Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  Beside the door into the hold, just beneath the videophone, they found torches and decided to make use of them. The risk of detection as a result seemed preferable to sitting in the dark doing nothing.

  “We can’t just hide away down here for ever,” said Ann. “Perhaps we should look for somewhere we can defend,” said Harry. “That means looking for weapons.”

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult here, should it? I mean, what else is this stuff they loaded in Ireland likely to be?”

  “What, you mean it isn’t a toy set from the top of the beanstalk?”

  “Was that dry humour under extreme stress or incipient hysteria?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Depends on your gender, as I understand it.”

  “Think of me as Bruce Willis then.”

  “You look more like Demi Moore.”

  “Think of me as GI Jane then.”

  “I thought it was GI Jane you laid out flat earlier!”

  Harry was silent. She half believed her wild blow must have killed Pitman, and the thought troubled her. She might even have felt guilty, but once again the blood lust she had seen in Pitman’s eyes rose to haunt her. The memory sickened her.

  “Look at this, Harry,” said Ann.

  They were in the aftermost section of the new cargo pile now and Ann’s torch beam played over several crates that had burst open on the floor. There were no clear identifying marks on the crates; the wood showed pale scoring where such markings had been largely erased. One large crate had disgorged four green fibreglass boxes and one of these, too, had burst open. A gleaming tube lay half exposed among its foam packing. Ann crouched down beside it and eased it out of the box. It was more than a metre long, with an obvious handle and an inconspicuous trigger among the folded sections of metal. Ann handled it with experienced fingers, but she did not open out any of the sections. Instead, she carefully put it down again and sat back on her heels.

  “What is it?” asked Harry.

  “It’s a Stinger.”

  “What’s a Stinger?”

  “A guided missile.”

  “What?” Harry picked it up. It was solid but well balanced. Surprisingly easy to handle.

  “Put that down!” said Ann sharply. “Do it gently and don’t touch any of the catches or switches. You might arm it by accident.”

  Harry did as she was told with an obedience her parents would never have recognised. “What is all this stuff?” she asked, suddenly uneasy.

  “It’s one of the better stories of the nineties,” said Ann. “The CIA lost a complete consignment of these things in Afghanistan when the Taliban militia took over. They’d apparently smuggled them into Kabul to help the Afghans fight the Red Army but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Afghans simply took them and started offering them for sale. There were nearly three hundred of them and at least one hundred are still out there. I cannot believe the IRA had them but didn’t use them. And to have sold them on, even now…”

  “Maybe things are looking better for Ireland.”

  “Maybe.” Ann didn’t sound convinced. “Depends who actually sold this stuff, what else they’ve got in stock and what they buy with the money they get for it. But that is of academic interest. What I’d like to know is what is it all doing here?”

  “And what is going to be done with it when we get where we’re going?”

  “Only one thing can be done with a Stinger. You use it to shoot down aeroplanes. That’s all it does. They’re still wondering about TWA Flight 800…”

  “How do you know all this stuff, Ann?”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  “I know but — ”

  “What? You thought I did social stuff? Articles for Hello! and Cosmo? At Home with Hilary Clinton and How To Keep Your Lover Through The Menopause? That sort of thing?”

  “Well…”

  “You ever read any of my stuff?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “My first big story was about the illegal transport of nuclear and chemical waste. I actually have registered radiation sickness from that one. I could smoke forty cigarettes a day for the rest of my life and it would hardly matter. The best one was my report on the illegal sale of arms and materiel to the warring factions of an African civil war right under the noses of the UN. I went into the bush and met the people. I actually got some of the illegal arms used on my own fair person. I have had blackwater fever, beri-beri and God knows what else besides. I do not do “Tea With The Queen” articles, all right?”

  “I see. So you’re an authority on this sort of stuff, are you?”

  “Not exactly, no. But I know it when I see it, and I know what this is.”

  “And how to use it?”

  “If push comes to shove, yes.”

  “Good,” said Harry. “Then we’re just a little more secure.” She stroked the Stinger almost lovingly. “No one messes with Harry unless Harry wants to be messed,” she said.

  Ann gaped at her. “Do you know what you’re saying? This isn’t an anti-personnel weapon. You try and use that in here and we’ll all be toast.”

  “Makes you think, though, doesn’t it? It’ll make them stop and think as well, won’t it?”

  “Talking of thinking…”

  “What?”

  “What on earth is actually going on here? I mean we’ve been sailing the Atlantic for days, loading and unloading in Ireland, chucking away Federal Motors’ finest and apparently gearing up for World War III. For what? Why?”

  “You only gear up for war if you’re going to fight.”

  Ann nodded. “Who? Where?”

  “From what I saw before we exited the bridge, we are taking our war machine westwards. So we may be fighting American aircraft.”

  “Who may be attacking us.”

  “Trying to stop us doing something.”

  “Something on water.”

  “Being done at one hundred miles per hour…”

  They fell silent then and Ann turned off her torch. And each became prey to disturbing speculation.

  When the tannoy came on again it made them both jump. “We need to talk,” it said. “Pick up the handset by the doorway and dial 01 for the bridge.”

  “What do you think?” asked Ann.

  “What can it harm?” answered Harry. “They know where we are. If they want to come and get us, they can. Maybe it would be a good idea to warn them we’re armed.”

  “And then some,” added Ann to herself.

  “Could be a trap, though.”

  “How?”

  “To get at least one of us over by the door.”

  “I see your point. Worth the risk, do you think?”

  “Probably. I’ll go. Why don’t you cover me with the Stinger.” Ann picked up the missile and hefted it to her shoulder. With expert fingers she snapped the fold-down sections into place. Her knowledgeable eye told her this was the later model with the POST system, the ultraviolet as well as the infra-red, the heat and movement seekers. She did not switch it on.

  Harry approached the door like a kitten stealing from a watchdog’s bowl. Her feet made less noise than her heart and every sense she possessed was focused on discovering whether or not someone was waiting to grab her as she got near enough. Her torch beam showed her that the door was securely closed — but in revealing this information it also told potential watchers how close to it she was. She put the torch down and sneaked off to the side, hoping she was invisible to the surveillance cameras. She crept up to the videophone, grabbed the handset and hit the buttons with shaking fingers. As chance would have it, she pressed 02 instead of 01. The little screen flashed on and Harry was confronted by a head thrust right up close to the screen. The head wore a black covering with a helmet on top. Where the face should have been there was a gas mask with black fittings, huge round eyepieces and a great flat filter sticking out of the side. Harry gave a cry of fright and dropped the handset altogether. It skidded away across the floor.

>   “What is it?” called Ann, shocked by her friend’s reaction.

  Harry sank to her knees, striving to control her breathing. Ann called again but Harry simply could not answer her. She scrabbled round until her back was hard up against the side of a friendly crate. Ann called for the third time. “All right!” answered Harry. “Just got a shock.”

  “An electric shock?” Ann could not imagine anything less having such an effect.

  “Surprise…There’s something…Someone…” Harry’s right hand fumbled on the deck, searching for the handset. When she found it, she lifted it slowly to her face. She dialled 01. The busy signal came up.

  She dialled 01 again.

  Busy.

  Now she tried 02.

  Busy.

  Comprehension began to dawn. Stations 01, the Bridge, and 02, the Upper Hold, were talking to each other. The creature with the fearsome mask was in the hold immediately above their heads. Mind racing, Harry did what she did best. She hacked. The videophone handsets had a conference facility to allow a third party monitoring rights in another conversation. Swiftly she dialled the sequence and finished with 01.

  Dall’s face filled the handset screen. “…need to get this situation sorted out,” he was saying. “Before any more lives are lost.”

  She dialled 02. The monstrous face reappeared. “Your call,” came the laconic, inhuman reply. Breath hissed eerily in and out.

  She dialled 01, then continued dialling in the breaks, trying feverishly to follow the conversation.

  “It’s a stand-off. You’re not going anywhere and if you try to come in here, the passengers and crew go first, you know that.” There was no room to doubt the threat in Dall’s cold voice.

  “We’ll be coming in there sometime soon,” said the man in the mask with equal certainty. “What you do, you answer for. One way or another. You and your people.”

  “Maybe,” said Dall. “In the meantime, you think about what I said.”

  “I’ll think.”

  Connection broke.

  “But what did you say, Dall, you son of a bitch?” said Harry, flicking the off switch on her handset before her eavesdropping was discovered.

  “What was that all about?” asked Ann when Harry pulled herself back to her.

  Harry explained the new situation as she saw it and Ann’s eyes grew wide with speculation. “We have to make contact with these people,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure,” said Harry, her mind still full of that terrifying, inhuman face. “They don’t look all that user-friendly to me. And anyway, what do you want to do? Try and make it up the stairs to the top hold before Dall sets the dogs of war on us again?”

  “The handset. Give them a call.”

  “They’ve got it switched off. Anyway, they don’t look the sort of people you call up just for a chat.”

  “Dall did.”

  “Yes. He did, didn’t he?” There was a little pause. “But he had to get their attention on the tannoy first.”

  “Yeah,” Ann conceded. “So what do you reckon we should do?”

  “Keep the Stinger handy.”

  “Yup.”

  “And go through this lot in more detail. Maybe the guys upstairs would trade a full inventory for a little protection. Though I have to say, they look more like something I’d want to be protected from. Now, how many of these Stinger things are there, precisely?”

  They spent the next hour or so going through the pile of arms and equipment. And wherever they went, the trusty Stinger went with them.

  So that when, all of a sudden and shockingly close at hand, two hatches burst open and two figures dressed in black abseiled rapidly to the floor, Harry was able to grab the missile and swing it up to her shoulder, looking every inch the twenty-first-century soldier.

  “Freeze,” she bellowed, her only experience of situations like this having come from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. “Keep your hands where I can see them. Ann, shine the torch on these two. I don’t want to miss anything important if I have to pull the trigger here.”

  And, with his hands obediently above his head so that his shoulder could depress the on switch to his throat mike, Lance Corporal Bruce Jones said, very quietly, “Bloody hell, boss, we’re in deep shit here. There’s a couple of tarts down here and one of them’s kitted out like Tank Girl. I kid you not. And she has a Stinger pointed at my bollocks.”

  Thus it was that representatives of the security forces first made contact with representatives of the New England’s resistance fighters just as the jet-ship came up towards twenty degrees west longitude, somewhere south of Iceland, somewhere north of Madeira, less than forty-eight hours from the eastern seaboard of the United States of America.

  CHAPTER XV

  Merrideth turned to Richard who was crouching at his side when Bruce’s message came through. “Friends of yours?” he whispered.

  Richard had been close enough to his side to hear what the corporal was saying. Now he gave a tight nod, his mind racing. Of the three women he knew to be aboard the only one likely to be able to recognise, let alone handle a Stinger was Ann Cable. Any women brought aboard by the pirates were unlikely to be running around in the lower hold — unless of course this was some obscure flanking manoeuvre or attack from the rear. “I’ll go down,” he said. He was in action before Merrideth could agree or demur.

  Richard did not use the abseils. He swung himself onto the rungs of the ladder reaching down the wall of the stairwell. Like a diver descending into a sea of darkness, he swarmed down into the lower hold. His first movement attracted a torch beam and as soon as he could do so with safety, he swung round so that the light could play on his face. “Ann?” he said quietly into the dazzle. “Ann, is that you?”

  “Richard?” There was total disbelief in Ann’s familiar voice. “What on earth are you doing with these guys?”

  “Looking for you. Don’t you recognise a bunch of knights in shining armour when you see them?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. OK, Harry, I guess we can lower our guard a little now.”

  “Thanks, Captain,” said Bruce in a whisper as Richard stepped down beside him. “I owe you one.”

  “Forget it, Bruce.” He looked around the hold, noting the array of red dots. “I think we need to take out the surveillance equipment as you did in the upper hold and then we can switch on the lights and have a good look around in here. Stinger missiles are not on the original manifest.”

  Bruce hesitated. “I’ll just check with the boss,” he said.

  Merrideth agreed but he drew the line sooner. “I’m not having people getting sidetracked into going through a terrorist arms cache,” he said to Mac later when the cameras were off and the lights on. It was the first time Richard had heard the terse commander go through his reasoning at such length and he even glanced at his watch to see whether Merrideth was due for more medication. “There’ll be nothing there we can use,” he went on. “Our equipment is the best suited for the job in hand there is. Anything else would be irrelevant. I don’t want the men going magpie on me and loading themselves down with lots of shiny new kit when their own is totally adequate. When we have control of the ship, we may think again. For now we’ll just close it off.”

  “But you’ll want to do a list of what’s there, won’t you?” Richard said.

  “Maybe later. In the meantime we have some debriefing to do.”

  Ann had been on the point of telling Merrideth that she had completed a pretty thorough examination of what was there. Perhaps it was his tone, perhaps it was the way he dismissed the cache as a whole; whatever the reason, she changed her mind and kept quiet. So did Harry.

  Merrideth’s questions focused on the pirates to begin with, then he widened his view to include an assessment of their motivation, their relationship with their captives and the position — and willingness — of the captives to take action for themselves. Ann made some perceptive observations but it was Harry who could furnish most detail about her erst
while colleagues. The interrogation moved onto a completely new track when Harry described some of the defensive work done by the pirates, apparently in preparation for just such company as Merrideth and his men.

  The debrief continued until Ann acerbically pointed out that she and Harry had bodily needs as well as duties; a cup of coffee or tea would go down well about now. Lunch for the men had been a substantial but unappetising affair of cold sausages and beans scooped out of foil packages just a little before the expedition into the lower hold. Even during this excuse for a meal, none of the men removed their black gloves. The women were given tea and then their debriefing continued, but soon after that Mac approached Merrideth and the two went into a huddle.

  Richard had no idea what they could be discussing now but he was happy at this stage to have his own, low-key debriefing with Ann and Harry. The information was not all one way, however. Ann particularly was fascinated by Merrideth and his men. She was aware that she was in the middle of an excellent story here, and she was keen to pursue it, but she knew that trying to interview any of the SAS men as they went about their work was out of the question. And it was obvious that whether they were preparing to go into battle with Dall and his men or simply patrolling the holds, these men were always at work.

  The attitude of Merrideth’s men towards the women was simply that they were members of the hostage group who had been rescued and whose debriefing might be useful as part of the stratagem to rescue the others. In different circumstances, once they had yielded the information they possessed, they would have been passed onwards and upwards. The SAS team were not equipped to nursemaid women or civilians and their existence here, like the pile of IRA arms, was a distracting and therefore dangerous irrelevance.

  Ann observed that in the simple world the SAS men seemed to inhabit, men were either for killing or bonding with, women either for pinning up or pinning down.

  “That’s not fair,” said Richard quietly, aware that he was, in fact, being distracted himself by the requirement simply to deal with their presence here. “They have to be focused all the time. They rely on each other absolutely. There can be no unknown quantities. This is a battleground, after all. Really, we have no place in it. We’re innocent bystanders trying not to become collateral damage.”