Pirate

Chapter Fifty-seven

The Golden Dragon

“ GUESS WHO ’ S COMING TO DINNER ?”

“What did you say?” Jet asked him, plainly irritated. This cozy dinner wasn’t going all that well. He could tell the general wasn’t too jazzed with Jet’s choice of a fiancé, either.

“That’s the title of the movie,” Stoke said.

“The title of what movie, Stokely?” she said, firing daggers at him across the table. She looked like she wanted to kill him, but the one she really wanted to kill was sitting right next to her. Dressed in an emerald-green silk number that looked sensational was the mystery guest. That would be her sister, Bianca, who was the surprise at this cozy little dinner party.

Bianca looked exactly like Jet. A duplicate twin, Stoke thought they called it. Same beautiful black hair, green eyes, identical. But the sisters were not close. In fact, the mood in the general’s private dining room was a little tense. Stoke was trying to lighten things up, striving heroically to keep the old conversational ball rolling. He was playing for time until Jet gave him the signal it was time to split.

The two sisters gave the impression that only one of them was going to get out of this room alive. When they first sat down, they’d been speaking Chinese to their father and you could tell the general was trying to calm them down about something. Stoke figured he should just stay out of it. Family business. But light and airy it was not.

Jet was supposed to create some kind of diversion. He couldn’t wait. He was all out of conversation and the general’s fuse was burning up pretty fast. Jet was looking at him funny now and he remembered she’d asked him a question. What was it? Oh, yeah. That Poitier flick he was talking about. Since Jet was an actress, he figured movies would be a safe topic.

“That’s the name of that movie I was trying to think of. The one with Sidney Poitier. Remember? The one where he goes to dinner at Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn’s house in San Francisco. Asks them can he marry their daughter. You remember that one, General?”

“No.”

“Pretty good movie,” Stoke said, getting into it now. “About this black dude, right? Who shows up at this white girl’s house to have dinner with her parents? It’s kind of awkward and nobody knows what to say, see? So, Sidney, he’s the black guy, he starts talking about—”

“Jesus,” Jet said to him, and went back to her lobster soup with the claw sticking out of it.

Jet’s father, General Moon, wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Or movie lover. He was just staring at Stoke. If you had to guess what he was thinking, it would be how to commit a murder that took a really, really long time and hurt really, really bad before the victim expired.

“You like football, General?” Stoke said. “I used to play for the Jets.”

That was all Jet needed to decide it was time to create her diversion.

“You lying little bitch,” Jet hissed at her sister.

“Don’t call me a liar, slut,” Bianca said. “You’re the one who—”

Jet picked up her soup bowl and threw it across the table. The lobster claw sort of bounced off Bianca’s shoulder but the soup ran down her face and into her cleavage. That was enough to bring the whole evening to a boil. When Bianca swept all the china off the table and picked up a knife, Stoke stood up and put his napkin on the table.

“If you folks will excuse me, I need to use the restroom.”

He smiled at the two hefty guys in dark suits standing outside the door and kept on walking. At the end of the corridor he hung a right and headed for the kitchen. It was down on the next deck, just like Jet had drawn it on her little map.

It was hot in there, really hot, and full of steam. Stoke wandered in and was immediately approached by a young guy who said, “May I help you, sir?”

“Looking for the men’s room,” Stoke said, bending down to talk because he felt like his head was in the clouds.

“Ah-so.” Wan Li smiled, just like in the movies. He motioned for Stoke to follow him through the madhouse that served as a kitchen.

They went through a metal door and stepped onto a catwalk that crossed over what looked like a large holding tank. Stoke saw some dorsal fins slicing through the water. It had to be the only floating restaurant in the world with shark-infested waters on the inside. No wonder that shark soup had tasted so fresh.

“You find what you look for just in there,” Wan Li said, indicating an anonymous blue-painted metal door at the bottom of a short ramp off the catwalk. “Door open. All empty. Nobody home this hour of night.”

“Hey, thanks a lot,” Stoke said. Wan Li hurried back to his kitchen. Stoke turned the knob and went inside. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. It was dark except for the harbor lights coming in through the row of windows to his left. Stoke, who had spent some time at Newport News helping navy draftsmen design a faster river patrol boat, knew instantly why Jet had brought him here.

This was where the giant cruise ship Leviathan and the German-built supertankers had been designed.

He looked at his watch. Jet had given him twenty minutes. He had sixteen left. Not a lot.

He pulled the small, flat flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, and made his way past rows of old-fashioned drafting benches and banks of oversized computer monitors. There were half-hull forms mounted along the wall to his right. Tankers, he saw, mostly hundred-thousand-ton displacement by the looks of them. Ships that drew about ninety feet of water. Ships that required deepwater ports.

There was a wall of glass at the end of the room. A glass door opened into a smaller drawing office on the other side. He went in. More models on the wall, this time VLCC and ULCCs. Very large and ultralarge crude carriers of more than four hundred thousand tons. With global oil consumption up about 8 percent a year, he could see why the French and the Chinese were getting in the business. A ULCC could make a profit of four million dollars on a single run from Kuwait to Europe. He wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to what a run from the Gulf to Shanghai might net.

Stoke looked at the blank monitor. It was no secret that China desperately needed oil and would do anything to get it. So what deep dark secrets was the Golden Dragon hiding?

He sat down at the computer CAD workstation and started scrolling and searching. He was looking at the shipwright’s plans for a huge tanker named the Happy Dragon. He scanned her prefabricated units—cross-sections, diagonals, buttocks, and waterlines—looking for something unusual. Nothing. Then he moved on to the completed hull form and its vast tanks and watertight bulkheads. Finding nothing interesting there either, he moved quickly to the propulsion files.

It took ten seconds to discover her first secret. She was nuclear-powered. So that’s where General Moon and the Chinese came in. They provided the reactors and fuel for the German-built vessels. Next stop, her reactor room, he said to himself, scrolling as fast as he could.

She had fourth-generation naval reactors similar to the KN-3 reactors used aboard a vessel he was very familiar with, the Russian Arktika-class nuclear icebreakers. He’d been a stowaway on one for a month. He looked at her twin reactors and uranium core fuel plans for no more than a minute when something made him move on. He flashed on that night aboard Valkyrie. The gadget he’d found in the guard’s pocket and the missing keel. The dosimeter. Both had been tickling his subconscious ever since. Yeah, and those iodine pills for radiation sickness. So? Keels were lead. Lead was the ideal shield against radiation. So where the hell did that lead?

He’d just opened a new file when the thing caught his eye. There it was, in a small cross-section of the Happy Dragon’s keel in the lower righthand corner of the screen. Something definitely didn’t look right.

Keels were built of solid lead. That was the whole point. This one wasn’t solid at all.

This one had something buried deep within it.

Holy shit.

All the pieces clicked into place in an instant. There was the barrel, surrounded by the tamper, with all the plutonium pieces arranged in a perfect pie shape around the beryllium/polonium core. Oh, yeah. It was an implosion-triggered fission bomb. Buried deep inside the lead keel of a fifteen-hundred-foot-long supertanker. A ship built to sail the endless seas without restriction. Built to traverse the world’s most vital waterways—

Wait a minute. The lead, that was the key. It wasn’t only good for keeping radiation out. Like a lead shield. It would also work to keep radiation in. The dormant bomb inside the tanker’s keel could remain shielded in place for decades. And without any possibility of detection until the instant it was detonated! Jesus. A keel was the perfect place to hide a nuclear weapon. Underwater and out of sight, completely encased in a solid lead shield that would prevent even a trace of radiation from being detected.

But how many of these damn things had they built?

Check it out—right there—he had clicked through to a page showing von Draxis hull design comparisons: looked like four hulls completed in the last four years. All ULCCs. Three of them with the nuclear option package in the keel, one without. Three out of four ain’t bad!

He could see it. You blow, or even threaten to blow, one of these things in a major shipping chokepoint, and you’ve got the whole world by the short and curlies. Strait of Hormuz, Panama Canal…you shut down the U.S.A. in a heartbeat. And they already had three of these things out there somewhere. At least one more on the way!

He grabbed a pencil and scribbled down the names of the ones that had the weapons as fast as he could. All Dragons. The Happy Dragon, the Super Dragon—and the Jade Dragon. Dragons roamed the earth. Right now. He ripped the page off the pad and stuffed it inside his pocket.

Thanks to Jet, he thought he had all the pieces now. She’d given him all she could. All she knew. And it was far worse than she knew. Anyway, he had the big picture now. German shipyards owned by von Draxis build the tankers. France buys the tankers to transport oil to China. China sells the nuclear reactors and enriched uranium fuel to keep those tankers smoking. Everybody’s a winner.

And in the belly of each beast that circles the globe, an invisible bomb that gave the Chinese and the French a huge sword to dangle over the world’s head.

He kept scrolling, looking at his watch. He was already way late for Jet’s pickup on the stern. He didn’t care. Somehow, he needed to find the goddamn detonating mechanism. He scrolled through endless pages, looking for a timer or a radio receiver. Knowing where the fission bomb was was useless unless you knew how it was detonated. That was the only way you could stop it.

After a few minutes, he had to give up. Either there was no internal timer or they’d designed the bomb to be detonated at a distance by radio or satellite signal. He had to get the hell out of here before General Moon’s bullyboys came looking for him. But first he had to do just one more very important thing.

He moved the cursor to the “search all” function and typed in a single word: LEVIATHAN.

If the goddamn tankers had bombs in their keels, then why not—shit. No files came up with that name. He banged his fist on the desk and tried again.

Nada.

He raced out of the marine drafting studio, across the shark-bait cat-walk, then slowed to a mild run through the crowded kitchen. Wan Li caught his eye, giving him a worried look, and pointed to an exit leading to the stem. He’d been gone way too long. He might have missed his ride. Or maybe there was some other complication. He’d deal with that. Right now, all he could think about was Leviathan. You really had to wonder whether there was a bomb in her keel, too. Cruise ships, like ocean tankers, go everywhere.

Question was, where the hell was that cruise ship located now? There was only one way to find out.

Foo Fighter was just pulling away from the barge when he got to the cargo door at the stern. There was maybe six feet of open water between the hull and Foo Fighter. The doorsill he was standing in was about twenty feet above the water. No way she could hear him now, even if he shouted loud as he could. If he jumped, he just might make it to the flat roof of the wheelhouse. It was pitching pretty badly. Still, it beat the hell out of swimming ashore in Hong Kong Harbor at night.

He jumped, clawing at the air, because Jet decided to hit the throttles while he was in midflight.

He made it, barely.

Fear lent him wings, as the saying goes.

When he clambered down to the afterdeck and ducked inside the wheelhouse, Jet was frozen at the helm. She was staring straight ahead, hands locked on the wheel at ten and two. Her pretty white dress was torn and bloodstained. She was barefoot. Her hair was messed up and matted with dark blood. He put a hand on her shoulder and she turned to look at him. There were black streaks down her cheeks under both eyes.

Already knowing the answer, Stoke said, “Hey. You okay?”

She looked away without answering.

“Hey. You have to talk to me.”

“I hope you found what you were looking for,” she said. Her voice, like her eyes, was dead.

“Yeah. I did. But I need to know something. Right now. I need—”

“He’ll be coming after us. You. Me. Most especially me.”

“What happened?”

“My father and my sister. When you didn’t come back, they figured it out. He was holding me down. The guards came in and he told them to go away. Locked the door. It was a family matter. He gave Bianca the knife. Told her to cut the traitor’s throat. Mine. And she would have, too. You should have seen her smile. So I hope you got the information you needed.”

“Jet, I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, you did the right thing.”

“The right thing? I killed my own sister. I almost killed my father.”

“That was self-defense, Jet. Cut yourself some slack.”

“Slack? My own father wants me dead. When General Moon wants you dead, there’s nowhere to run. It’s over, Stoke. We’re not getting out of China alive.”

“How did you leave him?”

“Unconcious. I shot him up with ketamine. A liquid anesthetic. He should be out for a couple of hours if I hit the right vein. After that—”

“Listen, Jet. I knew I’d have to leave in a hurry. Didn’t know for sure if you did. Now I do. There’s a seaplane.”

“Where?”

“On a temporary mooring in Kowloon Harbor. Six minutes from here. I’m taking it to Taiwan. There’s a State Department jet on the ground at Chiang Kai-shek Airport with its engines warming up. I’m taking you out of China. Okay?”

There was an imperceptible nod of her head.

“That’s a good decision,” Stoke said. “Thank you for what you did back there. One question I have to ask you. Where are the tankers? Where are all these big surprise packages, Jet? Now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do. Tell me.”

“I don’t know where the tankers are, Stoke! How would I? I know Leviathan sailed from Le Havre five days ago. She’s probably at the dock by now.”

“Which dock is that? Schatzi happen to say?”

“Pier 93, I think. New York City.”

“Jesus, Jet. Is there a plutonium bomb on that cruise ship?”

“What?”

“I think there is a bomb aboard that ship. Remember that weird-looking keel on that Leviathan model in Germany? Big damn bulge at the bottom of it. A bulb keel you called it. There’s a bomb inside that bulb, Jet.”

“He wouldn’t do that, Stoke. My father’s not that evil. He’s no mass murderer. I don’t think he—oh, god, I hope to hell you’re wrong.”

“I think a bomb that big will take out the whole West Side of New York. And, what’s left of the city after the explosion will be flooded with dirty water. Radiation levels so bad no one can live there for at least ten years.”

She looked up at him. Tears were running down her cheeks.

“I can’t believe he’d do that, Stoke. Blow up the whole goddamn world. Even for my father, that’s complete, utter fucking insanity.”

“Okay, Jet, tell me this. Do the French know about these bombs? Are they in on this?”

“I don’t think so. This isn’t about France. France is fucking clueless. This is all about who rules the world, Stoke. It’s about China and America, dividing the spoils, upping the ante. In case you haven’t heard, the next world war is going to be over oil. We’re running out.”

“Listen. You see that berth down there? Why don’t you go lie down for a few minutes? I’ll take the helm, okay? I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Need me?”

“We got company, Jet. Back there. Couple of blue-light specials. This is a pretty crowded neighborhood and maybe I can lose ’em. I stowed some weapons under that berth. Two HK machine guns and a grenade launcher.”

Stoke took the wheel and put the boat hard over to avoid a suddenly oncoming ferry. Jet ducked down into the little cabin and lifted up the cushion, moving very slowly and deliberately. She handed up one of the HKs, but she was clearly in shock. If he did need her, she wasn’t going to be much help.

A rapidly blinking blue light had flickered across Stoke’s peripheral vision. Then it disappeared into the great floating city of barges, scows, and sampans. He thought he’d lost it. A minute later, they were everywhere. Two or three fast patrol boats, maybe more. He saw their flashing blue lights bearing down on Foo Fighter from astern and abeam, weaving through traffic at ridiculous speeds.

He was smaller, though, and, he hoped, faster.

He was sure more would be on the way any second now. Shit, General Moon would have the whole Chinese navy out here as soon as he came to his senses. Stoke leaned on the throttles, firewalling them. The answering roar and the little hull’s great leap forward was reassuring. The good news here was Foo Fighter was a screamer. He’d seen the chrome-plated heads and that big Holley hot-rod four-barrel carburetor sitting on top. He knew that big block Chevy V-8 might come in handy.

He was running flat-out in open water now, a blurred neon skyline out his window, ahead the dark silhouettes of sampans moving on the water, merging into the darker mass. He was doing nearly fifty miles an hour, headed straight toward that big black wall. The almost solid city of sampans and ferries between him and Kowloon Harbor would be tough to navigate with the throttle wide open. But slowing down was definitely not an option. He leaned forward over the wheel, ignoring the rapidly gaining patrol boats, his concentration total.

The window about six inches in front of his face exploded a second before he heard a sizzling round just below his left ear. Now he heard and felt the heavy thunk of rounds slamming into the transom and the deck behind him. They’d found his range all right.

Oh, shit. He cranked the wheel hard to starboard and missed a big sampan by inches. He saw a hole in the black wall that loomed up in front of him. The alley created by two hulking barges was about six inches wider than his beam. A bullet in the back or collision at sea can ruin your day. But he didn’t slow down. He didn’t really have time for a shootout with Chinese gunboats right now. He had a plane to catch. And a phone call to make.

Alex Hawke was in New York City. He was probably at New York Hospital this very minute, sitting in a room somewhere with Ambrose Congreve. He kept his left hand on the wheel and took out his sat phone. He and Hawke needed to have a very serious conversation.

Right now.

He put the wheel hard to port and Foo Fighter ducked down another blind alley at full bore.