Snakehead

And the start of a long association with us.”

“Alex . . .”

Ash tried to look up. But his head fell forward. He was dead.

Major Yu prodded him with his foot. “Well, as they say, Ash to ashes and dust to dust,” he remarked. “I’m glad you heard that from him, Alex. You can take it with you to the grave.”

He raised the gun once again and pointed it at Alex.

There was an explosion, loud and near. But it wasn’t the gun. The entire room shook, and dust and metal fil- ings came showering down from the roof. Alex heard a shearing of metal as the crane overhead broke in half and came crashing down. The shock sent Major Yu reeling back. His arm banged against one of the work surfaces and the gun went off, the bullet smashing uselessly into a wall. Major Yu was shouting in agony, and Alex realized that the impact of the blow had shattered the brittle bone in Yu’s arm. The gun now lay useless on the ground.

Deafened, half dazed, Alex threw himself onto the gun, snatched it in both hands, desperate to protect himself from further attack. But he was already too late. Yu had already decided to leave. The room was full of smoke.

The SAS were here. Alex Rider would have to wait until another day.

There was a trapdoor set in the floor, with the ladder leading down underneath. Somehow, using his one good D r a g o n N i n e

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arm, he pulled it open and climbed down, dropping into the boat below. But the fall had been too far for his bones.

The impact broke both his ankles. Howling with agony, barely able to stand, he groped his way over to the controls. He used a knife to cut through the mooring rope. A second later, he was speeding away.

Meanwhile, Alex had staggered over to the controls.

On the TV, the little square representing Royal Blue was about two inches above the seabed but edging closer all the time. There was the scanner, wired into the computer.

Alex slammed his palm onto the glass panel and let out a sigh of relief as a line of text appeared on the computer screen.

> AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED

There was a pause, then a second line scrolled across.

> Override master commands? Y/N

Alex tapped on the Y key just as the door crashed open and about half a dozen SAS men somehow managed to burst in, covering every angle with their weapons. Scooter was at the front of them with Texas and X-Ray right behind him. It looked as if Sparks, the young soldier who had once played a guitar on an Australian beach, hadn’t made it.

Scooter saw Alex. “Where’s Yu?” he demanded.

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S N A K E H E A D

“Gone.” Alex had his eyes fixed on the screen. A menu had come up. He ran his eye down the list of options, looking for the one that said DISARM or DEACTIVATE.

But it wasn’t there. Instead, his eyes settled on the last command.

> DETONATE

“Over here!” It was Texas. He had found Ben Daniels and was already kneeling beside him, tearing open his shirt to examine his wound. One of the other soldiers rushed over with a medical kit.

Alex slid the mouse, highlighting the last command.

He looked at the television screen. Royal Blue was still above the seabed but almost touching it. He remembered what he had heard. The bomb still had another half mile to travel, far down into the Earth’s crust. A timeline read 23:47:05:00, the microseconds flickering and changing too fast for his eye to follow. But the bomb still had thirteen more minutes until it would be in position. The moon and the sun were not quite ready yet.

Could Alex destroy the bomb without accidentally setting off the tsunami?

In desperation he turned to the SAS leader, who seemed to understand the stakes almost at once.

“Do it,” he said.

Alex double-clicked on the command.

Three thousand, five hundred feet below Dragon Nine D r a g o n N i n e

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but five hundred feet above the seabed, the bomb exploded. Alex felt the entire oil rig shudder violently, and the floor veered crazily beneath his feet as five of the steel tethers along with the drill pipe itself were torn apart.

And half a mile away, speeding through the water in his Sealine yacht, Major Yu heard the explosion and knew, with an overwhelming sense of bitterness and defeat, that even his last hopes had been destroyed.

Somehow Royal Blue had been detonated too early. There would be no tsunami. He sat, hunched up in front of the steering wheel, moaning quietly to himself. He had com-prehensively failed.

He didn’t even feel the shock wave from the explosion until it hit him, but this of course was the main purpose of Royal Blue, to flatten anything for miles around. The pulse smashed into the yacht, destroying the electric system, snuffing out the lights, ripping every fitting apart.