He heard no splash. The wind and the wake of the ship were too loud for that.
With those items gone he moved to the darkest corner of the unlit opening and dropped to one knee.
Kneeling in the dark, Kurt slipped a 9mm Beretta from a side pocket and began screwing a silencer into the barrel. His senses were on overload. He listened for movement.
He could hear little beyond the throbbing of the engines and the hum of machinery. But before he could move, the handle on one of the doors turned. The starboard hatchway opened, and Kurt pressed himself farther into the dark like a spider trying to hide in a cracked bit of concrete.
Two figures walked out illuminated by the interior light until the hatch door slammed shut.
They walked to the rail.
“I can tell that you’re impressed,” he heard a male voice say, a voice he immediately recognized as belonging to Andras.
Unable to believe his luck, Kurt’s hand tightened on the Beretta. But then the other voice spoke, and Kurt recognized it as well. A female voice. A Russian voice. Katarina’s voice.
“I don’t know how you people built such a thing without the world knowing,” she said. “But much as I hate to admit it, it’s rather an incredible design. I suppose I should thank you for the tour, and the food and the wine.”
“Now you understand why your superiors will be interested,” Andras said.
“Yes,” she said. “I suspect they will be fascinated with what I have to tell them.”
Kurt’s mind whirled as he listened to her speak. He certainly didn’t blame her for using any method she could think of to earn her captor’s trust and a chance at freedom, but the words she used made it sound like something bigger was in play here.
Before anything more was said, a crewman opened the hatchway door.
“Radio call for you, Andras,” the man said. “Coming in from Freetown. It’s urgent.”
“Time to go,” Andras said.
He led Katarina toward the door, guided her through first, and then followed. The swath of light widened and then narrowed and vanished as the heavy steel door clanged shut.
If there had been any doubt in Kurt’s mind before, it was gone now. The Russians wouldn’t be interested in a random supertanker. The ship had to be something more, which meant all the odd structures and anomalies probably had some purpose. Kurt was pretty sure it wouldn’t turn out to be a benevolent one.
Getting to his feet, he moved to the bulkhead door which Andras and Katarina had gone through a minute before. Silently, he applied torque to the handle. He moved it slowly until it clicked.
He cracked the door a quarter inch and looked down the passageway. With no one in sight, Kurt opened the door wider and slipped inside.
53
GAMAY TROUT STOOD beside her husband Paul in the operations center of the USS Truxton. The activity aboard it and the other ships in the battle group had increased to a frenetic pace over the past few hours.
The ship was being readied for battle, and it wasn’t alone. Helicopters had fanned out not only from the Truxton but from the group’s flagship, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after that, she heard the scream of jets launching and flying off in full afterburner. The sound was unmistakable even though the Lincoln was five miles away.
Until now she and Paul had not been officially updated, but she guessed they were about to find out what was going on.
The ship’s captain, Keith Louden, stepped forward. An average-sized man, with short gray hair and sharp hawklike eyes, he was in his early fifties, fit and trim.
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” Louden began, “we’re about to take action against a hostile enemy. An enemy that has already destroyed two of our satellites with some kind of weapon designed around a particle accelerator.”
Gamay took a deep breath. “Are we safe here?” she asked, remembering the bodies they’d seen in the Kinjara Maru, blackened and burned.
The captain nodded.
“According to the experts at the Pentagon, this weapon operates on a line-of-sight trajectory. That is, it fires in a straight line, something like a laser. Unlike a bullet or artillery shell, or even a ballistic missile warhead, it can’t hit anything around the curvature of the earth. So we should be out of harm’s way in our present position. But once a ship or plane pops up over the horizon, that’s a different story.”
The captain went on to explain the situation, relaying what was known about Sierra Leone, the threats Djemma Garand had made, and the military’s planned response.
As the captain spoke he walked them over to a touch-screen monitor. On it they saw the section of Sierra Leone’s coast where the weapon and the oil platforms were located. A curved line across the screen flashed in red.
“That’s the horizon,” the captain told them. “Anything that goes beyond that line, whether it’s a ship or plane or missile, is likely to be incinerated within seconds.”
Gamay studied the line, a circular arc at a range of approximately forty miles.
“I thought the horizon was sixteen miles,” she said.
The captain turned to her. “It depends where you stand. That’s one reason every soldier likes to grab the high ground, it allows you to see farther. In this case, Mrs. Trout, it depends where and how high they’re firing from.”
He tapped the screen and brought up a photo of one of the oil platforms.
“The main structure on those oil platforms rises about three hundred fifty feet from the surface. The particle accelerator ring has a diameter of fifteen miles. A blast from the forward platform, or the forward part of the accelerator ring, could reach a lot farther out into the Atlantic than the platform closest to the coast. In addition, the height lets them shoot downhill at us.”
“Like archers in a castle’s tower,” Paul said.
“Exactly,” the captain said. “The taller we are, the farther out they can strike us.”
“For instance?” Paul asked.
“We have a pretty low profile for a destroyer,” Louden said. “But we still poke up above the surface a tad over sixty feet. They could hit our superstructure at thirty miles, our radar masts at thirty-five.”
“And aircraft?” Gamay asked.
“They face the same kind of danger,” the captain said. “Flying on the deck still comes with some vertical component. And pilots who encounter problems are taught to pitch up immediately because that’s better than flying into the deck or the ocean. But out here, that would immediately expose them to direct fire. And for aircraft flying at altitude, like civilian airliners, the danger zone might extend three hundred miles or more.”
Gamay took a deep breath and looked over at Paul.
“Truth is,” the captain continued, “it’s something we’ve never dealt with before.”
“What are your options,” Paul asked.
“Normal procedure calls for airstrikes,” the captain said. “Beginning with cruise missiles. But both Tomahawks and Harpoons fly at subsonic speeds. F-18s max out around Mach 2, and not that fast down on the deck.”
He turned back to the screen and its red “Event Horizon” line.
“An accelerator like this one fires a particle stream that moves at almost the speed of light. That means our fastest missile will cover no more than one or two feet in the time it takes that beam to cover fifty miles.”
An image flashed into Gamay’s mind. She pictured soldiers in World War I going over trench walls in futile charges against enemies armed with machine guns. She was no war historian, but she understood why the carnage was so high and the battle lines never moved. Most of the men in those charges were cut down before they’d made it ten yards. This sounded like a similar situation.