And kept lifting.

Chase clung to the gun with both hands, but was powerless to stop himself from being hauled into the air, his chest thumping against the pipe as his feet left the floor. Tendons in the huge man’s arm strained through his skin like steel cables, veins bulging as Komosa let out a gurgling snarl of pure rage.

His other arm drew back to strike…

Chase realized he would never be able to wrench the gun out of Komosa’s hand-his grip was too strong, the steel clench of a vise.

Instead, he changed his hold, jamming his left thumb into the trigger guard over Komosa’s forefinger. With his wrists together, the handcuff chain was slack-he flicked it up with his other thumb as he forced Komosa’s finger harder onto the trigger-

Blam!

The bullet blasted the chain apart, pieces scattering across the hold.

Even though his hands were now free, Chase didn’t release his grip on the gun-the moment he did, Komosa would shoot him. Still hanging from the man’s raised arm, he slammed a knee up into his groin.

Komosa flinched back, the obstructing pipe preventing Chase from scoring anything more than a glancing impact. The blow from his other arm finally came. Chase tried to twist to avoid it, but the African’s knuckles plowed into his stomach with the force of a train.

He groaned, the sickening punch driving the wind out of him. His right hand lost its grip on the gun, setting him swinging wildly as Komosa abruptly moved back-

Chase’s head slammed against the pipe with a dull clong of bone against metal. Stars of indescribable colors went supernova in his vision, new levels of pain searing through his skull.

His left thumb clenched again-

On the helipad, waiting impatiently beside the tilt-rotor, Sophia looked around sharply as she heard the faint sound of another shot from below. Then she jumped into the cabin. “Take off! Quickly!”

The men already aboard looked at her in surprise. “What about Mr. Komosa?” asked the pilot.

“Go!” she screamed. “Get us out of here, now!”

The only reason for her to hear a second shot was if something had gone wrong-

The bullet smacked into the far wall. His nauseating dizziness worsened by the ringing in his ears, Chase was unable to resist as Komosa bashed his left wrist against the pipe, trying to break his hold on the gun and knock him to the floor.

Another blow. Something crunched. His fingers were slipping…

Through a haze of pain, he saw Komosa’s blood-streaked face. Go for his eyes, training and instinct told him. Too far. Komosa’s reach was greater than his own. Which only left-

With a desperate burst of strength, Chase whipped up his right arm to stab at the gun with his thumb.

Not at the trigger, but the magazine release button behind it.

With a clink, the magazine dropped out. Then Chase went for the trigger, squeezing his left thumb for a third and final time to fire the remaining round in the chamber. The Browning’s slide locked back.

Before the magazine reached the deck, Chase swung his foot and booted it across the hold. It hit the wall near Nina and clattered to the floor.

Komosa’s eyes bulged with anger. He smashed Chase’s wrist against the pipe again. This time, the pain was too much and Chase let go, stumbling and falling onto his back.

He was free of the pipe at last, but that was no consolation as the furious Komosa descended upon him.

The gun swung down at his head. Chase just barely brought his hands up in time to block the impact, but Komosa struck again, and again, the hard metal finally cracking against his skull. Chase’s head thudded back against the deck.

He groaned. Through the blur of his vision he could make out the bomb about eight feet away, the clock still couting down. From outside the ship he heard the roar of engines: the tilt-rotor taking off and rapidly peeling away.

Komosa got up, looking for the magazine. He spotted it and staggered towards Nina.

She saw Chase roll onto his side and crawl slowly, painfully, towards the bomb. Whatever he was doing, she had to give him more time.

She couldn’t reach the fallen magazine with her hands. But she could with her feet-

Using the pipe for leverage, Nina swept around and kicked the magazine just as Komosa reached for it, sending it spinning across the hold to bang against the far wall. He hissed something incoherent, blood bubbling from his cut lips, then kicked her hard in the stomach before shambling after the clip of bullets.

Chase reached the bomb. He gripped the vertical rails, pulling himself forward.

Komosa scooped up the magazine and slammed it back into place, the slide springing forward to load another bullet into the chamber. He turned to take aim at Chase-and found Chase aiming at him.

“Pierce off!” Chase snarled as he fired the bolt gun.

With an explosive bang, the six-inch steel rod shot across the room. Designed to penetrate metal, the bolt met almost no resistance as it punched through Komosa’s rib cage and heart before erupting from his back and slamming into the bulkhead. Pinned like a butterfly to a board, Komosa stared in shock at Chase before releasing a final bubbling wheeze. His head slumped forward, more blood running out of the neat hole in his chest to join the ooze dribbling from his broken mouth. The gun clunked to the deck at his feet.

“That was horrible,” Nina gasped.

“Fucker deserved it,” Chase said weakly, dropping the empty bolt gun and crawling towards her.

“No, I meant the pun.”

A noise escaped Chase’s mouth that could almost have been a laugh. “Are you okay?”

“Forget me, what about the bomb?” She squinted at it, trying to read the figures on the screen. “Oh my God! There’s only six minutes left!”

Chase changed direction, somehow finding the strength to push himself upright. Reeling, he went to Komosa’s body and picked up the gun. “You’ve got to get to the bridge, send out a Mayday-channel sixteen. Then turn the ship around, get it as far from land as you can.”

“What about you?”

“I’m gonna try and stop that thing from going off! Pull the chain around the pipe.”

She did as he said. “I thought you said it was booby-trapped!”

Chase placed the gun’s muzzle shakily against the chain, directing it as far away from Nina’s hands as he could. “I’ve got to do something!” He fired. The chain broke, Nina’s wrists springing apart. “Go on, get moving!”

With a worried look back at his bloodied face, Nina hurried from the hold.

Chase staggered over to the bomb. “Okay, what’ve we got?” The timer read 00:05:22. “Five minutes to stop a nuke going off. I can do that. Yeah.”

Leaning on the cap for support, he looked down into the heart of the steel base. The thick bolts that held down the uranium slug had retracted. He reached into the hole, hoping that he might be able to pull the slug out from the rails, but the fit was too precise for him to get even a fingernail’s grip around its edge.

If he couldn’t get the slug out, then maybe he could block its path…

Fragments of information from his SAS briefings surfaced through the roiling dizziness. In a bomb of this type, the two pieces of uranium needed to be kept at least ten inches apart to prevent them from reacting to each other and emitting radiation prematurely. That explained the gap separating the base and the cap.

So if he could jam the rails…

Winded, Nina entered the bridge.

As she’d expected, it was empty-everybody else aboard had left in the tilt-rotor. To her horror, the view through the wide windows was filled by the familiar outline of lower Manhattan: Battery Park a swath of green to the left with the glass block of the Freedom Tower rising beyond the older brick buildings; to the right the ferry terminal and the South Street Seaport, the financial district’s anonymous skyscrapers a sunlit wall behind the shoreline. The Ocean Emperor was making a slow turn, heading up the East River.