Snakehead

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 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.
    “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 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 comprehensively 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. Major Yu’s bone structure wasn’t strong enough to withstand it. Every single bone in his body fractured at the same time. For about two seconds, he remained vaguely human. Then his body, with no frame to support it, crumpled in on itself, a bag of skin full of broken pieces. The boat veered around, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of British engineering with no one to steer it. Zigzagging crazily, it disappeared into the night.
    Back on Dragon Nine, Yu’s remaining men were being rounded up. The SAS had lost two men, with three more injured. Ben Daniels was still alive. He’d been given a shot of morphine, and there was an oxygen mask strapped to his face.
    Scooter had finally noticed the other body lying in the control room.
    “Who was that?” he asked.
    Alex took one last look at his godfather.
    “It was nobody,” he said.

23
    DINNER FOR THREE
    “I T’S VERY GOOD TO see you, Alex. How are you getting on at school?”
    It seemed a very long time since Alex had last found himself back in this room, the office on