Devil's Gate

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.