As Kurt hoped, the bullets all passed above him, but he let out a groan and spoke as if he were in agony. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” he grunted. “You’ve lost.”
He waited for a reply but none came.
Kurt could hear the catwalk creaking underneath him. He surmised that Andras was taking a new position and zeroing in on the sound of Kurt’s voice. Kurt needed to get him talking so he could do the same thing, since it didn’t take a wizard to predict that Andras was not standing in the middle of the tunnel but was either lying on the deck like Kurt or pressed up against the bulkhead on one side or the other.
Breathing heavily for effect, Kurt spoke again. “If I was you… I’d be… getting out… of here.”
He was counting on Andras having enough of an ego to feel he had mortally wounded his prey. But, so far, the man had made no mistakes.
“Give me your weapon,” Andras said, his voice coming from the shroud of gas like an unseen evil ghost.
Austin lay there with the cold seeping in his skin. His face was so numb, he could hardly feel anything. He held the Beretta in hands nearly frozen, his elbows placed on the deck.
“Let the girl go,” he said, cupping a hand to one ear like a radar directional finder and waiting for a response.
“Of course,” Andras said, his words echoing in the tunnel. “Everyone goes free. I’ll send them all off with roses, and mints on their pillows. Now, slide over your weapon!”
“I’ll… try,” Kurt muttered brokenly.
Kurt inched to his left, thumped his pistol onto the metal walkway as if he had dropped it and scraped it along the deck, to make it seem as if it were sliding over metal before stopping.
With that, Kurt rolled quickly to the other side of the tunnel. A burst of three shots rang out, pinging off the deck where he’d just been.
“Sorry, Mr. Austin,” Andras said as if he were bored. “I don’t trust you any farther than I can throw this ship.”
And then several more bursts shook the tunnel. The muzzle flash lit the fog like lightning in a cloud. The glare was too diffused to give Andras’s position away, but Kurt spotted something else. He couldn’t see the bullets themselves fly, but he noticed they created tiny shock waves in the thick, frigid mist.
He fired back, unleashing an eight-shot salvo that blasted through the fog. When he finished, the slide of his gun locked in the open position. His clip was empty.
The silence that followed was haunting. Kurt stared into the fog, wondering, hoping, he’d made a killing shot.
Andras had not fallen or Kurt would have heard it. Nor had he fired back.
Beginning to worry, Kurt checked what remained of his ammo. Only one bullet remained in another clip that he hadn’t emptied.
He pulled back the receiver, slid the round into the breach, and thumbed the slide release. The weapon locked, his last shot in the chamber.
Finally, he heard movement through the icy shroud. It came like a drunk shuffling along a sidewalk. A vague, ghostly form slowly appeared: Andras, limping, dragging his leg.
He held an assault rifle, the stock pushed into one armpit, the muzzle pointed at an awkward angle toward the deck and Kurt Austin. Blood seeped from his mouth, indicating a shot to one lung. His face was stained crimson as blood flowed from a deep crease on the top of his scalp. For a second Kurt thought he would fall, but he didn’t.
The eyes, Kurt noticed, burned with an intensity beyond all madness. It was the picture of a man shocked at finding out he was vulnerable to any other man. He pulled himself to a stop six feet from where Kurt lay. He stared at Kurt through his bloody mask, appearing amazed that, after all his fire, Kurt had survived without a scratch.
Kurt had his own dilemma. With one 9mm shell left, he wasn’t sure he could finish Andras off, not without a head shot. And as soon as he fired, Andras would open up with his rifle, shredding Kurt at such close range.
It had become a standoff.
Kurt eased off the deck and stood. They were only yards apart, aiming their weapons at each other. Kurt’s right hand held the Beretta, his left had found a knife in his pocket. The same knife he and Andras had traded back and forth three times already. He couldn’t open it, but he still could use it.
He flipped the knife at Andras, who caught it deftly and smiled as he stared at it.
“Out of ammunition, Mr. Austin? Pity you didn’t open the knife before you threw it.” Now confident, Andras moved slowly. He raised the assault rifle in preparation to fire.
Kurt beat him to the draw, took an instant to aim, and fired at the liquid nitrogen pipe just above Andras. The liquid burst out under high pressure, dousing Andras heavily on the right side of his body, washing over his arm and the assault rifle he held.
The rifle fell and broke open as it struck the deck. Andras stumbled and hit the tunnel’s wall. He watched uncomprehending as his arm, hand, and fingers shattered into a thousand fragments like a crystal vase crashing from a top shelf to the floor. A scream of agony froze in his throat.
In seconds the nitrogen began filling the tunnel. It blanketed Andras, his body already frozen like a block of ice. It swept down the hall toward Kurt as he raced to the hatch and pulled himself up the ladder.
The frigid mist followed him like a wave in the surf, but Kurt climbed as fast as his hands and feet could take him and made it out through the top of the passage.
He slammed the upper hatch shut. Feeling it lock into place, he lay on his back and relaxed for the first time in more hours than he could calculate.
After one minute, and one minute only, he rose to his feet and searched for Katarina. He found her sitting by a stairwell as if she was waiting for a miracle.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
She turned and looked at him, her face lighting up like a cloud under the sun. “Oh, Kurt,” she said. “How many times did I think you were dead?”
“Luckily, it’s Andras who is dead.”
Her smile widened in a mixture of doubt and joy. “Are you sure?”
Kurt nodded. “I watched him fall to pieces with my own eyes.”
63
KURT AND KATARINA arrived at the same stairwell Kurt had come down hours before. He looked up. There was no way Katarina could climb eight flights of stairs.
“Is there another way out?” he asked.
She nodded.
“This way,” she said, leading him past the stairwell.
Twenty yards on, another door beckoned. Kurt opened it. Sitting in a pool, secured to the edges of a metal dock, were three submersibles. Two of them looked suspiciously like the XP-4 he had rescued a week ago. The larger one dwarfed them, and he assumed this was the Bus.
He noticed that the XP-4-looking craft had torpedoes mounted on either side, like pontoons.
Beside them was the 60-foot motor yacht that Katarina had been prisoner on.
“This is where I came in,” she said.
Kurt looked for the door controls. “Are we above the waterline?” he asked.
She nodded.
He pressed a switch but nothing happened. The high voltage was still down. He found a manual release and threw the lever over. A capstan-like wheel began to spin as the door fell with the force of gravity.
Seconds later he and Katarina were in one of the XP-4s, moving out into the darkness of the night.
With Andras dead, the high voltage disabled, and the liquid nitrogen blasting out into the particle accelerator tunnel, Kurt figured he’d lived up to his claim of being a gremlin, but he had one last act up his sleeve.
He turned the small sub around and circled to the very aft end of the ship.
He fired both torpedoes into the ship’s propellers and rudder assembly.
The explosion was blinding. Almost immediately Kurt could see that the ship’s wake was turning to mush. The props were damaged or gone, and seawater was likely flooding the bottom deck.