Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘What,’ asked Pat by way of an answer, ‘if there was an organization that ran parallel to the Mafia? Only it was more secret? Better organized in some respects? Richer and more powerful, but most people have never heard of it?’

  Pat clicked on to Wikipedia, and Robin read: ‘The ’Ndrangheta is a criminal organization in Italy, centered in Calabria (near Sicily). Despite not being as famous abroad as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, and having been considered more rural compared to the Neapolitan Camorra and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, the ’Ndrangheta managed to become the most-powerful crime syndicate of Italy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While commonly lumped together with the Sicilian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta operates independently from the Sicilians, though there is contact between the two, due to the geographical proximity, and shared culture and language of Calabria and Sicily. A US diplomat estimated that the organization’s drug trafficking, extortion and money-laundering activities accounted for at least three per cent of Italy’s GDP.’

  ‘Three per cent,’ said Robin. How much is that?

  ‘Italy’s GDP is about two point two trillion dollars. Three per cent of that, off the top of my head, is in the region of sixty-six billion, give or take, if I’ve got my noughts in the right place …’

  ‘Sixty-six billion dollars! It’s no wonder that, as it says here, Since the 1950s, the organization has spread towards the north of Italy and worldwide. Yes,’ Robin added thoughtfully, ‘’Ndrangheta. I think I’ve heard of them.’

  She sat back, frowning. Savouring, suddenly, the sweet complexity of the whisky on her tongue. ‘Heritage Mariner doesn’t do a lot of container work in the Mediterranean as such, but we bring a shedload of stuff in through Suez and out past Gib. So I know a good deal about Gioia Tauro, the big new container port in Calabria – and the fact that it’s supposed to be under almost total Mafia control. But clearly it’s a mistake just to lump the Mafia and the ’Ndrangheta together. So that makes the ’Ndrangheta look like the biggest net importer of cocaine from the South American drug cartels. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘It is. And you’re right to make the distinction: not Mafia – ’Ndrangheta. And the ’Ndrangheta are coining it in as a result. Especially as – until 2010 – the Italian authorities were more focused on keeping the Mafia under some kind of control in Sicily …’

  ‘… while the ’Ndrangheta grew like weeds in Calabria, just across the strait of Messina …’

  ‘That,’ said Pat lugubriously, ‘is only the beginning. After the massacre in Germany I showed you, the Italian authorities began to go after ’Ndrangheta godfathers as well as Mafia ones. They started literally digging them out of the mountains. They had whole towns riddled with underground tunnels and hidey-holes. As a result of which, ’Ndrangheta wanted to move its money and influence abroad. It already had powerful cells in places where Italian communities exist. Taking it alphabetically …’ he clicked back on to Wikipedia, ‘… that would be Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Germany – as we know – the Netherlands, Mexico, South Africa and, of course, the United States. But, my point is this: they are always on the lookout for ways to expand. New associates. New markets. And they will go in via legitimate enterprises. Look.’ He clicked on the link to a particular section of the page and Robin read: Belgium: ’Ndrangheta clans purchased almost ‘an entire neighbourhood’ in Brussels with laundered money originating from drug trafficking. On 5 March 2004, forty-seven people were arrested, accused of drug trafficking and money laundering to purchase real estate in Brussels for some twenty-eight million euros. The activities extended to the Netherlands where large quantities of heroin and cocaine had been purchased …

  ‘And you’re telling me that Lazzaro is a part of this?’

  ‘No. I’m telling you that Lazzaro is the capo of the Gioia Tauro clan. He’s among the first of the ’Ndrangheta capi to be moving himself outside Italy and running things internationally. He’s looking to expand into markets – legitimate and illegitimate – that will glean him the most profit. He’s open to suggestions and up for making contacts. With anyone. Anywhere.’

  ‘And he seems to be the guy who’s now elbowing in on the syndicate insuring Sayonara. The guy who sent the team aboard that Richard is facing down …’ Robin paused and frowned, remembering the flash of irritation in those deep, dark chocolate eyes. ‘Oh, shit, Pat,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Pat reached for the precious Bushmills bottle.

  ‘Tristan Folgate-Lothbury sent the team aboard. At least, he sent them to Rat Island. And then he lost contact with them altogether …’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Pat solicitously.

  ‘What if the team that went aboard weren’t Tristan’s team? Lazzaro wanted the drill. What if they were Lazzaro’s men? What if they were ’Ndrangheta?’

  68 Hours to Impact

  Richard tore the headset off his streaming eyes, blinking fiercely and shaking his head. His vision cleared almost at once and he saw his teammates floundering blindly all around him, their night-vision goggles overcome by the brightness. He stepped forward, fearing that this was a trick to incapacitate them before springing some kind of trap. But no. Apart from the men nearest to him – and the sounds of the second group echoing over from the port side, there was nothing. No movement. No challenge. Just the distant buzz of fluorescent strip-lighting. The sighing of the wind against the canopy. The stirring of the waves. The restless sotto voce rumbling of the turbines.

  Richard crossed to the reeling figure of Rikki Sato and caught him by the shoulder. It took a moment to calm the jumpy computer expert, then he was able to pull off the headset and offer the blind man the glasses hooked into a breast pocket on his bulletproof vest. ‘Doctor Sato, it’s Richard Mariner,’ he said. ‘It’s just the ship’s lighting. Do the systems on board switch on automatically?’

  ‘Yes! There are sensors …’ The computer expert actually slapped himself on the forehead with frustration and anger, hard enough to send the black-framed glasses skittering down the short slope of his nose. Richard stepped back. He had never seen anyone do that before. ‘The lighting system works on the motion sensors. I should have remembered,’ the distraught man wailed.

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Doctor,’ he said. ‘There’s more than simple slips of memory at work here. When the first team went into the bridge house thirty-one hours ago, they didn’t set off any motion sensors to switch on any lights or we’d have seen it on our systems in London. This is all being done on purpose. As was that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that they had the emergency override codes – the same as your guys do, and only Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Fujitsu men have access to those. They came aboard, went into the bridge house and set off the red alert. They set off the cameras, but not the motion sensors, or the lights would have come on. They wanted to work in the dark because they wanted us to be in the dark. They wanted us to know someone was on board, perhaps, but not who. And then, when the transmissions from the on-board cameras stopped and we couldn’t keep such a close eye on them any more – I’ll bet that’s when the motion sensors for the lights came back online; the ones we tripped just now, so they could do whatever they wanted to do without having to fuss with inconvenient headsets and infra-red night-vision equipment.’

  ‘But if it was motion sensors that switched the lights on now,’ said Sato, ‘it was not a trap, or else something would be happening.’

  Richard looked around as soon as Sato finished speaking and waited for the others to sort themselves out. After Sato, his next priority, of course, was Aleks. Dom would have to take care of himself. But neither needed his immediate assistance. They were all pulling off their goggles and mopping their eyes. He turned away from the group of men he had entered with and caught his breath at what he saw, losing his train of thought as the immediacy of what he was seeing simply overwhelmed him. It was even more than he had imagined in the vast, echoing darkness just before the lights
went on.

  True, as he had sensed, they had stepped into a long, narrow passage immediately inside the bulkhead door, for the wall of the whaleback cover rose seemingly less than a metre beyond his square shoulder, coming in over his head like the wall of a tunnel. But on the other, equally close at hand, rose a dome. A dome like the dome of St Paul’s in London. And there, beyond it in the brightness, another, like the dome of St Peter’s in Rome. Beyond that, St Mark’s in Venice or the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg. In fact, he thought, simply dazed, if you lined those domes up one after another, you would still have to add the great dome of Santa Sophia in Istanbul to make up the set.

  Five great domes rose out of the deck before him, swelling and receding as the green nonslip decking sat around them with great circles cut out of it to accommodate them below. They differed from the greatest architectural domes fashioned by the greatest church-builders only in that they were larger than anything Palladio, Brunaleschi or Wren had ever dreamed of, and as smooth as the surfaces of gargantuan balloons, blanketed in the steel cladding of the whaleback’s interior. Shrinking away from it, like breasts beneath a nightgown as they receded towards the nipples at their apexes where the pipes stood ready to conduct their liquid cargo in and out.

  Each hemisphere had a radius of twenty-two metres from centre point to outer edge, and a radius of twenty-two metres from centre point to topmost curve. Five metres each way bigger than St Paul’s, in fact, thought Richard, tricked into plundering his encyclopaedic general knowledge. How much bigger they were than the other great domes only Heaven knew. And, sitting in shrinking holes in the decks below, did the domes continue to make perfect spheres? He fought to remember the detail of the schematic on the laptop he had left back with Ivan. So he did what any of the techies blinking owlishly around him would have done: he pulled out his Galaxy and called up the schematic on that – the detailed one he kept in the cloud rather than the basic one stored in the memory. Or rather, he would have. But there was no signal. He checked, frowning with simple surprise. There was battery. There was memory. There was everything pre-programmed. Everything stored on the hard drive. But nothing from the cloud.

  He had been talking to Robin little more than an hour ago and only a couple of hundred feet up in the air. But now there was no signal whatsoever.

  The implications of the last conversation he had had with Robin hit him with breathtaking force, for the overconfident joking looked as though it would turn into a very unfunny fact very soon indeed if he couldn’t get a message out. Because if he didn’t find a way to stop her, she really would be sending in Harry and the Pitman. ‘Aleks,’ he said, his voice as always becoming deeper, slower and calmer the louder alarm bells started ringing in his head, ‘how’s the reception on your headset? How’s the big communications centre your man over there is carrying? Any contact going out? Any external signals coming in?’

  He showed the Russian his phone. ‘I mean, this is the latest Galaxy smartphone. Worldwide reception guaranteed.’

  Rikki Sato came over and took it. He looked at it, touching the screen gently and frowning. ‘Signal’s being blocked,’ he decided after a while.

  And Aleks nodded, tapping the equipment that filled his right ear. ‘Mine too,’ he said. ‘I have internal comms, though, I think.’ He turned to his communications man – distinguished by the size of the radio pack he carried on his shoulders and the whip antenna soaring out of it. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘The battlefield unit’s working fine,’ came the reply. ‘But nothing else is. You and Senior Warrant Officer Roskov ought to be able to talk to each other fine – for the time being, at least. But we should be able to talk out to Moscow, or the moon, and we can’t. We’re being blocked, like Doctor Sato says. Nothing in. Nothing out. Nothing I can do about it, I’m afraid, until we find out what’s responsible. Or who.’

  Harry Newbold is sitting with the Pitman on the patio behind their combined house and office in Amsterdam when Robin’s message comes in. Harry’s fingers are shaking with cold because it is drizzling and the temperature is unseasonably low, even allowing for the time, which is a little after two a.m. And a bathing costume is the least appropriate apparel that anyone could possibly be wearing under the circumstances. In fact, Harry is fortunate not to be working stark naked. ‘Come on,’ snarls the Pitman. ‘You can strip it faster than that!’

  Harry’s shaking fingers pull the little Hechler and Kock P30 apart, laying the sections neatly on the table. Harry is working blind: sight is denied for it is well after midnight and the lights are out, even though this is just another one of the Pitman’s little training exercises. ‘What really bugs me, Pitman, is that there’s nothing equally uncomfortable I can make you do with a computer programme, a virus or a worm. I think you’re beginning to take these exercises too far!’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart,’ grates the Pitman gutturally. ‘I’m not wearing any more than you are but I’m not shivering or whining. Now get a move on. Just ’cause you’re the hacker doesn’t guarantee you’ll only get to sit on your ass and play with your laptops and tablets. And no one ever promised us we were going to have to field-strip our weapons on a sunny afternoon!’

  Just as Harry snaps the final sections of the handgun back together, the Pitman’s phone rings. Robin’s face fills the screen, providing the only light. ‘We’ve lost contact,’ Robin says. ‘Richard should’ve reported. He hasn’t.’

  ‘We’re on our way,’ promises the Pitman. ‘Harry: dry off and do your magic thing. I’ll look after the Hechler and get us some clothes.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ Robin continues as the Pitman carries the phone into the house behind the discreet little office front overlooking the canal at Jolicoeurstraat in the Zuidoost business district, flicking on the lights. ‘Richard’s been lackadaisical, as usual, but like I said, he swore he’d contact me the instant they went aboard.’

  ‘OK. But you said there was more.’

  ‘Have you heard of the ’Ndrangheta?’

  ‘In Amsterdam, who hasn’t?’ answers the Pitman, frowning. ‘They’re supposed to be shoving shitloads of coke in through here. All through Europe – and into Russia. Europoort, St Petersburg, Archangel. Anywhere a cargo ship can dock – especially one that’s come out of Gioia Tauro. Word is that a pretty high percentage of the coke they transport out of Gioia Tauro used to come into Amsterdam or Europoort for shipment and distribution through Europe. But now apparently they’re opening up the Russian market. They’re tough guys, the ’Ndrangheta – you don’t want to mess with them. What have they got to do with this?’

  Robin explained in some detail what Pat Toomey told her.

  ‘Chill, Robin,’ advises Pitman after a while. ‘We’re always packed and ready to hit the road. Like the flashlight batteries – Ever-ready …’

  By the time Robin has finished speaking and the Pitman has broken contact, Harry is seated at the computer. Its screen is rapidly filling with flight information far more intimate and detailed than anything Flightbookers, Kayak or Expedia could offer. The Pitman is pulling out pre-packed bags and backpacks.

  ‘Fastest way out is on a Japan airlines departing Schiphol,’ calls Harry, hacking into Schiphol airport’s system. ‘It’s operated by Finnair. Boeing 747. One stop in Helsinki, then over the Pole to Narita. I’ve no doubt someone can chopper us out from there. Say twenty hours in all to Sayonara. Twenty-two tops. Gates close at two-thirty. Lift-off at five-thirty.’

  ‘It’s fully booked,’ observes the Pitman, the Dutch accent thickening towards Voortrekker with disappointment and disgust. ‘Overbooked, in fact.’

  ‘Not as far as we’re concerned,’ growls Harry. ‘Two seats side by side in first class have just become available for every section of the journey. Full frequent flyer privileges. Emerald Tier.’ Harry looks up and grins knowingly. ‘Grab the gear, lover. I’ll complete the paperwork while you get the Harley-Davidson hot. And I’ll slow things do
wn for everyone else at Schliopl with a little unscheduled security exercise, I think. Under these circumstances, twenty-four kliks in less than an hour is pushing it, even for us!’

  66 Hours to Impact

  It went against Richard’s inclinations to begin their search in a militarily methodical manner – he was always one for unexpected inspiration, and he felt increasingly strongly that this was what was needed now. But he had put Aleks in operational command and, for once, Richard was grudgingly content to pass the authority down the line. For the time being, at least. Especially as it allowed him to watch and learn, to observe and surmise from the best in the business, which facilitated the kind of intellectual detection he normally enjoyed when he played Sherlock Holmes to Robin’s ever patient Watson. He found himself thinking of Robin also because of his inability to contact her, which had to mean that Harry and the Pitman would be joining them within the next day or so, and Aleks was under added pressure to have things sorted before they dropped in and queered his pitch.

  ‘Look, Aleks,’ he said quietly at the outset, before things started going more seriously awry, ‘if these people are still aboard, then they know we are here. Even if they didn’t notice a bloody great chopper buzzing over the ship, they’ll have seen the lights come on. They’ve had more than twenty-four hours to settle in and get ready for our retaliation. We’ll be exploring enemy territory that they already know backwards. We have to go slowly and carefully in case they’ve left any surprises. They already know where everything is – whether they left it there or not. And we’re out on a limb down here – with all the main computers, control and propulsion the length of the ship away up there in the bridge house. Fair enough, there are way stations where the techies can access systems, records and what-have-you if they’re lucky and the opposition have been careless. But if we want to make a real difference before Harry and the Pitman show up then I suggest we make a pre-emptive strike for the bridge.’