62
KURT AND KATARINA
continued toward the aft end of the Onyx. Kurt kept one arm around her waist and held
her close beside him because she was weakening and barely able to
keep up with his pace.
The tunnel itself was
filling up with a dense white fog and a cold that chilled them to
the bone. With the high voltage off-line, the liquid nitrogen was
beginning to warm and expand. It would boil off as soon as it got
above negative 321 degrees. Kurt guessed a system like that would
have relief valves that might vent the gas into the
tunnel.
They pushed forward,
feeling their way through the frigid cloud. At times, visibility in
the tunnel was no more than three feet. They moved slowly, looking
for the aft-most hatch.
Finally, Kurt’s hand
fell on a curved seam. He recognized the recessed handle and the
shape of an access hatch.
“Our way out of
here,” he said, reaching up and turning the wheel that sealed the
hatch shut.
After pulling it
open, he helped Katarina onto the ladder. She began to crawl up the
rungs. Kurt was ready to join her when a familiar voice cut through
the dense mist like a knife.
“Kurt
Austin.”
Katarina stopped on
the ladder.
“Go,” Kurt whispered.
“And don’t wait for me.”
She pushed off,
moving upward, and Kurt held still.
“Do you realize
you’re quite possibly the most aggravating man alive,” Andras said,
still hidden in the vapors.
Certain the killer
was setting up to spray the tunnel with automatic weapons fire,
Kurt dropped flat to the deck and pointed the barrel of his nine
millimeter into the white blanket of mist.
Andras wasted no time
sending a volley of gunfire into the passageway. The shots rang
like thunder on a warm drizzly night. The shells thudded against
the steel bulkheads and ricocheted like a flight of deadly
wasps.
As Kurt hoped, the
bullets all passed above him, but he let out a groan and spoke as
if he were in agony. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” he
grunted. “You’ve lost.”
He waited for a reply
but none came.
Kurt could hear the
catwalk creaking underneath him. He surmised that Andras was taking
a new position and zeroing in on the sound of Kurt’s voice. Kurt
needed to get him talking so he could do the same thing, since it
didn’t take a wizard to predict that Andras was not standing in the
middle of the tunnel but was either lying on the deck like Kurt or
pressed up against the bulkhead on one side or the
other.
Breathing heavily for
effect, Kurt spoke again. “If I was you . . . I’d be . . . getting
out . . . of here.”
He was counting on
Andras having enough of an ego to feel he had mortally wounded his
prey. But, so far, the man had made no mistakes.
“Give me your
weapon,” Andras said, his voice coming from the shroud of gas like
an unseen evil ghost.
Austin lay there with
the cold seeping in his skin. His face was so numb, he could hardly
feel anything. He held the Beretta in hands nearly frozen, his
elbows placed on the deck.
“Let the girl go,” he
said, cupping a hand to one ear like a radar directional finder and
waiting for a response.
“Of course,” Andras
said, his words echoing in the tunnel. “Everyone goes free. I’ll
send them all off with roses, and mints on their pillows. Now,
slide over your weapon!”
“I’ll . . . try,”
Kurt muttered brokenly.
Kurt inched to his
left, thumped his pistol onto the metal walkway as if he had
dropped it and scraped it along the deck, to make it seem as if it
were sliding over metal before stopping.
With that, Kurt
rolled quickly to the other side of the tunnel. A burst of three
shots rang out, pinging off the deck where he’d just
been.
“Sorry, Mr. Austin,”
Andras said as if he were bored. “I don’t trust you any farther
than I can throw this ship.”
And then several more
bursts shook the tunnel. The muzzle flash lit the fog like
lightning in a cloud. The glare was too diffused to give Andras’s
position away, but Kurt spotted something else. He couldn’t see the
bullets themselves fly, but he noticed they created tiny shock
waves in the thick, frigid mist.
He fired back,
unleashing an eight-shot salvo that blasted through the fog. When
he finished, the slide of his gun locked in the open position. His
clip was empty.
The silence that
followed was haunting. Kurt stared into the fog, wondering, hoping,
he’d made a killing shot.
Andras had not fallen
or Kurt would have heard it. Nor had he fired back.
Beginning to worry,
Kurt checked what remained of his ammo. Only one bullet remained in
another clip that he hadn’t emptied.
He pulled back the
receiver, slid the round into the breach, and thumbed the slide
release. The weapon locked, his last shot in the
chamber.
Finally, he heard
movement through the icy shroud. It came like a drunk shuffling
along a sidewalk. A vague, ghostly form slowly appeared: Andras,
limping, dragging his leg.
He held an assault
rifle, the stock pushed into one armpit, the muzzle pointed at an
awkward angle toward the deck and Kurt Austin. Blood seeped from
his mouth, indicating a shot to one lung. His face was stained
crimson as blood flowed from a deep crease on the top of his scalp.
For a second Kurt thought he would fall, but he
didn’t.
The eyes, Kurt
noticed, burned with an intensity beyond all madness. It was the
picture of a man shocked at finding out he was vulnerable to any
other man. He pulled himself to a stop six feet from where Kurt
lay. He stared at Kurt through his bloody mask, appearing amazed
that, after all his fire, Kurt had survived without a
scratch.
Kurt had his own
dilemma. With one 9mm shell left, he wasn’t sure he could finish
Andras off, not without a head shot. And as soon as he fired,
Andras would open up with his rifle, shredding Kurt at such close
range.
It had become a
standoff.
Kurt eased off the
deck and stood. They were only yards apart, aiming their weapons at
each other. Kurt’s right hand held the Beretta, his left had found
a knife in his pocket. The same knife he and Andras had traded back
and forth three times already. He couldn’t open it, but he still
could use it.
He flipped the knife
at Andras, who caught it deftly and smiled as he stared at
it.
“Out of ammunition,
Mr. Austin? Pity you didn’t open the knife before you threw it.”
Now confident, Andras moved slowly. He raised the assault rifle in
preparation to fire.
Kurt beat him to the
draw, took an instant to aim, and fired at the liquid nitrogen pipe
just above Andras. The liquid burst out under high pressure,
dousing Andras heavily on the right side of his body, washing over
his arm and the assault rifle he held.
The rifle fell and
broke open as it struck the deck. Andras stumbled and hit the
tunnel’s wall. He watched uncomprehending as his arm, hand, and
fingers shattered into a thousand fragments like a crystal vase
crashing from a top shelf to the floor. A scream of agony froze in
his throat.
In seconds the
nitrogen began filling the tunnel. It blanketed Andras, his body
already frozen like a block of ice. It swept down the hall toward
Kurt as he raced to the hatch and pulled himself up the
ladder.
The frigid mist
followed him like a wave in the surf, but Kurt climbed as fast as
his hands and feet could take him and made it out through the top
of the passage.
He slammed the upper
hatch shut. Feeling it lock into place, he lay on his back and
relaxed for the first time in more hours than he could
calculate.
After one minute, and
one minute only, he rose to his feet and searched for Katarina. He
found her sitting by a stairwell as if she was waiting for a
miracle.
“How are you doing?”
he asked.
She turned and looked
at him, her face lighting up like a cloud under the sun. “Oh,
Kurt,” she said. “How many times did I think you were
dead?”
“Luckily, it’s Andras
who is dead.”
Her smile widened in
a mixture of doubt and joy. “Are you sure?”
Kurt nodded. “I
watched him fall to pieces with my own eyes.”