Read Dragon for Free Online Page B

bullets into the front end of the car.
     
    •   •   •
     
    Two kilometers to the east, Captain Korvold was staring through his binoculars at the Divine Star when she blew herself out of existence, vaporizing in the final blink of his eyes.
    A monstrous fireball erupted with a blue brilliance whose intensity was greater than the sun. White hot gasses instantly burst over an area four kilometers in diameter. A hemispherical condensation cloud formed and spread out like a vast doughnut, its interior quickly burned out by the fireball.
    The surface of the sea was beaten down in a great bowl-like depression three hundred meters across. Then an immense column consisting of millions of tons of water rose into the sky, its walls sprouting thousands of horizontal geysers, each as large as the Narvik .
    The shock wave raced from the fireball like an expanding ring around Saturn, speeding outward with a velocity approaching five kilometers a second. It struck the Narvik , pulping the ship into a formless shape.
    Korvold, standing in the open on the bridge wing, did not see the holocaust. His eyes and brain had no time to record it. He was carbonized within a microsecond by thermal radiation from the explosion’s fireball. His entire ship rose out of the water and was tossed back as if struck down by a giant sledgehammer. A molten rain of steel fragments and dust from the Divine Star cascaded the Narvik ‘s shattered decks. Fire burst from her ruptured hull and engulfed the shattered vessel. And then explosions deep in her bowels. The containers on her cargo deck were tossed away like leaves before a gust from a hurricane.
    There was no time for hoarse, tortured screams. Anyone caught on deck flared like a match, crackled, and was gone. The entire ship became an instant funeral pyre to her 250 passengers and crew.
    The Narvik began to list, settling fast. Within five minutes of the explosion she rolled over. Soon only a small portion of her bottom was visible, and then she slid under the agitated waters and vanished in the depths.
    Almost as suddenly as the Divine Star evaporated, it was over. The great cauliflower-shaped cloud that had formed over the fireball slowly scattered and became indistinguishable from the overcast. The shimmering fury of the water calmed, and the surface smoothed but for the rolling swells.
    Twelve kilometers across the sea the Invincible still floated. The incredible pressure of the shock wave had not yet begun to diminish when its full force smashed into the survey ship. Her superstructure was gutted and stripped away, exposing interior bulkheads. Her funnel tore from its mountings and whirled into the boiling water as the bridge disappeared in a violent shower of steel and flesh.
    Her masts were bent and distorted, the big crane used to retrieve Old Gert was twisted and thrown on one side, the hull plates saucered inward between her frame and longitudinal beams. Like the Narvik , the Invincible had been beaten into a formless shape that was almost unrecognizable as a ship.
    The paint on her sides had blistered and blackened under the fiery blast. A plume of black oily smoke billowed from her smashed port side and lay like a boiling carpet over the water around her hull. The heat bored right through anyone exposed in the open. Those below decks were badly injured by concussion and flying debris.
    Jimmy Knox had been thrown violently into an unyielding steel bulkhead, bouncing backward and gasping for air as if he was in a vacuum. He wound up flat on his back, spread-eagled, staring up stunned through a gaping hole that appeared as if by magic in the ceiling.
    He lay there waiting for the shock to pass, struggling to concentrate on his predicament, wondering in a fog what had happened to his world. Slowly he gazed around the compartment at the bent bulkheads, seeing the heavily damaged electronic equipment that looked like a robot with its guts pulled out, smelling the smoke from the fires, and he