Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

With an explosive bang, the six-inch steel rod shot across the room. Designed to penetrate metal, the bolt met almost no resistance as it punched through Komosa’s rib cage and heart before erupting from his back and slamming into the bulkhead. Pinned like a butterfly to a board, Komosa stared in shock at Chase before releasing a final bubbling wheeze. His head slumped forward, more blood running out of the neat hole in his chest to join the ooze dribbling from his broken mouth. The gun clunked to the deck at his feet.

“That was horrible,” Nina gasped.

“Fucker deserved it,” Chase said weakly, dropping the empty bolt gun and crawling towards her.

“No, I meant the pun.”

A noise escaped Chase’s mouth that could almost have been a laugh. “Are you okay?”

“Forget me, what about the bomb?” She squinted at it, trying to read the figures on the screen. “Oh my God! There’s only six minutes left!”

Chase changed direction, somehow finding the strength to push himself upright. Reeling, he went to Komosa’s body and picked up the gun. “You’ve got to get to the bridge, send out a Mayday-channel sixteen. Then turn the ship around, get it as far from land as you can.”

“What about you?”

“I’m gonna try and stop that thing from going off! Pull the chain around the pipe.”

She did as he said. “I thought you said it was booby-trapped!”

Chase placed the gun’s muzzle shakily against the chain, directing it as far away from Nina’s hands as he could. “I’ve got to do something!” He fired. The chain broke, Nina’s wrists springing apart. “Go on, get moving!”

With a worried look back at his bloodied face, Nina hurried from the hold.

Chase staggered over to the bomb. “Okay, what’ve we got?” The timer read 00:05:22. “Five minutes to stop a nuke going off. I can do that. Yeah.”

Leaning on the cap for support, he looked down into the heart of the steel base. The thick bolts that held down the uranium slug had retracted. He reached into the hole, hoping that he might be able to pull the slug out from the rails, but the fit was too precise for him to get even a fingernail’s grip around its edge.

If he couldn’t get the slug out, then maybe he could block its path…

Fragments of information from his SAS briefings surfaced through the roiling dizziness. In a bomb of this type, the two pieces of uranium needed to be kept at least ten inches apart to prevent them from reacting to each other and emitting radiation prematurely. That explained the gap separating the base and the cap.

So if he could jam the rails…

Winded, Nina entered the bridge.

As she’d expected, it was empty-everybody else aboard had left in the tilt-rotor. To her horror, the view through the wide windows was filled by the familiar outline of lower Manhattan: Battery Park a swath of green to the left with the glass block of the Freedom Tower rising beyond the older brick buildings; to the right the ferry terminal and the South Street Seaport, the financial district’s anonymous skyscrapers a sunlit wall behind the shoreline. The Ocean Emperor was making a slow turn, heading up the East River.

She ran to the wheel. The ship was obviously running on autopilot-if she could cancel it and turn back into the harbor…

The wheel spun in her hands, but the ship’s turn didn’t alter. The steering was operated electronically, not directly linked to the rudder, and the computer wasn’t giving up its control.

“Shit!” She looked for a way to release the autopilot. Nothing jumped out at her, just ranks of indecipherable monitor screens.

The radio-

That was easy to find, at least, a push-button handset on a coiled wire. She turned one of the dials until “ 16” appeared in an LED display and took the handset. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! This is the Ocean Emperor off lower Manhattan-there is a nuclear bomb aboard! I repeat, this is the vessel Ocean Emperor declaring a Mayday, there is a nuclear bomb aboard set to go off in four minutes!”

She waited for a response. Several seconds passed with nothing but the faint hiss of static. She was about to try again when a rather irate man’s voice crackled from the speaker. “Ocean Emperor , this is the Coast Guard. I must inform you that making a hoax Mayday call is a federal crime carrying sanctions of up to six years’ imprisonment and a fine of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fine, whatever!” Nina spluttered. “Get your ass aboard and arrest me-just make it quick, ’cause I can’t stop this boat!”

Another pause.

“Did you say…nuclear bomb?” the man asked.

“Yes! Nuclear bomb! B-O-M-B bomb! We’ve got Hiroshima in the hold and we don’t know how to stop it! Call Homeland Security, call the president, call whoever the fuck you need to call, just do it in the next four minutes!”

Somebody else spoke in the background before the transmission cut off. Nina shifted her weight anxiously from foot to foot. “Come on, come on, do something…”

Finally, a reply came. “Ocean Emperor , we are issuing a full alert,” said the man.

“Oh thank God!”

“But if you are telling the truth… there’s not really anything we can do in four minutes. It’s up to you to stop it.”

Nina stared at the handset. “Well, that helps! Thanks a lot!” She threw it down onto the console and ran back for the stairs. “Eddie! We have a problem!”

Chase heard the distant shout. “So what’s new?” he said to himself.

He had collected what few items he’d been able to find in the hold-Komosa’s pistol, the bolt gun-and attempted to wedge them inside the vertical rails to block the uranium slug’s path. But they weren’t enough. They could stop the slug from hitting the cap and achieving critical mass-but it would still get close enough to release a massive burst of radiation that would not only kill him and irradiate the entire yacht, leaving a huge piece of lethally radioactive junk adrift off one of the world’s most densely populated cities, but possibly be powerful enough to affect people on land as well.

He needed more. But the hold was empty. Just him and the bomb.

And Komosa’s corpse…

He checked the timer. Three minutes.

Less.

Chase stood, the pain in his head surging, and unsteadily made his way across the hold. The deck was rubber beneath his feet, like walking across a slack trampoline. He suspected he had a concussion, but couldn’t afford the time to think about it. Instead, he reached up and took Komosa by the shoulders, trying to slide him off the bolt pinning him to the wall.

Dark blood oozed glutinously from the hole in Komosa’s chest as he pulled, but the body only moved slightly. The bolt was stuck inside his rib cage.

Nina entered the hold. “Eddie!” she gasped as she saw him manhandling the corpse. “What’re you doing?”

“Help me get him down,” Chase said.

“What for?” Nina began to ask, but then she saw the guns stuck through the rails separating the two sections of the bomb and realized what he had in mind. “Wait, you’re going to use him to jam the thing up? What is this, Weekend at Bernie’s?”

“He’s all we have! Come on, give me a hand. How long’ve we got?”

Nina checked the timer. “Two minutes!”

She ran across the room to join him, suppressing her disgust as she took hold of one of Komosa’s arms. Chase gripped the other. “Okay,” he said, “ready, and pull!”

They both braced their feet against the wall and leaned back, pulling as hard as they could. Komosa’s head lolled, broken mouth agape. A horrible squishing, crunching noise came from somewhere deep inside the dead man’s chest, but he remained pinned.