Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  “Don’t you see?” Bob Stark was saying, much more loudly and forcefully than was absolutely necessary, almost shouting across the bridge at Dall. “We’ll be in United States territorial waters any time now. And if the government thinks we pose any kind of a threat, New England’s speed won’t matter a damn. They’ll just blow us out of the water!”

  “Like fuck they will,” snarled Dall, goaded. “With the Senator and his wife, the professor, you, and a Pulitzer prize winner aboard? Will they hell! They’ll do what they do best. They’ll hesitate. Shit, look at Desert Storm. Look how that turned out after all the huffing and puffing. We had Saddam over a barrel with a grenade shoved up his nose and nobody had the balls to pull the pin!”

  O’Reilley shoved his ferret face onto the bridge. “They’re sending again,” he said. “Same message, same wavelength.”

  “Still no idea?” Dall turned his back on Bob, concentrating on the radio operator. Every hour for the last six hours O’Reilley had picked up a transmission coming out of the communications system Op had set up below.

  “Nah. Short burst, encrypted signal. Could be going anywhere between here and Jupiter just about.”

  “Best guess?”

  “American Special Forces. If the SAS can’t slow us down, then maybe the SEALs will.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. So we’ve got to watch for incoming encrypted. And Dix, we’ve got to look out for incoming fast craft. You keep your eyes peeled or you lose them. Paul, have you any idea at all as yet how those sucking SAS men got aboard?”

  “Not one, Captain,” answered Paul Aves. “But they’ve been light-footed and light-fingered so far, even though they haven’t managed to slow us yet.”

  “Don’t be so stupid,” snapped Bob. “The SAS could slow us or stop us any time they wanted to. All they have to do is pull the plugs or blow the fuses.”

  “Who’s being stupid?” snarled Dall. “It obviously escaped your notice that we spent all of that first day setting this place up to be a fortress that can double as a firework display. They’ve worked it out, even if you haven’t. They touch one thing on this fucking boat they should not and the whole shitload, including us, goes up like the Fourth of July.”

  *

  Although neither of the women was included in the next briefing, Richard was. If pressed, he would have admitted that his inclusion seemed a little casual, almost accidental, given that his advice had made all the difference so far.

  “Mac,” began Merrideth, his voice little more than a whisper, “you and Op have checked all the hands-off and the surprises. Summation?”

  “Tricky. They’ve put a range of systems and devices in place. But they seem to have placed overrides in parallel with them. If we try to power down the engines either directly or from the engine control room, then the whole lot goes up in our faces. If they decide to do it from the bridge then that’ll be A-OK.”

  “Op?”

  “Mac’s got it in one, boss. Take a specific. If we tried to override the controls and open the rear cargo hatches from here, we’d trigger God knows what. If Dall decides to open the whole shooting match from up on the bridge then that’ll be fine. The systems we’ve checked have all been rigged like that. Signal from the bridge, fine. Signal from down here and it’s goodnight Vienna.”

  “But why would you want to open the cargo hatches?” asked Richard, intrigued.

  Op looked at Mac first and then at Merrideth. The major shrugged wearily and infinitesimally — the way he did everything at the moment. “To let the Friends in,” he answered. The way he said it made it clear Friends had a capital F. Richard guessed that they must be American Special Forces. A little spring of excitement began to well up in him at the thought.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked eagerly.

  “Well,” wheezed Merrideth, “it’s simple enough really. They’re reckoning on coming aboard in the same way we did, except that we’re already here to signal time and location.”

  “But you said you were planning to open the cargo hatches.”

  “Right. On an agreed signal at a prepared rendezvous, they’ll place themselves like we did on their own super-cat or hovercraft. At the correct moment, we were to open the rear hatch to the lower cargo hold and they would come aboard.”

  “God! They’d have to be quick! The safety override will kill the jets and the hatch would go down all right, but the people on the bridge would press their own overrides and the thing would swing shut again almost immediately and power up again as soon as it did so!”

  “We’d calculated a window of ten minutes in all. They don’t need to wait for the hatch to open fully and they can still come in while it’s closing if they’re fast. Ten minutes is all they’ll need, with luck. But it’s all academic now. We can’t get on the bridge and we can’t override the cargo hatch controls, or anything else, from down here without setting off booby traps. Can you?”

  “Well, no,” admitted Richard. “But I know a man who can. Well, not a man, actually…”

  *

  “Of course! I hadn’t thought!” said Harry.

  “You’ve been preoccupied with the wounded,” said Richard. Harry dropped her gaze. Her preoccupation had not arisen out of humanitarian considerations at all.

  “But now that it’s under discussion,” pursued Richard, unaware, “could you patch through from one of the terminals within our control to your own system on the bridge and then make the systems down here think the programs they are running have come from the command areas?”

  “Well, if my experience with the terminal in the library is anything to go by,” she answered slowly, “there certainly seems to be reason to hope.”

  “I get the impression we’ll need to be pretty certain,” said Richard. “If anything goes wrong then the whole ship is rigged to explode, so Merrideth says.”

  “Now that is nasty,” whispered Harry. “I tell you what,” her wide eyes rose to his face, their gaze troubled but earnest. “You leave this with me for a while and I’ll check.”

  “Check?” he asked, a little taken aback. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll ask Angela if the mjaor’s information is true. Then I’ll see about setting up a test or two. In my head at first, but on the engine control room computer later. Don’t worry,” she added, noting his expression, “I’ll be sure to check with you at each important step.”

  “With me or with the major.”

  “With you,” she said emphatically, squaring her jaw suddenly. “I don’t think I entirely trust the major.”

  Richard nodded and he returned to the cargo hold while Harry went back to the sickbay to carry out the first part of her scheme.

  Pitman and Lazio were having a hard time of it. The SAS men expected no quarter and offered none. All of them had spent hours, days even, in the most acute physical discomfort merely as a part of their training. As a result, the two captives were permanently handcuffed to the bed. They were allowed no freedom of movement at all, and the cuffs themselves were only loosened occasionally and sufficiently to maintain circulation. As Merrideth observed, the only thing worse than a prisoner is a sick prisoner. They were fed, watered and passed the bedpan by hand. Harry doctored them, Ann nursed them as necessary, the SAS men guarded them, and that was all. Harry had suggested a bed bath but the suggestion was vetoed as being too dangerous.

  Lazio grunted as Harry entered but he hardly registered her presence; she had been keeping him semi-comatose with drugs. Ann was away in the lower hold, ferreting around in the IRA armaments — with Merrideth’s grudging permission. So Harry and Pitman were effectively alone. They had forged a strange bond which had begun, oddly enough, when Harry had put the drill down, unable to do more with it than offer the most illusory of threats.

  Pitman had naturally assumed spineless weakness in her enemy and had been moved to no gratitude whatsoever. But Harry’s continued care and attention, selfless and apparently so artless, had begun to wear her down. They communicated now w
ith some directness across the barricades of their armed truce. But, as with Harry’s apparent guilelessness, Pitman’s gruff honesty hid more than it revealed.

  “Merrideth says Dall’s got this place all wired ready to blow,” said Harry softly. “Richard Mariner’s just told me about it and I’d trust him with my life.”

  “Yes. As far as I know, Dall’s got systems in place to destroy anything your friends handle wrong.”

  “Not just the bits and pieces. The whole ship.”

  “Maybe. Seems logical.”

  “No. It doesn’t. If this was a desperate stand-off and he really had his back to the wall, do or die, then I could maybe see a reason. But to risk the whole ship on the off chance that the SAS might want to slow her or even stop her -1 just don’t see it. Not unless there’s a hell of a lot you’re not telling me. Or a hell of a lot he hasn’t told you.”

  “Very likely. Either one. I’ve told you, I’m not going to give you much more than the big four, even if you bring the drill back in. And even if I did spill my guts, you can bet all Dall’s briefings are “need to know”. Only Dall and maybe Paul Aves know the whole story. I only know what I need to know in order to do my job and collect my pay.”

  “Then I hope you’ve invested some of that pay in good insurance, because I’m off to do some serious tinkering with Captain Dall’s booby-trap systems.”

  *

  The engine control room still stank of flash powder. The floor, walls, and some of the equipment bore clear evidence of the stun grenades which had overcome Lazio. The main force of the blast had been absorbed by the central bank of instruments but even so, one of the monitors which stood in the rank along the left-hand wall was weirdly distorted.

  Harry crossed to the machines with a barely-controlled skip of excitement, Richard close behind her. They sat down and Harry flicked switches and pressed buttons, bringing the machines to life. Like many of his generation, Richard had taken to computers with rather less ease than video players, so the speed and mastery shown by his slim companion fascinated him.

  As the screens awoke to her bidding, they demonstrated the programs for which they had been prepared, primarily the status and disposition of the engines. Like many an expert being observed, Harry kept up a running commentary as she worked. “This pre-programming is simple surface stuff,” she said. “Suitable for heathen engineers who have little idea of the subtleties. Let’s see what happens if we close this engine monitoring program down and get deeper into the file management system.”

  “Is anyone on the bridge likely to be monitoring this?” asked Richard as the screen went blank and then re-awoke covered with a bewildering range of linked icons.

  “Not unless they’ve started up my computers. Still, let’s see…”

  Harry’s voice was full of a strange mixture of breathless tension and ill-controlled excitement. She had missed the machines almost as though they were friends — or lovers, thought Richard. As he entertained this strange fancy, Harry was changing the display on another screen from measurements, stresses and load factors to a completely new series of icons. This was the blast-damaged screen nearest to the door, and its image was disturbingly askew. Richard was surprised it was still working at all. As he watched, the screen suddenly went red, as if it had flooded with blood. SECURITY said a glaring word in blue against the shocking background. PASSWORD.

  Harry typed so rapidly that Richard could not follow her fingers and a series of asterisks came up onto the screen. He counted eight of them before the security system, satisfied, allowed them onto the next level. The screen cleared and then produced a weirdly twisted monochrome image of the bridge.

  “Sound?” asked Richard, leaning forward.

  “’Fraid not. Can you lip-read?”

  “No. I couldn’t on this screen anyway. It’s so twisted that these people don’t look human. It looks like a Quasimodo convention up there.”

  “It’s the best I can do. Still, you can see that no one’s paying any attention to my equipment. There’s the captain and Dall up by the helm. That looks like Stubbs by the radar display and John Dix, for some reason, by the weather monitor. And there’s the foul O’Reilley coming out of his pit. Can’t see who the guard is but that looks like the lot. They don’t seem to have noticed the security camera coming on. As long as we don’t move it about, there’s no reason to suppose they will ever work out they’re being watched. Now, on with the show.”

  Lacking Harry’s youthful confidence, Richard kept one eye firmly on the collection of dumb dwarves and silent trolls currently manning the bridge. Because of this he missed some of the finer points of Harry’s mouse-handling and keyboard technique, but her running commentary kept him up with what she was planning and what she was doing. “There are levels which we want to go down here,” she said. “It’s not quite Tomb Raider but it’ll do. First we want to make sure we can ferret around in here without anyone catching us at it. After setting up our bridge watch we’ve got to check for traps and alarms. Can we disable the whole system security program without setting something off? Lucrezia, you look after security, what do you think? Lucrezia thinks not. So…”

  The second level of Harry’s game was to plan ahead what systems she would want to consult and disable their security programs one by one.

  “Now, let’s follow lovely Lara down the next set of passages. Where can we actually go, now that the traps and gates have all been disabled and opened to us?”

  All of this would have been gibberish to Richard had not both William and Mary introduced him to the intrepid animated virtual explorer in their own junior versions of the best-selling computer games. How typical of Harry, he thought, that she should identify with such a strongly twenty-first-century woman. Indeed, the whole system seemed to be guarded by women. Lucrezia Borgia, Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Marie Stopes. Because they were exploring the control areas, not the communications, Ellen Degeneres and one or two others who might have raised Richard’s eyebrows and alerted him to Harry’s orientation remained secret still.

  “And here we are on the lowest level. We can go where we like through the command systems with nobody any the wiser. But what can we actually do?”

  Harry’s flying fingers paused. Hovered like hawks above the keyboard. Her eyes, slowly clearing of their concentration and reminding Richard disturbingly of Robin’s eyes awakening in the morning, swept up to his face. “This is the most dangerous level,” she said. “I’ve given it all the thought I can but it may be good to talk. What can I do to test our access without alerting them?” Harry gestured to the trolls on the bridge monitor with her chin.

  “It has to be something in this area,” mused Richard. “It’s this area that we have to control if we’re going to make Merrideth’s plan work.”

  “And this area is outside their control and observation,” she agreed. “But if anything goes wrong, it’ll be this area that blows up.”

  “But haven’t they wired everything so that the whole ship goes up no matter where security is breached?”

  “That’s what Merrideth says. That’s what Angela says. I wouldn’t trust either of them as far as I could throw them.”

  “That’s as maybe. But so what?”

  “Well, I was thinking, what about a little anchor malfunction? Two seconds. Maybe light up a monitor on the bridge but switch it off again at once. Shake them up a bit, maybe. And if anything local is set off, we’re well away.”

  “And if Merrideth is right and it all goes up?”

  “Well, we’re no worse off than we would have been in any case.”

  Richard thought it through-She was right. He was beginning to question Merrideth himself now, and obviously only a fool would trust either of the captives. It would be worth trying the anchors — a localised explosion away in the chain locker wouldn’t do them any harm back here.

  “Right,” he said, unconsciously tensing the whole of his great body as though to ward off the half-expected cataclysm. “Anchors away.”


  Ship-handling was part of Cleopatra’s province — in Harry’s system as in life. As soon as the Egyptian queen got them through the last security check, Harry only had to click on an icon to open the anchor control system.

  STATUS, said the screen. Anchors stowed.

  DIRECTION, typed in Harry. Lower port anchor.

  SAFETY ALERT, said the screen. Anchors may not be lowered while vessel under way.

  “Ready?” said Harry. Her voice was quiet, her tone gentle. “Want to alert Merrideth’s merry men?”

  “No point. If nothing happens we can tell him later. If something does happen he’ll notice.”

  “I guess,” said Harry, and sucked in a lingering hiss of breath.

  DIRECTION, she typed. Systems manager override.

  The seven dwarves on the bridge monitor all swung round as though Snow White had just arrived. They began to gesture at the console, at each other. A light was flashing insistently. No doubt an alarm was ringing.

  Most importantly, however, nothing seemed to be blowing up.

  Richard sucked in his breath at the sight of the furore on the bridge. But the light abruptly stopped flashing. The figures stopped shouting and gesticulating. Turned away, puzzled. The hunched homunculus of Dall crossed towards the console. Hit it like a man exasperated with a malfunctioning television.

  Richard’s eyes flicked across. The words DIRECTION: Override were jumping up towards the top of the screen. Below them stood STATUS: Anchors stowed. His gaze moved round to Harry sitting at his side, her face flushed and her eyes sparkling. “Bingo,” she breathed.