“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

Puzzled, Trulli did as she asked. After a few seconds, a couple of dozen new markers appeared. There were several in the Bahamas, where Corvus’s shipping line was based, more either in or close to major East Coast ports…

And one on its own, off the Virginia coast. Directly along the tilt-rotor’s course.

Nina stabbed her finger at it. “That! What’s that?”

Trulli zoomed in. “It’s the Ocean Emperor!”

Nina’s mind flashed back to the party where she had first met Sophia. “Corvus’s boat?”

“Yeah. It’s heading for New York, doing about twenty-three knots, so if it keeps up that speed it’ll get there tomorrow morning, about nine-ish.”

“It’s got a helipad,” Nina remembered. “Is it in range of Sophia’s plane?”

Trulli checked. “Yes.”

“That’s what she’s doing. If she tried to fly over the city the air force would intercept her, and there are nuclear detectors on the roads-but she can land on the Ocean Emperor and sail the nuke right into New York Harbor without anyone knowing a thing until it’s too late!”

“Jesus,” gasped Trulli. “So what do we do? We’ve got to tell somebody!”

“Yeah, but who? I can’t go to the authorities-I’m wanted for murder!”

He gave her a shocked look. “You’re what?”

“I didn’t do it! But we can’t just phone up Homeland Security-Corvus had friends in the government, they won’t send the Coast Guard to pull over his boat on an anonymous tip.”

“Corvus is dead,” Trulli reminded her.

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. Plus, if they do stop them…Sophia’ll kill Eddie. I know it.” She looked away from the computer, through the office window. “I’ve got to get on that boat.”

“Even if we had a chopper, which we don’t, it wouldn’t have the range or the speed,” Trulli protested. “There’s no way we can catch them.”

“What about that?” She pointed at the suspended submarine.

“Huh?”

“That. You said it was fast-how fast?”

“In theory, anything up to four hundred knots, but-” Trulli froze as he realized what she meant. “No way, it’s still experimental! I’ve never tested it at full power!”

“Well,” said Nina firmly, “now’s your chance.”

“This is a really bad idea,” said Trulli as he operated the electric winch controls. The Wobblebug slowly descended into the still water of the dock, the surface rippling gently around its curving hull.

“Noted,” Nina told him. “If we sink, you can say that you told me so.”

“It’s not sinking I’m worried about. It’s blowing up.”

Nina looked more closely at the submarine. In some ways it reminded her of a wingless jet fighter. Two gaping intakes near the bow, currently blocked by metal louvres, led back to much narrower rocketlike nozzles at the stern. The bow itself, however, was oddly blunt where she would have expected it to be streamlined, as if somebody had sliced off the tip of the pointed nose. “What do you mean, blowing up?”

“It’s why I called it the Wobblebug. The original Wobblebugs were steam-powered cars from like a century ago.”

“It’s steam powered?” Nina said in disbelief.

“Yeah. It’s not like it burns coal, though!” He pointed at the intakes. “Seawater goes in the front and gets superheated by electric elements, and the steam blasts out of the back like a rocket motor. Most of the hull’s full of polymer polypyrrole batteries-it’s the only way to deliver enough juice short of using a nuclear reactor.”

“Wait, it can do four hundred knots just using steam? So why isn’t everybody doing that? I thought submarines were pretty slow.”

“They are.” Trulli stopped the winch, the Wobblebug now floating in the water, and hopped onto its casing to detach the cables. He pointed at the blunt bow. “But if you make the nose the right shape, when you hit a certain speed you get supercavitation-kind of a shock wave of air bubbles around the hull that cuts the drag from the water down to almost nothing. Like underwater warp drive. The Russians have had supercavitating torpedoes called Squalls for over a decade that can do two hundred and fifty knots, no problem.” The cables at the stern released, he made his way forward, balancing on the rocking hull with the ease of a tightrope walker. “The reason nobody’s used the technology for manned subs is that it’s really hard to get the design right.”

“Until now.”

“Well,” Trulli said pointedly, “that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” He unhooked the final cable and jumped back to the winch controls to raise the steel lines out of the way.

Nina regarded the vessel. “But assuming it works-”

“Which is a big assumption.”

“-we should be able to catch up with the Ocean Emperor long before it reaches New York, right?”

“We should. Just a couple of problems, though-first off, you’ve actually got to get aboard the Ocean Emperor from the Wobblebug.”

Nina glanced over at the cagelike storage units beneath Trulli’s office, which among other items contained coils of rope. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Uh-huh. The second problem is that it’s a one-way trip. If the Ocean Emperor’s not where we expect, we’re screwed. There’s no going back.”

“Why not?”

“You need to get up to a certain speed before the supercavitation effect starts working. And the only way to do that’s with a rocket. A real rocket, not a steam-powered one.”

Nina looked back at the Wobblebug’s stern. Recessed between the two nozzles of the steam jets was a third, broader opening. “A rocket?”

“Yeah. It’s a solid-fuel rocket, like the kind they use to launch missiles from subs. Once it’s ignited it can’t be stopped-and it only lasts for thirty seconds. When the sub slows down below supercav speed, that’s it. It can’t speed up again. It’s got backup pump-jets so it can maneuver, but they can only do twenty knots tops. Twenty-five, if you’re not worried about them burning out.”

“The only things I’m worried about right now are saving Eddie and stopping my home from being nuked,” Nina said.

“Point taken.” Trulli switched off the winch and took the end of an electric cable from a reel, uncoiling it as he boarded the sub again. He opened the top hatch. “Okay, I’ll get everything prepped, and-”

“Mr. Trulli!” They looked around to see the security guard, Barney, walking towards them. “Is everything all right?”

“Er, yeah, mate,” Trulli said unconvincingly. “No worries. Just, ah…” He looked down into the open hatch. “Think my keys might be in here.”

Barney gave Nina a suspicious glance, then walked past her to stand at the edge of the dock. “Looks to me like you’re planning to take this thing out.”

Trulli adopted a cheesy grin. “Dunno why you’d think that.”

“You know that Mr. Corvus has to give his personal permission for each launch.” Barney’s hand moved towards his holstered gun. “I think you should step back onto the dock and-unk!”

He staggered, then fell to the dock. The fire extinguisher with which Nina had just hit him over the head clanked down beside him as she put her hands on her hips and addressed Trulli. “So, Matt. Are we good to go?”

“You’ve changed since I first met you,” he muttered, then dropped into the hatch, the cable trailing behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, the unconscious Barney had been tied up and locked inside one of the storage cages, and the large door at the end of the building raised. A cold wind blew in from the sea, the Wobblebug creaking against the fat rubber bumpers hanging over the side of the dock as waves lapped along it.

Trulli’s head popped out of the hatch. “Okay, we’re ready. As we’re going to be, anyway. I’ve hooked up a GPS receiver to the onboard computer, but it won’t work until we surface, so if the Ocean Emperor changes course while we’re underwater, we’re screwed.”