by Peter Tonkin
It was at that moment, in an almost automatic reaction to these ominous thoughts, that Richard found a name for the leader of his mysterious foe. One that was apt if ironic, that characterized him and his abilities – defined his current game plan if nothing else, and yet at the same time reduced him. Contained him. Humanized him. Made him seem less fearsome and all-powerful. For we have reached the scene of crime, Richard extemporized, and Macavity’s not here … He wondered whether Aleks had read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, or whether the code name Macavity might be useful to them all.
‘Penny for them,’ growled Dom, appearing at Richard’s side.
‘I was thinking about poetry,’ said Richard. ‘T.S. Eliot, actually …’
‘A cold coming we had of it?’ hazarded Dom with a shiver. He looked around the soulless vastness of the bridge house.
‘Macavity’s a mystery cat,’ said Richard.
‘I get you,’ nodded Dom. ‘The Leader of the Opposition. He’s not here …’
‘Precisely. But why?’
‘They could be vanishing each time we arrive because they know they’re outclassed, outnumbered and outgunned. Maybe they’re running away from us. Because they’re scared …’ Dom’s voice tailed off as he apparently realized he was failing to convince even himself.
‘Hmmm …’ said Richard. ‘We’ll learn more when the techies get to grips with the computer system – and hopefully find out what has been done to it. In the meantime …’
‘In the meantime,’ inserted Aleks as he joined the pair of them, ‘my first priority is to restore communications. That way at least we stand a chance of calling off Harry and the Pitman. I’ve sent Kolchak and a couple of men up. If the opposition has a jamming device then logic suggests it must be up on the highest point. And there’s an open deck area above the bridge house.’
‘That’s logical,’ allowed Richard.
‘And also, in the meantime,’ continued Aleks, ‘it is hard for a Russian to quote Napoleon, but an army marches on its stomach. We need to feed the troops.’
‘I know where the galley is,’ said Richard.
‘No, Captain, we have it covered. Ship’s engineer Esaki had a hand in designing the bridge house. He knows where everything is. And Ivan Karitov is our unit chef. He has the skills and the supplies to prepare something that should suit us all. Esaki says there isn’t much in the way of a mess, though. The ship was designed to accommodate half-a-dozen men on harbour watch and a skeleton crew to take her out with the pilot. We’d have to eat in shifts. And the same will go for the other facilities. There’s only one head, for instance. Two stalls, three urinals.’
‘I hope you brought your own toilet paper, then,’ said Richard. ‘If there’s only enough for six on board …’ His gaze swept over the better part of twenty men crowding into the bridge around them.
‘Perhaps, when Kolchak has sorted out the communications,’ suggested Dom, glancing upwards as though he could see through the deck-head above to where the Russians were trying to disable whatever was blocking their signals, ‘you could call up Harry and the Pitman. Tell them to bring in a roll or two.’
The idea gave Richard pause – and Aleks. He frowned, then pushed his throat microphone closer to his Adam’s apple. ‘Kolchak,’ he said. ‘Report in.’
His face assumed that vacant gaze which told he was listening to silence as he waited for a reply, Richard observed. And the vacant expression lasted longer than it should have – to be replaced by a frown, which Richard unconsciously mimicked. ‘Dom,’ he said quietly, ‘something’s happened to Kolchak. We need to go up and take a look.’
Aleks nodded agreement. ‘Roskov,’ he called, ‘bring a couple of men here.’
Richard led the way out through the starboard bridge wing door. Dom followed at his right shoulder. Steve Penn remained behind, crossing to watch Rikki Sato working on the main command console. The bridge wing itself stretched outward, glass-walled from waist height fore and aft, like a carriage on the London Underground or the New York Subway stripped of seats. There was a second, uncovered section further on. Immediately on their right was another door opening on to the outer companionway that led like a fire escape up to the open upper weather deck on top of the bridge house.
Richard gestured to Roskov and the Russian’s tight little four-man squad took over point position. Richard, Dom and Aleks followed the soldiers as they went outward and upward, the beams of the torches beneath their short-barrelled HK 416 carbines probing forward. The moonshine made them seem weak and pallid, even as it turned the soldiers and the two men with them into silvery statues. The exterior companionway was steep and narrow. It was difficult for more than one man to squeeze in between the bridge-house wall and the safety rail. Richard had one step to himself – no one was ever going to fit in beside him. There were sixteen steep steps up from the bridge wing to the upper weather deck. Richard climbed them just behind Roskov and his team, with Dom immediately behind him and Aleks as rear-guard. They all moved with the tense and concentrated silence of men going into a battleground. Richard was all too well aware that they were under the silvery brightness of the full moon. Independently of whatever night-vision equipment Macavity and his cohorts might possess, they were utterly exposed and in full view up here, if there was anyone to observe them. For the moment Richard stepped up on to the upper weather deck it was obvious to him that the whole huge expanse of decking was empty. True, there was a funnel that stood tall, casting a sharp-edged black shadow across the open expanse of metal. There was an impressive array of guidance and communications equipment. Pieces of deck furniture that Richard recognized as storage boxes and hatch covers, varying in size from that of a coffin to a hut that looked like the housing for the upper motor on top of a lift shaft. But there was no sign of Kolchak and the men who had accompanied him up here.
Richard felt the tension tightening among Roskov’s squad. Rifle-stocks tight to shoulders, bodies crouching forward, they moved as one. Torch beams swept across the deck as they walked slowly, silently forward, beginning to spread out into a carefully rehearsed search pattern. Richard slid out his Galaxy and tapped the screen. He looked across to Aleks and the Russian lieutenant joined Dom at Richard’s shoulder in an instant. It took him less than a minute to call up a schematic of the bridge from the phone’s memory, though Richard poignantly missed his laptop for a moment – and came close to regretting the caution which had prompted him to leave it with Ivan. They all glanced up and down, matching the features they could see so clearly in the moonlight with the 3D images on the bright screen, locating vents, hatch covers, equipment storage boxes and housings of various functions and sizes all around as Roskov’s men continued to quarter the silvery deck.
Aleks moved away then, leaving Richard in a brown study listing the stunning array of communications equipment around the funnel and trying to assess the most likely place that Macavity might have chosen to place his signal-jamming equipment, and how he could have managed to jam Richard and his group’s communications without interrupting the communications between the computers down below and the satellites up above. If, indeed, he had. Richard’s thoughts had just come full circle when the shooting started. There were two shots in rapid succession, followed by a shouted order from Aleks immediately echoed by Roskov. One of the Russians straightened, raising his smoking carbine to point at the moon. ‘In there,’ he said, gesturing to the one piece of deck furniture that had raised questions in Richard’s head: the hut that looked like the housing for a lift mechanism. Because, of course, there was no lift.
They crowded round the hut. It was walled with thin metal and two black pocks showed where the jumpy soldier’s bullets had penetrated. The door was secured by a bolt that had a padlock through it. But the bolt was slid right back and the padlock was hanging open and useless. Roskov took it and jerked the door open. All the torch beams focused like searchlights on the black interior.
Kolchak was standing there with his feet
widely straddled astride a big black box. His mouth has been sealed with silver duct tape. His fists were secured in a big round boxing glove of the same bright material. His face was white and his cheeks were wet with tears of frustration and pain. There was an ugly mark on his bulletproof vest which showed where one of the bullets, misshapen by its contact with the metal wall, had slammed into it – probably breaking a rib or two, thought Richard. The second bullet had missed his vest and smashed his shoulder to a bloody pulp.
53 Hours to Impact
Kolchak sagged forward the instant the door opened and Roskov stepped in to catch him as he fell. He was just about to step back, pulling Kolchak out on to the deck, when Richard shouted, ‘Stop!’ Both he and Aleks fell to their knees. Aleks shone the torch beneath his rifle barrel at Kolchak’s boots and they gazed, narrow-eyed at the way the soldier’s feet were positioned on either side of the big metal box. Aleks reached gingerly in on Kolchak’s left and Richard echoed his movement on the right. Each man gently ran his fingers from ankle to knee, inside the calf and out, on the front of it and on the back. Only when they were certain that Kolchak was not attached to the big metal box did they straighten.
Aleks gestured to Roskov and he pulled Kolchak free, laying him gently on the deck. As the others gathered round him, the man who had shot him eased the silver duct tape off his mouth. One of the others pulled a first aid kit from his backpack and put a pressure bandage on the ruined shoulder. Kolchak groaned with agony, but his eyes remained bright. He was ex-special forces. He knew how to handle pain. And he had other priorities. ‘You were right to take care,’ he said. ‘The box in that little shed is the signal jammer. But it has a bomb attached to it. If you try and interfere with it, switch it off even, the bomb goes off.’
‘That’s a bit self-defeating,’ said Dom, apparently without thinking. ‘I mean, we want to destroy the thing in any case …’
‘The men who put me in there said that bomb is attached to others,’ Kolchak informed him. ‘I don’t know how many or where …’
‘Best leave well alone then,’ decided Richard. ‘Unless you have a bomb disposal expert among your men, Aleks.’
‘No,’ said the lieutenant shortly. ‘Kolchak, where are the others?’
‘In that coffin-shaped box over there,’ said Kolchak, pointing with his chin. ‘They came at us out of nowhere, Lieutenant. I don’t know how many. But they were good. Very good indeed. We didn’t stand a chance. They trussed me up and dumped my men in that box. And lieutenant?’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a grenade between my fists. Pin out. I’m holding the lever down but I’ve lost all sense of feeling in my hands. Someone is going to have to be very careful how they take the tape off them.’
‘Roskov,’ said Aleks, ‘detail two men to take Kolchak down to the command bridge. Do the best you can with his shoulder, but don’t touch his hands until I get there. Then I want you and your last man with me. We have to be very careful indeed about how we open this box.’
‘Aleks,’ said Richard quietly, looking at his Galaxy again and glancing across at what Kolchak had gestured towards. ‘I don’t think that is a box.’
They crossed to the square cover and checked for booby traps. There were none. At last, Aleks crouched own and slid his fingers under the edge. As he straightened he eased it upwards so the other soldiers pointed their guns into the widening gap, their torch beams probing the darkness.
‘No. I was right,’ said Richard, sadly. ‘Sorry, Aleks.’
The cover was not the lid to a box. It was the top of a vertical duct which ended somewhere down in the engineering sections, six decks – the better part of thirty metres or one hundred feet – straight down beneath them. Probably in the engine room, Richard thought, reaching for his Galaxy. But then again, he thought, observing details not shown on the Galaxy’s graphics, there was a ladder riveted to the nearest wall of the vertical, steel-sided shaft. Could Macavity have made Kolchak’s companions climb down there as some kind of invitation? As bait? Aleks lowered the cover back into place and they all stood looking down at it for a moment, deep in thought, but none of them said anything – not even Richard – until Aleks decided, ‘Well, we’d better go down into the bridge house and unwrap Kolchak’s hands.’
‘We’d better be quick about it too,’ said Richard. ‘Because the first thing your medic is likely to do is knock him out with painkillers. And you’ll want him wide awake and on the ball when the duct tape comes off.’
Aleks nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said with a frown which showed his irritation that he had not thought this through for himself. ‘Let’s go down.’
The bridge house was crowded and the simple warmth given off by so many men was beginning to raise the temperature. Kolchak was sitting in the pilot’s chair in the command bridge, naked to the waist with his vest and uniform top on the deck at his feet. There was a huge bruise beginning to darken on the left side of his chest, but he was breathing deeply and easily enough to assure Richard that even if there were broken ribs, none had penetrated his lung. His right shoulder was lost beneath a huge white pressure bandage. A soldier stood beside him with a bag of D5W fluid, which was passing down a catheter into his arm to keep him hydrated and keep his blood pressure up. Richard suspected there would have been a sizeable dose of morphine injected first. But the soldier’s eyes were still focused. The pupils had not yet begun to dilate. Richard took a quick glance around the bridge as Aleks began to arrange for Kolchak to be moved once again. Rikki and his team were still working on the computers – either directly or via linked-in laptops. The engineers were taking it in turns to test the plumbing by the looks of things. And wisely. They would be put to work soon enough – whether the technicians managed to break into the computer control systems or not. In the meantime, Steve Penn and the LNG experts would need to keep an eye on the cargo – always assuming that whatever displays Rikki and co. could call up were accurate or reliable. And in the meantime, Dom seemed to have attached himself to Richard.
But first and foremost there was the matter of Kolchak’s hands. ‘We can’t risk it in here, obviously,’ Aleks was saying. ‘I don’t even want to risk doing it on the bridge wing just outside. So we’re going to have to take him right outside again. Down to the main deck or back up to the top deck we’ve just come down off?’
‘Back up to the top deck would be quicker,’ said Richard. ‘And as far away as possible, just in case …’
‘You’ll need to be quick,’ warned Kolchak unexpectedly. ‘I’m beginning to feel all warm and fluffy.’
‘Right,’ decided Aleks. ‘Back up to the top deck it is. Let’s move. Me and the moron who shot him.’
‘Ryzanoff,’ growled Roskov. ‘If you’re certain …’
‘I won’t delegate this,’ Aleks replied. ‘But I will need help. Ryzanoff only needs to hold the torch steady. And keep his gun on safety.’
‘I’ll come too, if that’s OK with you, Lieutenant,’ said Roskov. ‘You’ll need someone to watch your back.’
‘OK, if you stay well back out of the blast area,’ nodded Aleks.
‘Then I’ll come to watch your back, Roskov,’ said Richard. ‘Keeping well out of the blast area too.’
‘Cool,’ said Dom. ‘And I’ll come and watch your back, Richard. I’ll keep so well clear there won’t be room for anyone to creep up behind my back!’
‘That should just about do it, then,’ said Richard, a little surprised at the Canadian’s fortitude. ‘But we’d better hurry. Kolchak’s starting to go out on us.’
There was no time for more deliberation. Kolchak was a little unsteady, but he was in that blessed interim between the painkiller kicking in and his brain switching off, so he was able to climb the companionway behind Aleks, with Ryzanoff, Roskov and Richard just behind him, ready to catch him if anything went wrong. And Dom just behind them, watching Richard’s back.
The upper weather deck was still flooded with moonlight, though it se
emed to Richard that the shadows had moved more than he would have expected. Kolchak and his two minders walked rapidly over to the outer limit of the bridge wing where the wounded soldier wedged himself in the angle of the safety rail and held the silver bundle of his fists up as high as his wounded shoulder permitted. Ryzanoff shone his torch on the ball-shaped parcel by pointing his rifle at it. Richard and Roskov were back by the coffin-shaped hatch cover, Dom was back by the funnel somewhere but they could all hear Aleks quite clearly. ‘OK, Kolchak, here we go.’ Moonlight caught the black blade of Aleks’ knife and he began to cut the sticky tape away, layer by layer, pulling it free as gently as he could. ‘What are the names of the men who went down the hatch?’ Aleks asked, clearly trying to make Kolchak stay alert, but wanting to distract him for the moment from the job in hand.
‘Gerdt and Kosloff,’ answered Kolchak.
‘I read their resumes,’ nodded Aleks. ‘Do you know them at all?’
‘They’re in my squad, so I thought I’d better …’
‘What are your impressions?’ demanded Aleks sharply as Kolchak’s voice drifted off.
‘Pavel Kosloff, good man, ex-GRU. Theo Gerdt, good man too. Also GRU trained. Army. Reliable. Steady …’
‘Steady …’ snapped Aleks, for Kolchak’s voice was getting dreamy again. ‘Either of them family men?’
‘Kosloff has a wife in Minsk. He was associated with the Fifth Army Corps stationed there, but he was one of the liaison team that went with General Orlov to NATO headquarters, SACEUR and then on down to JFC facility in Naples, Italy. He’s got a couple of kids, I think. Gerdt’s still fancy free …’
‘Gerdt’s a cocksmith,’ supplied Ryzanoff suddenly. ‘Had more girls than I’ve had shots of vodka. Got some hot Italian he met in Moscow on the go. Met her at this Mayfair club. Lucrezia something. He says she’ll do anything—’
