Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)

“Empty car?” Joe guessed.

Suspicious of the whole scenario, Kurt crept up to the square cart and looked over the edge. “No passengers,” he said. “But it’s not empty.”

He reached inside and scooped up a handful of the cargo. “Pellets,” he said. “Extremely light.”

Joe took a quick look, rubbing one of the pellets between his fingers. “Titanium,” he said. “Not fully processed yet but halfway there.”

“I think I get it now,” Kurt said.

“Get what?”

“Than Rang’s played-out mines that are producing three times what they did a decade before . . . His alliance with the shadowy figures in the North . . . He’s salting his own mines,” Kurt said. “The generals send him half-processed titanium that he ships to a processor as if they came from his own mine and he sends them computer hackers, high-tech supplies, and probably a steady diet of cold hard cash in return. The North Koreans get technology and access to markets the UN sanctions prevent them from touching, and Than Rang gets cheap ore at fire-sale prices.”

As if in response to the arrival of the ore-bearing car, a series of yellow lights began to flash around the base of the platform on which the shipping container had been placed—the one Kurt and Joe had been riding in with the high-tech servers.

“Last train to Clarksville,” Kurt said. “Let’s make sure we’re on it.”

He and Joe dashed for the open door of the shipping container, jumping inside just as the platform levitated upward. Kurt pulled the door shut and the container began to accelerate rapidly and smoothly. In seconds, they were moving fifty miles an hour, all without the slightest sound of machinery or even the grind of wheels on the road.

“Since we seem to be on the express train here,” Joe began, “I should probably ask what we’re going to do when we get to the other side.”

“My guess, we’ll either be entering a dead zone or an all-out firefight,” Kurt said.

“We could have waited for them to come back.”

“What if they plan to take another way out?”

“You got me there,” Joe said.

It wasn’t long before the

big container began to slow. As it settled onto the receiving platform at the far end, it became clear there was no firefight in progress. A minute of silence rang in their ears before Kurt dared crack the rear door open.

A quick look revealed several dead soldiers in North Korean uniforms and no sign of fighting or alarms in sight.

Kurt and Joe hopped out of the container and did a quick survey. Nine men down. No sign of reinforcements. Ruthless and precise.

Oddly enough, the three hackers lay on their sides in the tram they’d come over in. They were not moving but didn’t appear to have been shot.

Joe shook one of them but got no response. “They look drugged to me,” he said. “They’re still breathing.”

“We can figure that out later.”

They followed the trail of bodies to a corridor, where they found an elevator. Joe was about to press the button when Kurt blocked his hand. “Let’s not announce our arrival.”

They pried the doors open and found a narrow elevator shaft. On the far side, a maintenance ladder traveled up a shallow, recessed channel that was carved into the wall.

Kurt counted five floors between them and the underside of the parked elevator car.

“What do you bet that’s where our friends are?” Kurt asked.

“Sounds like a place to start. We can’t search this whole complex.”

They moved into the elevator shaft and began climbing the ladder. Kurt went first. Joe braced the door to keep it open. It gave them a little light to work with and would make for a quicker getaway if they had to come down the ladder as well.

Climbing quickly, they passed the first two floors. As they cleared the third, Kurt heard a clink beneath him and then a dull metallic clatter as something fell down the shaft to the concrete below.

He looked down and saw Joe, holding on for dear life with one hand and clinging to a broken part of the ladder with another.