by Peter Tonkin
Robin did not click on any of these. Instead, she found herself distracted by the most-viewed videos section. Here there was a click-through entitled: CLIMATE: The Storm of the Century? With a note promising video footage from the North Pacific showing the effect of Tropical Cyclone FUJIN on the seas east of Japan. Robin clicked on the link and her screen filled with a clip from a news report. At the top of the picture was the logo TV Japan 24/7. Yesterday’s date stood beside it. The bows of what seemed to be a deep-sea fishing vessel plunged into a wall of white water. It was a marvel that the Japanese fishing boat climbed up it and broke through the foaming crest. The picture shook as the cameraman staggered. The clearview, through which the pictures were shot, went white with spray. It seemed almost miraculous that the water did not smash through the glass and flood the bridge. Instead, the spray washed downwards to reveal wall after wall of white-topped water. The vessel was running with her stern to the storm, trying to sail just a little faster than the huge swells which surrounded her. It was the safest way to proceed in seas as dangerous as these. The caption scrolling across the bottom of the screen read: Fishing vessel Etsu Maru runs through the outskirts of typhoon Fujin.
‘Penny for them?’ growled a familiar voice. Robin glanced up and met the bright blue gaze of her PA. Once again, she was struck by how much Alex resembled the thrusting, youthful Richard Mariner she had first fallen in love with. Physically, at any rate, but he lacked Richard’s simple commanding power. The only thing the two men shared, apart from physical similarities and a warm regard for Robin herself, seemed to be an excruciating sense of humour. And, to be fair, she could certainly do with a laugh at the moment. But when she simply, wordlessly turned the tablet round and let Alex see a re-run of the Japanese footage by way of an answer to his greeting, the last of the humour drained out of the young man’s angular face. ‘That looks very nasty indeed,’ he observed. ‘Speaking as an inveterate landlubber, that is. Or should that be “invertebrate”? Spineless, certainly. You know I get seasick just looking at a muddy rugger pitch if the puddles are big enough.’
‘Be that as it may,’ she said, ‘it’s what Richard seems to be heading into the middle of. Or rather, it’s heading straight for him. Unless,’ she glanced at her watch with a worried frown, ‘he’s already in the middle of it.’
Alex immediately changed the subject and got down to business, pulling his laptop and collapsible printer out of the carry-case and getting ready to process and reproduce. A huge mug of cappuccino arrived at his elbow as he settled to work. ‘Now, what do you want me to put on this morning’s agenda?’
‘Insurance scams, organized crime, murder, mayhem …’ she answered.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Business as usual. Where d’you want to start?’
‘With your breakfast,’ she replied, coming over all motherly. ‘Full English?’
Pat Toomey was the next arrival and both Robin and Alex watched with a mixture of awe and envy as he settled into the Full Irish, which seemed to be the Full English with extra fried potato bread and pancakes, wheaten toast, soda bread and lashings of butter and marmalade. Pat was still partway through this when the others turned up and, like Robin, settled for a start to the day that would do less for waistlines and more for cardiovascular health.
The most pressing order of business was Sayonara. Gerry and Pat brought the others up to speed about the current situation. Pat added his suspicions about the links between Diusberg Reinsurance of Vancouver and the ’Ndrangheta. ‘The long and short of the matter,’ concluded Andrew Atherton Balfour, ‘is that Sayonara is sailing effectively uninsured. The Duisberg Insurance Company seems to be less than legitimate so we can’t rely on them paying out. So is her cargo. The paperwork is all in place and everything seems to be above board. But it is clear that if anything should happen to her, Heritage Mariner and Greenbaum International would be locked into years of litigation before one penny could be claimed.’
‘If anything significant could in fact be claimed,’ added Gerry Overbury. ‘Because we at Lloyd’s are planning to close Duisberg down and put most of its employees in jail. With the help of The Combined Special Enforcement Unit of British Columbia; the Mounties’ anti-organized crime people.’
‘In the meantime, what do you suggest?’ asked Anthony Ho, the finance director. ‘We can’t risk Sayonara proceeding uninsured. What can we do?’
‘I suggest,’ said Gerry, leaning forward in turn to stare the stony-faced Hong Kong accountant down, ‘and I’ve been thinking this through quite carefully – I suggest that you take out another, entirely legitimate insurance with a copper-bottomed, one hundred per cent reliable syndicate …’
‘What’s that going to cost?’ demanded Anthony, throwing himself back in his chair so forcefully that his salmon sushi skittered across the table, slopping soy sauce.
‘In the short-term, certainly, I can guarantee preferential rates. Under the circumstances, I can promise that,’ answered Gerry and Pat nodded.
Robin’s tablet lit up as a Skype message came in. The screen which had made Alex almost seasick earlier was suddenly filled with a face familiar to Robin if not to the others. ‘Robin,’ said Anastasia Asov. ‘Robin, are you there?’
Robin picked up the tablet without thinking. ‘Yes, Anastasia. What is it?’
‘I think you’d better get out here as fast as you can, Robin. The Japanese media are reporting that Sayonara’s vanished. She went into the cyclone Fujin late yesterday and even the automatic ship-tracking systems in contact with the black box seem to have lost all sight of her.’
Robin was on the Austrian Airlines flight OS452 out of Heathrow just under two hours later. She had her laptop with her and the Airbus A320 was set for wifi so she was able to keep on top of what the board discussed and then decided via Alex’s Skypes and emails. It all seemed academic to her now, for if Sayonara had been swallowed by the storm they were too late to change anything in any case. But then, as she was passing through Vienna airport, hurrying purposefully from European Arrivals to International Departures as she found herself fighting the almost overwhelming temptation of apple strudel piled high in Strock bakery, her cellphone rang. In spite of the fact that she was already late for the connecting flight that would get her to Naruto just after seven-thirty a.m. tomorrow – twenty-two-and-a-half hours before Sayonara was due to dock at the NIPEX facility, she stopped and pulled the slim machine out.
It was a text from Indira, who was back in position at her computer in the huge room at the top of Heritage House, waiting for a zip file update as she and her team had been for the sixty-eight silent hours of the crisis so far. The text simply said: New zip from Sayonara. 12.00 noon BST. No info re: position, speed, disposition or situation. Automatic distress call, repeated three times, then all silent again.
36 Hours to Impact
They came for Richard a little after ten p.m. ship’s time and by then it was already too late. He had spent some of the intervening hours in dazed sleep, having nightmares about the men he had led aboard and what was happening to them. Some others were in partial wakefulness, cursing Dom DiVito and probing the tender back of his skull where there was a large matted lump. But he had also a good number of them in full wakefulness, during which he had disregarded his discomfort and explored his surroundings and his situation with increasing insight and success. He might be unable to escape and uncertain as to the fate of his team – trusty and turncoats alike – but he could prepare to take action when the chance arose.
When he came to, clear-headed, some uncounted time after Dom laid him out, he sat up, heart racing and eyes wide. He had a dream-like half-memory of feeling the back of his head in brief moments of painful wakefulness and he did so again without thinking. Thus he discovered that he was not tied up or taped. The lump on his skull was large, tender and crusted with dry blood. He had no idea how long it took for blood to dry, but he assumed he had been out of things for several hours. He brought his left wrist in front of his eyes
to check the time and two other facts he had known but not yet really registered became obvious: he was in utter darkness and his Rolex had gone; where the luminous face should have revealed the time, there was nothing. Where there should have been a forearm, there was blackness so absolute it seemed to have been painted on the backs of his eyes. His right hand closed round the wrist. Bare flesh. For the first time in how many years?
Richard was not a man who panicked easily. He wasted no time in worry or recrimination, therefore. At this stage he didn’t regret the loss of his watch any more than the loss of contact with Aleks and the others. Nor did it occur to him that Dom’s blow had somehow caused him to go blind. He put the most positive interpretation on things that he could – he would get his Rolex back, he was not blind and he would escape from this lightless prison. If his men were captive, he would release them. He accepted the position in which he found himself and began to try to work out how to escape from it. His first order of business was to establish what exactly was the position in which he found himself. He was immediately in a quandary. Should he search himself to discover what else was missing? Should he explore his surroundings to determine how – and perhaps where – he was being imprisoned? Either course of action might furnish the first chance to start planning his escape. Both alternatives seemed to require that he stand up and so he pulled himself to his feet and stood, swaying a little at the heart of an immense darkness. But the act of coming erect triggered another series of impressions which formed distracting multitudes of thought. Because he could not see, he found himself relying on his hearing and his sense of smell. One deep breath gave him an array of odours which he catalogued almost subconsciously as he thought of other things. Metal, paint, a faint but piercing chemical stench.
But what he could smell abruptly seemed much less important than what he could hear. And he realized immediately that the loudest noise in the soundscape surrounding him was the rhythmic pounding of the engines. He frowned. He had spent much of his adult life on board vessels like this one, powered either by diesel motors or by steam engines. The vast majority of those vessels had proceeded for almost their entire voyage at eighteen knots. He knew the rhythm as well as he knew his own heartbeat. And Sayonara’s engines were running too fast. Just a shade. So little that he hadn’t noticed until now. But now that he had, he frowned as his mind whirled off into new areas of speculation and suspicion.
As Richard began to assess the implications of his suspicions, he began to sort through his clothes to see what had joined his Rolex in the possession of his captors. The Galaxy was gone, of course. His pockets were empty, but he was still wearing everything he had been when he crawled into the ducting, except for the protective vest. His laces still secured his boots so, whatever else they thought he might be, they didn’t consider him a suicide risk. And, he suspected, they could be confident enough that he wouldn’t be able to use the laces to garrotte anyone either. He had taken it for granted that his communications equipment would be gone. And he had also taken it for granted that his guns would also be gone. Laces were one thing. Carbines and nine-millimetre Glocks were something else entirely.
But he could only be certain of what was missing if he checked the deck beside his feet. And that in turn led him to explore the room he was being held in. The darkness was strangely disorientating and it took him much longer than he would ever have imagined to establish that he was in a small, square, four-sided space whose height was taller than he could reach either standing or jumping. Four increasingly confident and forceful jumps into the air with his hands above his head established that the deck head was far above him – something confirmed by the slightly cavernous echoes as he landed. Four careful paces forward, arms out, fingers spread, brought him to a wall. The fingers discovered that the wall was featureless in all the areas that they explored. It was cool but gently throbbing to the power of the engines. When Richard sniffed his fingertips, they smelt of metal and paint. He was not surprised. But he decided he was more likely to be in the engineering areas where he had been captured rather than up in the bridge. He wasn’t sure whether the strange, half-familiar chemical smell made engineering more or less likely. So he put that on the back-burner for the moment.
Being right-handed, Richard moved right and after six sideways steps the fingers discovered a corner, which he checked with his elbow, then his shoulder and knee. Richard turned right and after three sideways paces the fingers discovered on the wall a vertical seam which he assumed to be the frame of a door. The door was one and a half paces wide. He could not reach the top of it but the bottom stood on a lintel a couple of hands-breadths above the deck. Even before he found the big lever handles, he knew this was a bulkhead door, therefore. It would be secured from the outside. It would be metal – probably steel. There was no way through it unless someone opened it first. Three paces to the right of the door there was another wall. He followed that to the corner he assumed must be at the inner end of his prison cell.
Six sideways steps led Richard across the back wall but demonstrated a flaw in his method of proceeding. Made increasingly confident by the predictable smoothness beneath his fingers, he moved sideways more briskly – until, hands still spread on smooth paint-covered metal, he barked his right shin painfully on something that seemed to be sticking out of the wall just below knee-height. He crouched, cursing silently, hoping that the pain in his leg would distract him from the pain in his head, and discovered that there was a metal-sided chemical latrine in the rear corner of his cell, which explained the half-familiar smell. And the fact of its existence brought to the forefront of all his physical sensations the overpowering need to use it. He just had the good sense to confirm that whoever had placed the latrine here had also supplied toilet paper to go with it.
As Richard sat there with the walls that met in a corner behind him pressed against his back and shoulders, his mind cleared by the immediacy of physical relief, he noticed the next thing that seemed important to him. During the time he had been focused on exploring his invisible environment, the way the ship was moving had changed. That change was emphasized now not only by the disposition of the deck beneath his feet but by the constant need he felt to adjust the position of his torso because of the way the walls were moving. If he listened carefully, he realized, he could hear the gentle slopping of the restless contents of the latrine to which he had just added. And, if he closed his eyes and really concentrated, he realized he could hear the vastly larger liquid body of the Pacific Ocean moving equally restlessly just outside Sayonara’s hull.
Frowning with increasingly disturbing thoughts, Richard closed the lid of the latrine and secured it as firmly as he could. He then followed the wall down to the corner by the door and sat, his back in the angle of the walls, his legs spread on the deck and his hands spread flat beside his hips. He closed his eyes once more and listened. In this position, it was the throbbing of the engines that dominated. Every now and then he thought he could hear footsteps and voices. But the sounds were so faint and dream-like that he could not be certain he was not imagining them. His mind drifted into speculation as to what was actually going on here – extrapolating the things he was certain of, adding in the things he suspected, seeking a wider pattern so that he could begin to formulate a plan of action; a plan to be implemented when he got out of here. And, oddly enough, perhaps, he never doubted that he would get out of here.
After some time, Richard pulled himself to his feet and moved to the inner corner of the cell, opposite the latrine. Here the throbbing of the engines was slightly fainter – though still strong enough to make all the surfaces around him vibrate in sympathy. The sound of the increasingly restless ocean was louder and, he now realized, the sounds of wind and spray. As logic dictated, therefore, the wall with the door was facing midships while the wall with the latrine and the corner he was sitting in now was closest to the outer wall of the ship’s hull, probably a deck or two below the waterline. But the waterline was becoming inc
reasingly restless. He nodded without thinking and bashed his tender skull against the wall. Sayonara was heading into a storm.
At first this fact did not seem to be particularly important. Storms were not uncommon in the waters the great ship was programmed to cross. She would be able to handle anything up to a strong typhoon. And if anything more severe than that were predicted, the vessel was programmed to receive early warnings from the FORMOSAT-7 weather satellites in constant polar orbit. A typhoon prediction from the weather satellite should automatically cause an alert at the NIPEX centre where it would be decided whether to guide the ship to temporary safety remotely or whether to send a crew out to her. But that was the system under normal circumstances; circumstances that no longer remained. Even if the guys at NIPEX knew that a storm was coming, they had no way of alerting the ship’s systems if communications were blocked by that thing up by the bridge. No way of moving the ship to safety by remote control. No way, now he thought of it, of getting anyone out here and aboard her, unless Macavity and co. were willing to allow it. However, there was no reason to think that Sayonara was unlucky enough to be heading into anything too dangerous at this point in time. He returned to his brown study, trying to work out what Macavity and whoever had sent him aboard was really up to – and how to frustrate their plans.
But after a while longer, Richard found that the increasingly acute sensations his body was experiencing pulled his mind back into the present. The conditions through which the vessel was sailing were coming to him almost subliminally from the deck through the nerves of his palms, fingertips, calves and buttocks; from the walls by his back, shoulders, spine and cranium; from the whole hull’s disposition and movement through the six degrees of freedom was transmitted to the delicate mechanisms of his inner ear. The semi-circular canals of the vestibular system inside his skull, just above the hinges of his jaw, were capable of the most minute discrimination. Normally this system served to keep Richard’s massive body balanced. Now, as he rested his head gingerly into the corner of the wall behind him, they transmitted not his own movements but those of the ship as she began with increasing liveliness to heave, sway and surge back and forth, pitch, yaw and roll up and down.
