The rifle fell and broke open as it struck the deck. Andras stumbled and hit the tunnel’s wall. He watched uncomprehending as his arm, hand, and fingers shattered into a thousand fragments like a crystal vase crashing from a top shelf to the floor. A scream of agony froze in his throat.

In seconds the nitrogen began filling the tunnel. It blanketed Andras, his body already frozen like a block of ice. It swept down the hall toward Kurt as he raced to the hatch and pulled himself up the ladder.

The frigid mist followed him like a wave in the surf, but Kurt climbed as fast as his hands and feet could take him and made it out through the top of the passage.

He slammed the upper hatch shut. Feeling it lock into place, he lay on his back and relaxed for the first time in more hours than he could calculate.

After one minute, and one minute only, he rose to his feet and searched for Katarina. He found her sitting by a stairwell as if she was waiting for a miracle.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him, her face lighting up like a cloud under the sun. “Oh, Kurt,” she said. “How many times did I think you were dead?”

“Luckily, it’s Andras who is dead.”

Her smile widened in a mixture of doubt and joy. “Are you sure?”

Kurt nodded. “I watched him fall to pieces with my own eyes.”

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.

EPILOGUE

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE INCIDENT the world seemed to spin a little slower. The situation in Sierra Leone had stabilized with the help of a UN peacekeeping force and troops from the African Union. Many political prisoners had been freed, including Djemma Garand’s brother, who was now being asked to help build a coalition government.

The missing scientists had been found and returned to their respective countries. Several were injured, but only one had died. The U.S. attack force had suffered the brunt of the losses. Thirty-one men and women from the Memphis were dead or missing. Eleven naval aviators — pilots and radar officers — had been killed. But their sacrifices, and the efforts of the NUMA civilians, had prevented a catastrophic incident from occurring.

Not a single death was recorded in the last-minute emergency in Washington. Dozens of car crashes, hundreds of injuries, but people had remained remarkably calm in their efforts to reach safety.

Kurt, back in the States, recuperated. He watched a lot of news and was regaled with visits from Joe Zavala, the Trouts, and Dirk Pitt.

Joe spent hours telling him stories of his adventures with the crew of the IL-76, back in Tangiers. Paul and Gamay had their own stories, not as lighthearted, but the kind that filled people with pride. He noticed they never stopped holding hands.

Dirk Pitt congratulated them all on a job well done and then began adding up the tab. The Barracuda, the ultralights, damage to a soccer field, legal issues with the White Rajah Club in Singapore, and something about a missing leopard.

“I don’t even want to know why we’re paying for the capture of a juvenile spotted leopard,” Dirk said.

Kurt opened his mouth in an attempt to explain but then shut it. What was the use?

The IL-76 charter was next on the list, the expended Lunatic Express, and multinational cleanup issues regarding oil leaked from the Onyx as a result of his torpedo attack.

When Dirk finished going through the list, he smiled. “As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned a few things,” he said. “One of them is: you get what you pay for. You and Joe are like one of my cars. Expensive, bad for the environment, and often a pain in the backside. But you’re worth every penny.”

As soon as he was able, Kurt made contact with Katarina, arranging to meet her back on Santa Maria.

After all that had transpired, the U.S. and Russian governments had agreed that items aboard the Constellation rightly belonged to the Russian people. Both sides agreed that it would be appropriate if Kurt and Katarina supervised the dives to retrieve them.

Katarina beamed when she saw him, and she kissed him long and hard as soon as they met up despite the presence of a small audience.