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.