” Joe said. “Got ya. What do you want to do?”
“I’d like to invite them in, show them Ahab’s video, and explain that we’ve all been tricked, but we don’t have the time.”
He pointed to the self-destruct timer, which was ticking down and closing in on ninety seconds.
Joe took a deep breath and held up one of the charges. “Don’t really need these if the whole plane is going to blow up. We could use them like grenades.”
“Now you’re talking,” Kurt said. “I’ll distract them. You get to your machine.”
“You’ll end up stuck here,” Joe said, not happy with the plan.
“Are you kidding?” Kurt said. “I’m taking the easy route. I’ll stroll off this thing while they’re all chasing you.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “That sounds more like it.”
As Joe left, Kurt twisted the timers on three of his four charges. He set them for ten, twenty, and thirty seconds. He would have preferred five, ten, and fifteen, but the safety protocol would not allow a shorter fuse.
Pressing the start buttons, he waited calmly as thirty pounds of C-4 ticked down to detonation. When enough time had passed, he heaved the charges out one after another.
The first charges crashed into the snow, perhaps ten feet from the point man of the approaching group. He shouted a warning to the others and ran. The group scattered, dropping their ladders and rushing clumsily through the snow for safety.
It detonated as they cleared the area, blasting a thirty-foot crater in the snow and sending a number of them flying. Unknown to anyone at the time, the blast cracked the ice below in a spiderweb-like pattern.
The second charge went off to a similarly spectacular effect, blasting so much snow into the air that it cleared half the hidden wing, while spearing a fog of sparkling ice crystals across the snowy plain.
By now the startled Russians took cover. Some of them responded by leveling their rifles at the cockpit and firing away.
Kurt slid back down the ladder as bullets tore into the upper half of the cockpit.
He dropped to the deck and scrambled aft as the incoming shells tore the small space apart.
He was out of the cockpit and into the control bay when the third charge went off, thudding the plane like a nearby thunderclap.
He reached the control bay ladder. Looking up, he saw Joe’s feet disappear through the opening. He raced up after him. A vague clock in his head telling him the bigger bang of the self-destruct system was not far off.
Poking his head out, Kurt saw clouds of ice particles drifting through the air, the Russians trying to regroup, and Joe burrowing through the snow on top of the plane like an Arctic fox. It kept him out of sight until he reached his snow machine.
Pulling himself aboard, Joe twisted the throttle. The electric machine accelerated instantly, and Joe was soon racing along the fuselage and down the side. The Russians saw him, but held their fire. No doubt they had orders not to shoot up the section of the plane holding the laser.
That amnesty ended the moment Joe hit the frozen surface of the lake.
But he had already hit top speed by then.
He whipped past the tail, cut to the left to avoid a snowcat, and sped off into the dark.
A few tracers followed him, but the gunfire stopped as all three of the Russian snowmobiles went after him.
Kurt followed Joe’s path along the fuselage and reached his own chariot. He climbed on board and grabbed the throttle. His more awkward ascent meant he had to turn around before he accelerated. He let the motor surge once as he spun around. Then put the power on smoothly.
As the belt dug into the snow, he picked up speed briskly. Instead of going for the tail as Joe had, Kurt used the wing as an off-ramp. Halfway down he turned sharply to the left. He was just going off the edge as the self-destruct timer hit zero.
Three successive explosions erupted behind him. The cockpit first, then the control compartment aft of it, and then a larger, hotter detonation as the weapons bay erupted from within.
A white ball of flame accompanied the blast, blinding everyone who had been caught looking.
The immediate effect of the explosions was the complete dismantling of the plane. The top of the fuselage blew upward and out. Geysers of flame jetted skyward, while jagged sections of aluminum pirouetted as they flew out into the night.
A secondary effect was the shock wave. The blasts were channeled upward for the most part, but shock fronts expand in all directions like a bubble.
This one hit Kurt with a powerful off-center shove, which forced the machine onto one rail.
Kurt was thrown off the side and went face-first into the snow.
The last he saw of the snowmobile, it was careening onward, curving back toward the inferno.