Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Four a.m. ship’s time. Midnight in Japan.’

  ‘Six hours out. But she was supposed to call for the pilot four hours out – if the NIPEX people couldn’t get control of her.’

  ‘Was that by time, position, or what?’

  ‘I don’t have any real idea about that. Where’s Ivan? There might be some details on my laptop.’

  ‘Ivan’s in the sick bay. Or maybe we should start calling it the mortuary. The guy with the massive shoulder wound’s dead. Kolchak, was it? And so is Rikki Sato, by the look of things. If he was really working for them, then I guess that’s why they’ve left him. Anyway, there are a few other guys in there who look to be at death’s door. But neither Ivan nor I are much good at first aid, so it’s a case of “wait and hope”, I guess.’

  Richard was torn. He was first aid trained to accident and emergency level, and he kept his qualifications up to date. But there were the engines to worry about. He had to check the men still in the makeshift cells and decide who could be trusted and who could not, balanced against who could be most helpful and who would be least. He wanted to talk things through further with the Pitman, particularly about the jamming device on top of the bridge house that Kolchak had given his life to find. As the Pitman had also done a bomb disposal course, could she disarm the booby traps that were supposed to be protecting it? He was bursting to talk to Harry about what had actually been done to the computer programmes by Macavity and his men and whether Rikki Sato as chief programmer was involved as he acutely suspected; even the apparently unthinking warning Alex had given the programmer about Harry Newbold being part of Plan B back in the hangar at Yelizovo airport suddenly gained a sinister undertone, especially as that revelation had also served as a heads-up to Dom DiVito. And he wanted to go through the records on his precious laptop with Ivan. But there were people apparently dying. And, with the main control programmes apparently kicking in, that fact reordered all of his priorities. He went to the mess.

  There were half-a-dozen occupants of the makeshift sick bay, not counting Ivan. They were all crowded in on the floor, most of them lying on sleeping bags. The huge Russian was seated on a plastic chair in the corner, Richard’s laptop on the edge of the one remaining table – which was piled with unused medical equipment, bandages and medicines. ‘Ivan,’ said Richard as he entered, ‘can you take a look at whether Sayonara was supposed to alert NIPEX she was ready for the pilot by time or position?’

  ‘I’ll check,’ rumbled Ivan. ‘Nice to see you back in command, by the way.’

  ‘As opposed to the pirates, eh?’

  ‘I was thinking more of the Pitman.’

  The only medical supplies were the field packs Richard’s team had brought aboard, and these were very basic. The late Master Sergeant Vasily Kolchak had been relieved of his painkiller drip, which had been pushed into the arm of one of the Japanese men wounded when the bridge windows had come in. Kolchak’s pressure bandage was still on his shoulder because there was no other use to which it could be put. Rikki Sato’s drip had also been pulled from his arm and inserted into another more lively limb. Kolchak was grey and beginning to leak at both ends. Richard thought he should double-check Rikki, though, as nobody else seemed in immediate danger of dying in spite of what the Pitman had told him. And it seemed to Richard’s wise eyes that the vein from which the needle had been pulled had started to ooze enough bright blood to arouse his suspicions. The Japanese computer engineer was badly cut up. He was covered in blood and as still as a corpse. It was easy to see why anyone glancing at him would assume he was dead. But Richard had been trained to make doubly sure. He folded the coverings down, remembering what Dom had said about the engineer’s guts being held in with duct tape. But the Canadian had been exaggerating. With infinite care, Richard rolled the apparent corpse on to its side and folded it into the recovery position. The body was cold, but not stiff, which again gave him hope. He replaced the blankets. Then he opened Rikki’s mouth and checked his airways. A wad of snot and half-dried blood came free as he moved the engineer’s tongue, and Richard felt that there was just the suspicion of a breath there too. He rolled Rikki back and started a gentle CPR, trying to ensure that air was going into the engineer’s lungs without running the risk of pushing any shards of windscreen glass deeper into his thoracic cavity or of bursting the stomach wound open. After a few moments, Rikki stirred. His eyes fluttered. Richard sat back and watched the computer man’s chest begin to rise and fall as he breathed unaided.

  Richard covered Rikki in as many warm sleeping bags as he could find, and was just retrieving the drip when Ivan said, ‘It’s by position. Sayonara’s supposed to go into external control mode when she reaches thirty-six point four north latitude, one four one point four east longitude. Four hours out.’

  Richard frowned. ‘That should make the ship’s time oh two hundred. Japan time twenty-two hundred, four hours behind. But the Pitman just said it was two hours later than that.’

  ‘So Sayonara’s signed in late?’

  Richard interrupted him. ‘She’s either signed in late, or she’s signed in on time but she’s much further south than the on-board computers think she is.’

  4 Hours to Impact

  Once Richard was sure Rikki Sato was breathing, he checked on the others. Then he went to find Harry. She was not in the back-up control room where he had last seen her, and it didn’t take a lot of insight to work out that she would be on the bridge where the main computer access was. Ivan tagged along, and as they went he continued their conversation. ‘So, what happens next?’

  ‘The world and his wife descends on us. I’d half expect the Japanese navy! Well, that’s pushing it perhaps; coastguard more likely. An armed emergency response unit of some sort. And then NIPEX men and, if it was me, I’d send out a full skeleton crew and the best damn pilot I could get.’

  ‘But you know what’s been happening on the ship, remember.’

  ‘And there are things I still want to know!’ Richard interrupted. ‘Rikki Sato can give me some answers when he comes round, but …’ And on that thought, Richard stopped. ‘Can you contact the Pitman?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Her radio went off line a while back but she’s fixed it now.’

  He called the Pitman, who was still deciding whether she should release anyone else. As he made contact, Richard explained what he wanted. ‘Hey, Angela,’ Ivan called. ‘Richard needs someone who can look after the guys in the sick bay.’ Both Karitov the chef and Murukami, Sato’s second in command, claimed some basic first aid experience, so Richard told the Pitman to release them. Then he and Ivan went on up to the bridge. ‘Is there anything we should do to get ready for our visitors?’ asked Ivan as they climbed the rickety companionway.

  ‘I don’t know what you brought aboard,’ said Richard. ‘But I’d ditch or hide anything that’s going to make the authorities feel like shooting you.’

  ‘That’s not going to be too hard for me to do,’ laughed Ivan. ‘But the Pitman may be another kettle of fish.’

  ‘What’s up with my Pitman?’ asked Harry, overhearing the end of the conversation as Richard and Ivan crossed the bridge towards her.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Ivan. ‘We’re just expecting a few more Japanese than there were at Pearl Harbor and we don’t want her to frighten them. Or piss them off.’

  ‘If you don’t want to piss them off, Ivan,’ said Richard, ‘I’d try to be a bit more politically correct. In the meantime, Harry, how’s the computer?’

  ‘Closed down. Offline. Waiting for someone to take control and bring Sayonara home. No buried programmes or protocols that I can find. It all looks clean up here. Have you talked to Rikki Sato?’ Richard shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t get it. He should have been able to get this all under control. It was expertly hacked all right, but not that badly.’

  ‘He was probably working for the opposition,’ explained Ivan. ‘His daughter’s studying in Calabria. They could have pressured him through her. Made him jus
t pretend to be trying to fix things while actually making them worse.’

  ‘The Italian connection,’ added Richard. ‘But still no communication, nothing incoming?’ Harry shook her head. ‘Well, that’s our next order of business. I know where the signal blocker is. Kolchak said it was wired to explode if anyone fiddled with it. But it’s maybe time to ask our Angela to have a look. These guys told us a lot of lies. Maybe that was one of them.’ It was at this moment that Richard noticed something completely unexpected. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said happily. ‘Would you look at that? Macavity’s left me my Galaxy and my Rolex!’ He crossed to the helm and picked the watch and the smartphone up from the shelf beside the engine room telegraph. He checked the time and slipped the steel case into its accustomed place on his left wrist. Having glanced at his watch, he automatically checked the ship’s chronometer above the clearview windows. ‘Oh one hundred,’ he observed. ‘If they got that message at NIPEX an hour ago, we can expect some company soon. All the deck lights are on as usual, so they won’t have any problem putting choppers down on the helipad.’

  ‘Unless they’re going to rappel down on to the upper deck,’ added Ivan. ‘Special forces stuff. I mean, when we came aboard they’d just discovered the bodies in Rat Island Pass – and Folgate-Lothbury face down in the Thames. They might want to take extra care.’

  ‘What?’ said Richard, stunned. ‘They found what?’

  Ivan began to explain what he had heard in the hours before coming aboard, but Richard interrupted him almost immediately. ‘Sounds like they might want to send an armed response just in case,’ he said. ‘They have to assume there’s a chance Macavity and his men killed the people they found in Rat Island Pass and they have no way of knowing they’ve gone over the side now. Tell Angela to get up top and take a look at the signal jammer as fast as she can. We really want to talk these people down if they’re coming aboard like gangbusters. Christ! So, Ivan, tell me more. What about Folgate-Lothbury?’

  By the time the Pitman came through the bridge on her way to the top deck, Ivan had brought Richard up to speed with what little he knew about the events of the last couple of days. Trying to work out how Robin would be reacting to the death of their chief insurer, while weighing the implications of the deaths on Hawadax Island and the ’Ndrangheta revelations, Richard followed her upwards, pausing only to pull the binoculars from their holster beside the door. ‘It’s in that structure that looks as though it should contain the mechanism for the lift they never installed,’ he explained three minutes later as they crossed the deck above the command bridge.

  ‘Computers don’t need elevators,’ she observed thoughtfully. ‘But this thing looks like a pepper pot, Richard.’

  ‘Long story involving poor old Kolchak. He was the one who told us Macavity’s men warned him that the signal jammer was wired to explode if anyone fiddled with it.’ While the Pitman began her examination, Richard strode to the forward edge of the upper weather deck and put the binoculars to his eyes. He started searching the southern horizon first to establish how soon they could expect a fleet of choppers to come swarming above them. But, as soon as he had established that there were three distant helicopters making a determined beeline towards them, he began to look more generally at the nearby sky, and the sea beneath it.

  The typhoon was now long past and Sayonara was sitting in what was usually a busy shipping lane where vessels approached the Japanese mainland from all over the North Pacific. She was riding over a swell that was moderating and swinging southwards. There was a gentle north-easterly wind blowing. The sky was clear and there was a low, fat moon. The air was crystal, as it often is after great storms. The binoculars brought everything close in such detail it was like looking through a microscope. The horizon to port was ringed with the running lights of ships of all sizes, designs and purposes. Richard made out their shapes and types but Sayonara was the only LNG transporter.

  Then something else caught his eye. Closer than any of the other vessels was a white gin palace. She was a big tri-level, the better part of forty metres long with an impressive sonar and communications array. She had a sun-shade over her command bridge like the peak of a cap and a rakish cover over her flying bridge. She was clearly an ocean-going vessel, though it was unusual to see millionaires’ playthings this far out at sea. What attracted Richard’s fleeting attention was the fact that, instead of the usual six- or eight-seater RIB, she was towing a substantial lifeboat. But even as Richard registered the yacht’s existence, before he even had time to look for her name or focus on the boat she was towing, his attention was jerked away.

  ‘I thought you said this thing was wired,’ said the Pitman.

  ‘That’s what Kolchak told us.’ Richard lowered the glasses and crossed to stand beside her. ‘It was what Macavity’s men told him.’

  ‘Well, unless I’m missing something pretty vital, someone was telling lies. It’s not wired as far as I can see.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised? Can we switch it off, then?’

  ‘Switch it off, pull it out, chuck it over the side if we want.’

  ‘OK. Good. Let’s switch it off. And I’ll get to a radio as fast as I can.’

  The jammer didn’t explode when the Pitman switched it off, but Richard’s Galaxy nearly did. It came to life, screaming at him that he had more missed messages than he could easily count. He was still looking at the screen in simple wonderment when the Pitman called out to him. ‘Incoming. Twelve o’clock high, as they say.’

  The succeeding hours rolled into a dazzle of action, during which Richard felt increasingly out of control. This was inevitable, and he knew it. There was no place for him in the routines of the various teams that came aboard. On the other hand, he was constantly being asked to do things, to answer questions, to explain what had happened. He felt out of place, out of the loop. Still, he hardly had time to check the missed messages on his Galaxy. And yet, he managed to use the time to get a clearer idea of precisely what had been going on and what might still be going on. Particularly now that Macavity and his men, turncoats and all, had simply left Sayonara seemingly little the worse for wear after all.

  The armed response unit of the Japanese coastguard demanded his attention first. Their commanding officer, a lieutenant, was already on the radio, calling from the lead chopper when Richard and the Pitman arrived on the bridge. He was ordering Ivan, who had answered first, to prepare the vessel to be boarded and to be aware that lethal force could and would be used if there was any sign of resistance. ‘I’d better go down to the sick bay,’ said the Pitman. ‘Get rid of some of the hardware and pretend to be playing doctors and nurses.’ She glanced round the bridge and vanished. Harry looked after her for a moment and then turned back to the computers. Richard took over the microphone and assured the lieutenant that there was no current terrorist threat – that his crew, although armed, would offer no resistance, and that there were wounded on board in need of medical attention, though they were currently under the care of a first aid nurse and her helpers. He was curtly ordered to meet the team on the top of the bridge house, so he ran back up into the buffeting brightness below the coastguard helicopter and stood back obediently as the lieutenant and his seven-man team rappelled on to the deck just as Ivan had predicted they would. Then he walked forward as the chopper soared away and the coastguard team fell in around their leader, bristling with Howa Type 89 assault rifles and the ubiquitous Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine guns.

  As they ran down on to the command bridge, Richard explained what had gone on during the last few hours. The lieutenant listened with stony-faced courtesy, directing his men with silent hand gestures into a series of routines that clearly took little account of what he was being told. When they reached the command bridge, he held his hand for silence and crossed to the radio. He changed the frequency and exchanged a few brief words with someone who was on another helicopter, judging by the background noise. Then he looked up at Richard once again. ‘Coastguard
Captain Endo is coming out on the NIPEX helicopter with a team led by Engineer Watanabe,’ he said in English. ‘They will land on the helipad in twenty minutes. You and I will meet them there, Captain Mariner. Then we expect an experienced crew and ship’s pilot who is expert in these waters to be aboard within the hour. They will take control of the vessel and sail her to the NIPEX facility. We are due to dock there in a little less than three hours’ time.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘That will be oh four hundred Japan Standard Time. Only two hours ahead of schedule. Most impressive.’

  ‘Three hours from now?’ said Richard. ‘That’s pushing it. According to the latest information we have, Sayonara is at thirty-six point four north, one four one east. Four hours away from port.’

  ‘That is incorrect,’ said the lieutenant brusquely. ‘We were requested to double-check her position on our arrival. There has been some dispute. We are at thirty-six north, one four one east precisely. Two hours out.’

  Richard suddenly wanted very much to talk to Rikki Sato, for the computer man was the only one who might be able to explain the anomaly – and, perhaps, the reason for it. But his request to do so was flatly denied. ‘I have dispatched my medical team to assess the well-being of your wounded. I do not want them or their patients to be disturbed. You may perhaps communicate with Doctor Sato later if he is strong enough. In the meantime, we have things well in hand. But we are on a tight schedule. We have to be at the chopper landing point in fifteen minutes. Lead the way, please.’

  ‘Mind if I tag along?’ asked Ivan.

  ‘Very well,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Miss Newbold, will you wait here with my watch-keepers or would you rather join the other lady below?’

  ‘I’ll come down,’ said Harry. And Richard reckoned that was a wise move. The combination of brusqueness and condescension the special security team had shown so far was likely to lead to confrontation if they tried it on the Pitman. Harry’s diplomatic skills might be challenged, by the looks of things.