Storm Front

Nothing happened. He began turning up the dial, moving steadily through the multichannel communicator’s range of frequencies. He had to go slowly. The connections in his device were far from perfect. He didn’t want to risk going too fast past the proper frequency and not delivering a strong enough pulse to trip the lock.

He was midway through the dial, not allowing himself to feel pessimistic, and still wasn’t hearing anything.

Then, three-quarters of the way up, he heard a click and a whir.

The magnets holding the lock had been released.

Storm drew Dirty Harry and depressed the handle. The door opened inward, and he pushed against it, using its bulletproof bulk as a shield. The 747 cockpit is one of the largest in the sky, and it has a short, narrow hallway leading to the two front pi lot’s seats. At first, all Storm could see was the right side of that hallway.

He shoved the door farther in. His vision now extended to the end of the hallway. If they hadn’t been in an airplane, he could simply have stuck his gun hand around the crevice and started firing blindly. But, given Captain Montgomery’s warnings about the instrument panel, that seemed like a bad idea.

Volkov, on the other hand, would have no such worries. Any bullets he shot from his wooden gun — and Storm was assuming he had plenty of ammunition left — would hit less sensitive parts of the airplane. Storm was expecting to be greeted by gunfire at any moment.

But none came. He opened the door farther. He could now see half of the first officer’s seat and part of the corpse that was slumped there.

He kept pushing the door, ready to fire the moment he saw any piece of Volkov. Slowly, steadily, inch by painstaking inch, he pushed until the door was fully open.

There was no one sitting in the pi lot seat.

But that didn’t mean Volkov wasn’t hiding somewhere. Storm crept in, not fully committing himself to entry in a narrow hallway — where he’d be an easy target if Volkov suddenly came at him from around the corner — but giving himself a better view. Still no Volkov.

He allowed himself a baby step. Nothing.

Another step. Still nothing.

After another step, he could now see the entirety of the space: the instrument panel, both pi lots’ seats, the booster seat for a third pi lot, the console, the avionics compartment — all of it.

Storm blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing.

The cockpit was empty.

Storm stayed perfectly still for a moment, almost as if he only needed to look hard enough to make Volkov appear. His mind was clicking through possibilities, but none of them made any sense. There was no door in the cockpit other than the one he’d entered through. There was no cubbyhole or space large enough to hide any man, much less one of Volkov’s width. There was no way out of the cockpit other than perhaps through the windshield, but that was intact.

Storm watched transfixed the eerie, ghostlike sight of the plane flying itself. The yoke budged itself slightly to the left, making a tiny adjustment in course per the order of the automatic pi lot computer.

Storm’s reflexes were set on a hair trigger. His gun was still drawn. He reminded himself to relax his grip — holding too tightly actually slowed reaction time — but he didn’t dare move anything else.

He was starting to consider other options. Maybe Captain Montgomery had been mistaken. Maybe Volkov hadn’t really gone into the cockpit. Storm had been in the belly of the plane when that transaction occurred. Was it possible that Montgomery — who had just watched his first officer get killed and sustained a wicked blow to the head — had missed something?

Storm was working out a new scenario — one involving Volkov somehow loading automatic pi lot coordinates into the computer then retreating into the plane — when his peripheral vision registered movement from above him.

It was a human arm.

Storm leaped forward. Some fraction of a second later, Volkov fired.

Had these events happened in reverse order, Storm would have been dead and the world would have been put on a course toward incredible turmoil.

Instead, the bullet, which was aimed for the top of his head, continued traveling in the space where the top of his head should have been. In rapid succession, it passed near his neck, shoulders, back and butt, all body parts that had been removed from harm’s way during the course of Storm’s lunge. Then it struck one of the body parts that hadn’t quite cleared: his left calf.

Storm roared in pain just as Volkov dropped from the ceiling, where he had been splayed ever since Storm started working the dial on the transmitter. Volkov landed square on Storm’s back, pinning him to the floor of the cockpit. Storm was aware that his gun, already loose in his hand, had gone flying; and, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it land in the well under the yoke, where the pi lot’s feet normally go.