by Peter Tonkin
*
‘… which promises to be the biggest fireworks show in history,’ the English commentator was saying. Even two hours after midnight there, London was still on the air. Midnight had got as far as Cape Farewell in Greenland, and would soon arrive in Rio which was gearing up as only Rio could. But in the meantime, lacking anything else to talk about, the increasingly desperate anchorman was discussing the forthcoming destruction of Mir. ‘Perhaps only the Russians, especially under their current financial circumstances, could have come up with the idea of getting rid of a two-hundred-ton space station simply by crashing it into Earth’s atmosphere. I have here a representative of Greenpeace who, as you will imagine, has a strong and not particularly festive opinion …’
In spite of the storm, the continuing festivities and the cold, the twins were asleep at last. As the Greenpeace man was joined by a woman representing Friends of the Earth to observe that the space station was due to break into four pieces — three of forty tons and one of eighty tons containing a nuclear reactor — and that no one seemed to know exactly where or when these things would actually land, Robin and Kate picked up a slumbering infant each and eased themselves out of the dining salon.
It was difficult to carry the children because they were so heavy now and the ship was rolling badly, but the women picked their way carefully along the corridor to the lift. When the car came, the doors hissed open to reveal Killigan and Hoyle leaning back into the rear corners. After only the slightest hesitation, Robin said, ‘Going up?’ and strode in. Kate followed, and an uneasy silence ensued as the lift rose one more deck to their level.
‘What do you think those two are up to?’ asked Kate as they walked along the corridor to the Mariners’ stateroom.
‘I don’t know,’ said Robin thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t like the look of them. When I’ve put the twins down, I think I’ll stay with them. Could you go and find Richard and Colin? Update Richard as to where we are and tell him about those two — not that he’ll be able to do anything about them. He won’t want to leave the bridge.’
Once the twins were tucked down, with Robin anxiously but comfortably on watch, Kate went off to deliver her friend’s worried message. Her first thought was to take the lift up to the bridge, but the thought of being trapped in it with Killigan and Billy Hoyle made her think again. So when it did not immediately answer her summons, she turned and made her way along the pitching corridor and up the heaving companionway instead.
She reached the bridge and walked into what was obviously an explosive atmosphere. ‘Look,’ Richard was saying, obviously trying to keep things calm, ‘We just have to plan for it. OK, so the radio’s down again. The radio on the Sikorsky is still unreachable and wouldn’t raise much except local traffic in any case. From the sound of things, we’d never have got any sense out of St Petersburg in time. America might have been able to help but Borisov here doubts it. Fine. At least we know the equipment on Deception is there and functioning one hundred per cent. That’s what we’ll have to go for. The camp is up on the clifftop at Mount Pond and it’s a bit of a climb from the beach —’
‘Eighteen hundred feet sheer,’ supplied Colin knowledgeably. ‘Half a mile on the path and it is very steep too.’
‘But once we’re in Port Foster bay, we can send Zodiac with a team prepared to run up there and call whoever you want. We might even be able to send the Sikorsky, but I can’t remember whether they have a landing area up there.’
‘But it will be too late for us!’ said Borisov desperately. ‘All our systems will have shut down.’ He looked at his watch; double-checked with the chronometer above the helmsman’s head. ‘We have just over one hour then. Total powerdown. All systems. Dead.’
‘Not the engines,’ said Richard. ‘And not the ancillaries the engine room controls. At five to midnight we get the chief to switch to manual override. We’ll still have steerageway.’
‘Steerageway to where? We’ll be blind and deaf, in the middle of the worst storm I have seen. And nothing ahead of us but Neptune’s Bellows, a passage less than a kilometre wide with rocks and shoals on either side and winds tearing in and out all over the place. It is madness. We’ll be dead.’
‘No we won’t,’ Richard insisted. ‘Not if we’re careful. Not if we plan. Not if we’re prepared. Ships have been coming and going through Neptune’s Bellows for centuries. Most of them without all of this equipment.’
‘Not in storms like this!’ cried Borisov, looking around as though expecting applause for this clincher to the argument.
‘Mr Varnek,’ snapped Richard. ‘When will we reach the eye of the storm?’
‘At midnight, Captain Mariner.’
‘And what will we find there?’
‘According to the weather sat, clear skies and calm winds for one hour, maybe two.’
‘Mr Yazov, where will we be then?’
‘Waiting to enter Neptune’s Bellows, Captain Mariner.’
‘You see, Mr Borisov? It is a question of timing. Of being ready and having every eventuality planned for. In one hour’s time, this weather will clear for one hour, perhaps two, before it all closes down again. In one hour and five minutes, we will lose everything except power and propulsion. Therefore we will need to know to within millimetres where we are and how we are heading. We will have moments to post watches on bridge wings and, if we can, on the forecastle head. If we are lucky we may even be able to get the Sikorsky up. As soon as the weather clears we will head at full speed towards Neptune’s Bellows. And the moment we are through we will need to send teams, either by Zodiac or Sikorsky, to the base there.’
On this note, a distant cheer erupted, as though the passengers had heard and approved Richard’s decisive words. Kate swung round and gasped with shock. The lift car stood open, unnoticed, its door wedged wide by Killigan’s boot on the one side and Hoyle’s on the other. The instant Killigan saw Kate recognise him and open her mouth to warn the bridge party that they were being spied upon, he moved. They both stepped back. The door hissed shut. The lift car was gone. The cheering carried on, distant but unmistakable. It was midnight in Rio, fifteen degrees to the east of them. They had exactly one hour left.
*
For the team on the bridge it was an incredibly busy hour and it passed in a flash of frenetic activity. The same was true for the men in the engine room. But for those caught in between, time dragged, the slow tick of the minutes only partially lightened by the colourful excesses in Rio. And there were a good number of people caught in between, for the team on the bridge was stripped down now to navigators and ship-handlers. All the computer people were redundant; even if they could fix anything, the respite would be pointlessly brief. Kyril stayed at his post, but he remained there alone, his equipment dead, his hope of communication with anywhere, near or far, put on hold until he got into the Sikorsky or up onto the deserted base on Deception. All the watch officers remained, on watch or not, just as all the engineers assembled with the chief below, preparing to switch over from the automatic to the manual systems at the captain’s order in fifty minutes’ time. Richard and Colin remained; no one else.
Kate returned to the Mariners’ stateroom and passed back to Robin Richard’s love and the knowledge that her message had been received. The hunch-backed T-Shirt, with Max and Jolene, went down to the dining salon in search of food and a little more partying. But Jolene was restless, all too well aware that Killigan and Hoyle were on the prowl and that Vivien Agran was nowhere to be seen. In the innermost pocket of her jacket, beneath the warm bulk of T-Shirt’s parka, she still held the little pile of computer disks, wrapped in the printouts of Billy Hoyle’s logs like a little present. Getting to a radio was a high priority for her, too, and she required a much less powerful machine than any of the others, for she only needed to reach Agent Jones at Armstrong. He was so close at hand, she had even tried to raise him on her personal phone, but the signal had gone down with the satellite dish and had not come up again.
/> She had a clear view of her duty beyond making that call too. Whether she could tell Jones what she had found and what she planned or not, it was her duty, clear and unavoidable, irrespective of the cost, to get back the Power Strip if she could and prevent its design specifications getting from the floppy disk onto the Internet. All she could do at the moment was to keep herself generally aware of the whereabouts of Killigan and Hoyle. But she had no wish to go looking for them. The next time they managed to get her alone for a couple of minutes they would not hesitate to finish their unfinished business with her.
The obvious thing to do was to ask the otherwise unemployed T-Shirt for his help. And Jolene knew he would not hesitate to give it. But sometime during that ecstatic time in the shower and those wonderful hours immediately afterwards, T-Shirt had managed to become so precious to her that she would far rather put herself at risk than do anything that might endanger him.
And so she and T-Shirt and Max sat with the others in the dining salon, watching a midnight carnival snaking through Rio with stories and comments from Montevideo and Buenos Aires. It was not until a little item came in from Gander, Newfoundland, whose time zone was on the half-hour between Rio’s and their own, that she realised how late it was getting. Shaking herself into some kind of wakefulness, Jolene looked around. The first person she saw, in the distance, was Vivien Agran. She had changed her clothes, Jolene noticed. She was wearing black jeans, a black shirt, a thick, heavy black parka. Jolene raised her hand, trying to catch her eye to ask her about a parka for herself so T-Shirt could have his back, but she was gone, leaving an impression almost as disturbing as Killigan and Hoyle. Jolene sat back, mind racing, and suddenly realised she was sitting opposite the one potential ally she had not tapped for any favours yet. She leaned forward. ‘Hey, Corporal Washington,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
*
So far, anyone wanting to use the Sikorsky or the Zodiacs had gone down the deck. The Sikorsky sat on a platform above the main deck behind the bridgehouse. The Zodiacs were lowered from the poop further back still, and were boarded down a set of retractable steps which started at a little mezzanine dock, hardly more than a balcony, and reached to a little step-off point at water level. This was not the only way to get back to the chopper and the inflatables, however. A long passageway reached back at second engineering deck level, piercing the storage areas and ending at the bottom of a well with a ladder up its side and a hatch at the top. The hatch was in the main deck just below the Sikorsky’s overhanging tail, within easy reach of the davits to lower the Zodiacs and one companionway up from the little mezzanine balcony. At 11.45, local time, Third Officer Borisov led a little squad of men down this passageway. His orders were manifold. He was to wait for the sudden quiet calm which would announce that they had passed into the eye of the storm. He was to expect a signal of confirmation on his VHF. He was not to expect the lights or power to fail as the chief switched over to manual power — though in fact he did expect this. He was then to lead his men up onto the deck. There he would ascertain, as best he could, whether the chopper would fly and the inflatables would float, and ready them all as swiftly as he was able. The pilot was part of his little command, as were the two most expert Zodiac coxwains. Kyril was with him. The radio officer would go first to the Sikorsky and try to raise any local bases he could on the chopper’s radio while the pilot was doing his pre-flight. Once the chopper was ready or the Zodiacs could be lowered, Kyril and Borisov would signal the bridge and be directed into the helicopter and/or the boats. By this time it was assumed that Kalinin would have passed, safe and sound, at best speed possible, through Neptune’s Bellows and into the calm, safe haven of Port Foster.
As Borisov led his elite team down the long engineering deck corridor, he was wrapped in thought, his mind — a dangerously negative force on occasion — far ahead of his feet, wrestling with ghostly problems. He was unaware that Killigan and Hoyle were also intent on making use of the quickest way off the ship and across to the communications equipment at the unmanned station on Deception.
*
‘Do you realise what you are asking?’ demanded Irene Ogre, drawing herself up to her full height. Corporal Washington met her, look for look on the level. ‘Yes, ma’am, Captain. But I am a legally constituted member of the United States Army, ma’am, and this is American soil. I know you have firearms locked away for use in emergencies. This is an emergency, ma’am. I realise you cannot leave the bridge at this moment, so I want you to turn over the key of the gun cabinet to me, please. The inspector here and I have to go and place two men under arrest until such time as Federal agents can come and question them.’
‘Killigan and Hoyle,’ said T-Shirt helpfully.
Irene looked across at Richard, but for once he was no help to her. His frowning concentration was wholly on the chronometer, the GPS readout on the ship-handler, and the latest weather-sat fax on which Varnek and Yazov had marked the positions of the ship and the still-invisible Deception. It was impossible to believe that in ten minutes time they would break out of this storm wall into a calm sea and clear sky and find an island, twenty miles in circumference, two thousand feet in height, immediately off their port quarter.
‘You see Deception, Mr Yazov?’ called Richard, his voice reflecting nothing of the tension he was feeling.
‘Clear as clear,’ called Yazov from the collision alarm radar. ‘If I had the sound on this turned on, you would be going deaf right now. As far as I can make out the detail, the mouth of Neptune’s Bellows is seven kilometres due west of us, right about … NOW!’
On his signal, Richard reached over and hit the emergency left turn button. The button instantly overrode the automatic ship-handling system, swinging the ship onto her new heading due west. The helmsman had been awaiting this and he braced himself to hold the wheel as the game ship swung beam on to wind and sea which until now had been following them. Over she rolled like a corvette, until it seemed that the starboard bridge wing was going to go under. Then she began to right herself. Vicious spindrift came whipping across her foredeck from left to right. A great sea punched her on the jaw, wrenching her head round with massive force.
‘How’s that eye coming, Mr Varnek?’ called Richard.
‘Any minute now,’ responded the Russian.
‘It’ll arrive on the dot of midnight, then,’ said Colin from the other side of the writhing, wrestling helmsman.
‘Yes. Very well,’ said Irene Ogre to Washington. ‘Take the keys. But I want no gunfights aboard my ship, Corporal, Dr DaCosta. This is not the Wild West.’ The three of them ran over to the lift and Irene moved to stand at Richard’s shoulder. ‘How long until the chief switches to manual?’
Richard’s eyes flicked up to the chronometer. ‘Four minutes,’ he said. ‘Nine to powerdown. Where is the eye, Mr Varnek?’
‘It’s just coming over Deception. On this line we will run into it at the stroke of midnight, a little less than five kilometres this side.’
‘It had better be there,’ said Colin quietly, standing by with Yazov, ready to go out and act as lookout.
‘It’ll be there. Are you ready?’
‘Aye.’
‘Mr Yazov?’
‘Ready.’
‘Right. Off you go down to the A-deck door. Good luck, the pair of you. And for God’s sake wait for my signal!’
Colin gestured out at the lethal, howling madness smearing itself across the clearview. ‘You don’t have to tell me twice,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ll not be going out in that without a direct order. Why, man, it’s almost as bad as December in Aberdeen.’
*
The guns were sturdy, not very remarkable, reliable. A Remington rifle and a Smith and Wesson .38 police special, a pistol, not an automatic, with chambers and no fancy red-dot sight. But Jolene felt so much better as she pulled it out of the case that she would almost have traded T-Shirt for it. Almost. She saw him looking longingly at it and remembered the section of his life st
ory he had told her in the shower. The Special Forces section. ‘You can’t have it,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s my security blanket. Humour me. And anyway, you look like what you really need is a broadsword.’
‘And a horse,’ he said. ‘In fact, now you come to mention it, I’d give my kingdom for a —’
Corporal Washington snapped the breach on the Remington open and closed like John Wayne with a Winchester. ‘Let’s move out,’ he ordered quietly.
But T-Shirt held up his right hand. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said.
The guns were in the captain’s quarters up on Palmer-Hall Deck. Because they didn’t know where Killigan and Hoyle were, Washington and Jolene planned to move downwards, deck by deck. But T-Shirt’s work on the computers had given him an insight into the way the various programs worked, so he called up the accommodation section and swiftly ran through the corridor monitoring programme. Five minutes later he found them, one deck down on Byrd-Ellsworth. ‘There they are,’ he said in triumph. ‘Got you, you —’
The lights flickered.
‘Shit!’ he said. ‘What’s the time?’
Jolene looked at her watch. ‘Jesus! It’s ninety seconds to midnight.’
‘You want to watch these bozos for a bit?’ asked T-Shirt. ‘See what they’re up to?’
‘No,’ said Jolene decisively. ‘I don’t want to watch them. I want to stop them.’
‘Fair enough,’ said T-Shirt. He stood up and prepared to follow her. ‘Hey!’
‘What now?’ snapped Washington, beginning to run out of patience.
‘They disappeared. I’ve got Mrs Agran now, but Killigan and Hoyle’ve gone. Now where the hell …’ He began to flick through the corridor monitors again, holding the others up for a few more vital seconds. Then, ‘Gotcha,’ he said again. ‘They’re on Palmer-Hall. Hey, that’s this —’
