Deadly Impact (2014)

by Tonkin, Peter

  ‘Tea,’ said Robin forcefully. ‘Is there a restaurant we can go to while they unpack my cases?’

  ‘The California,’ answered Anastasia. ‘I could do with something to eat myself. A little American obed. Let’s go.’

  Robin pondered the oxymoron that coupled the concept American with the uniquely Russian meal obed on the way down in the lift. But when they arrived at the California restaurant, she understood what Anastasia was talking about. In the face of a bewildering selection of cold meats and fish, salads, cheeses and noodles chilled or steaming, they both settled for what the menu called ‘The American Breakfast’, which Robin would frankly have called a Full English in any other context. Bacon, eggs, sausages, grilled tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, toast and – blessedly – tea. Twinings Traditional English in a teabag with a little label on the end of the dunking thread. As far as Robin was concerned, it was as welcome as anything even Fortnum and Mason could have served back home at 181 Piccadilly. ‘Now,’ she said as she finished her third reviving cup and looked at her friend across the meagre remains of two American breakfasts, ‘what’s all this about a meeting of the NIPEX board in …’ She checked her watch. ‘… just over three hours’ time?’

  ‘Three hours?’ said Anastasia. ‘But it’s an hour in the car! You have only two hours to change and get ready! How on earth are you going to manage?’

  The answer to that was by the skin of her teeth. But even as the chauffeur came up the steps from the hotel’s porte cochère to find Anastasia waiting impatiently in Reception, so the lift door opened and her English equivalent arrived. The black pencil dress with the ruffle collar was by Alexander McQueen, as was the wave-panel short dress coat in household cavalry red that she wore over it, open, with its tails flapping in the wind of her passage. It might be hot and humid but, like Anastasia, Robin was dressed to impress. The stiletto pumps marching determinedly across the marble were black to match the dress, as was the Heroine tote shoulder bag that was just big enough to take her laptop as well as all the necessities she had transferred from her travelling bag. And if her freshly coiffed hair was not quite dry – if the coat was still a little warm from its steam-pressing, nothing could detract from the simple impact Robin made as she strode across Reception.

  ‘Right,’ barked Captain (Mrs) Mariner, her quarterdeck voice carrying to every ear in the place – and at least some in the eight-sided temple at the far end of the garden. Even Anastasia jumped. ‘Time for the off.’

  20 Hours to Impact

  Angela van der Piet is an unusual person, though she doesn’t think of herself as such. Nothing frightens her. Nothing and no one. Or so she tells herself. And she needs to keep reminding herself of this fact on a regular basis at the moment because her subconscious keeps on screaming to her that she is buried in an airless grave and slowly suffocating to death. Her subconscious knows what it is screaming about, too, for during her days as one of the few female frontline operatives in the KCT, the Dutch equivalent of the British Royal Marine Commandoes, she was buried alive at least once. And lucky to survive the experience. Since as well, during her days as a mercenary, she has been in tight situations, in tiny, airless places, both ashore and on board ship, with the feeling that she has been entombed and forgotten, like a long-lost Egyptian mummy. But she is not, in fact, buried. It just feels like it. Or it would do so, except that her apparent tomb keeps rolling from side to side and occasionally giving a disconcerting swoop to port that almost brings her stomach up into her throat. And she is moving.

  The Pitman is worming her way along a cramped and lightless duct below the bottom deck where the lowest sheaf of pipes joins the undersides of the Moss tanks to each other, a matter of centimetres above Sayonara’s bilges mere metres above her keel. The system is an exact replica of the pipework joining the five huge spherical tanks up above the whaleback in the vastness of the cool, clean air which is restricted by nothing but the horizon. The contrast, thinks the Pitman bitterly, could hardly be greater. This is the fifth tank she has checked, starting with tank number five immediately in front of – and far below – the bridge. Tank number one, nearest to the ship’s bulbous bow, has been the most difficult to get to. But maybe that is just because she is getting tired and bored. A lesser person would have given up long ago, probably at the moment when her radio snagged and she lost contact with Ivan and Harry. A lesser person would never have survived as long as the Pitman has – and proposes to continue doing, into a lengthy, fulfilled, contented and wealthy retirement. If her plans and dreams come true. And if she stays lucky.

  There is room for a maintenance engineer to crawl along here with a torch and some equipment. But the average engineer is likely to be a slight-framed Japanese man, not a strapping Dutch woman more than two metres tall with shoulders as wide as a rugby prop forward’s. He is likely to be dressed in overalls and carrying a small case of carefully selected tools, not clad in a back camos and battle top, with a bulky bulletproof vest festooned with webbing, hung with a malfunctioning radio, ammunition clips, Glock nine-millimetre handguns and Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knives. Above all, perhaps, the engineer would be holding a sensible torch. He would not be using the beam from the detachable Surefire G2 Nitrolon bulletproof flashlight mounted beneath the barrel of a compact but cumbersome short-barrelled rifle to brighten his way.

  But all of a sudden, the Pitman finds herself reckoning that the fear and discomfort have been worthwhile after all. She has just found one of the bombs that Richard asked her to check for. The only one so far, in fact. It is ominously huge and very fucking dangerous. She freezes, breathing deeply and steadily, disregarding everything except what she can see. And that would frighten anybody. As far as the Pitman can make out, the massive bomb is a very professional-looking piece of work. As part of her Vaktechnische opleiding Speciale Operaties training after she was awarded her green beret, she went through a demolition course and some basic bomb-disposal work. Since then, in the army and as a mercenary, she has handled C4 and Semtex plastic explosives. The peculiar faint putty smell that can usually only be discerned in close proximity to C4 in confined spaces or when being confronted with extremely large quantities is the clue. Especially in the absence of the distinctive Tolulene paint-thinner odour of Semtex. Or of recent, tagged Semtex at any rate. All three circumstances that identify that C4 rather than Semtex seem to be in play at once here and now. The distinction is important in that Semtex is more powerful than C4. But in quantities like this it hardly matters.

  The vast underside of the spherical tank seems to be enclosed in a broad ring of explosive stretching beyond the range of the Pitman’s vision. It is impossible for her to see the whole of the tank bottom from where she is. The huge downward swell of the tank, which she can almost feel with its massively crushing weight above her, comes to a point where the pipework reaches down to run back along the duct she has just checked. It is supported by stays like spider’s legs that hold the tank and the pipe securely above the deck which separates them from the ship’s bilges. The nearest section of the area is open so that she has a view of perhaps a quarter of the entire base before the huge pipes plunge down and bend towards the stern and the next spider’s leg blocks her view. And all around the section she can see from here is a double ring of big grey plastic bricks linked together with bright wires. All of her experience with C4 tells her that those wires will end in a detonator. And that the detonator will either be controlled by a timer, a remote signal or an impact trigger. Or one of the above backed up by another. Given the placing of the explosives on the first tank, an impact trigger seems the most likely primary detonator. And, she reckons coldly, an impact trigger would probably be the best idea if Macavity and his men want to ensure the destruction but make it look like an accident resulting from some kind of collision.

  What was it Richard was saying about the incorrectly set GPS taking Sayonara into the middle of the floating city? That would be very messy indeed. This amount of C4 would make a big enough
bang itself. But the C4, of course, is only designed to be the detonator of a far larger explosion when the cargo of an LNG tanker goes up, like the high-explosive trigger that sets off a nuclear bomb. She taps her throat microphone again. ‘Ivan,’ she whispers. ‘Ivan, can you hear me? Harry?’ There is no reply – not even the faint hissing of an open channel in her ear. With a mental shrug – the only kind she can actually manage – the Pitman starts to worm her way forward once again, her mind returning to the immediate problem. An impact trigger would mean that the main detonator is likely to be on the front of the bomb. So the wires – and there will almost certainly be wires – should lead from the bomb’s main detonator to the trigger somewhere on the bows. After five more minutes of effort, she has a clear view of the foremost curve. The circle of explosives does in fact seem to come to some kind of point there, like the noon mark on a clock face. There is an extra element sticking out. There are, as she suspected there would be, wires stretching forward. The bright beam of her Surefire flashlight allows her to follow the line of bright wire across the deck and up the far wall.

  The Pitman lies half on her back for a moment, her opal eyes fixed on the upward track of the wires and her mind far removed from her current position, even when the hull gives one of its occasional swoops to port and the sound of a wave crashes like thunder rolling along the tall steel hull behind and far above her, where the surface of the ocean is. She is thinking about the big, bulbous bow that begins on the far side of the wall where the wires are, and how far under water it is. She has, ghost-like, unsuspected, been observing Macavity and his men since soon after she came aboard. She has seen the way they are holding Richard’s men hostage – suspiciously easily. She is not surprised that Richard wants Ivan to check for Italian connections because she suspects that Dom DiVito is not the only member of the Heritage Mariner team who could be playing for the opposition. Aleks Zaitsev and Macavity are thick as thieves. Steve Penn shuttles between them in a free and friendly manner. Even some of Ivan’s other soldiers are getting a pretty easy ride. And was Rikki Sato the only technician who seemed to be playing a double game? But no matter who has been where, and doing what – and why – she has seen no one with anything that looks even faintly like diving equipment. So, unless the impact trigger was put in place before the ship was launched, Macavity and his men cannot make use of the submarine section of the bow. Therefore, she decides, the trigger must be above the surface. Up on Sayonara’s cutwater or forecastle head.

  But then again, she thinks as she worms her way back to the nearest trapdoor that will release her out of the ducting and on to the deck, unless the impact trigger is very small or very well disguised, it is likely to be all too visible to anyone who gets a good look at Sayonara. And, no matter what is actually planned to happen during the next twenty hours or so, various people are certainly going to get a very good look at her. Logically, therefore, the impact trigger would be disguised or hidden. But then it occurs to the Pitman that, just as she hasn’t seen anyone with any diving gear, she hasn’t seen anyone with any heavy-duty cutting gear either. There is probably welding gear on board, together with the other emergency equipment such as that required to fix the bridge windows, she thinks. But heavy-duty cutting gear – that’s something else again. On the dockside at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipbuilding yards – yes. On board Sayonara – probably not. So, how could Macavity and his men get the impact trigger on to the outside of the forecastle head without cutting through the bow plates?

  Just as there are companionways leading from one deck to another within the bridge house and halfway along the hull, so there are at the bows. These, unlike the ducting, are brightly lit. Brightly enough to show the wire the Pitman is following as it continues to mount from the keel towards the upper decks, sometimes half-hidden among the wiring on the forward-facing wall of the companionway, beside the labels announcing the numbers of the decks, and sometimes on the wall at the far forward end of the corridors the companionways lead to. By the time the Pitman has oozed like a shadow through the brightness following the wire up to Engineering Deck C, she has worked out the most likely answer to her own question. They must have put it through the hawse hole and concealed it behind the anchor. And proof seems to be offered by the fact that the wire has vanished by the time she reaches Deck C. Wherever it has gone, it went on Engineering Deck D. There is, she knows, an anchor on each side of the forecastle head. A moment’s more thought, however, makes her certain that the impact trigger will be behind the starboard anchor. Sayonara will be coming south out of the North Pacific when she arrives at the NIPEX facility in Choshi. So the starboard side will be nearest to the coast of Japan, to the facility, to whatever is the target.

  As part of her preparations for this assignment she had gone through the details of the ship’s design in the finest detail Richard’s laptop and Harry’s hacking into the Mitsubishi computer records could provide, as well as everything she could discover online about ships – how to supply, maintain and handle them. She knows every deck, compartment, nut and bolt of Sayonara. She knows that the hawse holes – if that is the correct term for whatever lets the anchor chains out and in – open from the chain lockers themselves. There are sizeable windlasses on the forecastle head on either side of the helideck that will raise and lower the massive anchors themselves, and the chain rises and falls through chain-pipes from the deck. But the chains are kept in chain lockers and Sayonara is so designed that the hawse holes are right at the top of these. When Sayonara is at sea, the anchors hang secured in place – carefully secured if the wild gyrations during the typhoon have not set anything off, which in itself would seem to suggest a perfect place to hide an impact trigger which could appear to be just another piece of the ironwork holding the anchor securely in place. The entrance to each of the chain lockers is on Engineering Deck D, one deck down, and the Pitman is retracing her steps when she freezes. The bow section has been quiet for hours. Deserted, apart from her. But now she senses that someone else is approaching. She holds her breath, focusing all her senses on trying to hear who might be nearing, and where from. Almost silent footsteps advance but up on the deck she has just left. Swiftly and silently, she slides on down until she has reached the door into the chain locker. She had planned to pause and try to fix her radio now she has more space, but the unexpected footsteps have changed her priorities. She opens the handle, thankful that this, like everything on board, is new, well-greased and silent. She steps through, climbing on to a ladder secured to the wall immediately inside the door, easing the heavy metal access closed behind her. There is a handle on the inside – a twin to the outer one. She half-closes it, hoping that no one will notice anything from outside. And then she turns.

  There is some light in the locker, coming in from the hawse hole in the starboard bow. But she flicks on her flashlight as well. She looks around, breathing in the strange atmosphere of new stainless steel overlaid with the timeless smell of the sea. A smell that comes from below and all around her – not just through the hawse hole on the vagrant breeze. The locker is not large; it’s little more than four metres across. As she is standing one rung up from the top of a great coil of chain she has no real notion of how deep the chain locker is but it rises little more than a metre above her as she straightens to full height. The bright yellow beam of the Surefire flashlight searches the walls and finds the wire almost at once. And it follows a clear line, carefully secured to walls and the deck head, over towards the brightness of the great square hole beneath which the anchor is secured. Glad of her Bates GLX Ultralite boots but wishing she had the extra security of her steel-toed Doc Martens, she steps down and begins to cross the slight hillock of anchor chain, her mind focused on following the vivid thread of wire. The massive hill of metal is unexpectedly hard to walk on. The links are like rocks on the seashore, round, unstable and slippery. On her second step she nearly falls. Her third step brings her close to the big square hole in the forecastle head, with its roller more
than a metre wide at the bottom to ease the passage of the chain. The chain itself reaches out to where the anchor is secured against the flare of the forecastle head. The last few links, as big as rugby balls with a cross-section halfway down their length, are lying across the roller, bearing no weight because of the way the anchor is secured. She takes another, shorter step, craning to see the top of the anchor on the outside of the hull. A huge bolt secured through a massive metal ring shines brightly in the morning sunlight. The anchor itself hangs below – nearly two metres of it, ending in a flat wedge that stands out like a little platform. Under the water, this will dig into the sea bed and hold the vessel steady. And, somewhere behind that little ledge or behind the two metres of the shank or the cross-piece above it, there is the impact trigger that will set off Macavity’s bomb. If only she can just get a good look at it.

  But then disaster strikes. Sayonara gives another roll, which ends in the sideways twist that almost made her sick earlier. The motion is enough to make the chain move in sympathy. It stirs like a sleepy serpent; the hillock on which she is standing imitates the wave Sayonara has just crossed. The Pitman is thrown forward. She loses her grip on her rifle and only its shoulder strap saves it from flying through the hawse hole. The Pitman follows it, however. She slithers helplessly forward. Her head and shoulders slide out across the roller, which moves in turn. She just has the presence of mind – and the simple naked luck – to grab on to that final link of the chain. Then she is outside, hanging on for dear life, her feet scrabbling to find purchase on the flat ledge of the anchor secured below her.