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.

55

AT THE TOP OF THE CLIMB, the catwalk bent away from the reactor. There, a small offset area enclosed with steel walls and plate glass windows overlooked the entire setup.

The crewman grabbed a handle and opened the door. Kurt shoved him inside and raced in behind him.

Two other men waited there, dressed in white, studying a monitor screen. One wore coveralls and looked like an engineer. The other, he guessed, was a technician, based on the coat he wore.

Kurt soon had all three backed up against the wall.

The question now was what to do.

He inched forward to the screen the men had been studying. The monitor displayed a side view of the ship.

“Schematic?” he asked.

One of the technicians nodded. “Power conduits,” he said.

Kurt looked more closely. Colored icons had different text next to them. Beside a yellow block was “Primary Electrical.” He figured that was the ship’s standard electrical system. A blue-colored icon read “High Voltage.” Its lines ran down toward the bottom of the ship and then looped in a circle and rose up near the bow and came back to a section amidships. Based on the photos he and Joe had seen, he could tell the raised-up sections coincided with the odd protrusions Joe had noticed near her anchor lines and the bulging section in the ship’s center.

“Is this the accelerator’s path?” he asked.

The men nodded in perfect synchronization. “It runs around the ship and exits near the bow,” the engineer said.

“Of course,” Kurt mumbled. Kurt could not believe he hadn’t seen the connection sooner.

The Onyx had been in Sierra Leone when Andras was seen there, and Kurt knew this coincided with the loading of the YBCO material onto the Kinjara Maru, but he’d never taken it a step further and made the leap of realization that the Onyx contained the weapon that fried the Kinjara in the first place.

Now it seemed so obvious, but one thing puzzled him. Where was the Onyx the morning he and the Argo had happened on the stricken freighter? They’d performed a pretty good search after Andras had fled and faked his death by destroying the speedboat. They’d found nothing visually or even on radar.

That meant there still had to be a submarine.

Kurt guessed that Andras and his men had gone overboard just before the explosion. He guessed they swam down to a small submarine, perhaps twenty or thirty feet below the surface, and entered through an air lock of some kind.

Meanwhile, Kurt and the rest of the Argo’s crew had been transfixed by the explosion.

But if the Typhoon was laying in a scrapyard somewhere, then what were the thugs using?

“You have a submarine?” he asked.

The technician nodded. “There are three here.”

“Any of them big enough to haul cargo?”

“The Bus,” the engineer said. “It’s one hundred ten feet long. Mostly empty space.”

Unless it’s filled with tons of YBCO, Kurt thought.

If Kurt was right, the Onyx had fried the Kinjara Maru and moved on. Andras must have taken the YBCO off the Kinjara during the night, loading it aboard the Bus and sending the sub to haul it to wherever the Onyx was, somewhere long over the horizon. But he couldn’t get the ship to sink fast enough, and that led to Kurt’s spotting the smoke trail in the morning.

But it didn’t answer a more pressing question. If the Onyx was the ship killer, why was Andras demanding full power from the reactors? If Kurt’d heard correctly, there was no ship in range to fry with the particle accelerator.