Dark Hunter (10 page)

Air Force One suddenly rocked, making Jake freeze. They must have hit a pocket of air turbulence. Craning his neck, he could see the KC-10 was much closer now, no doubt almost in position. Then he noticed one of the escort fighters had dipped low, forced down by the same turbulence that shook the Boeing. Unfortunately it meant that all that the pilot had to do was turn his head and he would see Jake.

Jake didn't waste any more time. He pushed himself against the solid fuselage—and phased through the metal like a ghost.

Grimm had instructed him on how to use the power. It was all very well phasing into the aircraft—but what lay beyond the wall posed the problem. Jake might re-form halfway through. Grimm had told him a cautionary tale about a supervillain who walked through metal doors to clean out bank vaults. On his last occasion the villain had not known a smaller vault door had been installed beyond the main one—and he had solidified midway through the new door. His heart was suddenly encased in the metal of the new door, resulting in instant death. The authorities found his torso hanging out of the steel door. That's why few people used that power: it was dangerous.

Jake just had to trust to luck that when he made it through there would be no nasty surprises. His vision suddenly turned black, as it had done when he'd made
a few practice phases through the castle walls, but he had a definite sense of movement. Seconds later his head poked through into a cargo area that ran a quarter of the length of the plane and was full of food supply boxes. Jake just about managed to make it through a double stack of boxes before re-forming … right in front of a surprised flight attendant, who was pulling a packet of cookies from a supply box. She opened her mouth to scream at the ghost that had just materialized right in front of her.

Jake gave silent thanks that he hadn't re-formed halfway into the stewardess or they would have both been either killed, or turned into some horrible conjoined twin.

He shot a hand across her mouth to stop the scream, but she bit hard into his fingers. Then she moved with practiced judo precision, levering Jake over her shoulder in a perfect
seoi nage
throw that slammed him to the floor. He wasn't expecting that. He also wasn't expecting the attendant to reach out and slam a panic button on the wall.

“Great!” snarled Jake; he knew that would bring the Secret Service running. Grimm had warned him that the Secret Service was not to be toyed with, even if he had superpowers. The stewardess spun around to face him again, taking a defensive stance. Jake felt his hands form a small ball of energy, he hoped just enough to knock
out the woman. He threw up his hands—and a rain of confetti covered the stewardess. Jake was more stunned than she was. Was this Mr. Grimm's idea of a joke?

“Stupid time for a useless power!”

As he looked up from his hand, he realized that the woman had switched martial arts, and he just saw a blur as her foot crashed into his chest in a perfect karate snap kick. Jake smashed into several boxes, which luckily fell down, blocking the stairwell door just as it was being pushed open by Secret Service personnel.

“I've had enough of this,” Jake groaned, surprised to see blood trickling from his nose. It didn't last long before his regeneration stemmed the flow.

The stewardess was ready to pounce again. Jake had to admit that he hadn't expected to be attacked by a kinda pretty flight attendant when he was trying to kidnap the president.

He raised his hand again, this time checking it when he felt a ball of energy form. Sure enough a tennis-ball-size translucent sphere glowed in his palm. He threw it at the girl, where it noisily exploded in kinetic energy and threw her clean through the air. She fell, unconscious.

Jake felt guilty. In all his bullying years he had never hit a girl. Not counting his sister, of course.

The blocked door leading from the cargo area budged as it was rammed from outside. The crates wouldn't hold back the Secret Service guys for long, and when they
found the attendant unconscious and alone, they would hopefully assume she had fallen and accidentally hit the alarm.

If Jake's information was correct, then there should be a medical facility directly above his head. He took a flying leap up, phasing through the ceiling just as the Secret Service broke through.

It was an odd experience to phase through the floor, and then suddenly find it solid beneath your feet. But Jake had had a catalog of odd experiences lately, so he didn't give it much thought. He was in what looked like a compact doctor's exam room, with a recliner and an assortment of expensive medical equipment stowed against the wall, including what looked like an X-ray machine. If it hadn't been for the curved wall behind him, Jake would almost have forgotten that he was in an airplane.

A clunking sound reverberated through the aircraft, and the pilot's voice spoke calmly over the PA system.

“Connected for refueling.”

That seemed to be all the details Jake was going to get. He took stock of his situation. There was one door leading out into a corridor that ran toward the tail, past the galley and into a large conference room. That meant the wall in front of Jake should be the Presidential Suite, built into the nose of the craft, just under the cockpit. And with any luck, that's where
he'd find the president, his primary target. Not that that really mattered, since Chromosome wanted the entire aircraft. As long as the president remained inside it then Jake only had one problem to solve. That was a major challenge for even the most seasoned villain; stealing an aircraft—in-flight—from between its protective fighter escorts. Grimm had told him that an entire aircraft was too big to teleport; other wise villains would have been teleporting entire bank vaults rather than breaking into them. Instead Chromosome's plan involved Jake persuading the pilot to turn around. If not, the autopilot would do it for him.

Once again Jake had to convince himself it was all worth it. The memory of his sister listening to Ironfist made him smile; there
was
hope for her yet.

The first thing Jake had to do was cut all communications from the aircraft. With over eighty telephones, radios, fax machines, and numerous computer systems it would be easy for anybody aboard the aircraft to make an emergency call. Luckily all calls were routed through a communications room situated behind the cockpit. And that should be just above Jake. He took another flying leap and phased through the ceiling.

After a second of utter blackness as he passed between floors, Jake phased into the room above and immediately knew that his information was incorrect. Tables and luxury, leather-padded revolving chairs, all
bolted to the floor, filled his view and he willed himself not to re-form just yet or he would become half boy, half table. He solidified on top of the table, where three very surprised men and one woman stared at him, frozen in terror. It was some kind of planning lounge and Jake found that he was standing amid stacks of papers and maps. Two doors on either end of the room were helpfully labeled “cockpit” and “communications room.” A stairwell ran down from this room to the mid-deck.

Jake fired a small energy orb at one of the men, knocking him out of his chair and unconscious to the floor. This bought the woman enough time to dart from her seat and slide—headfirst—down the stairwell. Jake turned to intercept her, but felt something connect with the back of his head and he pitched forward. Luckily this time he had remembered to will his force field around him in case he met any more kung-fu-happy staff. But he still felt the blow and the room spun as he toppled off the table.

He looked up to see that one of the men had pistol-whipped him. Seconds later an alarm squawked through the plane; obviously the woman had raised it. It was enough of a distraction for the two men to look stupidly up at the flickering red light on the ceiling.

Jake let two radioactive streamers rip—punching both men in the stomach and slamming them into the curved bulkhead. They were knocked out, their expensive suits
smoldering. Jake had no time for pity—now he was feeling angry that his plan to do this quietly had been sabotaged.

The communications room was a dark place, filled with banks of sophisticated computers lit only by the harsh LCD screens. Four operators didn't have time to look up as the fortified door buckled when it was blown off its hinges. The door struck three of them, taking them out, before it slammed into the expensive hardware in a shower of sparks.

Jake entered looking vengeful. He had planned to deliver a small electromagnetic pulse through the aircraft's communication systems, as Grimm had advised. That would be enough to take them off-line. But now Jake was running on adrenaline, and was doing what came naturally to him—being heavy-handed.

He unleashed a lightning bolt across the room. The crackling electricity struck every system and overloaded them in a fountain of sparks. The last conscious operator in the room couldn't have been more than twenty. He peered at Jake through owl-like glasses.

“Don't shoot!”

“Don't tell me what to do,” Jake snarled impulsively. A strand of lightning jumped from his finger and struck the man in the chest. He slumped to the floor in a ball.

Jake ran back into the lounge, which was now lit only by emergency lighting strips—he must have overloaded
the ship's electronics. He heard the clatter of feet on the stairs as impeccably dressed Secret Service personnel ran up, armed with automatic pistols. Jake had been told that nobody would risk firing a gun on board, as a bullet hole would depressurize the aircraft. But it looked as if nobody had bothered telling the security services that.

Jake sent another volley of lightning down the stairs. The two leading men, who were so big they barely managed to fit up the staircase, fell backward, cannoning into two more.

Jake ran for the cockpit door, and didn't break his stride as he phased through. The cockpit was jampacked with flight instrumentation and the windows offered a view of the KC-10 refueling plane right in front of them, with the long fuel pipe trailing out toward the side of the cockpit. Jake could clearly see the shuttlecock drogue connected to the line, just outside the cockpit window. Despite the alarm that was sounding, the crew could not simply stop the refueling process. They were already running on empty tanks.

The pilot didn't even look around as he heard a gasp from the copilot and engineer. He was too busy jiggling the controls to make sure Air Force One remained connected to the refueling pipe.

“I'm going to make this very easy for you,” Jake said in a voice that trembled from both nerves and excitement.
“All you have to do is refuel and turn this plane toward Romania. All your radios are out, and in a few minutes you won't have a fighter escort.”

“You're hijacking us?”

Jake hesitated. That seemed too strong a word. Then again, telling the pilot that he was kidnapping them all didn't sound any better.

“You'll live. Unless you try something stupid.”

“Why are you doing this?” said the terrified copilot, as the cockpit door was repeatedly hammered by Secret Service guys desperate to get in.

“I'm doing this to get my family back. I wish there was another way, but—”

The copilot had been maintaining perfect eye contact, and no flicker gave away the fact that the engineer, who was positioned just to Jake's side, had slid out a high-voltage stun gun. He fired it into Jake's ribs.

Jake felt as though every nerve in his body was on fire as the current pulsed through him. The special-issue stun gun would have felled a bear in seconds—no normal human stood a chance.

But Jake wasn't normal.

The current emerged from his body, amplified. Lightning bolts burst out from him in all directions, striking instruments and crew with such ferocity that Jake could smell burning clothes and hair. Jake himself dropped to the floor, momentarily weakened. When
he caught his breath and looked up he saw the entire crew was unconscious and slumped over the controls, even the pilot. Worse still, the instrument panel was dead—lights out, and dials reading zero across the board. He could still hear the engines roaring, so they were still flying, but the sophisticated computer system was dead.

He'd lost the autopilot.

In fact, the roar of the engines seemed
overly
noisy. He stood up and gazed through the cockpit window.

And what he saw was
bad
.

When the pilot had slumped forward, his hand had been on the throttle. It had been pushed by his body weight, and had edged the control to maximum. Air Force One had jolted forward, severing the attached fuel line. Pure aviation fuel splattered across the window like a bad rainstorm.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Air Force One had accelerated so close to the slower KC-10 tanker that the top of the cockpit grated along the tail of the refueling tanker.

The sound of tearing metal reverberated through the Boeing. Jake watched in shock as metal-on-metal sparks kicked up—igniting the volatile jet fuel.

The blue nose of Air Force One erupted in flames as the fuel caught fire. The front of the aircraft was now an orange fireball.

The two F-22 pilots in the opposite planes had never seen anything like it, and they were powerless to help. The KC-10 tanker sharply banked aside—narrowly missing a collision with the Boeing. The trailing fuel hose still spewed liquid fire until automatic cutoff valves stemmed the flow. Air Force One's twisted refueling probe blocked access to the aircraft's fuel tanks, preventing the flames from reaching it and blowing the aircraft up in midair.

Jake dragged the pilot out of his seat as the Boeing climbed sharply. He'd flown flight simulators and even Basilisk's
SkyKar
—but this was a different beast altogether. And there were fifty innocent people on board. He gently pushed the control stick forward and the aircraft leveled out, although all Jake could see through the window was a wall of flames.