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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Critical Mass
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MCGARVEY STEPPED THROUGH A HATCH ONTO A DIMLY LIT catwalk that looked down into the engine room. The generators were humming, and one of the main engines was turning, but there were no crewmen.
Except for the few people on the bridge, the
Grande Dame II
seemed to be deserted. Below decks should have been alive with activity if the ship was being readied for departure, as she seemed to be. Yet the passageways were empty, as were the cabins he'd looked into, the galley, the crews' dining area, and now the machinery spaces.
It made no sense unless something had happened ashore that had drawn the crew away.
Something incredibly powerful slammed into his right shoulder, sending him crashing against the railing, a tremendous pain rebounding throughout his body, nearly making him lose consciousness. Before he could recover, his pistol was snatched from his hand so violently his body was spun around.
Heidinora Daishi, the squat bulldog of a man from the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo, stood grinning at McGarvey, whose heart was hammering painfully in his chest. He was having trouble catching his breath and his vision was blurring.
“I hoped that I would see you again,” the Japanese killer said, his voice low-pitched and rough, and his English difficult to understand. “This time you have lost your weapon, so the fight will be equal.” He casually tossed the
Walther back into the passageway, sending it clattering along the deck.
McGarvey's head was spinning as he desperately tried to work himself fully conscious. Under the best of conditions this fight would have been unequal; the man he was facing was built like a Sherman tank, probably was an expert in any number of martial arts, and, more important, seemed to want to vent his power here and now.
“Stand up now,” Heidinora said, taking a handful of McGarvey's drysuit and shaking him like a rag doll.
McGarvey feinted left, then came in under Heidinora's right arm, and hammered three quick blows with every ounce of his strength to the man's chest just over his heart.
Heidinora grunted in irritation, not pain, and batted McGarvey away like an insect, sending him sprawling on the catwalk, stars again bursting in his eyes.
Before he could move out of the way the Jap was on him, kicking him viciously in the side with his steel-toed shoe.
The pain was exquisite, and he knew that he could not take very much more punishment before he became totally helpless.
Heidinora kicked him again, this time on the hip, nearly dislocating his back.
Christ! The man meant to kick him to death. It could not continue. But he had no way of defending himself.
Heidinora kicked again, but this time McGarvey managed to rear up and deflect the blow with his left arm, momentarily pushing the man off-balance.
Rolling right, McGarvey pulled himself under the catwalk railing, and before Heidinora could react, twisted over the edge, and dropped the ten or twelve feet to the engine room floor, the hard landing knocking him temporarily senseless.
When he finally looked up, Heidinora was gone, on his way down to finish the job. His head still spinning, McGarvey frantically looked around for something to use; anything. But the engine room was spotlessly clean. Not even an oily rag lay out; no empty coffee cups, no ashtrays, no tools.
He managed to get to his feet, where he had to support himself against a piece of machinery for a long moment until he regained his balance. The entire ship seemed to be spinning around, the decking heaving and bucking as if they were at sea in a heavy storm.
Straight ahead was a thick steel waterproof door on massive hinges. The sill was high, so that whoever came through would have to lean forward to step over it.
McGarvey stumbled as quickly as he could to the door and pulled it all the way open. As he'd hoped, it was well-balanced, and swung easily.
Someone was coming down the stairs at the end of the short passageway, and McGarvey stepped back behind the door, out of sight.
A moment later Heidinora started through the doorway, his right leg first, his right hand on the doorjamb, and his head and shoulders bent forward.
McGarvey heaved the door closed with everything he had, the thick steel smashing into the Japanese killer's face, driving him backward, and then catching the man's leg against the jamb, crushing his kneecap.
Heidinora roared in pain and rage, and he shoved the door back, and tried to pull his way through.
McGarvey smashed the heavy door into the man's face and forehead again, pulled it back, and shoved it again with all of his might, this time hitting the top of Heidinora's skull with a sickening crunch, and then closing on his hand, severing all four fingers at the roots.
Heidinora was in trouble. His eyelids were fluttering and his breath came in big, blubbering gasps as if he were a drowning man trying desperately for one last breath of air. Blood pumped out of a wicked rent in his skull. The man's chest heaved once, and then he slumped back. He was dead.
McGarvey hung on the doorframe for a long time, catching his breath, pain coming at him in waves, but the blurred vision and dizziness finally subsiding.
A plastic security badge was clipped to the lapel of Heidinora's coveralls. McGarvey peeled off his drysuit,
stashed it in a dark corner behind some machinery and back at the doorway took the security badge from the body and clipped it to his jacket.
The ruse would not stand up to close scrutiny, but all he needed was to get off the ship, across the dock and into the main building.
Careful not to step in the blood, McGarvey made his way down the corridor and painfully up the stairs to the catwalk where he retrieved the Geiger counter. Its case was cracked, but otherwise it seemed undamaged.
He found his gun in the upper passageway, and from there worked his way up to the main deck. He held up at the portside hatch. Ten feet away the rail opened to the boarding ladder down to the dock. The moment he started down he would be in plain view of everyone below, as well as anyone watching from the bridge. But there was no other way ashore.
Shoving the Walther in his belt beneath his jacket at the small of his back, he stepped across the covered passageway on deck, and started down the boarding ladder, making every effort not to limp or in any way show that he was in pain.
Two men in white coveralls, Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders, stood talking on the forward dock, near the ship's bows. They looked up as McGarvey descended, said something to each other, then looked away, apparently uninterested, even though they could not have seen the security pass from that distance.
At the bottom, McGarvey crossed the dock without hesitation, and entered what turned out to be a ship's stores and holding area within the main building. Someone was working with a forklift to the right, at the end of a long file, but there was no one else in sight.
Moving quickly now, McGarvey went to the far end of the warehouse, and through a door which led down a short corridor to a freight elevator.
The elevator was up one floor. He called it down, and then pulled out his pistol, switching the safety catch off, stepping to one side as the doors slid open on an empty car.
Inside, he studied the board. This floor was indicated by a
light. There were four floors beneath it. He punched the button for the lowest floor and then moved back and to the side.
Something was nagging at the back of his mind. Something about the ease with which he'd gotten off the ship, across the dock and this far into the building.
The elevator opened on the fourth sublevel to a T-intersection of two corridors that disappeared both ways into the darkness. This place was deserted too; another fact that was somehow bothersome.
A few yards down the left corridor a pair of tall wire mesh doors led into a high-voltage electrical distribution cabinet. McGarvey glanced inside. This set up could accommodate the power needs of a big skyscraper, yet he didn't think it was the main distribution center for the headquarters complex. No, this supplied power for some specific section of the complex. Some installation. Something that required a huge amount of amperage.
The elevator doors closed and the car started up. McGarvey turned and hurried back to the head of the corridor to watch the floor indicator. The car stopped one level up, and almost immediately started back down.
McGarvey turned and looked both ways down the corridor, but there were no doors, nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
In desperation he rushed back into the darkness to the electrical distribution cabinet, yanked open the door and crawled inside, taking extreme care not to brush up against any of the yard-long bus bars that carried so much power. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing up.
He closed the door and eased back into the deeper darkness as the elevator slid open and two men armed with Uzi submachine guns stepped out into the corridor, sweeping their weapons left to right, as if they'd been expecting trouble.
Moments later one of them said something into a walkie-talkie, and when he had his reply, said something to the other man who sent the elevator back up.
McGarvey could not make out what they were saying, but
it was evident they were nervous. They kept a wary eye on both branches of the corridor.
The elevator returned and two white-suited technicians got off with a motorized cart. Without hesitation the four of them started down the left corridor and as they came even with McGarvey's hiding spot, his Geiger counter began to react, the volume just loud enough for him to hear the crackle.
He pulled the device off his shoulder and stared at the gauge. The needle was jumping well above ambient.
On top of the cart was an oblong metal box about one yard on the long axis and half that on the short side. It was marked in French: PORTSIDE SEWAGE LIFT PUMP.
As the technicians disappeared with the cart into the darkness, the Geiger counter reading rapidly subsided. Whatever the box contained, he decided, it definitely was
not
a sewage lift pump.
ROLAND MURPHY SAT AT HIS HUGE DESK LISTENING TO WHAT his Deputy Director of Operations, Phil Carrara, was saying. It was coming up on noon, and besides Carrara, the DCI had called Ryan and Doyle in to listen. The general was tired, and he had every right to be. He'd been going almost twenty-four hours a day since the Japanese crisis had come up, and he wasn't as young as the others.
“She won't do anything foolish, will she?” he asked his DDO.
“I don't think so,” Carrara said.
“How'd you get her to stay?” Ryan asked.
Carrara sighed. “I told her a lie.”
“Her friend, Lana Toy?”
“We have her in protective custody. Told her that we needed her cooperation if we were going to save Kelley's life.”
“What happens if they blow the whistle when this is all over?” Ryan asked.
“I don't know,” Carrara said wearily. “But in the meantime Kelley is damned frightened. I think McGarvey has made a believer out of her. She'll stick, no matter what happens.”
“Which gives us just a few minutes before she calls back. What time is it over there now?”
“A little before 2:00 A.M.,” Carrara answered. “Dawn will be in another three hours, which will put her in an exposed position if we order her back to Fukai's perimeter.”
“No word from McGarvey?” Murphy asked. “Not so much as a sign?”
“I'm afraid not, General,” Carrara said. “She told us that he went into the water around twenty-hundred hours their time, about four hours ago, with the intention of somehow getting aboard a ship tied to the Fukai docks, and from there getting ashore.”
“What do we have on the boat?” Murphy asked, turning to Doyle, his Deputy Director of Intelligence. Doyle had worked with the National Photo Reconnaissance Office over the past days. He opened a file folder and withdrew a satellite shot of the Fukai compound. He passed it to Murphy.
“She's the
Grande Dame II,
one of the two Feadship pleasure yachts in Fukai's fleet. The other, sister ship, the
Grande Dame,
has been sailing in the Mediterranean for the past year. Evidently number two is being made ready to replace number one for the fall and winter season. They're identical; 243 feet at the waterline, twin MTV diesels, state-of-the-art electronics. Either ship is capable of crossing any ocean in style at cruising speeds in excess of twenty knots.”
“Impressive toys,” Ryan mumbled taking the photograph from the DCI. “The bomb, if one exists, could easily be transported aboard either ship.”
“Of course,” Doyle said. “But I don't think it's likely. By now Fukai has to realize that he's come under suspicion.”
“Especially with McGarvey poking around,” Ryan put in.
“If he has the bomb parts there in Nagasaki where his technicians are putting them together, he'll want to get rid of the device as quickly as possible.”
“He could load it aboard the ship at his dock in under an hour, I would suspect,” Murphy said.
“I don't mean just get it out of Japan, General. I meant deliver it to its target and … fire it … as soon as possible.”
“By air,” Carrara said. “Fukai Semiconductor maintains a fleet of jetliners. They've even got a pair of Boeing 747s.”
“One of which is currently on the ground at Fukai, for
routine maintenance,” Doyle said. “Kiyoshi Fukai himself is scheduled to fly out to Paris in a few hours.”
“Paris as a target?” Murphy said. “That doesn't make sense. Nor would he risk riding on the same plane with a bomb. He'll want to keep his distance.”
“Pardon me, General, but I don't agree,” Carrara said, sitting forward. He turned to Doyle. “He's going to Paris by what route Tommy? East or west?”
“East,” Doyle replied. “With a stopover for fuel in San Francisco.”
“Where the bomb would be off-loaded,” Carrara said, turning back to the DCI. “A customs check on a man such as Fukai would be perfunctory at best. He could drop the bomb off, set on a timer to explode after he was well on his way to Paris. There'd be no evidence left behind to connect him with the device.”
“Then we stop the plane from taking off,” Murphy suggested.
“That wouldn't be so easy,” Ryan cautioned. “As you say, Fukai's stature puts him above that of an ordinary citizen.”
“I can convince the President.”
“And if we were wrong, what then?” the Agency's general counsel asked. “Maybe McGarvey's presence has been detected and the bomb would
not
be loaded aboard that plane. There'd be an international stink if we convinced the Japanese government to go after its richest man and nothing was found. I suggest we wait until the plane lands on U.S. soil and make a routine but thorough customs check. If a bomb is aboard, we'll not only find it, but we'll have Fukai himself in custody.”
“Unless he's insane,” Carrara said softly. “If he's cornered mightn't he trigger the bomb anyway?”
“That's a cheery thought,” Doyle said. “But it's a possibility we should consider.”
“What do you suggest?” Murphy asked.
“Let me call my office first,” Doyle said. “There's been a satellite pass within the past few minutes. Photo Recon has
got a realtime link.” Doyle picked up the phone and called his chief of Analysis. He had his answer almost immediately.
“Well?” Murphy demanded impatiently.
“The 747 that was parked on the apron has been moved to a hangar near the Research and Administration complex. We caught a view of her tail section, but nothing else.” Doyle looked at the others then back to Murphy. “Call the President, Mr. Director, and lay it out for him. Our alternatives, as I see them, are to stop the plane on the ground now, before it leaves Japan; let our customs people take care of it in San Francisco; or …” Doyle hesitated a moment. “Or divert the flight to a deserted airport somewhere well away from any civilian population so that if the bomb is triggered, casualties will be at a minimum.”
“If the pilot refuses?” Ryan asked.
“Then we'd better be ready to shoot it down over the ocean.”
 
Kelley Fuller called two minutes later from a roadside phone three miles from the main gate into the Fukai compound, but still within sight of the airfield. She sounded bad.
“There is still no sign of him,” she said, obviously at the edge of panic. “I think he must have drowned. There were small boats swarming all over the harbor until just a little while ago.”
“Listen to me, I want you to do one more thing for us,” Carrara said. The call was on the speaker phone so everyone could hear.
“Yes, I'm listening,” she said.
“Can you see that big airplane from where you are?”
“Yes,” she answered uncertainly.
“I want you to keep watching it. The moment it moves toward the runway I want you to call us. Then you can get out of there. But only then. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do,” Kelley said. “But what about Kirk?”
“We'll help him,” Carrara said. “Trust me.”

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