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.

“The guy’s still a pain in the arse when he’s dead!” Chase exclaimed. “Okay, pull!”

They hauled at his arms once more, straining to break him free. The wet noise came again, this time accompanied by a drier crackling. “Come on!” Chase yelled at the body. “Come loose, you fucking great-”

With a sharp crack of bone as the rib that had been impaled by the bolt finally snapped, Komosa jerked away from the wall and toppled over. Off balance with their feet against the wall, Nina and Chase fell with him. Nina shrieked as the huge man landed on top of her, his dead hand splayed over her face like a giant fleshy spider. She batted it aside, revolted.

Chase kicked himself out from under the corpse, then lifted it off Nina. “Come on, we’ve only got-” He checked the timer. “Shit! We’ve only got a fucking minute!”

They each grabbed one of Komosa’s wrists, then pulled him across the hold. Too slowly. At six feet eight of solid muscle, he was no lightweight. Nina looked over her shoulder at the timer.

Fifty seconds…

“Are all-his bloody piercings-made of lead?” Chase grunted between each nightmarishly sluggish step. The bomb was six feet away, five, four…

Forty seconds…

“Okay!” Chase gasped as the corpse finally thunked against the bomb’s solid base. “Shove his arms in above the guns-we’ve got to block at least a foot of that gap!” He crouched and grabbed one of Komosa’s hands, forcing it through the rails. Nina did the same with the other.

Thirty…

Chase reached around to grab Komosa’s fingers and feed his hand out through the other side of the bomb. It didn’t move.

The Nigerian’s forearms were too thick to fit between the rails.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Chase moaned. He shifted position and gripped the dead man’s elbow, trying to shove his arm farther through the gap. Nina let go of the hand she was holding to help him.

No luck. Only the first few inches of Komosa’s wrist would go through before his bodybuilder’s muscles wedged tight against the steel.

Twenty…

Nina switched her efforts back to the other arm, managing to get the hand and wrist into the gap-but nothing more. She jumped back and desperately kicked at his elbow, trying to hammer the arm in deeper, but with no success. Ten…

“Fuckfuckfuck!” spat Chase as the timer dropped into single figures. Even with the two guns and both of Komosa’s hands obstructing the rails, it wasn’t enough to stop the uranium slug from reaching a critical distance. He needed something else, something at least four inches thick.

But there wasn’t anything.

Except-

Five…

“Get back!” Chase yelled at Nina, shoving her away from the bomb. Three, two…

With a roar, Chase thrust his own left arm into the gap.

One…

Zero.

The explosive charge beneath the uranium slug in the bomb’s base detonated. The can-size cylinder of superdense U-235 leaped upwards like a cannon shell, fire spewing out beneath it as it cleared the base and raced up the rails, hitting the bolt gun and the Browning and carrying them upwards with it.

They hit Komosa’s dead hands, breaking bones with the force of the impact.

And slammed them up-

Into Chase’s arm.

Still roaring, he had tensed every muscle to prepare for the pain he knew was about to come-but it was still beyond anything he’d imagined as his forearm was smashed against the underside of the cap. Even with Komosa’s hands cushioning the impact, both the bones in his forearm broke as the slug flew up the rails towards the waiting supercritical uranium mass…