Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  Heat formed in the pit of his stomach as his system grabbed the calories and the sugar acted quickly to steady him.

  His next foray out into the main cabin netted a portable emergency radio, which operated on a VHF ship-to-ship band.

  It wasn’t as good as the EPIRB which had been attached to the wall, but right now the emergency positioning beacon was out of the question. It was too awkward to carry when he was going into a combat situation, and he couldn’t afford to activate it unless Linden and Horton were incapacitated, because the light and sound effects would instantly alert them to the fact that he had escaped.

  He switched the portable radio on, set the beacon to transmit on the ship-to-ship frequency, and zipped it inside the front of his wet suit. It wasn’t the perfect solution but, until he had control of the launch, it was the best he could do.

  Since leaving Sydney Harbor, they’d been on the move constantly. Linden was moored now, which meant he’d found a reef, but the chances were he’d steered clear of going too far north toward Great Barrier Reef, because he wouldn’t want to be disturbed by tourist traffic. Jake’s best guess was that they were situated somewhere between Sydney and Brisbane, far enough out that they wouldn’t be disturbed, in a relative dead zone as far as seacraft went, except for shipping. If they were anywhere near the shipping lanes, chances were a ship would pick up the beacon if it came close enough, which was the problem. The VHF radio was meant for emergency use only, the range no more than a few kilometers. If he had to rely on it, he was probably screwed.

  There was also the sobering fact that ships had been known to ignore beacons. And even if a vessel did pick up the signal, locating his exact position would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  He did a quick search of the cabins and came up empty. If Linden had any extra weaponry with him, he was keeping it topside, or on his person. Checking his watch and noting that his forty-five minutes were almost up, Jake briefly returned to the forward cabin, slipped on a life jacket and moved back out into the main cabin to wait.

  Eight

  The faint vibration of footsteps warned Jake that one of the men was coming below deck. Seconds later, Horton stepped into the galley. Uncoiling from a semicrouched position, Jake locked one hand around Horton’s throat, choking off sound as he drove up with the knife. Horton’s forward movement impaled him further, but at the crucial moment, Jake’s leg crumpled, and he lost his tight grip on Horton’s throat.

  A gurgling moan escaped, low-pitched and irregular enough that Linden wouldn’t mistake it for the cry of the gulls wheeling above the boat. Sucking in a breath, Jake shoved Horton into the doorjamb, no longer concerned with muffling sound, and pressed hard on his carotid. Within seconds Horton’s eyes glazed over and he went limp, but it was seconds too long, as Jake heard the telltale creak overhead as Linden moved toward the ladder.

  Withdrawing the knife, Jake allowed Horton to drop to the deck and searched him for a firearm. When he came up blank, he unhooked the fire extinguisher from its wall bracket. All he could do was keep his forward momentum. If he retreated back into one of the cabins, he would be trapped; Linden would simply bide his time and pick him off. Using the thin ply wall of the galley as cover, Jake gauged the moment when Linden’s balance and line of sight would be most compromised—the split second his feet hit the pitching deck—then lunged through the opening and depressed the lever on the fire extinguisher.

  Powdery white chemical sprayed into Linden’s face. He reeled, slamming into the railing, and the gun discharged with a flat crack. Paneling splintered as Jake ducked and crabbed sideways in automatic reflex, lurching as one foot caught on Horton’s outstretched arm, forcing him to transfer all of his weight to his injured leg. Hot pain exploded up his side, and the knife slipped from his fingers as he grabbed the railing to steady himself.

  Jake’s head jerked up as Linden recovered his balance and ripped off coated dark glasses. His face was covered in white powder, but where the sunglasses had been there was a strip of tanned flesh. His vision was virtually unimpeded as he swung the handgun up. Adrenaline pumped. With a grunt, Jake pivoted on his good leg and threw the extinguisher, knocking Linden off balance once more and sending the gun spinning over the side.

  For an endless moment the gun hung above the waves, sun glinting off metal; then it dropped into the sea with a faint plop, taking Jake’s options with it. He was injured and unarmed, and his leg kept failing him. He had no idea how well armed Linden was, but, given that he was a professional, Jake had to assume the man had a backup gun. If he were doing the job himself, he would have both an ankle gun and a knife.

  Gripping the railing, he pivoted, twisting his body to protect his injured leg. As he half stumbled, half fell into the sea, a lukewarm trace of black humor penetrated the cold rage that had driven him from the moment Linden had put a gun to his head. Next time, he wouldn’t leave home without an automatic weapon and a supply of C4.

  Drawing his backup gun, Linden gripped the railing and scanned the sea, cursing beneath his breath at his stinging eyes and the sun glaring off the choppy expanse of blue. He checked the other side of the launch and came up empty again.

  A faint splashing sound at the rear of the boat had him spinning. For tense seconds he couldn’t discern what was wrong; then he realized that the runabout, which normally trailed several meters back from the launch, was more distant than it should be. Lombard must have untied the rope at the bow of the small boat in an attempt to steal it.

  Linden stepped over Horton, who was still twitching, and examined the wet weather steering station inside—a duplicate of the one on the bridge—and hit the ignition. Shoving the launch in reverse, he opened the throttle, uncaring that the anchor was down. There would be slack in the rope, and chances were that the anchor would naturally unhook rather than hold, allowing him to back right up to the runabout.

  Water splashed over the stern, and diesel fumes filled the cabin, as the launch churned backward. When the runabout loomed closer, Linden cut the throttle and flicked the gear lever into neutral, leaving the engines on idle. The launch continued its wallowing backward momentum as he gripped the handgun and walked to the stern, grimly keeping his balance as he checked over both sides of the railing in case Lombard tried to pull anything else.

  Gaze cold and alert, Linden secured the runabout, registering the small lurch that signaled that the anchor, which had pulled free when he’d started backing the boat, had once again drifted to the bottom, caught and taken hold. Almost instantly, the heaving motion caused by the ocean swells pushing against the side of the boat started, and Linden braced himself, keeping his gaze on the runabout as it swung around nose-first into the current along with the launch.

  Lombard was too badly hurt to get back on the Mariane unless he used the backboard at the stern, and Linden had that covered.

  Long minutes passed while Linden watched the runabout and the blue-green water at the stern.

  The abrupt dip of a large sea bird momentarily distracted him. Automatically, his gaze swept the area the bird was hovering over, then fixed on a flash of yellow.

  Snarling in disbelief, he hauled himself up the narrow ladder and onto the flying bridge. He grabbed a long dark case stored beneath one of the bench seats, set it on the cushion, released the catches and flipped the lid. Methodically, he extracted the stock and barrel of a Remington rifle. With slick movements, he locked the two pieces together, slid the bolt into place, attached the telescopic sight, then slotted two cartridges into the chamber. The scope was zeroed for six hundred meters—more than enough. The Remington wasn’t the kind of state-of-the art, precision tool he used for long-range work—damned if he was going to bring any of his good gear onto a boat—but it was perfect for the unstable sea conditions.

  Fitting the stock to his shoulder, Linden searched the sea and finally spotted Lombard, several degrees south of where he’d calculated he should be, which meant that either the launch had continued to swing in the
current, throwing off his estimate, or the canny bastard had changed direction.

  Despite the fact that Lombard was hampered by the life jacket, he was swimming strongly and was already more than two hundred and fifty meters from the Mariane.

  With calm, steady movements, Linden activated the image intensifier and reacquired Lombard with the scope. The bright yellow of the life jacket made him an easy target, but the sway of the flying bridge, worse now in a stiffening afternoon breeze, kept spoiling Linden’s aim and, quite frankly, made him sick.

  Sucking in a deep breath, he forced himself to ignore the sour taste in the back of his throat and the continual disruption to his balance. As he exhaled, he unclenched his jaw and counted, using the discipline of more than three decades of sniping to steady his aim.

  Slowly, tension flowed out of him. He drew another breath, held it, then exhaled, until he finally reached the place in the breath cycle when the fine tremor set up by muscular tension dissipated.

  He squeezed the trigger once, twice. The first shot was wide—punching into a shoulder; the second caught Lombard in the head, jerking him sideways.

  Linden continued to observe, patiently waiting out the swells to check that Lombard didn’t move. After several minutes, he lowered the rifle, satisfied.

  As he dismantled the gun to clean it, Linden’s gaze caught on Horton’s out-flung hand, which was just visible from his position on the flying deck. The twitching had finally stopped.

  Of everything that had gone wrong with this job, Horton’s death pissed him off the most.

  As far as Linden had been able to ascertain, Horton’s only area of expertise had been driving the boat. That had been damn useful while he’d been alive, because Linden hated boats. He had enough knowledge to get by, but that was it. With Horton gone, he was left with the problem of getting back to land and disposing of a launch that had become the kind of crime scene that would have any forensic expert rubbing his hands with glee.

  When he’d finished cleaning and dismantling the weapon, Linden began loading the runabout with his equipment, food and water, and enough spare fuel that he wouldn’t have a problem reaching land. Using a compass to take a bearing, he ascertained his approximate position, then lifted the floor panels at the rear of the launch and pulled the bung. Immediately, water fountained into the boat.

  The launch took an hour to go down, because he’d forgotten to open all the doors to the cabins and the trapped air kept the Mariane afloat, but Linden waited it out. When the charter vessel finally disappeared beneath an eruption of bubbles, he tossed the rope that secured the runabout to the launch, and which he’d used as an impromptu anchor, into the sea, powered up the motor and headed for land.

  Nine

  The container vessel Volodya, sailing out of Sydney. Crew, 19. Call sign VDSR3.

  The radio operator clicked the hand piece of the spare VHF set he was repairing, swore beneath his breath and rummaged for the screwdriver. Seconds later, he examined the exposed circuitry, systematically tracing the connections to see which one had failed this time. Absently, he reached for his coffee, grimacing when he found it had gone cold and a thick skin had formed on top.

  Setting the mug down amidst the chaotic tumble of tools and colored wiring, he picked up the soldering iron and delicately melted both ends of the broken connection, coaxing them together to complete the circuit. He had fixed this set a hundred times, and no doubt he would fix it again, but on the long haul from Sydney to Vacaro, an isolated settlement on the Peruvian coast, performing minor repair work of any kind was a welcome distraction.

  As he reassembled the radio, his finely tuned ear gradually became aware of a consistent, low-level noise. At first he thought it was static, perhaps caused by the handset of the radio on the bridge being put down carelessly, so that the channel had been left open. A quick telephone call to the bridge confirmed that the radio was presently not in use, and that the handset was hooked correctly in place.

  Frowning, the radio operator turned the volume up and sat back to listen, all his attention centered on what he now discerned to be a faint electronic pulse. The signal was weak and fragmented, and occasionally it disappeared altogether, but no one who’d worked in shipping could miss its meaning.

  “Shit,” he muttered, and scrabbled for the phone, knocking the coffee over. The sound was a mayday.

  Anatoli Baklanov, captain of the Volodya, listened to the signal, his expression impassive. Shipping law and simple decency demanded he give the order to turn the ship and render aid to whoever was in trouble, but lately, for Anatoli, the subject of laws and contracts, rules and regulations, had become a gray world. He was no longer certain where the line between right and wrong was drawn—or where he and his crew stood in relation to it.

  In the shipping world, they were small fry. Mainly operating as a cargo service in the Pacific Basin, but with a recent change of ownership, the company had also expanded into the container trade, inching in where they could to compete with the larger companies plying between North America, Australasia and Japan.

  On this trip, they had had several new destinations added to their usual route, lengthening their circuit by a good three weeks. Some of the ports on the manifest made Anatoli’s stomach hollow and his gut burn. He had his suspicions about the new owner and some of the cargo they had taken aboard, but his concerns had all been met with blank looks and smooth answers. The bottom line had been that if he no longer found his job satisfactory, he was welcome to leave.

  In Anatoli’s view, that was all very well—he could find another job—but his crew was another matter. The Volodya carried nineteen men, and, of those, a core of fourteen had been with him for more than a decade. Six of the fourteen had served under his command in the navy. If he went, most of the crew would walk with him, and that posed difficulties. In the cutthroat world of shipping, the likelihood that they would all find new berths was slim.

  The radio operator sat back in his chair, the knowledge of their dilemma clear in his gaze. “We can’t just leave him.”

  Anatoli continued to listen to the weakening signal—now almost gone. His responsibility toward his men weighed heavily. He had come to the realization that they had all made a terrible mistake in accepting employment with the Volodya’s new owner. In signing the new contracts, he was now certain, they had allowed Varinski to turn them all into criminals.

  With a last feeble pulse of static, the radio went silent, and for the first time in more than twenty years, Anatoli lost his temper.

  Varinski might have made them criminals on paper, but he would be damned if he would abandon his humanity.

  Curtly, he gave the command and hoped they weren’t too late. They were presently traveling well under full speed at twelve knots, but even so, it would take time to turn the ship.

  An hour later, the inert form of what appeared to be a diver was winched on board. The ship’s doctor, Pyotr Chapaev, a medical student who had dropped out of the program in his fourth year and who also doubled as a kitchen hand, was uncertain for the first few minutes whether the man was dead or alive.

  Anatoli watched over the procedure as Pyotr sliced the wet suit away and searched for a pulse. He didn’t want to feel relief that a man had died, but it was a fact that his death would simplify the situation for him and his crew.

  Squatting down, he touched the unconscious man’s wrist. Even though he knew the diver had probably been in the water for hours and was likely hypothermic, the icy feel of his skin was unsettling. He studied the man’s chest and could detect no movement.

  Chapaev primed a needle and searched for a vein.

  Anatoli frowned as Chapaev inserted the needle. “Give it up, Pyotr, he’s dead.”

  Pyotr barely registered the captain’s command as he injected the adrenaline. The tenets that he’d lived by when he’d been training to be the most brilliant doctor in Petrograd—before his wife and child had disappeared and his life had turned to shit—crowded out everything bu
t the vital needs of his patient. Tipping the diver’s head back, he sent oxygen into the man’s lungs in short bursts. As he placed both hands over the diver’s chest and began to pump, he spared the captain a quick, impatient glance. “He’s not dead until he’s warm and dead. His core temperature is twenty-nine degrees centigrade. If he’s still not breathing when he reaches thirty-two, you can have him….” His mouth quirked in what he’d always been told was a ghoulish grin. “Until then, he’s mine.”

  Broodingly, Anatoli moved out of the way as the blankets and hot water bottles Chapaev had demanded arrived, and the first officer and the engineer, both of whom had medical training, moved in to assist.

  Not for the first time since he’d given the order to turn the ship, Anatoli questioned his sanity.

  The fact that they had found the man at all had been little less than a miracle, because it had taken them fully thirty minutes to relocate the signal after they’d turned the ship. When the transmission was strong enough that they should have been practically on top of the lost craft, the Volodya’s engines had been disengaged.

  Without visual confirmation of any wreckage, and with the beacon still operating, they’d had to assume that what they had was no longer a boat in trouble but a man overboard. In a last-ditch effort, a tender had been lowered into the water by crane, and even that decision had hung on a knife’s edge, because the sun had been setting. If the conditions hadn’t been abnormally calm, and many of his crew ex-navy and trained in search-and-rescue work, it was unlikely they would have carried on with the search.