Devil's Gate Read online

  54

  WITH HIS BERETTA out in front of him, Kurt Austin crept through a narrow corridor that ran for forty feet before terminating in a stairwell.

  One flight led up, the other down.

  Glancing over the railing, he couldn’t tell how far in either direction the stairs climbed or descended, but it was a long way. Probably all the way up to the top of the ship’s accommodations block, maybe even out onto the roof where the various antennas and radar emitters were. Ten stories up.

  And down . . .

  Maybe all the way to the bottom of the hull. To the bilge. He guessed Katarina and Andras had gone up. Despite a nagging desire to find and confront Andras, Kurt looked downward.

  Whatever the Onyx really was, the truth would not be found in the ship’s offices and living quarters or even on its bridge. It would lie below, where the oil tanks and the pumps and the guts of the ship were supposed to be.

  Two levels down, he found a dormant pump room. He snuck inside.

  Tankers the size of the Onyx had massive pump rooms; a ship that could hold millions of barrels of oil had to be able to load and unload or even transfer it around rapidly. Kurt had spent time on a few tankers whose pump rooms were as large as their engine rooms. This was no different, except . . .

  Kurt moved closer to the main pipes. A layer of frost clung to them and spread across the bulkhead wall. He tapped a pipe with his fingers. It was incredibly cold.

  They certainly weren’t pumping oil.

  He found a bank of controls and a computer screen. The readout said:

  Whatever was going on down there, it was being controlled from up above. He didn’t dare mess with it. He probably couldn’t get in anyway, and just trying would almost certainly alert the bridge crew to his presence.

  He moved back to the door and put his ear against it. Hearing nothing other than the hum of the engine and various generators, he opened it.

  He made his way back to the stairwell and headed deeper. He decided to skip a few levels and literally get to the bottom of things.

  He’d climbed down two flights when a clanking sound stopped him in his tracks.

  A quick glance over the railing showed a hand two flights below, sliding along the railing and coming up. He heard voices, and feet lazily pounding the stairs.

  “. . . All I know is, he wants full power brought up and maintained,” one man was saying.

  “But there isn’t even another ship nearby,” a second voice said.

  “Don’t ask me,” the first man said, “but something’s going on. We’ve never gone to a hundred percent before.”

  Kurt wanted to hear more, but he couldn’t wait around. He moved to the landing closest to him and went through the door, closing it behind him as quickly and quietly as he could.

  The machinery was louder on this deck, and Kurt reckoned he was right above the engine room. He pressed himself against the wall, one eye on the door to his right, one eye on the hallway to his left.

  The footsteps continued up toward his level. He could still hear that the men were talking but could no longer make out the words. He felt relieved when the footsteps rounded the corner and went higher.

  Then suddenly the door swung open and stayed that way.

  “Hey, don’t say anything,” the man holding the door shouted back to his friend, who was continuing up the stairs, “but I’m ready to get off this tub the next time we dock.”

  The man continuing up the stairs laughed. “At least until you blow all your money, right?”

  Kurt stared at the door.

  The man was standing in the doorway, hand on the open door and his back to Kurt, as he continued his conversation with the man on the stairs. Kurt needed him to go back out or come on in. But standing there was anything but ideal.

  Laughing at his friend’s joke, the man turned, stepped into the hall, and came face-to-face with the business end of Kurt’s Beretta and its silencer.

  “Don’t even blink,” Kurt whispered. He waved the man in.

  The crewman was a thin Caucasian with a Mediterranean look about him. He had short curly hair and a tanned and lined face from too much sun over the years, though he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five.

  The man did as Kurt ordered and shut the door behind him.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m a gremlin,” Kurt said. “Haven’t you ever met one before?”

  “A gremlin?”

  “Yeah, we sneak around, screw things up. Generally make a nuisance of ourselves.”

  The man gulped nervously. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Not unless you make me,” Kurt said. “Come on.” Kurt nodded down the hall. “Let’s find you a nice place to rest.”

  The man moved in front of Kurt and walked slowly. He made no false moves, but Kurt knew that could change at any second. At the end of the hall another door beckoned.

  “Open it,” Kurt said.

  The man did as he was told and then stepped inside. Kurt followed and then stopped. He was standing in a huge open room with a ceiling at least forty feet high.

  The heat from steam pipes radiated through the space, and Kurt felt the humidity soak his body almost immediately. An odd harmonic hum issued from a bank of generators as they vibrated in a low octave. Large white pipes ran in one direction while blue-painted ones crossed them, shielding electrical conduits. The blue pipes continued alongside a catwalk and twisted up and around a pale green cylindrical structure three stories tall that dominated the center of the room.

  Kurt walked forward, pushing the Mediterranean man in front of him. On the side of the huge green cylinder he saw stamped lettering. A number and the Russian word Akula confirmed his fears.

  “This is a reactor?” Kurt asked.

  The crewman nodded.

  As if to confirm, a sign, written in English, French, and Spanish, also carried the international three-triangle symbol for radioactivity.

  Kurt looked past the huge structure and saw an identical one, perhaps two hundred feet away. “The missing Typhoon,” he said to himself.

  All the evidence had pointed to someone buying it and making it disappear. It turned out he was right about what happened, even if he was wrong about the purpose. The sub had indeed gone missing, and Andras and whoever he was in league with were in fact the new owners, but apparently they’d been more interested in the reactors than the hull.

  Why? Kurt wondered. What on earth did an oil tanker that was doing only 7 knots need with a pair of nuclear reactors? She was venting diesel smoke, he’d smelled it on his approach, so if they weren’t using the reactors to push the props what were they using them for?

  “What’s this for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what they do,” the crewman said.

  Kurt bashed the man across the face with the butt of the pistol and then aimed it at his eye. “Don’t lie to me,” he said.

  “For the accelerator,” the man said meekly.

  “A particle accelerator? Here on the ship?”

  The man remained quiet.

  “Come on,” Kurt demanded, cocking the hammer of the Beretta. “I heard you tell your friend someone wanted more power. That’s why you got off on this floor. By the look of your clothes, you’re an engineer, not a deckhand. You know what’s going on here. Now, you’re either going to tell me or you’re going to take your secrets to the grave, immediately.”

  The man stared at the pistol in Kurt’s hands. He ran his tongue over his lips and then spoke.

  “They use the reactors to power the accelerator,” he said. “The energy is channeled out through the front of the ship. It can incapacitate a vessel.”

  “It can do more than that,” Kurt said. “I’ve seen the bodies of men burned alive and their brains fried in their skulls from your little toy.”

  “I just run the reactors,” the man pleaded.

  “Great excuse,” he said. “Where were you headed?”

  “The control room
,” the man said.

  “Take me there,” Kurt demanded.

  The man glanced at the pistol in Kurt’s hand once again and then nodded. He moved to the catwalk and began climbing it. Kurt followed as the catwalk curled around the reactor’s containment wall.

  55

  AT THE TOP OF THE CLIMB, the catwalk bent away from the reactor. There, a small offset area enclosed with steel walls and plate glass windows overlooked the entire setup.

  The crewman grabbed a handle and opened the door. Kurt shoved him inside and raced in behind him.

  Two other men waited there, dressed in white, studying a monitor screen. One wore coveralls and looked like an engineer. The other, he guessed, was a technician, based on the coat he wore.

  Kurt soon had all three backed up against the wall.

  The question now was what to do.

  He inched forward to the screen the men had been studying. The monitor displayed a side view of the ship.

  “Schematic?” he asked.

  One of the technicians nodded. “Power conduits,” he said.

  Kurt looked more closely. Colored icons had different text next to them. Beside a yellow block was “Primary Electrical.” He figured that was the ship’s standard electrical system. A blue-colored icon read “High Voltage.” Its lines ran down toward the bottom of the ship and then looped in a circle and rose up near the bow and came back to a section amidships. Based on the photos he and Joe had seen, he could tell the raised-up sections coincided with the odd protrusions Joe had noticed near her anchor lines and the bulging section in the ship’s center.

  “Is this the accelerator’s path?” he asked.

  The men nodded in perfect synchronization. “It runs around the ship and exits near the bow,” the engineer said.

  “Of course,” Kurt mumbled. Kurt could not believe he hadn’t seen the connection sooner.

  The Onyx had been in Sierra Leone when Andras was seen there, and Kurt knew this coincided with the loading of the YBCO material onto the Kinjara Maru, but he’d never taken it a step further and made the leap of realization that the Onyx contained the weapon that fried the Kinjara in the first place.

  Now it seemed so obvious, but one thing puzzled him. Where was the Onyx the morning he and the Argo had happened on the stricken freighter? They’d performed a pretty good search after Andras had fled and faked his death by destroying the speedboat. They’d found nothing visually or even on radar.

  That meant there still had to be a submarine.

  Kurt guessed that Andras and his men had gone overboard just before the explosion. He guessed they swam down to a small submarine, perhaps twenty or thirty feet below the surface, and entered through an air lock of some kind.

  Meanwhile, Kurt and the rest of the Argo’s crew had been transfixed by the explosion.

  But if the Typhoon was laying in a scrapyard somewhere, then what were the thugs using?

  “You have a submarine?” he asked.

  The technician nodded. “There are three here.”

  “Any of them big enough to haul cargo?”

  “The Bus,” the engineer said. “It’s one hundred ten feet long. Mostly empty space.”

  Unless it’s filled with tons of YBCO, Kurt thought.

  If Kurt was right, the Onyx had fried the Kinjara Maru and moved on. Andras must have taken the YBCO off the Kinjara during the night, loading it aboard the Bus and sending the sub to haul it to wherever the Onyx was, somewhere long over the horizon. But he couldn’t get the ship to sink fast enough, and that led to Kurt’s spotting the smoke trail in the morning.

  But it didn’t answer a more pressing question. If the Onyx was the ship killer, why was Andras demanding full power from the reactors? If Kurt’d heard correctly, there was no ship in range to fry with the particle accelerator.

  He tapped the screen to zoom out. His eyes fell on the huge bundle of high-voltage lines in the dead center of the ship, where the tanks would have been had the Onyx actually been a crude carrier.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the central section of the ship. “All this mess, what is it?”

  The men hesitated.

  “Come on,” Kurt snapped, gun held steady. “I don’t have all day.”

  “It’s the Fulcrum,” the engineer said finally.

  “Fulcrum?” Kurt said. “What does it do?”

  The engineer reached over and tapped the screen, zooming in on the array. Kurt’s eyes went to the screen a little too intensely. It made him vulnerable. Something he realized too late.

  The engineer lunged for him, grabbing his gun arm with both hands. Kurt yanked it free, slammed an elbow into the man’s gut, and then knocked him sideways with a forearm to the face. But the crewman had grabbed some type of wrench off the floor. He swung it at Kurt, missing his face by inches as Kurt pulled back.

  Kurt triggered the Beretta with two quick pulls, and it spat two shells into the crewman’s chest, the sound muffled by the silencer. The man fell back, dropped the wrench noisily, and crumpled to the deck.

  Kurt snapped the weapon around to his right. But it was too late.

  The technician had punched some kind of alarm button. Klaxons began sounding and lights flashing.

  Kurt jammed the gun into the man’s face, thought of killing him, and then relented. For all he knew, this guy was the only one who knew how to shut down the reactor.

  Guessing he had little time, Kurt kneed the man’s solar plexus and sent him sprawling. Then he turned, ducked out the door, and began racing down the catwalk. His feet clanked on the open metal loud enough to be heard over the humming generators, but he didn’t have time for stealth.

  Halfway down the catwalk’s stairs, shots rang out.

  He saw a ricochet first and then a group of men near the door he’d come in through. He fired back, forced them to take cover, and leapt over the railing. Landing on his feet, Kurt took off running. He sprinted past the reactor units and raced deeper into the ship.

  He came to a door, grabbed the handle, and wrenched it open. To his surprise, a blast of cold air greeted him.

  He sprinted inside only to find himself racing beneath a giant lattice of huge interlocking arms, folded up in a way that reminded him of stacked lawn chairs or a monstrous jungle gym that hadn’t been assembled.

  Hundreds of gray blocks lined each one of the arms. High-voltage power conduits and a network of pipes and hoses covered in frost ran between the blocks.

  The whole compartment was the size of a small stadium, ten stories high, four hundred feet long, and stretching the entire breadth of the Onyx. As he raced along the metal floor he spotted giant hydraulic pistons connected to the folded array of hinged arms.

  He guessed this was the Fulcrum. But what that meant, he had no idea.

  The design gave him the impression that it could open up, spreading apart like a giant handheld fan. A diagram on the wall warning the crew to keep clear of the hinges seemed to indicate the same thing. He’d assumed the particle accelerator that ran around the hull and exited near the front was the ship’s weapon. So what the hell did this thing do?

  Whatever it was, it seemed more important to the engineers than the particle accelerator, and that worried Kurt.

  Before he could learn any more, Kurt heard footsteps and another door opening at the far side of the cavernous room. He realized he was being surrounded. He looked up. Another catwalk beckoned thirty feet above.

  Cautiously, he climbed up the hydraulic actuator and pulled himself onto the array. It was like scaling the world’s largest set of monkey bars. He was almost there when he accidentally touched one of the coolant pipes.

  He pulled his arm back with lighting speed and somehow managed not to lose his balance or curse in pain. Gritting his teeth, he looked at his hand. The skin was peeling off as if it had been burned, but he knew better: it had frozen instantly.

  He looked at the pipe. Writing barely visible beneath the frost read “LN2,” a common abbreviation for l
iquid nitrogen. From what he’d learned, superconducting magnets had to be chilled to ridiculous temperatures in order to activate their superconducting properties. He guessed the pipe’s insulated surface was at close to 70 degrees below zero. The liquid inside would be pressurized and pumping through at an incredible 321 degrees below zero.

  Kurt began climbing again.

  Don’t touch the pipes, he mouthed to himself, as if his freezer-burned skin wasn’t enough to remind him.

  By the time he reached the catwalk he could see the men pursuing him. Three of them approached from one side, five more from the other, spread out along the floor.

  As quietly as he could, Kurt climbed onto the catwalk. After sitting still for a second, he began creeping along it.

  He remained virtually silent, but the vibration caused by his movement caused a chunk of frost to break off of the bottom. It dropped like an icicle from a power line and made a sound like shattering glass as it hit the ground.

  “Up there!” someone shouted.

  Kurt took off, running. He heard a single shot and then nothing.

  Had he managed to look back, he would have seen the leader of the pursuers grabbing the shooter and all but choking him for firing a stray shot in this room. But Kurt never looked back. He made it to the door on the far side of the Fulcrum’s vast bay and pushed through it, closing it behind him.

  He raced forward, desperately looking for a place to hide and a way to send a message.

  Something was about to happen, this ship was about to take some type of action, he was certain of that. And whatever it might be, he was pretty certain the rest of the world would not like what was coming.

  56

  Moscow, Russia

  THE BALD MAN FROM THE STATE, a ranking member of the FSB, held court in a windowless room in the Lubyanka, the huge monolithic headquarters building of the Russian Federal Security Service.

  In the room with him were several members of the Politburo and a representative from the Russian Navy and a general in the Red Army.