Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

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.

He tapped the screen to zoom out. His eyes fell on the huge bundle of high-voltage lines in the dead center of the ship, where the tanks would have been had the Onyx actually been a crude carrier.

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the central section of the ship. “All this mess, what is it?”

The men hesitated.

“Come on,” Kurt snapped, gun held steady. “I don’t have all day.”

“It’s the Fulcrum,” the engineer said finally.

“Fulcrum?” Kurt said. “What does it do?”

The engineer reached over and tapped the screen, zooming in on the array. Kurt’s eyes went to the screen a little too intensely. It made him vulnerable. Something he realized too late.

The engineer lunged for him, grabbing his gun arm with both hands. Kurt yanked it free, slammed an elbow into the man’s gut, and then knocked him sideways with a forearm to the face. But the crewman had grabbed some type of wrench off the floor. He swung it at Kurt, missing his face by inches as Kurt pulled back.