Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘I’m sorry, Captain Mariner,’ answered Aleks. ‘We agreed that I’m in command. You and the other executives are here as observers, and to help when necessary. We do things my way.’

  ‘Fair enough, Aleks. I signed up for this. You do your stuff and pay no attention to me.’

  ‘Right,’ said Aleks. ‘Let’s get on with it then.’

  They stayed inside the hull to begin with as Aleks was content that the forecastle head with its winches and helipad which they had just vacated was clear. On his order, therefore, the port and starboard teams proceeded towards the stern, along the main deck, under the cover of the whaleback. The first great dome gathered and receded. The deck beneath their feet widened until it was possible to see from one side to the other, and the two teams waved to each other through the cleavage between the mountainous domes. At this point, on each side, there was a hatchway that opened at the top of a ladder leading down into the vessel’s lower decks. ‘Open the hatches,’ ordered Aleks. ‘We go down. Doctor Sato, what computer equipment is down there?’

  ‘On the next deck down, nothing but storage. Then there’s the chain lockers. In the lower decks, the engineering decks, there are lines from the sonar set and the forwards GPS in the ship’s bow. Below that only the pipes that join the undersides of the Moss tanks.’

  ‘Right. Engineer?’ Aleks looked expectantly around his team.

  ‘I am Engineer Esaki,’ said a square, solid man, stepping forward. ‘It is as Doctor Sato says. The decks in the forecastle head are simply arranged. As, indeed, are all the decks. This is not a complicated design by any means. Beneath the weather deck with the helicopter landing area are the storage areas, then the chain lockers. They are two decks deep and hold the anchor chains and the equipment ancillary to the winches. They are accessible at the top level but are dangerous places, particularly in heavy seas. The chains, like the cargo, will move when the hull rolls or pitches. Below these, where the flare of the cutwater itself leads down into the standard bulbous bow torpedo shape, there is a two-deck deep area that houses the sonar array. This is constantly active, of course. Lines run from this along the third deck down – the third of the four decks that go down before you reach the bilges and the double-hull where the skirts support the lower sections of the Moss tanks and the pipes that join them. These lines take information from the sonar set to the main control and propulsion computers in the bridge and the decks beneath it.’ Esaki held up a schematic of Sayonara’s interior on his tablet. The main, or weather, deck ran along the vessel from the helideck on the bow to the stern-rail under the lifeboat. The main-deck level of the interior bridge house was A Deck. The decks in the bridge house above it mounted through B, C, and D to E, which was the main command deck where the command bridge peered over the whaleback. Then, above the command bridge was the upper weather deck, the topmost deck comprised of a large expanse of decking that stood open to the wind and rain on either side of the funnel. Beneath the main deck, the engineering decks also went down in series through B to D towards the keel. But these decks ran the length of the ship within the hull and were pierced by five huge round holes that housed the Moss tanks containing the cargo.

  ‘Are there access points on those lines that might allow Doctor Sato’s computer experts access to those computers?’ demanded Richard.

  ‘Can we link up and hack in from down there, you mean?’ asked Sato, answering before Esaki could. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. And certainly there are access points – both where a laptop can be plugged in to examine local systems or nearby sections of the larger systems.’ He gestured at the lights blazing above them. ‘We clearly have power, and all my people have adapters that can handle voltages from one hundred and ten to two hundred and forty.’

  ‘The on-board system is the standard hundred and ten volts,’ added Esaki. ‘This also is standard in Japan. You should not need your adapters, Doctor Sato.’

  ‘But there are also access points built in,’ Sato persisted frostily, none too pleased that Esaki was interrupting the flow of information. ‘Most of these are touch-screen. It should be possible to access and perhaps regain some control over some of the systems from these points. It is what we are here to do, after all. But, of course, it is also a risk. The instant we connect, the opposition will know where we are and what we are doing.’

  ‘Doctor Sato,’ said Aleks, his voice a little weary, ‘I have every reason to believe that the opposition already know exactly where we are and precisely what we are doing. But unless we do it, we will never know for certain. And we will never learn how men like these can be stopped. So let’s go down.’

  The problem with Aleks’ methodical approach, persisted Richard’s uneasy thoughts, was its predictability. They were searching for a dozen or so men in a hull whose capacity topped three hundred and fifty thousand cubic metres below decks. And that was independent of the extra capacity offered by the whaleback cover and the bridge house. Now, fair enough, most of this space was filled with anchor chains, sonar, Moss tanks, engines, alternators, computers and ancillary equipment like rudder gear and whatnot. It was right down here in the torpedo-shaped bow that the black box that recorded every change of engine and rudder setting, every variation in heading and speed, was kept. But there were still plenty of places where the opposition could hide – inside and out – while the earnest search teams sought them. If the opposition chose to, they could become like ghosts, ever present but invisible, on the deck or the deck above. Around the next corner. Or, come to that, sitting comfortably up in the bridge house with a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea, watching them on the monitors, the internal cameras, the motion sensors … How he itched to do what Aleks had forbidden – to strike out with a little independent commando – running up the deck or along the top of the whaleback to avoid the cameras and sensors, hitting the bridge house from behind to see what was really going on.

  ‘Creepy, huh?’ came Dom DiVito’s voice over the communications headset, unexpectedly enough to make Richard jump.

  ‘And then some,’ he admitted.

  ‘You feel like you’re being watched?’ chimed in Steve Penn.

  ‘Watched, tracked, listened to, you name it …’ Dom chuckled mirthlessly.

  ‘They have to control the airwaves – they’re jamming out outside signals. Therefore they can probably listen to us as well,’ Richard warned.

  ‘So every time Aleks gives an order …’ Dom observed.

  ‘He tells them what he’s up to,’ affirmed Richard. ‘And just because we lost transmission from the cameras and sensors back in Heritage House doesn’t mean they haven’t got the full array lit up like a Christmas tree on the bridge.’

  ‘Fair enough. But why, if this is just a drill? Surely that’s not part of the usual drill. I mean, what’s the point? And who are they?’ demanded Steve.

  ‘That’s for them to know and for us to find out,’ concluded Richard.

  This conversation, and its extension during the next hour or so, took them past the doors into the chain lockers, down as far as the first access point just behind the sonar in the bulbous bow, three decks below. By the time they arrived there, everyone was strung out, both physically and emotionally. They were increasingly aware of how far beneath the surface of the ocean they were going, and none of them would have made good submariners. The lights down here seemed dimmer. The air was staler, clammier. Even Richard was beginning to let the silences between the increasingly dark speculations he was exploring with Dom and Steve drag out longer and longer.

  But at last, having completed the first survey, Aleks led them back to the access point that Dr Sato and his second in command, computer engineer Murukami, had both agreed would let them access the system. It was as they had said – two decks up from the bilge itself, on the last deck with a solid floor – the one below was made of mesh that could be raised in sections for maintenance. On the wall a couple of metres aft of the main door into the sonar area was a small screen the size of a tablet
computer on the wall itself. Lines in white ducting led along the wall on either side. An access point for computer leads or a memory stick stood in a little box beneath it.

  Aleks described what he could see quietly into his headset and Konstantin on the far side of the ship agreed that he could see the same. Richard and Steve agreed with their respective leaders.

  Sato tapped the screen in the wall in front of him. It remained blank.

  Konstantin’s man did the same. With the same result.

  ‘Give me a laptop,’ ordered Sato. ‘I’ll see what I can access using a connection.’

  Murukami passed his boss a laptop and a long connector wire. Sato plugged one end of the wire into the back of his laptop and stepped towards the wall, holding the other end, ready to make connection.

  There was an explosion of sound in Richard’s headset. ‘STOP!’ he shouted automatically, long before he knew what was going on. ‘Steve! What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘Some kind of short,’ answered Steve Penn breathlessly. ‘Our man plugged his laptop in and it almost exploded! Blew him right across the corridor. There’s smoke coming out of the socket. He’s gone down like a felled tree. I think he’s dead!’

  Richard just had time to register the look of sheer, stark horror on Rikki Sato’s face. And then the lights went out.

  63 Hours to Impact

  Everyone froze except Richard, who pulled his night-vision goggles on. ‘Get your goggles on,’ he advised. ‘And get some CPR going, Steve. If your man’s not dead yet he needs help as fast as possible. Is he well clear of the shorting cable?’

  ‘Yeah,’ came Steve’s shaky reply. ‘But I think we might be too late for CPR. He looks really weird under the infra-red – like he’s still on fire. Our medic’s checking him now …’ There followed a moment’s silence, then Steve added, ‘No. He’s gone, I’m afraid.’

  ‘We’ll have to make arrangements to leave him somewhere safe while the rest of us proceed,’ said Richard to Aleks.

  ‘Right,’ said Aleks. The Russian seemed shaken. Perhaps even shocked.

  The lights flickered, luckily giving Richard enough warning to get his goggles off before they came back on. ‘Have you got a volt metre?’ he asked Sato, who was still standing with a laptop in one hand and the snake of the connector wavering with its head dangerously close to the wall, apparently frozen with horror. ‘If the light’s back on, so’s the power. This one might be dangerous as well. Can you check?’ Richard gently took the laptop from the stricken engineer and handed it back to Murukami. ‘Has anyone got a volt metre?’ he repeated. ‘Anything we can check the power in this socket with? See if it’s as dangerous as the other one?’

  Sato pulled himself back together, took a black box out of his belt and approached the connection. There was the slightest sloshing sound. Frowning, Richard looked down and the instant he did so, he reached out and took the computer man by the shoulder. Immediately beneath the connection there was a pool of water. Anyone making a connection must be standing in it.

  ‘Wait, please, Doctor,’ he said to Sato. ‘Steve, is the deck wet beneath the fused connection point?’

  ‘Yes, it is, now you mention it. The whole passageway is damp.’

  ‘Doctor Sato, I think we can assume that any attempt to connect to the circuits down here will be dangerous and possibly fatal. I’d leave well alone. Lieutenant Zaitsev,’ he emphasized the officer’s title, jerking him out of his frowning stasis, ‘we need to decide what we’re going to do with the casualty. Then I think we need to clear this deck level and proceed with even more caution than we have so far.’

  ‘But it was an accident, surely!’ said Aleks half an hour later as the reassembled team completed the brief Shinto service and prepared to leave the dead computer expert lying as reverently as possible at the top of the ladder beside the main hatch on the covered A Deck.

  Certainly, there had been nothing to suggest otherwise at the scene of the accident, thought Richard. The most careful examination conducted by Dr Sato and by the ship’s engineers had revealed nothing untoward. Nothing particularly unusual, in fact, except the dampness on the deck. Which, as they all observed, could well have come from condensation on the outer surface of the Moss tank behind them. It wouldn’t take much in the way of a flaw in the insulation for the core of minus one hundred and sixty degrees Celsius to cause condensation out here where it was roughly two hundred degrees Celsius warmer. So, yes. It looked like the kind of accident that was all too common on working vessels, no matter how exhaustive the health and safety regimes.

  Some of the dead man’s friends would observe the Kichu Fuda day of intense mourning – though there was no priest to lead the rites correctly. All of them searched in their pockets and packs to leave obituary gifts or Koden beside the still corpse, whose name in the life he had so recently departed, Richard learned, had been Yoichi Hatta – an apt name for an engineer of any sort. But until he was back home and the proper rituals of immolation and Kotsuage could be carried out, and the bunkotsu which would allow the founding of a family shrine, there was nothing more they could do. ‘It was more likely than not an accident,’ concluded Aleks shortly.

  There was a moment of silence as Aleks looked around them all. One by one they shrugged and dropped their eyes under the intensity of his steely gaze until one of the younger ones, Boris Brodski, shook his head. ‘I don’t see that,’ he said with quiet authority. ‘In a situation like this, it’s silly to assume a death is just an accident. Fair enough, we don’t want to start panicking at every little sound and shadow. We sure as hell don’t want to get trigger happy. But, I mean, we’re not on a picnic here …’ Something tapped on the metal outside of the whaleback, echoing briefly, then gone so swiftly that no one paid it any real attention.

  ‘You both have a point,’ allowed Richard. ‘Loose wiring, wet floor, a little carelessness … That’s all it takes, I know. But let’s not jump to conclusions. We just have to take care. The only thing we stand to lose is time. And we still have plenty of it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘A little more than sixty-two hours, in fact, until we are due to dock at the NIPEX facility at Choshi.’

  ‘Right,’ said Aleks. ‘Let’s split up as before and proceed with the search as we agreed.’

  During the next hundred minutes, they searched the midship sections between the huge spheres of the Moss tanks, from the covered weather deck down to the keel and back up again. Soon it was clear that Richard and Dom DiVito were not the only ones convinced they were being watched. On more than one occasion Aleks – or, according to Steve Penn, Konstantin – had to stop his men from destroying the security equipment they were certain was spying on their every move. They became increasingly monosyllabic, concerned – as Richard had been from the outset – that their communication and movements were being hacked into the bargain. The lighting remained on but, since Yoichi Hatta’s electrocution, it seemed duller. The shadows were more numerous, more threatening; darker and closer to hand. The relentless rumbling of the motors and the alternators, the muttering of the water as it bubbled along the hull just beside them and the roaring of the wind across the whaleback just above them all seemed to cloak mocking whispers.

  Both Aleks and Konstantin became the subject of increasing pressure as their men became convinced that the opposition were following their every move more and more closely. It was an unexpected consequence of the point Aleks’ young associate, Boris Brodski had made. Even the more experienced began to feel that there was someone dogging their footsteps, watching and waiting to attack them. Not only on the decks they had not yet searched and those they had just searched, playing a kind of grim variation of Grandma’s Footsteps, but even like spiders on the outside of the whaleback itself. And there seemed reason for this suspicion, at least, because on more than one occasion as he squeezed past the girth of a Moss tank, with his shoulder close to the whaleback’s inner surface, Richard thought he heard a stealthy footstep or the tapping sound of something m
etallic striking the white paint of the outside. As he had, he now registered, in the silence after Aleks’ observation just before they left the corpse at the top of the ladder near the hatch out on to the weather deck.

  The only real relief came when they explored the midship pulpits that stood either side of the ship, open to the elements, thrusting out in little balconies that hung like bridge wings over the ocean. The atmosphere below deck had become so charged with suspicion and mistrust that it came as a simple, almost blessed, relief to stand out in the late afternoon sun, watching the great golden blaze of it westering towards the horizon as Sayonara sailed apparently serenely a little west of south towards distant Japan. ‘You see,’ called Aleks, clearly overcome by the lessening of the tense atmosphere, ‘there is no one out here after all!’ He gestured up at the great metal marquee of the whaleback that covered the five Moss tanks. ‘No murderous mountaineers swinging on ropes along the sides to spy on us! The idea is ridiculous!’ He laughed. ‘Take a look for yourselves!’

  At his unthinking invitation, most of the starboard team crowded across to the outer rail and leaned back dangerously, stretching their necks to see as much of the white-painted metal curve as possible. And it did, indeed, seem empty and innocent. Appearing to billow like a great metal sail stretched to the full, it curved away on either side until it vanished round the corner at the forecastle or beneath the reach of the bridge wings. Directly above, it reached up, hard edged against the evening sky, the full curve broken only by the tips of the upright pipes and tank caps that ran in series along its top.

  But then Richard’s keen eyes began to pick out the little inconsistencies that spoke of hand and footholds in the apparently unbroken incline and his memory clicked in, undermining the optical illusion as effectively as if a magic trick were being explained to him. The fact was that the apparently plain top was actually made up of layers as sheaf upon sheaf of pipes ran the length of the thing, coiling into and out of the tank tops as they went. Starting on the side of the pulpit they were occupying and wrapping itself round the metal sail was a metal-runged ladder that reached up to the very top of the thing, joining with a walkway that ran beside the pipes from stem to stern. And Richard was by no means the only one to remember just how many access points, walkways and ladders were in fact riveted to the outer skin of the whaleback.