Storm called Bryan.
“What do you want now?” Bryan said in a whisper. “The credit on your Bahrain card is running out, you know.”
“I need one of the nerds to check all the airlines to see if they can find Graham Whitely Cracker V on any flights out of Newark Airport.”
“Hang on.”
While he waited, Storm reached Terminal B. He pulled Strike’s van to the curb outside the international departures area and left it there. Let the authorities sort out why a van full of surveillance gadgets and weapons was abandoned there. Maybe they’d do him a favor and shut down the airport.
As he got out, Bryan returned to the line. “He’s on Air Venezuela flight nineteen to Caracas.”
“When does it depart?”
“It was scheduled to leave Gate 53B two minutes ago. You know Venezuela is out of our—”
Storm knew he didn’t have time to listen to the rest. It wasn’t news to him. The United States had an extradition treaty with Venezuela that dated back to 1922, but it was shot full of exceptions and oddities. More to the point, the Hugo Chavez government seldom cooperated with extradition requests, particularly when the party to be extradited had the means to pay bribes. As soon as Volkov was out of U.S. airspace, he would be beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Not that the U.S. government was trying to detain him anyway, what with the way Jones was playing things. Maybe Storm could get on the phone with his new buddies at the FBI and convince them Cracker was being kidnapped. But that would take time, something he no longer had.
The fact was, there was no legal or diplomatic mechanism to prevent Gregor Volkov from slipping out of the country; no high-placed phone calls or favors called in or well-reasoned pleading with the right bureaucrat could stop Volkov or his plot. He would slide from Caracas to Moscow, or Brazil, or wherever it was he felt like going to launch a financial meltdown that would consume the world’s economies.
There was only one way to stop him now.
Brute force.
Which brought Storm to conclusion number four: He had a plane to catch.
He stuffed the phone in his pocket and sprinted into the terminal. He charged up the stairs, toward the morass of switch-backing humanity that was the security area. The line for crew and airport personnel was on the left side. Without breaking stride, Storm charged past two confused flight attendants, through the metal detector — setting it off in the process — and past a quartet of TSA employees who were so concerned about whether or not people had their shoes on that they didn’t immediately react to the most brazen security breach any of them had seen outside a training exercise.
Finally, one of them had the wherewithal to yell, “You! Wait! Stop!”
Storm was already gone. The sign for Gate 53B told him to keep going straight. Arms and legs pumping, he blitzed by curious travelers, all of whom turned to watch this madman’s dash through the terminal. Somewhere, well behind, TSA had sounded its alerts.
Gate 53B was at the end of this terminal branch. Storm ran up to a woman who was head down in a computer screen.
“Excuse me,” he said, breathlessly. “I’m with the CIA. Did a man wearing an eyepatch just board flight nineteen?”
“Yes, sir, but that flight has already closed. If you’d like—”
Storm didn’t hear the rest. He was already charging down the Jetway.
“Hey! You can’t go down there,” the woman called after him, as if that would somehow stop him.
Storm reached the end of the Jetway. There was no airplane there, just an opening at the accordion-like end of the ramp. He dropped down to the tarmac, where he found a man in a jumper with earmuffs still fixed to his head. The man was stowing directional wands in the back of a small motorized cart.
“Excuse me,” Storm said. “I’m with the CIA. Did you just direct flight nineteen out of this slot?”
“Yeah.” He pointed to a white-and-red Air Venezuela 747 lumbering away in the distance. “That’s it right there. But you can’t be—”
Storm resumed his sprint. The aircraft had turned right out of its gate but now was heading left toward a runway. It was perhaps four hundred yards away. If Storm went straight, he might be able to catch it.
As he sped toward it, he watched the 747 come to a stop at the head of the runway. There were no other planes ahead of it. It was number one for takeoff. Storm was now three hundred yards away.
Having braked, the pilot was now calling for full power from the four Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines at his command. The plane responded immediately. A 747 was a big, heavy piece of machinery, but those Pratt & Whitneys were capable of pouring out more than fifty thousand pounds of thrust.
Two hundred yards out. Storm was still gaining on the plane, but he could go no faster. The plane, meanwhile, was accelerating. From somewhere behind him, a phalanx of TSA personnel had reached the end of the Jetway that Storm had exited. Storm dared not turn to look. But if he had, he would have seen the guy in the earmuffs pointing toward him.
A hundred yards away. Ten point two seconds of all-out sprinting. Storm was coming in at a nearly perpendicular angle. He picked the point where — he hoped — he and the plane would intersect. He aimed at the front landing gear.
With sixty yards to go he thought he might not make it. The plane was picking up speed too quickly. It was now going faster than him. At forty yards, he adjusted his course and aimed for the back landing gear. It was now his only chance.
At twenty yards, the plane was really starting to pull away. At ten yards, Storm thought his lungs were going to burst.
He closed in, leaping for the strut above the 747’s tire. His outstretched hands grasped on to the metal. His body swung to the side of the tire, then slammed into it. The downward force being exerted by the back side of the spinning tire was working to pry Storm off, but it was not yet rolling quickly enough. Storm was able to hoist himself up the strut, then into the landing gear compartment.
The scream of the engines was deafening. Storm hung on against the increasing g-forces as the plane gained speed, then was able to wedge himself against the side of the compartment, hanging on to a pair of pipes that ran along the top. And that’s where he still was as the 747 lifted off the ground.
Derrick Storm was now, quite unofficially, the last passenger aboard Air Venezuela flight 19.
The 747 ascended rapidly, first over a patch of Jersey swampland, then over the suburbs of the Garden State. Storm had found good purchase in the landing gear compartment, but he didn’t dare look around — or do anything that might cause him to lose his grip — until the wheels retracted.
When they finally did, Storm retrieved the Maglite from his jacket, turned it on, and assessed his situation. With the wheels up, there was little room for him to move around. But claustrophobia was far from his biggest problem. Climbers who ascended the world’s tallest peaks started having serious problems with oxygen deprivation above twenty thousand feet. Above thirty thousand feet, the air would become too thin to breathe and deathly cold. Storm was uncertain whether he would suffocate or freeze to death first, but he wasn’t especially keen to find out. He had read news articles about stowaways found dead in wheel wells. He had to get to a pressurized part of the aircraft before it reached that altitude. He guessed he had about twenty minutes.
He looked up at the roof above him. If there was one thing that favored him, it was that airplane engineers preferred lightweight materials, for the simple reason that a lighter plane was easier to get off the ground. Sure enough, there was only a thin layer of sheet metal over his head.