Pirate ah-3

by Ted Bell

  “Selling to who? France?”

  “To Germany.”

  “And what are the Germans doing with these weapons?”

  “That’s why you’re here, Stoke. My father’s house has many rooms. I’m sure there’s something horrible in every one of them. But I’ve just told you all I know.”

  “I know what kind of man your father is, Jet. Just like I know who you are. But I got to say, I’m kind of surprised at the way you’re handling this part.”

  “You don’t trust me? After all I did in Berlin?”

  “I trust you, Jet. Yeah. I do. Pretty much.”

  “Thank you. Really.”

  “Jet, let me tell you something. I appreciate all you’re doing. You know I do. But I don’t see how you survive this, girl. Going against a man like your father. Maybe we’ll get out alive tonight. But they’ll find you, Jet. He’ll find you. He won’t let you go after this.”

  “That’s my problem, isn’t it? You ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Sorry about the choppy ride,” Stoke said, the two of them side by side at the wheel of Foo Fighter. The storm was kicking up now and they were getting bounced all over the tiny wheelhouse. Rain was beating against the windshield but the wipers worked pretty well. And it was warm and dry inside. “Want me to slow down?”

  “Actually, I’m amazed at how you keep missing all these sampans. You see that thing all lit up on the horizon? That’s the Golden Dragon. We’ll tie up on the other side.”

  “Got it.”

  Jet looked at him. “How much do you know now, Stoke? From what you took out of Schatzi’s office?”

  “Not enough, Jet, or I wouldn’t be here. I work for Alex Hawke. And Alex, at least for right now, is working for the U.S. government. I’m here in Hong Kong because Alex Hawke told me to be here. Just so we’re clear. Who’s doing what for who, I mean.”

  “I’m clear, Stoke. I want you to be. I’m on your side.”

  “Good. Anyway, Washington is still busy examining everything I stole from Schatzi’s office. We know the Germans are building a supertanker fleet for the French. Ultralarge crude carriers in the half-million-ton range. We know the French government-owned company, Elf, is setting up a massive operation of ship terminals, refineries, and tankers to transport oil from the Gulf to China.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “China gets oil. France gets money. End of story.”

  “And Leviathan?”

  “Same story. She was built in Germany for the French by your pal, Schatzi. Just like the tankers. Good business idea, if you ask me.”

  “My father’s got a lot of ideas, Stoke. Some good, some no doubt very, very bad. That’s why we’re having dinner with him on the Golden Dragon.”

  “Just the three of us, huh? Nice and cozy.”

  “There’ll be four. I don’t know who the mystery guest is. Probably his righthand man, Major Tang.”

  “Tony Tang? Charming guy.”

  “You know him?”

  “We just met. He’s dead.”

  “You might not want to mention that to my father. Major Tang was his best friend.”

  “Lips are sealed.”

  She looked at him a second, then said, “Okay. Slow down. We tie up over there at the restaurant dock. Where all the water taxis wait. We’re going to his private dining room up on the top deck. About halfway through the meal, I’ll figure out some kind of diversion. At that point, you’re going to excuse yourself. Say you’re going to the loo. But you’re really going to the kitchen that prepares meals for my father and his staff. Don’t worry. The kitchen staff is too crazed to pay any attention to you. Just act like you’re lost.”

  “That will be easy.”

  “There’s a young sous chef down there who works for me. He’s expecting you. His name is Wan Li. He’ll ask if he can help you. You tell him you’re looking for the lavatory.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’ve drawn a diagram of the Dragon’s upper deck. My father’s private offices are here. Here’s the small dining room where we’ll be having dinner. The kitchen is here. Wan Li will take you where you need to go.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You’ll see. From what I know now, the answers to all your questions is down in the bowels of the Golden Dragon. Wan Li will show you.”

  “And after that?”

  “I’ll give you twenty minutes. That should be enough time. Then I’m storming out of the dining room and returning to the boat. Leave the keys in it. I’ll bring it around and pick you up at this cargo door on the stern. Wan Li will show you. It’s a gangway where the produce barges unload for the kitchen.”

  “You have a weapon?”

  “In my handbag. I hope I don’t need it.”

  “You might.”

  “He’s my father, Stoke.”

  “I know.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  The Golden Dragon

  “ GUESS WHO ’ S COMING TO DINNER ?”

  “What did you say?” Jet asked him, plainly irritated. This cozy dinner wasn’t going all that well. He could tell the general wasn’t too jazzed with Jet’s choice of a fiancé, either.

  “That’s the title of the movie,” Stoke said.

  “The title of what movie, Stokely?” she said, firing daggers at him across the table. She looked like she wanted to kill him, but the one she really wanted to kill was sitting right next to her. Dressed in an emerald-green silk number that looked sensational was the mystery guest. That would be her sister, Bianca, who was the surprise at this cozy little dinner party.

  Bianca looked exactly like Jet. A duplicate twin, Stoke thought they called it. Same beautiful black hair, green eyes, identical. But the sisters were not close. In fact, the mood in the general’s private dining room was a little tense. Stoke was trying to lighten things up, striving heroically to keep the old conversational ball rolling. He was playing for time until Jet gave him the signal it was time to split.

  The two sisters gave the impression that only one of them was going to get out of this room alive. When they first sat down, they’d been speaking Chinese to their father and you could tell the general was trying to calm them down about something. Stoke figured he should just stay out of it. Family business. But light and airy it was not.

  Jet was supposed to create some kind of diversion. He couldn’t wait. He was all out of conversation and the general’s fuse was burning up pretty fast. Jet was looking at him funny now and he remembered she’d asked him a question. What was it? Oh, yeah. That Poitier flick he was talking about. Since Jet was an actress, he figured movies would be a safe topic.

  “That’s the name of that movie I was trying to think of. The one with Sidney Poitier. Remember? The one where he goes to dinner at Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn’s house in San Francisco. Asks them can he marry their daughter. You remember that one, General?”

  “No.”

  “Pretty good movie,” Stoke said, getting into it now. “About this black dude, right? Who shows up at this white girl’s house to have dinner with her parents? It’s kind of awkward and nobody knows what to say, see? So, Sidney, he’s the black guy, he starts talking about—”

  “Jesus,” Jet said to him, and went back to her lobster soup with the claw sticking out of it.

  Jet’s father, General Moon, wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Or movie lover. He was just staring at Stoke. If you had to guess what he was thinking, it would be how to commit a murder that took a really, really long time and hurt really, really bad before the victim expired.

  “You like football, General?” Stoke said. “I used to play for the Jets.”

  That was all Jet needed to decide it was time to create her diversion.

  “You lying little bitch,” Jet hissed at her sister.

  “Don’t call me a liar, slut,” Bianca said. “You’re the one who—”

  Jet picked up her soup bowl and threw it across the table. The lobster cl
aw sort of bounced off Bianca’s shoulder but the soup ran down her face and into her cleavage. That was enough to bring the whole evening to a boil. When Bianca swept all the china off the table and picked up a knife, Stoke stood up and put his napkin on the 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.
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  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 feet above the water. No way she could hear him now, even if he shouted loud as he could. If he jumped, he just might make it to the flat roof of the wheelhouse. It was pitching pretty badly. Still, it beat the hell out of swimming ashore in Hong Kong Harbor at night.

  He jumped, clawing at the air, because Jet decided to hit the throttles while he was in midflight.

  He made it, barely.

  Fear lent him wings, as the saying goes.

  When he clambered down to the afterdeck and ducked inside the wheelhouse, Jet was frozen at the helm. She was staring straight ahead, hands locked on the wheel at ten and two. Her pretty white dress was torn and bloodstained. She was barefoot. Her hair was messed up and matted with dark blood. He put a hand on her shoulder and she turned to look at him. There were black streaks down her cheeks under both eyes.

  Already knowing the answer, Stoke said, “Hey. You okay?”

  She looked away without answering.

  “Hey. You have to talk to me.”

  “I hope you found what you were looking for,” she said. Her voice, like her eyes, was dead.

  “Yeah. I did. But I need to know something. Right now. I need—”

  “He’ll be coming after us. You. Me. Most especially me.”