table.
“If you folks will excuse me, I need to use the restroom.”
He smiled at the two hefty guys in dark suits standing outside the door and kept on walking. At the end of the corridor he hung a right and headed for the kitchen. It was down on the next deck, just like Jet had drawn it on her little map.
It was hot in there, really hot, and full of steam. Stoke wandered in and was immediately approached by a young guy who said, “May I help you, sir?”
“Looking for the men’s room,” Stoke said, bending down to talk because he felt like his head was in the clouds.
“Ah-so.” Wan Li smiled, just like in the movies. He motioned for Stoke to follow him through the madhouse that served as a kitchen.
They went through a metal door and stepped onto a catwalk that crossed over what looked like a large holding tank. Stoke saw some dorsal fins slicing through the water. It had to be the only floating restaurant in the world with shark-infested waters on the inside. No wonder that shark soup had tasted so fresh.
“You find what you look for just in there,” Wan Li said, indicating an anonymous blue-painted metal door at the bottom of a short ramp off the catwalk. “Door open. All empty. Nobody home this hour of night.”
“Hey, thanks a lot,” Stoke said. Wan Li hurried back to his kitchen. Stoke turned the knob and went inside. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. It was dark except for the harbor lights coming in through the row of windows to his left. Stoke, who had spent some time at Newport News helping navy draftsmen design a faster river patrol boat, knew instantly why Jet had brought him here.
This was where the giant cruise ship Leviathan and the German-built supertankers had been designed.
He looked at his watch. Jet had given him twenty minutes. He had sixteen left. Not a lot.
He pulled the small, flat flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, and made his way past rows of old- fashioned drafting benches and banks of oversized computer monitors. There were half-hull forms mounted along the wall to his right. Tankers, he saw, mostly hundred-thousand-ton displacement by the looks of them. Ships that drew about ninety feet of water. Ships that required deepwater ports.
There was a wall of glass at the end of the room. A glass door opened into a smaller drawing office on the other side. He went in. More models on the wall, this time VLCC and ULCCs. Very large and ultralarge crude carriers of more than four hundred thousand tons. With global oil consumption up about 8 percent a year, he could see why the French and the Chinese were getting in the business. A ULCC could make a profit of four million dollars on a single run from Kuwait to Europe. He wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to what a run from the Gulf to Shanghai might net.
Stoke looked at the blank monitor. It was no secret that China desperately needed oil and would do anything to get it. So what deep dark secrets was the Golden Dragon hiding?
He sat down at the computer CAD workstation and started scrolling and searching. He was looking at the shipwright’s plans for a huge tanker named the Happy Dragon. He scanned her prefabricated units—cross-sections, diagonals, buttocks, and waterlines—looking for something unusual. Nothing. Then he moved on to the completed hull form and its vast tanks and watertight bulkheads. Finding nothing interesting there either, he moved quickly to the propulsion files.
It took ten seconds to discover her first secret. She was nuclear-powered. So that’s where General Moon and the Chinese came in. They provided the reactors and fuel for the German-built vessels. Next stop, her reactor room, he said to himself, scrolling as fast as he could.
She had fourth-generation naval reactors similar to the KN-3 reactors used aboard a vessel he was very familiar with, the Russian Arktika-class nuclear icebreakers. He’d been a stowaway on one for a month. He looked at her twin reactors and uranium core fuel plans for no more than a minute when something made him move on. He flashed on that night aboard Valkyrie. The gadget he’d found in the guard’s pocket and the missing keel. The dosimeter. Both had been tickling his subconscious ever since. Yeah, and those iodine pills for radiation sickness. So? Keels were lead. Lead was the ideal shield against radiation. So where the hell did that lead?
He’d just opened a new file when the thing caught his eye. There it was, in a small cross-section of the Happy Dragon’s keel in the lower righthand corner of the screen. Something definitely didn’t look right.
Keels were built of solid lead. That was the whole point. This one wasn’t solid at all.
This one had something buried deep within it.
Holy shit.
All the pieces clicked into place in an instant. There was the barrel, surrounded by the tamper, with all the plutonium pieces arranged in a perfect pie shape around the beryllium/polonium core. Oh, yeah. It was an implosion-triggered fission bomb. Buried deep inside the lead keel of a fifteen-hundred-foot-long supertanker. A ship built to sail the endless seas without restriction. Built to traverse the world’s most vital waterways—
Wait a minute. The lead, that was the key. It wasn’t only good for keeping radiation out. Like a lead shield. It would also work to keep radiation in. The dormant bomb inside the tanker’s keel could remain shielded in place for decades. And without any possibility of detection until the instant it was detonated! Jesus. A keel was the perfect place to hide a nuclear weapon. Underwater and out of sight, completely encased in a solid lead shield that would prevent even a trace of radiation from being detected.
But how many of these damn things had they built?
Check it out—right there—he had clicked through to a page showing von Draxis hull design comparisons: looked like four hulls completed in the last four years. All ULCCs. Three of them with the nuclear option package in the keel, one without. Three out of four ain’t bad!
He could see it. You blow, or even threaten to blow, one of these things in a major shipping chokepoint, and you’ve got the whole world by the short and curlies. Strait of Hormuz, Panama Canal…you shut down the U.S.A. in a heartbeat. And they already had three of these things out there somewhere. At least one more on the way!
He grabbed a pencil and scribbled down the names of the ones that had the weapons as fast as he could. All Dragons. The Happy Dragon, the Super Dragon—and the Jade Dragon. Dragons roamed the earth. Right now. He ripped the page off the pad and stuffed it inside his pocket.
Thanks to Jet, he thought he had all the pieces now. She’d given him all she could. All she knew. And it was far worse than she knew. Anyway, he had the big picture now. German shipyards owned by von Draxis build the tankers. France buys the tankers to transport oil to China. China sells the nuclear reactors and enriched uranium fuel to keep those tankers smoking. Everybody’s a winner.
And in the belly of each beast that circles the globe, an invisible bomb that gave the Chinese and the French a huge sword to dangle over the world’s head.
He kept scrolling, looking at his watch. He was already way late for Jet’s pickup on the stern. He didn’t care. Somehow, he needed to find the goddamn detonating mechanism. He scrolled through endless pages, looking for a timer or a radio receiver. Knowing where the fission bomb was was useless unless you knew how it was detonated. That was the only way you could stop it.
After a few minutes, he had to give up. Either there was no internal timer or they’d designed the bomb to be detonated at a distance by radio or satellite signal. He had to get the hell out of here before General Moon’s bullyboys came looking for him. But first he had to do just one more very important thing.
He moved the cursor to the “search all” function and typed in a single word: LEVIATHAN.
If the goddamn tankers had bombs in their keels, then why not—shit. No files came up with that name. He banged his fist on the desk and tried again.
Nada.
He raced out of the marine drafting studio, across the shark-bait cat-walk, then slowed to a mild run through the crowded kitchen. Wan Li caught his eye, giving him a worried look, and pointed to an exit leading to the stem. He’d been gone way too long. He might have missed his ride. Or maybe there was some other complication. He’d deal with that. Right now, all he could think about was Leviathan. You really had to wonder whether there was a bomb in her keel, too. Cruise ships, like ocean tankers, go everywhere.
Question was, where the hell was that cruise ship located now? There was only one way to find out.
Foo Fighter was just pulling away from the barge when he got to the cargo door at the stern. There was maybe six feet of open water between the hull and Foo Fighter. The doorsill he was standing in was about twenty
