“What if we can’t protect them?” Pitt asked. “Are we just going to let them die in their happy ignorance?”
Brinks squirmed. “Look,” he said. “Garand may have taken this round, but there’s no way they can hit us here. Every one of our experts concludes that. Their weapon fires in a line of sight. It simply cannot hit anything over the horizon. Even the F-18s were safe, once they dropped back a few miles.”
The Vice President looked around. “Anyone have anything to add? Now’s the time if you do.”
There was silence for a moment, and then another staffer from the NSA spoke up, a slight man with frameless glasses. “There is one possibility,” he said.
“Spit it out,” Sandecker ordered.
“Particle beams are aimed and directed through the use of magnets,” the man explained. “One study concluded that an extremely powerful magnetic field placed along the target line could bend a particle stream, redirecting it onto a new target. In essence, giving it the ability to shoot around corners.”
Pitt didn’t like the sound of that. He stepped forward, though it wasn’t really his place. “What would it take to hit us here?”
The man straightened his glasses and cleared his throat. “The power output of a small city channeled into a vigorous magnetic array of some type.”
“Where would this magnetic array have to be?” Pitt asked.
The man didn’t hesitate. “It would have to be located roughly halfway between the weapons emitter and the target.”
That made the threat seem less likely. There weren’t any islands out there, certainly no place big enough to generate the kind of power this man was talking about. Then again…
Pitt turned to the Pentagon staffer who was operating the tactical display. “Widen the screen to show the entire Atlantic,” he demanded.
No one objected, and the task was accomplished in two quick strokes of the keyboard.
On the big screen the familiar profile of the American East Coast appeared on the left-hand side. Africa and Western Europe took their places on the right.
The battle group and the Quadrangle continued to be marked by a series of tiny icons in the lower right-hand side, just under the bulge of West Africa.
“Show me the location of the Liberian tanker Onyx,” Pitt said. “Based on Kurt Austin’s last report.”
It took a few seconds and then a new icon appeared in a blue tint, one so pale it looked almost white. A tiny flag next to it read “Onyx: Liberia.”
Dirk Pitt stared at the icon along with everyone else in the Situation Room.
It sat almost dead center of the screen, exactly halfway between the Quadrangle off the coast of Sierra Leone and the city of Washington, D.C.
“My God,” Sandecker said. “When do our submarines attack?”
The Navy’s attaché answered. “Thirty minutes just to get in range. They won’t be able to stop it.”
With that, Sandecker sprung into action, grabbing the aide.
“Get the President to the bunker,” he said. “Order an immediate alert on the Emergency Broadcast System. Contact all law enforcement and emergency services personnel and the power companies. Tell them to have their people take cover and be ready for an emergency shutdown. We’re going to need them to get this place back up and running if this happens.”
As Sandecker spoke to the aide, a brigadier general from the Air Force was on a phone to Andrews, passing the word and ordering a scramble. Other people around the room were giving similar commands, in person or over phone lines. The normally quiet Situation Room suddenly resembled a busy telemarketing center or a Wall Street trading pit.
Pitt grabbed his own cell phone and sent an emergency text that would reach all NUMA personnel in the vicinity. He called the office to follow up.
For his part, Brinks looked stricken, fumbling with a cell phone, trying to call his wife. Dirk understood that; he was thankful that his wife, Loren, and his children, Summer and Dirk Jr., were on the West Coast this week or he’d have been doing the same frantic dance.
Brinks hung up and wandered unsteadily over to Pitt, of all people.
“Voice mail,” he said as if in a trance. “What a time to get voice mail.”
“Keep trying,” Pitt told him. “Ring that phone off the hook.”
Brinks nodded but continued to act as if he’d been drugged. The shock had stunned him into inaction.
He looked at Pitt through starry eyes. “Did your man get on that ship?” he asked quietly.
Pitt nodded. “As far as I know.”
Brinks swallowed, perhaps his pride. “I guess he’s our only hope now.”
Dirk nodded. One man on a tanker in the middle of the Atlantic now held the fate of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in his hands.
59
ABOARD THE ONYX, Kurt ran and fired and ran again. He emptied his second magazine, loaded another, and kept moving, pushing Katarina ahead of him.
Clear of pursuers for a second, they ducked into an alcove between two of the ship’s storerooms and listened.
Some kind of strange alarm had begun sounding. It almost resembled the Whoop, Whoop heard on a submarine before it was about to dive.
“What’s that?” Katarina asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Seconds later a recorded voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Fulcrum deploying. Stand clear of midships array. Repeat. Stand clear of midships array.”
“We’re running out of time,” Katarina said. “Can’t be more than a couple minutes left.”
“And we’re going the wrong way,” Kurt said.
They’d had no choice, each pack of crewmen they’d run into had forced a detour. Since they’d left the cabin, they’d actually moved farther forward instead of aft.
In their favor, the ship was mammoth yet crewed by no more than a hundred or so. Some of those had to be at duty stations to pull off whatever Andras was doing with this Fulcrum array. And at least six were now dead.
Working against them was the ship’s architecture. The Fulcrum compartment was between them and the coolant room at the aft end of the ship. Since the Fulcrum took up the top half of the ship, and ran from beam to beam, the only way to get past it was to go deep into the ship and use one of the bottom decks to cross under it.
The alarm and recording continued, and Kurt imagined the giant fan-shaped array, larger than a football field, emerging through huge doors on the top of the Onyx’s hull.
“Let’s go,” he said, pulling Katarina up and getting on the move once again.
She was struggling to keep up but had yet to make the slightest complaint.
Kurt found a ladder that dropped through a hole in the deck. He took it, sliding down with his feet on the outside rails.
“Come on,” he said. As Katarina came down the ladder he noticed the rag around her hand was soaked right through in red.
He went to look at it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Keep going.”
Another ladder dropped them down a few feet to one more deck. And this time, Kurt stopped. He could hear machinery throbbing in an odd pattern, on, off, and back on.
It gave him an idea.
“Wait here,” he said.
Kurt crept forward. Markings on a pair of closed hatchway doors read “Thruster Unit.”
Behind him, Katarina leaned against the wall and slid down it in slow motion.
“I’m okay,” she said as he started back toward her. “Just… taking… a little rest.”
She wasn’t going to make it much farther. At least not running through the ship at breakneck speed. And they were running out of time anyway.
The Whoop, Whoop alarm stopped, and even down in the bowels of the ship the hull shuddered slightly as something big locked into place.