Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  The computer screen abruptly cleared and Indira’s attention switched back to it. ‘Get me the video feed closest to the alarm that just sounded,’ ordered Richard, the quiet rumble of his voice making his words sound more like a reasonable request than the orders of a tense commander.

  ‘I have four alarms sounding,’ warned Indira. ‘Both port and starboard bulkhead doors of the A-Deck corridor and both aft access doors to the cargo areas forward of the bridge. That’s something we’ve never seen before. It’s quite an escalation, in fact. They seem to have all the emergency override codes needed for the drill and counter-command control codes, or some sort of malware that simply prevents us accessing the ship’s command control programmes, though the monitoring programmes still seem to be online. That’s why the boys at NIPEX are shut out. In fact, they’ve definitely got the codes: there’s no sign of forced entry.’

  ‘They have good intelligence, then,’ nodded Richard thoughtfully. ‘If they have access to the counter-command control codes that keep the NIPEX team out, that’s worrying, though they had that access on the last drill too, if my memory serves me correctly.’ He swept the hair back off his forehead thoughtlessly, frowning as his mind raced.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Indira.

  ‘Go with any of them,’ said Richard decisively.

  ‘Going with A-Deck main corridor starboard side video feed one,’ she answered briskly.

  ‘That’s just inside the A-Deck starboard door,’ said Robin, sharing her husband’s tension.

  The screen filled with blackness. A distant glimmer of movement. A rustling whisper of sound. The squeak of a footfall, fading.

  ‘Next one’s in,’ he rapped. Blackness on blackness. The merest hint of motion. Again, the whisper. Indira hit the volume and picked up steady breathing.

  ‘Infra-red,’ he snapped. Signals whipped at the speed of light from earth to a series of satellites across distances comparable to those between the earth and the moon, and back again, showing what the cameras could see at the infra-red end of the light spectrum. The picture changed as the camera adjusted its visual spectrum further. Figures moved across the screen in a range of fluorescent orange shades. Beams of strange brightness shone out of headlights ahead of them. The bodies moving purposefully forward were partially obscured by the coldness of what they were wearing and what they were carrying. They looked alien, almost robotic; different to any of the other teams that had tested the security systems in the past. More in number. More focused and purposeful. Seemingly better armed.

  ‘Bridge?’ asked Richard.

  ‘We’ll take a look …’ said Indira at once. But when she switched feeds, the screen went blank.

  ‘They’ve neutralized the bridge feeds,’ observed Robin. ‘That was fast.’

  ‘Too fast and too efficient,’ decided Richard. ‘Time for action. Plan A.’

  ‘So original!’ teased Robin, trying to relieve some of the tension. ‘Did you think that up yourself? Plan A?’

  The edges of his wild blue eyes crinkled into a brief smile. ‘No. But it’ll have to do, original or not. We have to take it all very seriously, security test or not. Especially if not. You know what to do?’

  ‘Of course,’ answered both Robin and Indira together. Robin moved forward and sat beside the young computer operative. She kicked off her shoes – a signal that she was ready for some real work.

  ‘OK,’ he said, in motion at once. ‘Usual routine. I’ll hit the road. OK?’

  ‘Aye aye, Captain,’ said Robin equably as he strode across the office towards the door that led to their flat, his emergency travelling outfit, pre-packed flight bag and the lift to his Bentley Continental in the garage below. ‘I’ll get Audrey on to the airlines. You’ll know which one you’re on by the time you get to Heathrow.’

  ‘And the assembly point for the rest of the team,’ he said, pausing in the doorway, sparking with energy, clearly bursting to be off adventuring.

  ‘Plan A says Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. That’s Yelizovo airport, with some pick-ups on the way in Domodedovo, Moscow,’ said Indira confidently, spectacularly unfazed by either the tension or the byplay – or, come to that, the lack of originality in keeping Richard’s ‘Plan A’ label. ‘Failing that, it’ll have to be Yuzhno-Sakhalin, and failing that Sapporo, like last time. We’ll have all three timed and factored by the time you get to Heathrow.’

  ‘Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Never heard of it,’ said Richard cheerfully. ‘Nor of Yelizovo. Therefore I so want to go there! Get Felix Makarov involved, just in case things in Moscow need smoothing. How soon can I be there?’

  ‘Thirty-six hours from take-off if Audrey can get you a seat,’ said Indira. ‘Aboard Sayonara within forty. Flight with BA to Moscow and Transaero internal across Siberia. Expensive, though. Ten thousand pounds, one way. Then there’ll be the chopper from Kamchatka …’

  ‘Make it so, even so,’ said Richard cheerfully, as though he were a captain of the Starship Enterprise. ‘And warn the others. Including Felix. But the quicker I’m at Heathrow, the more options we’ll have, by the sound of it. Sakhalin or Sapporo will have to do if push comes to shove. I’ll be in touch all along the line – on the hour every hour till I get back home.’

  He turned to go.

  ‘And if you’re not?’ asked Robin, looking over her shoulder, her tone stopping him in his tracks. ‘This lot look like they have tricks up their sleeves.’ She nodded towards the computer screen, which was once again black and blank. Sinisterly silent.

  ‘If things go quiet when we get aboard,’ said Richard as he sprang into motion once more and disappeared down the corridor, ‘then it’s time for Plan B.’

  ‘Plan B?’ asked Indira in the slightly echo-like silence after he vanished. ‘There’s a Plan B?’

  ‘There is indeed,’ said Robin. ‘We’ve never had to use it before, but there’s always a first time. Plan B is Harry and the Pitman.’ Which left her frowning companion none the wiser.

  88 Hours to Impact

  As British Airways flight 233 from London Heathrow settled on to its short finals over Moscow, Richard glanced out of the window by his side. Russia was shrouded beneath an overcast sky and there was nothing to see. He looked back at his laptop screen. The Airbus A380 was one of the new generation with on-board wifi access: he had been able to use his laptop live instead of just relying on the memory. So he was in Skype contact with Heritage Mariner’s head office and aware that Plan A was falling smoothly into place. And he was fizzing with excitement as a result. It was six p.m. on Sayonara, six a.m. in London and nine a.m. on the ground below.

  According to Robin, his team was assembling at its various points around the Pacific Rim, even though they were only eleven hours into the crisis. During that time, she had changed, returned to her computer, confirmed that Sayonara’s hourly zip files had stopped coming in, briefed the long-suffering Heritage Mariner executives in various time zones all over the world that their CEO was off adventuring again – and slept. She’d woken a little more than an hour ago, showered and got back online. All while he was starting out on his travels.

  Now, however, Richard was just coming round from a three-hour power nap that had filled most of the flight time. It looked as though Robin was by no means the only one involved who was awake at an unusual hour – the rest of the team would all be up and about, ready to head for their final meeting place at the obscure airport of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The team’s general make-up was long-decided in case of such an event, but its actual personnel was something else again.

  To go with Plan A, the personnel assembling at pick-up points all over the world were, of course The A Team. The name amused Richard, his ready smile widening at the memory of what Robin had thought about the hackneyed nom de guerre. With a gleam of her teeth and flash of her eyes, the flight attendant smoothed her skirt over her hips and swayed up the aisle towards him once again. Black-haired, blue-eyed giants with square jaws and fascinatingly theatri
cal scars didn’t often appear in her experience. And this one had a deep, growling voice that made something profound within her seem to melt whenever she heard it. But even though the dark-haired passenger’s dazzling blue eyes were precisely level with her crisply covered bust and the button straining at its cleavage, he remained disappointingly fixated on his computer with occasional glances out at the overcast skies hanging low above Moscow. So she swept past with a little moue of disappointment and he never even realized she had looked at him with anything more than purely professional interest.

  But Richard had more than enough to occupy his mind. The A Team, personally identified or not, were carefully selected, fully briefed, cutting edge and at the tip top of their game. They were men who had been chosen by Richard, Felix Makarov of Sevmash and his associate, the security expert Ivan Yagula. Others, further afield, had been chosen by Nic Greenbaum of Greenbaum International and the CEOs of the Japanese consortia involved in the making and maintenance of Sayonara herself; the oversight, loading and unloading of her potentially explosive cargo. Comprising ex-special forces, ships engineers, liquid gas experts and computer experts, they were ready, willing and able to meet any threat of any kind to any aspect of Sayonara’s hull, systems, cargo, control or integrity. Their existence and constant readiness for action were two of the most important aspects of the case Heritage Mariner, Mitsubishi and NIPEX had been forced to make to the International Maritime Organization and their insurers, Lloyd’s of London – not to mention to the American, Russian and Japanese governments through whose jurisdictions the revolutionary, unmanned vessel was programmed to sail. Any flaw in their emergency response and Sayonara would be banned from national and international waters without a second thought or any chance of appeal.

  There were a couple of ships’ engineers from Mitsubishi’s shipyards in Kobe en route to Sapporo, briefed to come north to meet the others within the next twelve hours. With them were the computer experts who had designed the ship’s systems – part of a cooperative group that had brought Mitsubishi and Fujitsu together. The Fujitsu men were headquartered at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science, which was in Kobe as well. Their current focus, however, was less upon Sayonara than their next project – the floating city of Kujukuri which was taking shape in the bay below the NIPEX terminal.

  These two teams would be met at Sapporo by the NIPEX team responsible for the oversight of the Liquified Natural Gas cargo – one of the safest cargoes currently carried at sea in its present state within the modified Moss-type spherical tanks at minus 160 degrees Celsius. Then they were booked to fly up to the meeting place at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Greenbaum International would also be flying LNG experts from Anchorage and Vancouver to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky by company jet as there were no scheduled flights they could use.

  But the engineers, computer experts and gas men were by no means at the top of Richard’s wish-list; and of course he never gave a second thought to their work on the floating city. Although in his heart of hearts he believed this to be a surprise security exercise, NIPEX’s loss of control was a serious matter whichever way you looked at it, unless the men on board were all accomplished sailors with a competent captain in command. And Richard had seen all too clearly what the bright orange figures revealed by the infra-red had been wearing and carrying. They appeared to have gone aboard heavily armed – and he was among the last men on earth to get caught bringing a knife to a gun fight. If Sam Mendes, director of the play he’d missed at the Old Vic last night as well as of the most successful Bond film of all time, could ever be persuaded to make a movie of what Richard was planning instead of the next in the James Bond franchise, it wouldn’t be called Skyfall. It would be called Overkill.

  Richard’s thoughts jumped twenty miles ahead as he felt the plane settle on to its short finals to Moscow’s Domodedovo International airport. When he suggested that his Russian associate Felix Makarov might smooth things over at Domodedovo, he had only been half serious. He had documentation that would whisk him through with silken speed. But Domodedovo was more than just a stopover. It was the pick-up point for the ultimate – and perhaps the most important – section of the A Team. The most problematical one, and the only one whose details were not yet on his laptop’s capacious memory.

  Heritage Mariner’s Russian partners in a wide range of enterprises were Bashnev/Sevmash, a consortium whose wealth and influence were based on oil, gas, electricity and nuclear power. Their various networks covered the old Soviet Union, controlling pipelines, electricity grids and road tankers, as well as the ocean-going ones they co-owned with Heritage Mariner. The two companies shared interests in oil-producing areas from the icy wastes of the Artcic to the burning heart of Africa, though the emphasis of the Russian company was on extraction while Heritage Mariner’s was on transport. Within Russia, however, Bashnev/Sevmash’s fleets of trucks delivered everything in the containers Heritage Mariner shipped for them: individual machines, motorcars, parcels and packages.

  Not to mention the fact that they had enormous political and legal power. Felix Makarov was the head of Sevmash, but his friend and long-time business partner Max Asov, CEO of Bashnev Oil and Power, had been killed not long ago and replaced by his daughter, Anastasia. It was a succession in the world of Russian corporate empires that was almost unheard of. But under the joint leadership of Felix, Max and – latterly – Anastasia, the Russians had also expanded into even less traditional areas. It was Bashnev/Sevmash who supplied the ground-breaking floating power station Zemlya on lease to the Japanese government, powering the half-built floating city. The expansion of the business necessitated an expansion of safety measures, and so Bashnev/Sevmash’s latest acquisition was a company headed by the man who was now their own head of security. It was called Risk Incorporated. And it was to Risk Incorporated that Richard turned when he needed the kind of men who knew how to counter the type of weapons the men on board Sayonara seemed to be armed with.

  Risk Incorporated was the Blackstone of the new Russia. Staffed by ex-special forces operatives, all further trained to the highest possible level, it was a ‘go anywhere, meet any crisis’ organization. And it needed to be. London Centre, Heritage Mariner’s commercial intelligence arm, had briefed Richard on more than one occasion recently that it was Risk Incorporated which was watching out for Bashnev Oil and Power in particular during the dangerous days of succession in the boardroom while the new CEO settled into her late father’s chair. There were rumours that the sharks were circling. And not just Russian sharks, by all accounts – everyone from the world’s most powerful oil and gas corporations to the Mafia.

  As the A380’s wheels touched the surface of the main runway and her turbofans went into reverse thrust, Richard leaned back and hoped that whoever else was waiting in Domodedovo’s VIP lounge would have the crème de la crème of Risk Incorporated’s hard men with them. Although he had joked to Robin about Plan B he really did not want to have to fall back on Harry and the Pitman. But still, he thought, as the jet slowed to taxiing speed and swung in towards the terminal, it might be as well to get the pair of them lined up. And, perhaps, to let the others at Domodedovo know there was a Plan B too.

  No sooner had Richard walked into the arrivals hall than a familiar figure confronted him. A huge young man stood serenely surrounded by security staff. He had a fashionably shaven head that revealed a long, muscular cranium. He was suited in single-breasted, mid-grey gabardine, shirted in white cotton, wearing a gold silk tie with a Windsor knot. All this was visible between the wings of a long black cashmere overcoat with a silk lining the colour of blood. The gold tie had no regimental crests, but there was the familiar Batman logo of the Spetsnaz special forces honourable discharge pin just visible on the lapel above his heart. The eyes were mid-blue and twinkling with good humour. The full, sensual lips quivered towards a smile as he swept forward, and the surprisingly fine nostrils flared. ‘Ah, there you are. Bang on time,’ he said in cut-glass Sandhurst Eng
lish.

  ‘Hello, Ivan,’ said Richard, striding forward to shake the massive Russian’s hand. It was the very man he had just been thinking of: Ivan Yagula, Head of Risk Incorporated, Bashnev/Sevmash’s new security chief and Anastasia’s new partner – in more ways than one.

  ‘I have people waiting to pick up your bags,’ said Ivan as he swept Richard out of the customs hall with only the faintest glance towards baggage claim. ‘You have a five-hour stopover, but there’s a lot we need to get done. It’s breakfast time here but I wouldn’t bother adjusting your watch. You’ve a good few more time zones to cross yet. Felix Makarov is here in person, and he has a large number of people that he would like you to meet. They are, I think you’ll find, just what the doctor ordered.’

  ‘A doctor of military strategy, I hope,’ countered Richard.

  Ivan gave a grunt of laughter. ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Now you mention it, they are the kind of men who give doctors of medicine full employment. Doctors and undertakers …’

  84 Hours to Impact

  Richard pushed his plate away, knowing that Robin would have disapproved of the massive obed of steak and chips he had just consumed. He was equally well aware that he should have contacted her again – but had omitted to do so, with malice aforethought, like a schoolboy playing truant.