Chimera Code (Jake Dillon Adventure Thriller Series)

by Andrew Towning

  Dillon stared at the Glock in his hand. It had done its job - had saved his life again as it had done many times before. But he was angry at how he had been protecting his own would-be Assassin... and now was she dead? Lying with Kirill in a cold freshly dug grave?

  Dillon stood up and paced around the thick trunk of the oak tree, stretching his back and rolling his neck, which cracked as it realigned itself with the release of tension.

  Why hadn’t they killed him earlier?

  Dillon pondered. Maybe the explosions had been intended - not just for him, but for the guests as well? But something had obviously gone horribly wrong with their plan and he had messed it all up for them, and so it had been left to Kirill and Zhenya to carry out the kill. Maybe.

  Dillon rolled the mobile phone in his palm, and then sent his report to Ferran & Cardini.

  What the hell, he thought. Let them figure it out! Maybe Vince Sharp could discover what had happened when the signal to the phone had disappeared as well...

  Twenty minutes later, a low whomping sound made Dillon look up through the canopy of the trees. The sound pounding over the ancient wood.

  Dillon held his position, safely concealed, while he patiently waited for the helicopter to come into view. It hovered directly overhead and then veered away to the right towards the clearing and touched down. The whump, whump, of the rotors sent branches and trees swaying and Dillon ran the hundred metres or so to the cockpit and the serious face of Ferran & Cardini’s most experienced pilot, Tony Brown.

  “Come on, Dillon - hurry up,” he shouted. “We’ve got company close by.”

  “Company?”

  Brown nodded as Dillon climbed into the cockpit of the modified Bell Robinson four-man helicopter and belted himself in. “Put on the spare helmet, will you. I may need your help. Whatever the hell you’ve been up to down here, you’ve certainly stirred up a bloody hornet’s nest. Ever used a helmet with a heads-up display before?”

  “I had one in my own helicopter.”

  “Why use the past-tense?”

  “Because those bastards back there blew it up. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Oh. Well, let’s get this thing back in the air and as far away from this place as possible.”

  The Bell-Robinson’s powerful twin engines screamed and the helicopter launched up into the total darkness of the night. Brown veered left, the nose dipped and the next instant he was heading southeast, following the coast at an altitude of five hundred feet above the white capped waves below.

  Chapter 4

  The twin hulls of the American Navy Sea Predatorstealth ship cut through the tumultuous waters of the Barents Sea, pushed forward at forty-five knots by its nuclear powered turbines. A vessel alone in dark waters, seventy-five miles west of the Russian island of Ostrov Kolguev.

  John Taylor, Commander of the stealth ship and many times decorated special forces veteran, drummed his fingers on the arm of his seat and stared at the charts and information displayed on the large glass screen in front of him. The bridge was buzzing with activity and anticipation as the order was given to bring the one hundred and seventy foot vessel to a stop. The turbines wound down and the sinister looking black painted hulk came to rest on the swell of the sea. Taylor glanced across at his second-in-command, Steve Kramer who had been on the bridge for a straight twelve hours and had a worried expression on his unshaven face as he studied the charts and data stream running across the glass display panel. The Commander smiled warmly, and dismissed the man.

  For the past six months the Americans had been working alongside the British Government and Ferran & Cardini’s research department in an attempt to erase a glitch in the new Kirill-Chimera seek - retrieve - and destroy programme. The Sea Predator’scomputer system had been loaded with the prototype and while undertaking trials ona number of Russian mafia targets - had momentarily become visible to them. Kirill had written the programme in such a way for it to constantly alter its script, once it had infiltrated the target’s hardrive and operating system - allowing all data to be extracted remotely and sent back to the Sea Predator- Kirill had then created a deletion protocol that was activated after releasing a death virus onto the target’s hardrive.

  A young rating by the name of Zak Ryan had immediately spotted the glitch. Had informed Taylor, who barked the order to get off-line and shut down the programme. He was now hoping that their invasive snooping had not been noticed by any eagle-eyed nerds working for the Russian Mafia... The border of Kazakhstan with Russia had, in recent times, seen a hundred fold increase in drug smuggling activities by the Mafia cartels, who were using the inhospitable terrain of the Ural Mountains to transport raw opium all the way up to the coast of the Kara Sea. The opium would then be processed in laboratories and distributed throughout Europe by a sophisticated network of transport routes. From the same labs came the latest designer drug

  - peddled to the higher end of the market and only available to the wealthiest of addicts with the promise of a never before experience. What they found was narcotic hell. This drug, Red Horse as it had been nicknamed, had made the Mafia-led cartels billions of dollars and even more powerful, but was costing the government financially, politically and, of course, socially. Ferran & Cardini had asked the American Navy if they could have the assistance of the Sea Predator in an attempt to locate the labs that were producing and distributing the Red Horse drug and erase them with her lethal payload of missiles.

  A day earlier, the Sea Predatorhad been tracking an unnamed vessel that was under suspicion of drug trafficking; the vessel was the size of a container ship, of unknown origin, and had been making slow progress from the north-east, close to Russia’s Artic coast. Its heading had been on a direct course towards the island of Ostrov Kolguev.

  Now however, the vessel had disappeared.

  Taylor used every resource that the Sea Predator had to find it, to no avail. As a last resort he dispatched two tracking torpedoes, these did not have warheads, instead they were equipped with the latest satellite navigation and tracking systems housed in the nose cone. The torpedoes had a two hundred mile range and had never let the commander of the stealth ship down before. If the mysterious ship that had so far evaded their state-of-the-art searches was there, then they would find it.

  For now, though. They were playing the waiting game.

  Taylor shook his head and sighed, running a hand through his fair coloured hair. He stood up, and paced around the bridge, if for no other reason, than to stretch his legs and relieve the tension he was feeling in his neck and shoulders. He went and took his seat again. “Anything back from the torpedoes?”

  “Negative, Commander.”

  “What about the satellite video stream?”

  “The same Commander, negative. We currently have three satellites passing over this sector, and according to the data they’re sending back down to us. There are no vessels visible to them.”

  Taylor cursed.

  “What is the position of the torpedoes?”

  “They’ve separated, Commander. The first is ninety-five miles due north of us, the other due east approximately seventy miles. If there’s anythingout there, they will find it and report back.” Taylor moved across the bridge to where the young Navy rating was sitting in front of his monitor screen. He looked up and said, a little nervously.

  “Commander, they’ve never missed a target.”

  Taylor nodded, rubbing wearily at his temples. “Have you informed command HQ or Ferran & Cardini of this?”

  “No Sir, I haven’t.”

  “Do so. They may have further intelligence relating to this vessel. What did we find out before it - vanished?”

  “Only that the vessel is approximately four hundred and twentyfive feet in length. That there is a possibility of some sort of weapons system on board. Predator’ssystem has also calculated that the vessel’s speed and distance it covered during the time we were tracking - is much faster than any ship of that size has a right to m
ove at.”

  They waited, watching the torpedoes progress on the display screen. A tense silence filled the entire bridge with the glittering glow of computer monitors displaying data feeds and map co-ordinates. Blue light scattered like sapphires across Taylor’s haggard unshaven face, and his eyes narrowed as his gaze fixed on one of the torpedoes.

  He pointed, “What’s that?”

  There was an instant where the screen went completely blank, resuming a moment later - minus both of the torpedoes.

  “What information was sent back by the torpedoes and can you confirm that they have been terminated?”

  “Zero information, Commander. And yes both torpedoes have been destroyed.”

  “That’s impossible! They’re supposed to relay data back to us on a constant stream. Could there have been a system failure - are you positive that they have been destroyed?”

  “Affirmative, Commander. Both torpedoes have definitely been terminated.”

  Taylor continued to stare at the blank monitor screens, frowning. And then like a tiny Sun exploding from a central black pinpoint, they turned white and then in reverse action - went black again. The Commander turned his attention to the two torpedo-linked scanners before them. A stream of encrypted data started to appear on the screens at lightning speed - lasted for approximately fifteen seconds - and then, like a visual tidal wave, the lines were swept out and into a virtual darkness and death.

  Taylor stared, numbed, at the scanners. Both were now black.

  Both torpedoes had been destroyed.

  “Report status.” he asked, his voice a dry croak.

  “Negative, Commander. All information relating to both torpedoes - appears to have been deleted from our system.”

  “Deleted?”

  “Affirmative, Commander. Deleted.”

  Both torpedoes destroyed; and not a single shred of information left to give the Sea Predatora clue to their attackers, had been registered; not a single warning given. Nothing.

  Taylor could taste the sweet Bourbon on his tongue and he longed for a drink.

  Then, his common sense shouted at him.

  “Contact Command HQ and Ferran & Cardini, again. Tell them we have an emergency situation.”

  “Transmitting, Commander.”

  They waited fifteen seconds - a very long fifteen seconds of tense wondering filled with uneasy sweat and thoughts about death as every man on the bridge waited for a reply, looking out of the stealth ship’s windscreens into total darkness and the black waters of the Barents Sea below their craft. Imagining their enemy with incredibly superior technology - the sort of technology that could make a container ship disappear, the sort of technology that could evade their most sophisticated scanning systems, and the sort of technology that could seek and destroy two fast moving torpedoes that were also equipped with a stealth mode - without giving away any indication of their location or weapons used.

  The reply came back...

  “Two Ferran & Cardini tech officers and one CIA station officer will be with us in approximately three and a half hours from Bergen in Sweden. They’re being flown up by helicopter; we are to deploy one of our mini-predator jet boats to meet them on the Finnish coast. They recommend that we sit tight and do nothing - merely to report any change in our status.”

  Taylor nodded, deep in thought - and then he started to pace across the bridge.

  The ship’s perimeter scanners and monitors remained dark, still and without life; this was not helping when you had started to believe the enemy to be invisible.

  * * * The Sea Predator received the Mini Predator jet boat back into its huge labyrinthine hull. Winches whirred, and within a few seconds the outer doors were watertight, ramps engaged and one uniformed woman and two civilian-suited men walked down the ramp towards Commander John Taylor.

  “I believe you have a problem, Commander, said the tall, blondhaired female. She had cold blue eyes and high cheekbones that highlighted her incredible beauty. She looked at Taylor, assessing the legend that stood before her, as they shook hands. “Major Deborah Armstrong at your disposal, Commander. I have a master’s degree in marine engineering and my expertise is covert marine surveillance and tracking systems. I was part of the design team that invented the stealth torpedoes and I’m currently working with the CIA.”

  Taylor nodded. “Your reputation precedes you, Major Armstrong.”

  “Thank you, Commander. But in these emergency situations

  - my reputation is of little consequence. Let me introduce to you, from Ferran & Cardini, Simon St Vincent, weapon’s expert, and Tim Greenwood, who has an incredibly detailed working knowledge of warships utilised by most world governments.”

  Formalities were speedily dispensed with, and Taylor led the trio straight to the bridge.

  “We have all the data from the ship’s computer system for the last twelve hours, as sent via the upload link at Langley. This shows that no malfunction occurred, at any time, with any of the torpedoe’s systems. It also confirms that no data survived - at all, about any ships or other craft within one-hundred miles of them. At the time of their termination, not one scanner showed anything out of the ordinary?”

  Taylor nodded.

  Deborah Armstrong seated herself in front of one of the monitor screens, and began to type; she merged with the ship’s computers and for a few moments all was silent as data flashed across the main screen located at the centre of the bridge. Eventually, she clasped her hands together, as if she were about to prey, eyes distant. “Gentlemen. I think we are in extreme danger.”

  “You’ve found something, Major?”

  Armstrong nodded. “It was hidden within the data flow; you did receive the reports back from the torpedoes, but they were scrambled so that the Sea Predator’s computers would not recognise the codes.”

  “What destroyed the torpedoes?” Asked Taylor slowly.

  “I don’t know. But they were tracking an extremely large ship, is that correct? Much larger than your run-of-the-mill container ship.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now it’s tracking you, Commander. And it is closing fast.”

  “That’s nonsense. How is it possible to track a stealth ship?”

  “I think it’s obvious, Commander. You are up against a much superior vessel with far superior systems.”

  “Weapons?” Asked Taylor.

  “Oh yes. You’re going to need every weapon you’ve got, Commander.”

  * * * The Sea Predator’s twin hulls cut through the dark waters of the Barents Sea with ease. Turbines roared, all need for stealth thrown off as the sleek craft surged forward towards the protection of the nearest Finnish naval base. A distance of three hundred and sixtyseven nautical miles.

  As the stealth ship increased its speed, so it increased the heat signature in its stern; nose raised, it powered through the water, cloaked only by darkness. Something thumped against the starboard side hull and then another a moment later. On Deborah Armstrong’s instruction they slowed their speed and she analysed the boat’s perimeter scanners, calling for Greenwood’s assistance in quickly disassembling the data. She looked up at Taylor, who was standing off to her left, and said, “The hull sensors are confirming that we haven’t hit anything sinister, like a mine. That it was much more likely to be some sort of floating debris.”

  Suddenly, a siren sounded and a constant flow of data started flashing across all the screens on the bridge simultaneously; Taylor moved forward to the main control console as his second in command looked round and informed him that they were being tracked. A moment later the radar operator shouted in a panicked voice, “They’ve locked on to us, Commander.”

  Taylor snapped; “That’s impossible.” And then immediately gave his crew a string of commands. The Sea Predatorwas fitted with the latest anti-detection systems, and a state-of-the-art predictive combat analysis programme. The Sea Predatorwas supposed to be completely hidden from its enemy - the enemy was not supposed to be able to see t
he stealth boat - at all.

  “Arm and lock-on the Venom IV missiles!” snapped Armstrong as the bridge exploded with activity. Every man and woman present knew their jobs and knew them well; this was what they had been trained for - and now they all knew what they had to do and were doing it well.

  “There it is,” snapped Taylor. Suddenly the ship uncloaked itself from out of nowhere, it was directly in their path and had them firmly locked in its sights; it had caught them by surprise in its trap with every exit covered.

  The stealth ship rocked with the explosion, a scream of steel and a rumbling like distant thunder. The whole boat started to judder, vibrating, and Taylor looked helplessly across the bridge at Deborah Armstrong as it dawned on them that there was a strong possibility that they were going to sink.

  “The missile hit us amidships.” Taylor’s face was ashen white as he met the stare of the crew present on the bridge. Armstrong was screaming orders at the seamen, who were carrying out her directives without question or hesitation. They knew what she wanted and understood the urgency required of them. The implications of ending up in open water and being gunned down was plainly written across their faces, which were bleached with shock and horror, at this terrible thought.

  Every man and woman on the bridge stared at the monitors in disbelief and horror as some form of advanced self-drilling missile had penetrated the supposedly unsinkable multi-compartment hull, and then had started to gouge its way through inch thick plating, wreaking havoc and allowing ice cold water to flood in to the starboard hull. The stealth boat, as yet, had not launched its own lethal payload of missiles. Armstrong consulted the data stream on the monitor, assessed the best possible course of action and then told Taylor. “I suggest you access and authorise every missile we have on board to launch immediately, Commander. We do not have the luxury of time on our side - but - we do now know where the enemy ship is. I have already loaded the command sequence.”