by Peter Tonkin
‘That would make sense,’ said Richard. ‘It’s certainly the way small terrorist cells work. But it begs several questions, doesn’t it? Not least of which is precisely what sort of opposition are we actually facing?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Aleks, looking round their increasingly shadowed faces. ‘I just know that I’m doing my best to play the hand we seem to have been dealt here. And, unless their deaths are genuine accidents, then we seem to be stuck in a real situation, facing some actual opposition. Not a test, but the real thing. With real dangers.’
‘And in real time,’ added Richard. ‘With a sixty-hour time limit, unless they plan on changing course, or speed.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Aleks.
Richard gestured at his Rolex. ‘In sixty hours, unless we change course or slow down, Sayonara will arrive at the new NIPEX facility twelve hundred miles south-west of here. Six a.m. Japanese time in two and a half days. Sixty hours and counting. We’d better find some answers.’
Eight hundred miles north-east, way back in the Rat Island Pass, the long Arctic evening is stretching out all around Inuit fishing skipper Nanuq Aareak as he brings his boat Chu the Beaver under the cliffs of Hawadax Island on an unusually high flood tide. He slits his eyes against the low sun as it rolls along the northern horizon and silently thanks his guardian spirits for the tide. A quarter of a million ton oil tanker is pushing out of Rat Island Pass at eighteen knots, making what should have been the calm at the top of the water dangerously turbulent. Twelve hundred feet – nearly three hundred and seventy metres of her – with a wake like a tsunami. The power of her passage sets the waters all around her churning and roiling.
Nanuq yells back to his crew to make a virtue of necessity and drop some lines over the stern. The crew consists of his mate, Chulyn and his mountainous brother, Chugiak. And Nanuq’s nephew, Aput, his dim sister’s idiot offspring.
The sky is alive with birds, and that is usually a sign that there are big fish running. Nanuq watches the black-backed gulls, the terns, skuas and oystercatchers as they follow the trail of oil and garbage left behind the tanker which has just swept past. His wise eyes remain fixed on the columns of birds as he steers Chu towards the point where they meet the heaving surface like waterspouts. With luck Chu might hit a tuna run and pull in a haul that will keep the little crew’s families fat for a month, and allow him to attract the attention of his potential third wife, Immuyak, who lives up to her name of Butter in almost every respect. ‘Watch that line, Aput,’ he bawls to his imbecile nephew. ‘Don’t let it snag on the weed. We’re further inshore than usual. Chulyn, keep an eye on the narpok.’
‘I’m busy,’ calls Chulyn. ‘Let Chugiak help him. Or do it yourself.’
Aput raises one hand to show that he has heard all this bellowed byplay, but as he does so the line is all-but jerked from his other. ‘Help!’ cries the boy in surprise. ‘Chulyn! Chugiak!’
Nanuq throttles back and comes stumbling down off the bridge to give the boy a hand as the rest of his crew are militantly attending to their own business. ‘What have you got there?’ he calls. ‘A whale?’
‘Feels like it, Uncle Nanuq,’ answers the boy cheerfully. The pair of them start pulling the line together, and Nanuq feels the dead, unmoving weight for himself.
‘You’ve snagged some weed,’ he announces in disgust. ‘There’s nothing alive on the end of this line.’
But as the way comes off Chu, the dead weight on the end of the line seems to ease and there is suddenly something floating at the surface among the hunting birds. Nanuq has fished these waters as man and boy for half a century, and he knows all too well what it is long before they drag it alongside.
‘Looks like it will be a lean month after all,’ he says sadly as he looks down into a bloated face, so fat, pasty and chewed over that it scarcely seems human at all. ‘And a hell of a lot of paperwork and time at the police station into the bargain,’ he adds grimly, as he sees the black hole of the bullet wound in the gaping cavity of the corpse’s left temple.
57 Hours to Impact
They waited for absolute darkness after all, moving at one a.m. ship’s time, as Sayonara entered yet another human time zone, eight hundred and sixty miles south-west of Rat Island Pass, according to the precise measurements of the low-orbiting satellite passing invisibly overhead. But it was another celestial body entirely that finally made them take action. Under the menace of a rising moon that threatened to be low and full, they worked their way along the whaleback, relying on their black gear to keep them invisible among the absolute darkness of the shadows and their infra-red headsets to guide them, all too well aware that their enemies were identically dressed and similarly equipped. And that the moon was rising more quickly than even Richard had anticipated.
Richard went first with Aleks’ men on either side. He knew the ship most intimately and was effectively their guide and point man. Vasily Kolchak was on his right and another soldier whose name he did not know was on his left. The nameless soldier was there because he wore the comms kit and could keep the others up to speed. They were maintaining radio silence in all but the direst emergencies. Though, thought Richard, really dire emergencies tended to be self-advertising through screams and shots if nothing else. Suddenly he felt less buoyant. His concentration became fiercer. There had been no sound prior to Boris’s unexpected demise and departure. No sound at all. What if their enemies were experts in the art of silent killing? Suddenly there was sweat on his upper lip that had nothing to do with the warmth of the night or the threat of the rising moon. He glanced over his shoulder nervously, relieved to see the flame-bright snake of the rest of the team reassuringly close behind him. Rikki Sato was back there, along with Dom DiVito and Steve Penn now that they were all going in together, mob-handed.
But Rikki came next behind Richard, with Aleks himself and Konstantin Roskov on either side of him. For Rikki was the man with the door codes. He had been head programmer for the entire project, and theoretically had the access codes for every programme on board. But, like his colleagues in the remote control room at NIPEX, he had been shut out by the pirates who commanded the bridge. However, if their enemies were cunning enough to have changed the codes they’d used to gain access, Rikki still had back-up emergency override codes that would open every door on board. Unfortunately he was not so confident that these codes would override whatever had been done to the main command and control programmes, but he was here to try whatever he could – if they could get him to a sufficiently central control console. The rest of them stretched out in a straggly line behind Rikki back to the pulpit halfway down the whaleback, their brightness contained by the pipework which Richard was relying on to keep them safe.
The top of the whaleback was not a smooth curve. It was a flat area a couple of metres wide where there was a kind of walkway – a crawlway, given how they were currently using it. The walkway was floored with black, non-slip paint, against which they were effectively invisible – under normal light spectrums and lingering darkness, anyway. Then on either side of this there stood walls of pipework, joining the valves standing as tall as a man on top of the Moss tanks hidden beneath them. The thickest pipes were waist-high, but there were other, lesser ones running parallel to them, making a very effective wall on either side. A wall that not only kept them safe from falling over the edge, but which, Richard calculated, also kept them safe from being shot at, even if their mysterious adversaries were watching them from the safety of the bridge. For the pipes had to be full of gas, unless they were full of liquid gas instead. And although the latter seemed unlikely, either state would mean that a stray shot would cause an explosion which would in all probability destroy Sayonara and everyone on board her.
But the protection of the pipes – illusory or not – lasted only as far as the final tank valve. Then the pipework all went over to the starboard side on Richard’s left, where it was outlined in silver against the first rays of the moon. Dead ahead was
an open space where the whaleback joined the front of the bridge. The space was large enough to allow them all to gather and to discuss their next move, but it was too temptingly open and the moon too obviously rising to allow any time for further consultation. As Richard and his escorts hesitated, however, Aleks, Rikki and Roskov joined them. Silently, the six of them crouched there, looking around while the others waited on the walkway.
On Richard’s right there was a rudimentary ladder standing out from the curve of the whaleback, its proud metal rungs falling away vertically into the shadows of the port side without the added security of a hand rail. And above it the windows of the bridge wings, where, Richard was certain, inscrutable eyes were observing them. But they were here now, and this was a time for action, not for second thoughts. Richard gathered himself to move forward and down, but Aleks’ hand fell gently on his shoulder. The lieutenant gestured and Roskov took point. As he moved on to the rungs, Kolchak and Aleks wormed forward as far as they dared, seeking to cover the soldier from their elevated position as he vanished into the black shadow on the ship’s port side.
Richard and Rikki crouched, watching, ready to follow Roskov down the moment Aleks signalled. As they waited, so the others gathered round them, Aleks’ men forming a protective square around the engineers and computer men. It didn’t come as too much of a surprise when the next man signalled forward was not Richard after all, but a second soldier. Within ten tense minutes, as the cold fingers of moonlight crept over the starboard pipework and fell across them, making them doubly visible to whoever was watching them, Aleks sent down enough men to secure the section of the weather deck below – a vital square of metal that stretched between the foot of the ladder, the safety rail at the scuppers and the door into the bridge house, all roofed by the floor of the bridge wing protruding low above it.
The pause gave Richard more time to think, and as he thought he found himself scanning the impenetrable darkness behind the windows of the bridge wing close above them, and the equally inscrutable eyes he was certain were watching, either uncovered to the normal spectrums of white light or still using the enhanced vision of the light amplifying or infra-red night-vision goggles. He pulled off his own headset and squinted upward through the gathering moonlight. The angle of the glass in the clearview windows on the bridge and its wings kept the moonbeams at bay and the whole front of the command bridge gaped like a huge square mouth, as black as the pupil of a god-like eye staring down at them. He glanced down at his Rolex with a shiver. Two a.m., it told him. Fifty-six hours until Sayonara was programmed to dock. Ten a.m. the day after tomorrow, ship’s time. Six a.m. local.
Richard glanced back up at the sinister bridge windows, his mind racing. He found he was suddenly grateful for the snafu that had called Harry and the Pitman out to them, for his straining eyes caught the slightest glimpse of movement; there and gone so swiftly he found himself doubting whether it had really been real at all. He turned, catching his breath to warn Aleks, but the Russian was gesturing him forward in any case. He scrambled forward, teeth gripped tightly together, jaws aching as though he had just tasted the most mouth-watering delicacy. He paused at the top of the ladder. ‘I saw a movement,’ he breathed. ‘In the bridge wing …’
Aleks gave a curt, silent, nod, but he didn’t move his cheek away from the stock of the gun he was pointing down on to the stygian abyss of the deck. And Richard swung out on to the rungs, pausing at the point where the ladder went vertical to see Aleks gesturing to Rikki that he was next. Right, he thought. Rikki gets us in, then we fan out and push forward. Typically, in reaction to the unsettling thought that he was being observed by someone whose identity, motives and plans he could not yet fathom, he was suddenly excited by the thought of action. The downward scramble shortened his breath – not because of the physical effort but because of the feeling that he was dangerously exposed beneath the guns of his adversaries. Though he never slowed or hesitated, it took all of his considerable self-control not to stop every now and then to look around.
At the foot of the ladder, Richard paused just long enough to replace his night-vision goggles. Out of the velvet blackness all around him, a range of burnt-orange figures suddenly sprang into being. One of them moved forward, gesturing slowly and carefully. Although he had no idea which of the Russian special forces men this was, Richard stepped back and followed the directions. As he did so he was suddenly all too aware that infra-red vision showed him Aleks’ men but did not show him who they were any more than it showed him the vessel he was standing on – or any of the crucial detail he needed to know about her. Like, for instance, where the safety rails were. He switched over to enhanced light mode and the flame-bright world around him was replaced by a dull, submarine-green one.
But at least its limits were delineated – particularly clearly where the moonlight was beginning to brighten the railings to the aft of the poop deck and the outline of the lifeboat hanging athwart-ships above them. Everything else was shrouded in fog. But at the same time the soupy green of his new vision made it clear that if Rikki was going to punch in the pass code for the A-Deck door to the bridge house, he was going to need some torchlight to let him do so. But no. As Rikki arrived in the middle of the group, the first thing he did was to pull out his laptop. With Richard at his side and a pair of guards just behind, he crossed to the door. The moment he opened the laptop, there was sufficient light to see the buttons. In the pale glimmer from the screen, Rikki punched in the access code. They all crowded forward, Richard reaching to test the handle, and the door yielded. Richard froze, calculating. If the weather deck was not the kill-zone it was so clearly suited to be, then the next most logical place with an overwhelming field of fire was immediately inside this door.
But the plan so far seemed to be to let Richard and his men come in relatively unchallenged, sucked deeper and deeper into guerrilla territory where they could continue to be picked off one by one. But whatever lay before them, Richard had read Sun Tzu’s book. ‘You have to believe in yourself,’ he whispered. He reached up, switched his headset over to infra-red, pushed the bulkhead door to the A Deck wide open and stepped in.
55 Hours to Impact
As Richard stepped through the doorway, something made him close his eyes and jerk the night-vision headset off his face. And luckily so. For the motion sensors had switched on the lights. Even through the red curtains of his clenched lids, the brightness seemed dazzling. He opened his eyes to slits on the second step forward and was reaching for his gun instantly for there was a flicker of shadowy movement at the mid-point of the corridor ahead. Someone had dived silently into the companionway that led sternwards on his right. But it was impossible to tell whether they had gone up the stairs to the command bridge or down to the engineering decks. And as that fact registered, so did the question how had they been here and yet the sensors failed to switch the lights on for them? Then came the obvious answer – they had been standing absolutely still, waiting. It was while his mind started grappling with that conundrum that it also occurred to him to wonder why, if there had been an opposition member in the stairwell, he had not attacked the first man coming blindly and helplessly in through the bulkhead door?
Something atavistic took over and Richard found himself flattened with his back against the forward wall, his gun covering the shadowy depth of the companionway even though from this angle he could see only the narrowest possible opening. Before he could do anything more, Roskov was at his side, also jumpy with tension, his night-vision goggles dangling against his chest. Richard tensed to move forward, only to feel a restraining Russian hand resting on his shoulder. Another Russian arrived, pulling off his goggles to reveal Kolchak’s square, brutal face. Within the next few moments, two more Russians escorted a wary-looking Rikki Sato into the increasingly crowded corridor.
Roskov gestured to Richard and Rikki to remain where they were and led the little block of soldiers forward. They vanished into the stairwell, and by the time they did so,
Richard had moved far enough along the corridor to see that they had gone upwards. That was logical. Going for the high ground was a military strategy as old as the hills. And such controls as they could access were likely to be most easily available on the command bridge. But if Richard could work that out, so could the opposition. Had the figure he had seen gone upwards too? The bulkhead door swung open once again and Aleks led the rest of the soldiers in – except for a couple of guards whom Richard glimpsed in the bar of brightness outside watching over Dom DiVito, Steve Penn, the engineers and the technicians on the outer section of the weather deck. As soon as he arrived, Aleks broke radio silence. ‘Secure, Roskov?’
‘Secure,’ came the reply.
Aleks nodded. ‘We go up to the bridge,’ he said.
‘Right.’ Richard set off at once with Rikki at his side, running nimbly up the companionway to the command bridge, in spite of the fact that the stairwell was in shadowy darkness. As he ran, Richard found himself trying to work out what was different in the layout of the bridge house. There seemed to be something missing that he would have expected to find. Then he realized: there was no lift system. And the simple absence once again drove home the fact that this ship was not designed for people to live in. It was for people to visit – for the harbour watch to camp out in. But that was all.
So it was almost a shock to discover a big, comfortable pilot’s chair on the starboard side of the Spartan wasteland of the command bridge, just inside the door leading out on to the dark bridge wing. But other than that one touch of humanity – almost of luxury – there was nothing human about the place. He shivered, and realized abruptly that, whereas the night outside was warm, in here it was almost icily cold. The temperature, like everything else it seemed, was controlled for the convenience of the great machines that were driving and guiding the vessel, unless the men who were becoming more and more sinister by their absence were controlling the computers and their environment as easily as they seemed to be controlling everyone else on board.
