Understrike

by James Barrington

  An impartial observer would have questioned his decision to choose that spot, because in the previous three months two other dossers had been beaten to death in that same length of street. The road was lined with commercial premises, silent and abandoned after the end of the working day, and if something happened there was no one around to help or even to witness what took place. Maybe the dosser didn’t know this, or maybe he did and was simply past caring. Or maybe there was another reason.

  The street didn’t really lead anywhere, apart from the premises of the companies that were established there, and although the occasional car or taxi drove past, there were almost never any pedestrians.

  So when the anonymous dosser heard the sound of heavy footsteps, accompanied by loud and aggressive-sounding voices approaching along the pavement from his left, he immediately looked up and stared towards the approaching half-dozen youths.

  There was nowhere he could go, no shelter he could seek, so he just eased himself slightly backwards, bracing himself against the wooden door behind him, and waited. It was possible that the approaching group would simply walk straight past him. Probably unlikely, but at least possible.

  They didn’t.

  Still talking loudly, they stopped and formed a rough semicircle around the old man in the doorway, staring at him. A couple of them were grinning the same way that a shark smiles, showing lots of teeth and ill intent.

  ‘This is our fucking patch, grandad,’ one of the youths said, his remark prompting titters of amusement among his fellows, ‘and if you want to hang around here, that means you get to pay the fucking price.’

  ‘Sod off,’ the dosser said, apparently unafraid of the group confronting him. As he spoke, he slid his right hand into the outside pocket of his heavy coat, and left it there.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got a fucking hard man here,’ the youth said. ‘Or an old tosser who thinks he’s a hard man, and that means we’re going to have to teach him a fucking good lesson. The kind of lesson that he won’t forget in a hurry.’

  ‘Or that he’ll never fucking forget,’ another one said, pulling a switchblade from his pocket and clicking open the blade.

  The dosser stared at the knife for an instant and then shook his head.

  ‘Look, just bugger off, will you? I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘It’s too fucking late for that, old man.’

  The apparent leader of the group reached into one of his own pockets and pulled out a collapsible steel baton, similar to the sort carried by British police constables, and snapped it open. It made a hissing sound as he swung it through the air in front of him. Beside him, the other youths began pulling out their weapons of choice: another switchblade, a couple of Stanley knives, and the biggest of the group ostentatiously slid a set of brass knuckles onto his right hand.

  ‘Just back away now, and nobody has to get hurt,’ the dosser said.

  The leader of the group looked at him slightly strangely for an instant. For some reason, the man’s voice didn’t sound quite as old as it had done before, and what it definitely didn’t sound like was the voice of a man who was frightened. And he should have been terrified.

  ‘Fucking get him, Jake,’ one of the group said, and the youth holding steel baton took a step forward, raising his weapon as he did so.

  ‘This isn’t really your day, is it?’ Paul Richter said, pulling a five-shot large calibre stainless steel revolver from his coat pocket and firing a round straight at the approaching youth, the noise appallingly loud and echoing in the narrow street. It took him in the centre of the chest and he crashed backwards to the ground, the baton flying out of his hand.

  He switched his aim immediately, and fired twice more, each round knocking down one of the six attackers. Then he slid the pistol back into his pocket and produced his own collapsible baton, which he immediately opened. The remaining three youths stared in disbelief at their fallen comrades, lying unmoving on the ground, then switched their gaze back to the ‘old man’ in front of them, a man who had suddenly shed 40 years and seemed to have grown six inches before their eyes.

  And that, really, was the point, because sometimes things just aren’t quite what they seem.

  ‘Come on, lads,’ Richter said. ‘There are three of you and only one of me, so what are you waiting for?’

  The biggest of them emitted a kind of feral howl from deep in his throat and stepped forward, drawing back his right arm and driving a massive punch towards Richter with his knuckle duster. If it had connected, it would probably have killed him, but Richter stepped slightly to one side, inside the blow, and at the same time swung his baton down in a short vicious arc that connected with the man’s lower arm, instantly breaking both bones.

  His two companions, each carrying a Stanley knife, stepped forward. But it was a hopelessly uneven fight, because they weren’t trained and Richter was. Two more blows with the steel baton and each of the youths collapsed to the ground nursing a broken humerus.

  But Richter hadn’t finished. He removed all the fallen weapons, then stepped over to the three men he had shot and checked each for a pulse in the neck. All were still alive, which was exactly what he had expected, because the weapon he had used was a French-made non-lethal self-defence weapon, firing a rubber bullet with a powerful charge of propellant behind it, and the kinetic energy had been enough to knock each of them unconscious. He lifted the first youth’s right arm and swung the baton with surgical precision to break his humerus, then did the same to the other two, incapacitating all six of them.

  Then he stepped back to the youth who’d been wearing the knuckle duster. He was slumped on the ground, clutching his broken right arm with his left hand and moaning in pain.

  ‘You’re lucky you picked on me,’ Richter said, ‘because now you can all walk away. But if you have any friends, which I doubt, you need to tell them that we have a little operation running in this area. A bunch of soldiers. In fact, a bunch of off-duty SAS men are covering this part of London looking pretty much the same as I did when you and your boyfriends walked over to me to have a bit of fun this evening. They won’t all be carrying non-lethal weapons, and they won’t all be as harmless as me, so just spread the word.’

  Then Richter straightened up and walked away, taking a mobile phone from his pocket as he did so and dialling a number.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said, when the call was answered. ‘And the latest score is six down. I’d appreciate a pickup as soon as you can get here, because the smell of this coat is starting to get to me now.’

  He had been waiting at the end of the road for about a quarter of an hour when a white Transit van pulled up beside him, the driver a black man wearing a yellow leather coat.

  Richter pulled open the passenger side door and looked inside.

  ‘The coat goes in the back, my man,’ Carpenter said firmly. ‘You don’t climb in here with me wearing that thing.’

  ‘I was only going to ask if the rear doors were unlocked,’ Richter said.

  Carpenter nodded, and a couple of minutes later, having tossed the foul-smelling heavy overcoat, deliberately prepared for the operation, into the cargo area, Richter climbed into the passenger seat wearing the reasonably clean jeans and shirt that he’d had on underneath it. His grubby and unshaven face provided a stark contrast to his clothing.

  ‘Thanks, Steve,’ he said. ‘Anything from the others?’

  ‘Not so far. A couple of the guys saw what looked like trouble approaching, but it didn’t come to anything. So you had six, eh? How many corpses?’

  ‘None,’ Richter replied. ‘They’ll all get to walk away, but with six broken arms between them it’ll be a while before they try their luck again on the streets.’

  ‘If they ever do,’ Carpenter said, slowing down as they reached a set of traffic lights. ‘I guess you want to go home now?’

  ‘Damn right I do. I need a shave and a long bath, and maybe the number of a pizza delivery service. On the other hand, I’ve got another
couple of days before my leave ends, so you’d better pick me up again tomorrow afternoon as usual, so tonight I’ll just have to manage with the pizza. And for God’s sake don’t tell Simpson that I’ve been moonlighting.’

  Chapter 2

  Three weeks ago

  Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoye Predpriyatie (Sevmash), Severodvinsk, White Sea, Russia

  The timescale initially envisaged by Viktor Mikhailovich Alexeev eventually proved to be somewhat pessimistic, not least because the most crucial single part of the weapons system that the project required had already been under development for some time, and although he had known about the new device he had simply not made the connection.

  Rumours about the Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System, later known within Russia as the Poseidon and categorized in America as the Kanyon, had begun to circulate in the Western intelligence community in about 2010, and it was first publicly acknowledged in September 2015, following the apparently accidental disclosure of a document by a Russian general on the Russian television station NTV. Accidents of that kind almost never happened, and certainly not in Russia, where the likely penalty for such crass and manifest stupidity would be extremely serious and in all probability fatal. Almost certainly, the ‘leak’ was a deliberate statement to the West that Russia was well advanced in its development of the Poseidon, a potential doomsday weapon, essentially a nuclear armed and nuclear powered super torpedo, and the Russian President Vladimir Putin was delivering an unmistakable warning to America.

  When the new classified project received the go-ahead from the highest echelons of the Russian government, the Poseidon was clearly the weapon of choice, but there was one obvious problem: the delivery system was going to require extensive modification because the tactical scenario required an entirely different launch platform to be used. That meant identifying a suitable vessel to transport the device and then, crucially, to launch it in the appropriate place at the optimum time. For some days, the matter was discussed at the very highest level of the Russian Navy, until one of the officers made some very basic measurements and calculations and came up with what was potentially the ideal solution. Once that had been established, the next step was easy: all they had to do was find the right ship.

  Not all container ships are huge, and some do not start off life intending to fulfil that role, but many end up being converted because shipping almost any kind of goods in a container is one of the fastest and most efficient ways so far developed of transporting cargo. The 2,500-ton MV Semyon Timoshenko was a SA-15 class cargo ship built in the mid-1980s in the Valmet Vuosaari shipyard in Helsinki, Finland, for a small Russian cargo line working mainly the White Sea, the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Because of the harsh weather likely to be encountered in the northern oceans, it was designed from the first as an icebreaker and multipurpose freighter. Early in the twenty-first century, when container shipping definitively became the way to go, the vessel was modified to carry the ubiquitous steel boxes in her hold space and stacked on the decks above.

  Ships, like cars, tend to age quickly, especially when sailing routes through the Baltic, Norwegian and Barents seas in the depths of winter, when the bow had to batter small icebergs known as ‘growlers’ out of the way while the ship steered a course around the bigger bergs, and the screaming wind and moisture-laden air coated almost every part of the vessel’s superstructure in a layer of ice inches thick. So when the managing director of the shipping company that owned the Semyon Timoshenko received a cash offer for the old and somewhat tired vessel from the Russian Navy, ostensibly for use in some kind of unspecified trial, he thought about it for less than ten minutes before accepting. The ship had then been unloading eight containers at Kandalaksha, a port town in the Murmansk Oblast, at the head of the Kandalaksha Gulf, and collecting a dozen empty units.

  A short exchange of radio messages sorted everything out to the satisfaction of both the managing director and the senior Russian Navy officer deputed to handle the negotiations, though rather less satisfactorily for the master and crew of the ship: the Semyon Timoshenko was to remain in Kandalaksha for an additional day, and was to disembark all the loaded containers it was carrying there. These were destined for several different ports in the region, but other container ships plied the same routes and could deliver the cargo without any problems, apart from incurring something of a delay.

  Perhaps strangely, the master of the ship was told to collect the planned 12 empty containers from the port, as instructed by the Russian Navy officer, because these would also be required for the trial the ship was supposed to be involved in. Containers are lost overboard from ships on an almost daily basis in the oceans of the world, and because these were empty nobody would care very much what happened to them, so they would simply be written off.

  The master was then ordered to sail the vessel direct to Severodvinsk, but not to the container port there. Instead, he was told to deliver the ship to Sevmash, Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoye Predpriyatie, the shipbuilding company located nearby. This is the only shipyard in Russia that has manufactured, and still manufactures, nuclear submarines. It builds other stuff as well, including massive structures like ice-resistant stationary drilling platforms.

  Once there, the master was instructed to pay off the crew, giving each of them a small bonus due to the early termination of their contracts, and then he himself was to report to the shipping company’s head office in Arkhangelsk, just down the road from Severodvinsk, to wait for a new command.

  The architects of the plan had chosen the Semyon Timoshenko for three reasons: first, and most important, because it was equipped with a deck crane. Second, it had been modified to act as a container ship and, third, it was old and battered and therefore cheap. That had been almost a year earlier, and in the intervening months, work of both a routine nature and other unusual and more specialized tasks had been taking place on the Semyon Timoshenko in one of the smaller dry docks in the shipyard. A maintenance programme had been initiated, which included cleaning the hull and checking its integrity, overhauling the engines, generators and other equipment, upgrading the navigation system to incorporate the very latest in GPS technology, updating and modifying the bridge controls, and so on. No changes had been made to the external appearance of the ship, because that was all part of the plan, but almost every system on board had been modified, upgraded or completely replaced.

  Some of the work carried out hadn’t been on the ship at all, but on the empty containers that were still stacked on the deck of the vessel, and to anyone with even a basic working knowledge of marine transport, these changes would have made no sense at all.

  The very first thing that the shipyard had been instructed to do was to X-ray each container, despite the fact that they were all empty. The standard dimensions of shipping containers are based on the imperial rather than the metric measurement system, and have a height of 8.5 feet, a width of 8 feet, and come in two lengths, either 20 feet or 40 feet. Within those standard sizes are different permutations, so, for instance, containers can have doors at each end (these are known as tunnels), doors that open along one or both sides rather than at the ends, open-topped containers which have tarpaulins as roofs, refrigerated containers, half-height containers for heavy bulk cargoes, and others. But by far the commonest, the workhorse container, is the 20-foot or 40-foot standard unit, and those stacked on the deck of the Semyon Timoshenko were all 40-footers with doors at one end only.

  Two of the containers that had passed the X-ray examination had been selected, lifted off the ship and placed end to end in the yard beside the vessel. A team of welders had then carved out matching holes in the solid ends of the containers, leaving a ring of steel about one foot wide around the hole. Then the ends of the containers were welded together, and additional strengthening steel plates were welded across the floor where they were joined.

  Two lengths of specially fabricated steel, looking something like railway lines but very much lighter, were delivered to
the shipping yard, placed inside the double container and welded to the steel of the floor, a precisely calculated distance apart and running for its entire length. Then the container was placed in a cradle and turned onto its side to give access to its base. After establishing the precise centre point of the modified unit, engineers welded a circle of steel about half an inch thick onto the container floor.

  Four hydraulic cylinders were fitted, one at each corner, which contained legs that would extend below the container, and a system of hydraulic pipes was installed that linked all four legs to ensure that they would extend at the same rate and to the same degree.

  Then a custom-built strengthening cage was welded to the inside of the containers, a lattice of steel somewhat like a roll-cage that provided support to the roof, side walls and floor. The two rear doors were fitted with thick steel plates in one specific area, to act as blast shields.

  Two other containers also needed attention; these, too, were welded together and had additional steel bracing struts fitted to provide extra strength for the roofs and sides of the units. Another circular steel plate was welded onto the roof in the exact centre of these joined units. Around the edge of this plate was a low steel lip, and within the lip was a very heavy-duty ball race, covered in grease.

  Once that work had been completed, the first modified unit was carefully lowered on top of the second, the circular steel plate slotting precisely inside the lip of the steel on the bottom container, allowing the upper double container to rotate on top of the lower unit. The two sets of joined containers were then lifted back onto the deck of the Semyon Timoshenko, one on top of the other, the upper one being locked into place simply by drilling a hole through the steel of the floor in each corner, a hole that penetrated the roof of the lower container, and by then placing a large steel bolt in each hole.

  That completed the work that the Sevmash engineers and shipyard staff had been told to do, but the ship could not sail until one final piece of equipment had arrived. This was a large tarpaulin-wrapped object delivered on a low loader and accompanied by a pair of utility vehicles full of armed soldiers. The utility vehicles remained outside while the low loader drove into the shipyard and stopped beside the Semyon Timoshenko, once more afloat in the flooded dry dock.