Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

“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.