Devil's Gate

63

KURT AND KATARINA arrived at the same stairwell Kurt had come down hours before. He looked up. There was no way Katarina could climb eight flights of stairs.

“Is there another way out?” he asked.

She nodded.

“This way,” she said, leading him past the stairwell.

Twenty yards on, another door beckoned. Kurt opened it. Sitting in a pool, secured to the edges of a metal dock, were three submersibles. Two of them looked suspiciously like the XP-4 he had rescued a week ago. The larger one dwarfed them, and he assumed this was the Bus.

He noticed that the XP-4-looking craft had torpedoes mounted on either side, like pontoons.

Beside them was the 60-foot motor yacht that Katarina had been prisoner on.

“This is where I came in,” she said.

Kurt looked for the door controls. “Are we above the waterline?” he asked.

She nodded.

He pressed a switch but nothing happened. The high voltage was still down. He found a manual release and threw the lever over. A capstan-like wheel began to spin as the door fell with the force of gravity.

Seconds later he and Katarina were in one of the XP-4s, moving out into the darkness of the night.

With Andras dead, the high voltage disabled, and the liquid nitrogen blasting out into the particle accelerator tunnel, Kurt figured he’d lived up to his claim of being a gremlin, but he had one last act up his sleeve.

He turned the small sub around and circled to the very aft end of the ship.

He fired both torpedoes into the ship’s propellers and rudder assembly.

The explosion was blinding. Almost immediately Kurt could see that the ship’s wake was turning to mush. The props were damaged or gone, and seawater was likely flooding the bottom deck.

The ship itself wouldn’t go down. The torpedoes were relatively small, and a vessel the size of the Onyx could take on massive amounts of water before she foundered. With all the damage near the tail end, that wasn’t going to happen, but she wouldn’t be going anywhere either. Not to Russia or China or any other unfriendly nations.

With that done, Kurt turned the submersible away from the Onyx and began to put some distance between them. Both he and Katarina would struggle to keep awake for the next three hours, but shortly after dawn a U.S. Navy helicopter spotted them, swooped down, and picked them up.

Kurt asked for news.

The medic told him of the panic in Washington but that nothing had happened. He asked about Sierra Leone and was told that an engagement off the coast of Sierra Leone had been completed. Lives had definitely been lost, but the threat had been eliminated. Kurt asked if there had been any mysterious crashes of old Russian cargo jets and was thankful to hear a firm negative to that question.

He went to ask about the missing scientists when the medic held up a hand.

“You’re going to be all right,” the medic said, “but you need to stop talking now.”

Kurt understood.

He watched over Katarina as they flew past the smoking hull of the Onyx, now swarming with U.S. Marines. From there they turned west and began a ninety-minute journey that would bring them to the guided missile frigate from which the helicopter had been launched.

With the news he’d been told, Kurt felt a sense of peace he hadn’t known in weeks. That feeling, his exhaustion, and the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter blades, everything around him seemed determined to soothe him and lull him to sleep. He closed his eyes and went with it.