Without really thinking, as much to busy her fingers while her mind raced, Pitman raised the drill and placed the point of the bit on the swell of the chair seat between her prisoner’s thighs. She pulled the trigger and the electric motor whined. The bit spun, its steel point ate into the cloth, shredding it in an instant. It sliced through the foam-rubber padding, spraying tiny grains of it onto Harry’s thighs. Suddenly threads of grey plastic whirled up as though being pulled out of the body of the chair by invisible threads. The bit sank through the chair completely and the chuck thumped meatily into the seat, its blur of grey steel mere millimetres from the pale curves of Harry’s body. She was trembling so much the chair was wobbling.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t! How could you? When I…When I…”
Pitman snapped out of her reverie. Shock that she should have done something so dangerous in such an utterly unconsidered fashion made her tear the drill out of the chair in apparent rage. Harry flinched so powerfully that the chair sprang back on its castors.
“Tell me more!” spat Pitman.
Harry concentrated on what little she knew about the SAS men. She did not articulate her thoughts and suspicions about her shipmates. She did not describe the Stinger missile she and Ann had found in the hold. She did not admit what her own plans for the computers were or how nearly she had been able to carry them out. She focused on Merrideth and his men and gave every detail she had observed, been told, guessed or overheard. And it was a word that Richard had used while he was talking to Ann that brought Pitman up short. And that word was Jellicoe.
“What?” she hissed. “Are you telling me that these are the Jellicoe Boys? Are you serious? But I thought — ” She froze. “Jesus Christ!” she said, but Harry didn’t hear her because of the explosions.
*
Merrideth’s men came out of the hold at 2 a.m. They came through the walls at the foot of the stairwell, blowing open the steel panels with shaped charges of P4, as Richard had suggested. As they came through, the two bricks split into pairs and whirled away through the undefended engineering sections. Merrideth and Mac stayed with Op to direct and monitor the operation with the aid of a map of the engineering decks. Bruce and Danny were the A team, at least by their own estimation, and so they ran the furthest and did the dirtiest. They slithered like penetrating oil down the passageways to the engine control room. They arrived there only instants after the sound of the explosion. Paul Aves had been on duty here until Dall called him up to consider the communications with their unwelcome guests. He had left Lazio on watch. Lazio was slow. The first thing he knew after the roar of the explosion was the thump of a stun grenade landing. Then he knew nothing.
Smell and Pain went through the corridors behind Bruce, securing empty and undefended areas. They arrived at the engine control room in time to help the other two tidy up.
Russ and Mike went on down a deck and into the massive engine room itself. The place was utterly deserted.
Tom and Martin were the real A team. They were faster, quieter and better organised than Bruce and Danny. They whirled along the corridors as though surfing on the sound wave of the explosion, checking in doorways, one high, one low, scanning lengthy fields of fire, moving like shadows, never still, never appearing at full height, never exposing anything other than body armour and armaments, always covering each other.
It was Tom who came through the door of the makeshift interrogation room first. The sight of the apparently naked form of a woman he had last seen bedded safely under his own guard, taped to a chair with silver ducting tape, brought him up short. He registered the black DIY box on the table, and caught the look on the face of the woman whirling to confront him, raising a massive, but unfamiliar, black gun.
“NO!” screamed Harry, fighting to tear herself out of the chair. It spun, teetered dangerously, and crashed into the table.
Pitman whirled, years of training taking over, raising the weapon in her hands and pointing it straight at the head of the first man in. She pulled the trigger. The drill whirred.
Tom fired. The shot went in under Pitman’s uselessly spinning drill and hit her exactly between the breasts. As Merrideth had given strict instructions that no one should be killed if humanly possible, the bullet was a lightweight plastic training round. It smashed into Pitman’s breastbone, lifting her off her feet and knocking her backwards over the table. The drill went one way and the black box another. Pitman slewed wildly across the table and slithered into the lap of the still screaming Harry. This time the chair toppled over. Harry’s shoulder and arm hit the floor, and the muscles down one side of her neck tore painfully. Pitman’s body rolled away from her and, as though in one final insult, Pitman’s left boot smashed into Harry’s ear and everything went black.
When Harry came to a short time later, the chair was upright but she was still secured to it. Pitman was lying on the table, her vest and underclothing torn, with one man standing between her straddled legs doing something sickeningly rhythmic to her naked torso while the other crouched over her head, balaclava cast aside, pressing his mouth obscenely to her slack blue lips.
For the last time that night, Harry sucked in her breath to scream, fighting against her bonds. But as she did so, familiar words began to seep into her consciousness.
“…three, four, five. BREATHE…”
Harry realised what they were doing and called, “Angela! Her name is Angela!”
The one doing the chest massage continue to count. The one giving the kiss of life glanced up and winked at her, his face ridiculously boyish with its freckles and jug-handle ears. “Come on, Angela,” he said. “Come on back to us, my old lovely. Here’s Harriet waiting to talk to you…”
And Pitman coughed, stirred.
*
As though they were face to face, head to head across a negotiating table, Merrideth and Dall faced each other over the videophone link. “I underestimated you,” grated Dall, his voice tinny through the little speaker.
Merrideth looked straight into his opponent’s eyes. “We’ve taken a small step,” he said calmly. “We hold a little more ground and a couple of your people. You still have control. You still have the power and the hostages. We are no threat to you here. Don’t do anything precipitate.”
“Precipitate,” grated Dall. “What d’you mean precipitate, you pompous, patronising Limey bastard?”
“There is no need for anyone to die.”
“Just what the fuck are you doing here if nobody has to die?” snarled Dall.
“We’re trying to retrieve the situation.”
Dall lapsed into silence, glaring into the camera. Merrideth tried to see behind the iron gaze in that flat little picture. He had gambled on Dall reacting sensibly. The SAS were in control of the engineering sections as well as the holds now. Nothing Dall could do would alter that. He had control of the command and accommodation areas. And there was not much Merrideth could do to alter that. The heart of his gamble lay in Dall’s reaction to the new situation. Would he start killing hostages out of frustration or spite? Merrideth hoped not. He had two hostages from among Dall’s personnel and he didn’t want to get into the game of trading body bags — or body parts, come to that. Surely Dall could see that nothing he could do — no one he could execute — would make things any better for him. The balance had shifted slightly. The stand-off was still the same.
“Short of sabotaging all the engines, there’s nothing we can do down here. You know that. You still have all the control up there,” Merrideth said again. A massive weariness suddenly swept over him. It seemed to him that he had spent all his life dealing with men like this, untrustworthy, self-serving, lazy and vicious. From Whitehall to Washington, from Colombia to Kuwait, from Belfast to Belize, one side or the other, it made no difference. “It’s your move, Dall,” he said. “Put up or shut up. When you’ve made up your mind, give me a call. Out.” He snapped the connection button to OFF.
Mac, beside him, said quietly, “Shall
I get something from Doc — from the captain?”
“No. I’m just tired. Dall won’t do anything. He’s a cheap whore in a big game. In over his head and he doesn’t know it. Playing for time, trying to up the ante, trying not to get screwed. No chance on any front, I’d say. Especially when Marshall comes aboard. What’s the time?”
“Rising four on ship’s time. Three local. We’ve moved time zones.”
“More than two thousand miles out. Over the Newfoundland Basin. Over the edge of the Grand Banks by morning. Then we’ll have to start preparing for the next set of guests.”
“Yup,” said Mac. “But in the meantime we really can get some rest.”
“Leaving out some solid stag, if you’d be so kind. If Dall’s having trouble handling this, then he’s only got two ways to go. Kill hostages or attack us.”
“OK, boss. What about the prisoners?”
“I don’t want to deal with them now. What sort of state are they in?”
“Alive. Just. Carefully restrained. The ship’s computer officer’s pretty competent as a nurse. She’s keeping an eye on them. Stag could keep a distant eye on her.”
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
“Consider it done.”
*
Angela Van Der Piet awoke slowly with an ache in her head and a pain in her chest. It was a sharp pain and so precisely placed that it felt as though her heart was breaking. Half-conscious memories fed disturbingly into her confused and aching head. She felt as if she was coming to after a lengthy session of physical and sexual abuse. This supposition was compounded by the fact that she was firmly secured to the bed.
She raised her head, trying to look down in the dim light. A sheet failed to cover her torso and she knew at once she was naked to the waist at least. The bruise along her sternum deepened the shadow between her breasts, seeming to make them fuller, and she felt terribly defenceless and at risk. Even more than most women, Pitman feared rape. She had taken the physical prowess of her girlhood ultimately into the Dutch army where she had forced her way into the special forces regiments by sheer strength of will. But once there she had found herself surrounded by men who saw women mostly as sex objects or good-luck charms. The whole of her gender, it seemed sometimes, were divided into mothers or faithful girlfriends far away, or good cheap whores nearby. As well as being physically at risk, she found herself sexually at risk as well, and the only way she could deal with it was by becoming almost nun-like. Asexual. And as butch as the most masculine of the men.
But the men Pitman worked with kept going into situations where the physical danger escalated and, with it, the sexual danger for her when she accompanied them. Even had she been safe from the attentions of her own squad, there was usually the rest of the army to contend with. And always the enemy. In war situations, the rest of her squad feared capture, torture and death. She feared capture, rape, torture and death. It had, in fact, never happened. And she had thought she had come to terms with the fear of it.
The simple pirating of a ship, the loading of some illicit cargo and its delivery to a prearranged location known only to Dall and Aves had seemed the least risky of all the assignments she had ever been on. Even the unfortunate need to dispatch the PIRA watchkeeper and his American girlfriend had hardly ruffled the surface of her calm. Nothing on this job had. Until that strange girl with her intense, intelligent eyes had appeared out of the woodwork to watch her the way certain men had watched her all her life. Until the S A bloody S had arrived on the scene so unexpectedly.
A figure suddenly loomed out of the shadows at her bedside. It was not that of the big rough corporal with hot bristly lips. It was that of the dangerous girl called Harry. What little light there was seemed to have been captured by her eyes and multiplied until they shone. She moved strangely, stiffly. Pitman suddenly, poignantly, regretted hurting, humiliating and scaring her so badly. It seemed for a wild instant that the pain in her heart was there because of that.
But then things took an unexpected twist.
“You’re awake,” said Harry quietly, and she sat on the bed with her hip snugly in the hollow of Pitman’s slim waist. She reached over for something Pitman could not see. She brought it into the light and it was Pitman’s turn to gasp.
Harry put the point of a drill bit exactly in the middle of the bruise on Pitman’s breastbone and raised her strangely shining eyes. “Now,” she breathed. “Where were we, Angela?”
CHAPTER XVI
During the next eighteen hours, while the stand-off persisted, New England continued along the old Great Circle route from Fastnet to Cape Race. She might be everything of the twenty-first century encapsulated in one vessel, but the timeless laws of physics and navigation dictated that the route followed by Brendan in his coracle, almost by Columbus in his caravels and by all the great ships from the Titanic to the Queens should be the course beneath her revolutionary keel.
As she sped westwards, at one hundred miles an hour, the Porcupine Bank gathered and fell away beneath her. The edge of the continental shelf tumbled vertiginously into the West European Basin. For the better part of a thousand miles this great abyss reached down before rising up into the North Atlantic ridge which in time fell away into the Newfoundland Basin, the northern arm of the North-West Atlantic Basin, joining the icy deeps of the North American Basin with those of the Labrador Basin. Beyond the Newfoundland Basin, the Grand Banks thrust out past Flemish Cap and the Newfoundland Rise. Here the North American continental shelf heaved itself up into the shallows which would in time fall back to become the rocky coastlines of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England and New York.
Out across these mountainous ridges and abyssal deeps, like a great submarine wind blowing ever eastwards, the enormous wash of the Gulf Stream came. In the ancient days of sail when a ship might move at speeds of half a dozen knots on average, the eastward surge, travelling counter at a knot or two, was worthy of consideration. Beneath New England, the Gulf Stream was reduced to insignificance. But great forces of nature have been belittled and dismissed before. Never for long.
Above the steady thrust of the Gulf Stream whirled unquiet air. The heavy atmosphere of the cold polar cap sat uneasily on the Arctic. The weight of its chilly density pulled it southwards while the buoyant warmth of the southern continental or maritime winds made them push up over their slow and heavy cousin. To the interface of warm air seeking to rise above cold, the physics dictated by the spin of the earth added a constant variety. The westward passage of the sun reflects the eastward tumble of the earth, and the air above the spinning continents and seas is disturbed, twisted and ultimately embroiled by the power of its passage.
So it is that the straight and steady line which would define the interface between polar and temperate air becomes a series of ripples, and the ripples become whorls and the whorls become depressions with warm, light wind trapped in toils of cold, heavy atmosphere. Where the airs intertwine — they hesitate to mix — pressure gradients build. In time, these stabilise to become warm fronts and cold fronts striving to contain the unquiet airs. Invisible, but as real as ski slopes, the fronts form in the air and sweep eastwards, while up and down their glacial slopes move columns of water vapour coalescing into clouds.
The winds which would blow contentedly westwards over the east-tumbling earth become embroiled in this system also, rushing out of high pressure towards low pressure, pushing the clouds they carry up and down the slopes of air. The speed of the winds is dictated by the intensity of the depression and the steepness of the pressure gradient around which they are proceeding. Further south, in the equatorial regions of the North Atlantic, storms sent westwards out of Africa tighten the gyre so fiercely that the winds whirling round them can travel at speeds close to 200 miles per hour. In the central and northern regions, such hurricane winds are rarer but they are by no means unknown. And they bring with them mountainous seas. Seas big enough, according to one record, to drive back the complete bridgehouse of the first Queen Eli
zabeth by more than a foot one stormy night in the Second World War.
Above the whirling air, mankind has hung necklaces of weather satellites which originally broadcast to forecasters and coastguards, though later to every properly equipped vessel.
The warnings from the weather sats kept New England on the southern edge of the great circle route as a series of unseasonable weather systems did much to spoil the first summer of the brave new century in northern Europe. She had been sailing at full speed for nearly forty hours when she skimmed over the banks south of Cape Race and set her head southwards, keeping along the line of the coast well east of Avalon, St-Pierre and Cape Breton, down towards Sable Island.
*
Things had deteriorated on the bridge. Dall had executed no one in retaliation for the loss of the engineering sections but it had been a close call and everyone knew it. The team he had brought aboard with him were confused, defensive, under great strain. They had lost two of their close-knit number, dead at the hands of the SAS, and two more whose fate remained unknown. The fact that each of the second couple was half of a particularly close buddy pair made things worse. The depressed Sam Copeland could think nothing but good of the trusty Pitman, and little but evil of what must be happening to her. Even Lazio seemed to have gained a range of positive attributes in the eyes of Lobo and his friends.
While the strain on the pirates mounted, the strain on the crew of New England reached breaking point. There seemed no doubt now that they were heading for North America and the best-defended, most closely guarded coasts in the world. Dall’s plan as far as anyone could penetrate it seemed to rely on the jet-ship outrunning anything sent after or against her until she could make a secret landfall or rendezvous. Ahead lay more unknown, incalculable danger from without and the increasing certainty of execution during some forced and botched negotiation within. If push came to shove, the SAS might well be more interested in regaining control of the ship than in preserving the lives of the hostages. But the gloomy restlessness of the imprisoned men and woman was kept on a tight rein by the threat of their eight captors — nine, counting the turncoat O’Reilley. If the SAS wanted him they would have to be very quick indeed to get to him before his muttering ex-shipmates did.
Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9) Page 21
