Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘But Yukio …’A look of fear spread across his face.

  ‘I’ve been in radio contact with the authorities already,’ said Richard. ‘We have people gearing up to get her off the campus at Cosenza and out of Calabria by morning.’ Rikki looked at Richard, his mouth hanging open with surprise as he tried to get his head round what Richard had learned, deduced and done.

  ‘Captain Mariner is telling the truth,’ emphasized Murukami. ‘You don’t need to protect Yukio any more. He’s taken care of that. But you can help us. And if you don’t, then we’ll all die. Was that your plan, Rikki? To die for Yukio?’

  ‘And to let the rest of us die as well?’ probed Harry. ‘You selfish fuc—’ Richard’s hand came gently down on her shoulder and she stopped speaking.

  ‘Yukio is safe. You don’t need to die. Nobody needs to die,’ Richard insisted. ‘Help us break into the programme. Give us back control of Sayonara.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Rikki. ‘It’s all too deeply embedded. It’s not just a question of hacking and reprogramming.’ He looked earnestly at Harry. ‘You’d need to actually replace complete sections of the computer itself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

  ‘Well …’ The language got very technical all of a sudden, especially when Murukami joined in, but Richard was enough of a techie to follow the main gist of what Rikki was explaining. As with the deceptively simple trick of setting a trigger on the ‘finished with engines’ setting of the engine room telegraph, Rikki had approached the problem of taking control of Sayonara’s computers with a combination of malware programmes and physical changes.

  Like many commercial computer systems, Sayonara’s was an amalgam of superfast multicore processors, massive hard drives and banks of state-of-the-art RAM boards where random access memory could run incredibly quickly. But at the heart of the system were the motherboards. As far as Richard was concerned, these individual components hardly seemed to exist as physical entities. He experienced them as a set of electronic interactions. He did not even consider the programmes themselves and it certainly never occurred to him to try to estimate the billions of calculations that were carried out in nanoseconds to access the incoming signal from Robin’s phone and to bring her picture on the screen of his Galaxy as her words were transmitted through the speaker, or which sections of the motherboard were involved. He took them for granted and only worried when something caused the computers to misbehave. But he still thought about such interference as electronic, like the attacks of hackers who constantly assaulted the computer systems of corporations, companies and countries worldwide.

  The discussion between the three engineers turned on the interrelationship of the processors, the drives and the RAM boards as they were organized through the motherboard of each computer system on board. And it was the motherboards that soon emerged as the cause of the trouble. Rikki had put extra chips in these boards that interfered with the information passing from one place to another. Not programmed, not only hacked after all. He had actually added extra sections to the boards themselves – daughter boards, they were called – and he had slipped them in here and there. Not only had he added boards but, devious as ever, he had put all of the contaminated boards into the back-up control areas, knowing that the systems on the bridge were likely to be the ones that people checked on first. It had been a simple matter to reverse the protocols so that the back-up systems down here took all the vital decisions. And it had proved very effective at first, for not even Murukami had noticed anything amiss when they focused on checking the systems up on the bridge. It was only when Harry started interfering with the systems down here after the whole lot fused that she had managed to restore a measure more of control than Macavity had planned, though finally her work had been of little benefit, for it had been overridden at the moment the pilot had signalled ‘Finished with Engines’.

  ‘So,’ said Harry, ‘what happens if we just take out the infected boards?’

  ‘The same as what happened when the bridge flooded and the system fused. The back-ups come online and they will still guide Sayonara to her destination.’

  ‘Can we replace them one by one with uninfected boards?’ she persisted. ‘With virgin daughter boards?’

  ‘That might restore some control. But it would only be the beginning. We would need to add new drives to overcome the original programmes.’

  ‘Could we get them flown out?’ demanded Richard.

  ‘Not in time to replace them. Not in ninety minutes. If we had some here, now, we might stand a chance, but …’

  ‘Wait,’ whispered Harry. ‘OK. I have a range of SSD’s with me – the drives we need to add. But the daughter boards are something else. Except that I have a detailed design for a standard daughter board on my laptop. And I mean detailed.’ She clicked what she was talking about up on to the screen. There was one of these in each of Sayonara’s control systems, all facilitating the passage of orders. All, according to Rikki, like translators at an international conference mistranslating one language to another, causing calculated confusion and confrontation.

  ‘That’s of no help to us,’ answered Murukami, looking at Harry’s laptop screen. ‘A design on your laptop, no matter how detailed, is useless.’

  ‘Not in this case,’ said Harry. ‘I also have a 3D printer with a copper granule feed. I could print a gun and shoot you with it. I can sure as hell print a daughter board, with all the wiring in place. In fact, I can print board after board and have SSDs to put on them!’ She looked at the three of them, glowing with elation. ‘Oh, come on, guys, isn’t anyone going to say, By heaven, Harry, it might just work?’

  Richard ran back to the bridge and updated the men there, focusing most of what he was saying on Ivan and the Pitman, both of whom went below at once to see if there was anything they could do to move matters along faster for Harry. Then he walked out on to the bridge wing, pulled out his Galaxy and contacted Robin. As briefly and clearly as possible, he explained what the problem was and what Harry was trying to do about it. ‘I think you’d better keep working on moving Zemlya out of the way, though,’ he concluded. ‘Harry’s plan looks like a long shot to me.’

  ‘Can we think outside the box a bit?’ she asked. ‘I could get one of the tugs to come and meet you, maybe pull you offline …’

  ‘I thought of that. But you need both to stand any chance of moving Zemlya, and there’s no guarantee that either or both of the tugs could get here, send cables aboard and pull us off line in time. Meanwhile, you’d be stuck at the bull’s eye in the target Sayonara’s heading for.’

  ‘Could you drop one of the anchors? Try to drag her offline?’

  ‘I thought of that too but there’s no bottom. It’s too deep for the anchor chains we have on board. Even if there was some way of joining both chains together, we don’t have time. I’m relying on Harry. What about you?’

  ‘The tugs are ready. The control rods are down and the core is cooling. But there’s a problem: we can’t get anyone out here to disconnect us from the grid. If we just drop them and run it could be disastrous and could’s the problem. These people will only act on stone-cold certainty. Could, might and maybe just don’t motivate them. If we can’t cut loose, we’ll have to go the other way; push in towards the land, get really friendly with the nearest city folk and hope you can squeeze past on our seaward side. It’s possible, but it’ll be close.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘Somewhere between a nose and a whisker.’

  ‘OK. Let’s look at this cup half full. If you move a couple of metres and we swing offline a degree or two, there should be clear water between us in just over an hour’s time.’

  Richard went back to work. He prowled the forecastle head, trying to work out whether he could in fact drop the port anchor in the hope that it would catch on the sea bed and slew Sayonara’s head round to the seaward side. But of course, even if that proved possible, he would have to make sure he dropped it at the last
minute so Sayonara’s treacherous programmes could not pull her back on line. Turning these thoughts over, he walked out to the forecastle head and looked forward. Right on the rim of the horizon dead ahead he saw the brightness of Kujukuri, telling him that Zemlya was still supplying power to the floating city. And that she was still dead ahead, just under an hour distant.

  In a frenzy of impatience, he ran back up on to the bridge. Macavity had taken all of the kit he and Richard had brought aboard, but he’d talked a radio out of the lieutenant and discovered that Ivan had done the same, so he was able to keep abreast of Harry’s attempt to replace all of Rikki’s polluted mother boards with virgin daughters and SSDs. Meanwhile, he assembled a kind of council of war to discuss options once again. There was no use shorting out the computer again, even supposing they could. There was little point in checking the helm or the engine room telegraph – though they did so every five minutes. Watanabe took the Mitsubishi engineers down to the engine room with the lieutenant as communications officer. But although they knew how to go about switching off the engines, their knowledge all revolved round using the engine room telegraph to ‘stop engines’ and eventually to ‘finish with engines’ which had already proved to be so fatal. It occurred to Richard that they could open the sea cocks and hope that Sayonara would settle beneath the ocean before she collided with Zemlya. But the sea cocks, like all the other controls, proved to be firmly in the power of the computers. And there was some question in Richard’s mind – and then in Watanabe’s and Endo’s, not to mention the men at NIPEX – of whether Sayonara would sink or, buoyed up by her five great tanks, simply proceed half submerged to her doom.

  In the end, it all turned on Harry and Robin. As the last twenty minutes ticked up on Sayonara’s chronometer, so Harry came through on Richard’s radio. ‘I think we have partial control,’ she said. ‘We’ve been concentrating on the engine and navigation systems which will give you control over the helm. It’s too late to piss about with anything else. You’ll just have to turn the helm as hard to port as you can and hold it there. You’ll have partial rudder control, but you won’t be able to play around with the propellers like you did when you turned her in the typhoon. It’s the best we can do at this stage. Good luck.’

  Richard took the helm himself and did as Harry advised, swinging it over to port with all his strength. He could see the gathering brightness of Kujukuri’s floating city and, for the first time, found that he could distinguish the lights of Zemlya where she sat fifteen minutes dead ahead. He placed the Galaxy on the control surface beside him, near the useless engine room telegraph. He dialled Robin’s cellphone and left the channel open as the machines tried to make contact. Teeth gritted, eyes narrow, he glanced up at the heading monitor above him. One degree to port, it showed. Two. The helm would move no further. His arms ached. His shoulder joints tore. He thought his back would break as he strained against the recalcitrant wheel. His forehead was abruptly slick with sweat. His breath came short and ragged.

  Suddenly Robin was there. Her face filled the screen. ‘I’m delivering my end of the bargain,’ he grated. ‘Two degrees to port and ten minutes out. How are you doing at your end?’

  ‘Both tugs at full throttle,’ she answered. ‘We’re pushing in towards the shore. I have no idea how far. We’ll be hard up against the first section of Kujukuri any minute, then things’ll slow. Not even Erebus and Terror will be able to push a floating city ashore. Though God knows, they’re trying hard enough.’

  ‘Right,’ said Richard. ‘Ask Erebus to try even harder. It’s only for a few minutes and if we survive I’ll pay to have her motors fixed myself.’

  Richard broke contact then and concentrated. Sweat was running into his eyes but he disregarded it. Zemlya’s rear wall suddenly seemed very near – and very tall. He could see Erebus on the near side, straining to pull the power station out of his way, smoke belching as her captain obligingly burned her motors out, adding as much extra thrust as he could. And Zemlya was answering, swinging round to an increasing angle across his starboard quarter, inch by inch. He felt Sayonara continuing to pull to port. But there was no doubt in his mind that they were going to crash. ‘Stand by for collision,’ he called. ‘Captain Ito, sound the ship’s alarm.’

  Alarms began to sound right throughout the ship, but Richard hardly heard them. He was rapt in the finest calculations of velocity and angle, vector and impact, as though he were playing billiards with balls of unimaginable scale, and with a cue over which he had very limited control. Zemlya’s rear wall, a steel cliff reaching five decks straight up out of the sea, was coming round to an angle of maybe twenty degrees away from Sayonara’s course. And Sayonara herself was bearing further and further away. But it was all too little, too late. He closed his eyes.

  The LNG tanker, moving at twenty-two knots, impacted with the nuclear power station, her starboard forequarter smashing against the wall that towered four more decks above it, as high as the ship’s command bridge. The flare of the forecastle head buckled, screaming and juddering. The starboard anchor tore off and took several metres of chain with it before the force of the collision snapped the steel links and let the ruin fall. The whole starboard quarter of the forecastle head buckled and tore. The deck rose in waves that reared and froze. The starboard anchor winch broke free and rolled across the corrugated helipad until the port winch brought it up short. But the impact on the forecastle head soaked up the energy of the collision before it could do any serious damage to Moss tank number one. Sayonara’s head bounced off Zemlya’s back and the whole ship juddered round to port, pausing only to tear off the starboard bridge wing before she was clear. Then the engines stopped.

  The loss of the starboard anchor tripped Macavity’s carefully hidden impact trigger. Electrical impulses raced along the copper wires towards the detonator the Pitman found when she was exploring beneath the forward tank. Down the forward wall behind the bulbous bow they went like lightning along the wire, across the deck and down. Down to the open area beneath the massive downswell of the tank. And here they shorted, sparked and died. Because the detonator, like the bomb, had gone.

  Richard stood, held erect only by his iron grip in the helm, looking over the rest of the bridge watch who were rolling like skittles across the deck, as his brain slowly registered that there would be no explosion resulting from the collision after all. Sometime during the collision his Galaxy had gone skittering across the engine room telegraph and he had caught it automatically without realizing. Suddenly it began to ring. The screen went blank. He hit reply, thinking it must be Robin. But no. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hello. Is there anybody there?’ There was nothing on the screen or in the sudden massive silence around the ship. Except, perhaps, a distant flicker and a rumble as though thunder was threatening away to the east. Then Robin came through at last. ‘You bloody man,’ she said. ‘Just look what your big rough boat has done to Anastasia’s poor little power station!’

  Richard was gasping as though he had just run a marathon. ‘Look what her big rough power station’s done to my poor little boat,’ he croaked.

  And she smiled, her eyes full of tears, her joyous expression filling the whole screen, and then some. ‘Hello, sailor,’ she said. ‘Welcome home.’

  The ocean-going gin palace that Richard had noticed earlier is called Volante. She sleeps ten passengers in palatial splendour, has berths for eight crew and she is Francisco Lazzaro’s pride and joy. Since the typhoon, which Volante rode out safely in Sendai harbour, Lazzaro himself has captained her out to shadow Sayonara with only a two-man skeleton crew to help. The ’Ndrangheta chieftain has revelled in the challenge of watch-keeping and helming his pride and joy for two days and nights, in eight-hour rotations with the others. And it was Lazzaro, in fact, who was at the helm when Sayonara’s lifeboat came alongside and the pirates Richard simply knew as Macavity’s men came aboard. Then, of course, Lazzaro had been happy to hand over command to the lieutenant from the South African navy. From bein
g all-but deserted, Volante had become overfull, so crowded that even the wounded had to double bunk. Thus their kit remains in the twenty-four-seater lifeboat which remains secured to Volante’s stern. Because, Macavity has explained to his employer, if Volante is to shadow Sayonara to her final cataclysmic meeting with Zemlya, she will have to stay far out to sea, where a lifeboat this size might be the difference between life and death for so many men on board.

  At the moment Sayonara and Zemlya come together, to the very second as plotted on Macavity’s MTM military chronometer, he and Lazzaro are on Volante’s bridge, watching the western horizon for the blinding flash and mushroom cloud that will tell them their plans have come to fruition; that they are one hundred and twenty-five million dollars richer. That Bashnev/Sevmash and Heritage Mariner are theirs for the taking. That they are all made men. They already hold wide, flat glasses of Niccolo Rizziconi’s Dom Perignon brought all the way from Moscow for the occasion, ready to toast their fortunes made. But something keeps the glasses from their lips. Darkness at the point where Sayonara and Zemlya have met. Darkness and silence.

  But the second of convergence passes. And the next second. And the next. Lazzaro swings round to face his South African henchman. ‘Something’s wrong,’ he snarls. Near-priceless champagne slops out of his glass like icy, golden tears.

  The lieutenant blenches, despite his special forces training. When things go wrong in Lazzaro’s world, people begin to meet lengthy and ugly deaths. That is why he put the insurance of the huge C4 device beneath tank number one. That is why he put in place a back-up in case the impact trigger behind the anchor failed. Ultimately, that is why he gave Richard Mariner his Galaxy back. ‘Just a moment,’ he says. ‘The game’s not over yet.’ He takes out his cellphone. ‘I can trigger it with this.’

  ‘But they can trace the call, you fool,’ snarls Lazzaro. ‘Since Al-Qaeda started using cellphones as detonators, the companies log calls and alert the CIA and the NSA. It is one of the things that Snowden revealed before he vanished into Russia. They’ll know it was you. And, through you, me!’