Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (5 page)

As he surveyed the assembled faces in the airy restaurant, Alex Zaitsev unexpectedly managed to put his foot in his mouth. ‘If you do call up Harry Newbold and the Pitman,' he said to Richard, ‘I think we're going to need a bigger chopper to take us all home.'

The Fujitsu computer men looked at him, their eyes dark and very suspicious indeed behind twelve thick black-framed spectacle lenses. ‘Excuse me,' said the nearest of them, with icy formality. ‘I am Doctor Rikkitaro Sato. I lead the computer team. Did you say you were considering calling on Harry?'

‘It's déjà vu,' said Richard to himself. ‘Pure déjà vu.'

‘Harry
Newbold
?' insisted Dr Sato frostily.

‘It's an insurance policy,' explained Richard. ‘Plan B. Back-up only. In case of unforeseen but insurmountable problems.'

‘Such as …' grated Dr Sato.

‘Give the guy a break, Doctor Sato,' interjected a new voice. Richard turned to find one of the Greenbaum International executives standing smiling at his shoulder. ‘If he could give you a
such as
, then it would hardly be
unforeseen
. You can see the logic in that, surely.'

Dr Sato grunted, bowed and turned away.

‘Domenico Giancarlo DiVito, Greenbaum's Vancouver office.' The stranger held out his hand to Richard. ‘But everyone just calls me Dom. Pleasure to meet you, Captain Mariner. Rikki's a real nice guy when you get to know him.'

And you got to know him fast
, thought Richard, meeting smile with open smile.
You've both only been here a couple of hours.

‘But I think you threw him a bit with the name-dropping,' the Canadian continued. ‘Bit like asking Colonel Custer to take tea with Sitting Bull. See where I'm coming from? You can understand the good doctor's point. Using Harry and the Pitman as your insurance policy is not so much a safety net as mutually assured destruction. A two-guy team coupling a top mercenary with a world-class hacker. That's a bit like Arnie Schwarzenegger meets Lizbet Salander, isn't it?
The Terminator with the Dragon Tattoo
?'

Richard looked down at the open, smiling face of the young Canadian beside him. ‘Nice to meet you, too, Dom,' he said after a moment longer. ‘And you may have a point. But then, so may I. Tell me, what is it that you fight fire with? Especially in situations that could get explosive?'

The ingenuous brown eyes were shaded for an instant. Then another cheery voice interjected. ‘Fire,' said the newcomer. ‘You fight fire with fire, Dom.'

‘Damned if you don't,' nodded Dom cheerfully. ‘This is my opposite number from the Anchorage office, Captain Mariner – Steve Penn. Steve, Captain Mariner.'

Christened Stephano Penne, Richard remembered. Penne, like the pasta. ‘Call me Richard. Nice to meet you,' said Richard, shaking their hands. ‘Steve's right, Dom. Fight fire with fire. So I'll keep my
terminator with a dragon tattoo
on call until I'm sure that I'm not facing something I need that particular fire to fight.'

Again, the open countenance darkened for an instant. ‘But this is just an exercise, right? A test run. In case we ever do find ourselves fighting a fire for real …' The two young executives exchanged glances.

‘That's what we suppose,' said Richard. ‘But then, my Bentley's supposed to be a safe ride and I'm supposed to be a good driver. But I still have—'

‘—car insurance …' said Dom DiVito with a shrug. ‘Sure. I get it.'

‘Right, Dom. Let's get the ruffled feathers smoothed, the troops fed and watered, the briefing done and the show on the road, shall we?'

Once again, Richard was content to let Aleks Zaitsev make the running after everyone had enjoyed a peculiarly Russian breakfast of bacon, eggs, ham and blinis served with a samovar of tea and a massive jug of coffee. Richard, chatty as ever, discovered that the restaurant was well-supplied with the food thanks to another group of foreigners who had passed through a little under a week earlier, also, apparently, heading west rather than east to Yelizovo or south into the local community of Petropavlovsk.

This time there was no need for a large-scale schematic. Even the Greenbaum execs knew the basic structure and layout of a hull designed to house Moss-type LNG tanks. And
Sayonara
was not radically different in architecture from all the other LNG tankers plying the seas, except that she had that whaleback deck in front of her shortened bridge instead of four or five great hemispheres lined up ahead of an eight- or ten-deck block of flats. And neither Aleks nor any of the others except Rikki Sato and his team really needed to be aware of the differences in computer control and programming. The computers were where the officers crew would have been: between the command bridge and the engine room. So Aleks simply talked them through the basic safety procedures; where they were planning to go first; who was going to be with them to watch their backs; where they were all destined to end up and who would be there to keep the bad guys off their backs while they discovered what damage had been done and put it right. He then emphasized that this was a purely defensive exercise.

That last being an extremely important point, thought Richard as, fed, watered, rested and half-briefed, they all trooped down to the hangar with the Bashnev/Sevmash truck and chopper parked beside it. They took off their business suits, executive shirts and ties, their city shoes and so forth and pulled on cargo pants that were lined and inky black, and black wool roll necks along with black Kevlar body protectors, balaclavas, boots and gloves. Here the techies were given their laptops, their connectors and their shoulder-cases, infra-red headsets and night goggles, and open channel two-way communicators. The soldiers got their guns.

The only men going in empty-handed were Richard, Dom DiVito and Steve Penn. But Richard at least made sure he had his Galaxy at the ready. He pulled it out and looked at its flat screen, remembering Robin's frowning face and angry words the last time he had held it. She was ready and more than willing to send in the reinforcements at the slightest excuse, whether she heard from him or whether she did not. If anything hit the fan, he thought grimly, she would hear. He liked to be in control, and had no intention of causing Harry and the Pitman to be called out because of what he hadn't done as opposed to what he had done.

He looked almost fondly at the familiar, trusty Samsung Galaxy smartphone, with worldwide access to the Net.

Battery full. Pre-dial loaded.

Panic button set to press.

T
he Bashnev chopper came over
Sayonara
exactly five hours after the internal flight from Moscow touched down in Yelizovo, calculated Richard, dividing his attention between the view from the window beside him and the face of his watch which told him it was noon, local time. Accurate to the second. And, for once, local time and ship's time coincided. The vessel was proceeding at eighteen knots. A ground speed of more than twenty miles per hour, he calculated. Heading along a south-south-westerly course, following the edge of the abyssal Kuril Trench down towards Japan. He checked his Rolex again. She was exactly fourteen hundred and fifty miles from the new NIPEX facility. Seventy hours' sailing time.

Aleks Zaitsev had spent the two hours of the flight giving a final briefing to the technicians, making sure that they were comfortable and confident with the equipment they were wearing, particularly the night-vision equipment they had been supplied with on the assumption that they could well be working below decks in a lightless environment. Richard was familiar with his own goggles – he'd worn a similar set when he'd been involved in night actions during a bush war in West Africa, in the days when Felix Makarov's partner, the bellicose and dangerously short-tempered Max Asov, had still been with them. Max had died in that nasty little war, on the shore of a lake full of coltan – a lake which promised to make all of their fortunes. The search for it had taken Max from Moscow to the slopes of Karisoke, a volcano in the dark heart of the war-torn continent, where he had died. Max had been succeeded by his daughter because his son and heir had died of a drugs overdose the better part of a decade earlier. Anastasia, therefore – though Max must be turning in his grave at the thought – and Ivan, her chief of security and right-hand man, were the natural Bashnev balance to Felix and his team at Sevmash shipping.

It was Anastasia, more than any requirements of business or security, which kept Ivan in Russia now, Richard suspected. Only Anastasia would keep the big man away from an adventure like this one. Though, given the young woman's warlike propensities, he was vaguely surprised that Nastia hadn't come along herself. Perhaps there was trouble brewing in Moscow, St Petersburg and Archangel, where the twin companies of Bashnev/Sevmash had their main business concerns. Perhaps he should ask London Centre what the word was on the street next time he was in contact with Robin. Or rather, what the word was on the
ulitsa.
It occurred to him that he should contact Robin pretty soon, in fact. Perhaps as soon as they got aboard
Sayonara
.

But then the immediate requirements of the situation took precedence for Richard. The Mil made a low pass over
Sayonara
. They all craned to see if there was anything obvious amiss, but there was not. The vessel swept determinedly forward, her decks and bridge house apparently empty. There was no gesture of greeting towards them; no declaration of war. Now it was the turn of the techies – most of whom had worked on her or on board her – to nod with silent wisdom while the soldiers gasped at her sheer size and the impact she made close-up, for she was a massive craft. Aleks Zaitsev, Konstantin Roskov and Vasily Kolchak were the only ones not giving vent to Russian oaths of surprise. They were focusing three pairs of electronically-enhanced binoculars upon their destination, trying to see into whatever deadly secrets lay within her.

The sides of her two hundred and eighty-eight metre hull were black and unmarked by any of the signs of age and wear that come so swiftly to working vessels. There didn't even appear to be a rust streak on the flare of the forecastle head beneath her carefully cradled anchors. Her squat bridge house sat far back at the opposite extreme of the long, lean hull, empty bridge wings stretching sixty metres from tip to tip. There was almost no poop deck and what little there was lay hidden below the hull of the lifeboat hanging from side-to-side aft of the bridge house above it. There was a glint of a safety rail in the summer sunshine then the square wall of her stern, falling towards the white heave of her propellers and the widening V of her wake.

The great whaleback of the protective cover, which stood so massively over the foredeck and the hemispheres of the Moss tanks, began immediately forward of the bridge to which it was joined. It stood more than twenty-five metres high and spread from rail to rail more than forty-five metres across the deck. Forty-eight point nine five, in fact, Richard remembered from the schematic on the laptop Ivan was guarding for him. Where the sides were pristine black, the bridge and whaleback were white, and in the midday sunshine it was as though they were flying over a snow bank so bright Richard wondered whether Aleks Zaitsev would be reminded of his Italian alpine ski runs. Pipe tops and mastheads stood in pairs above the pristine curves, like the uprights of a ski-lift long fallen out of commission. Between them, on the very top of the whaleback, there were pipes, as on a tanker, running in parallel series, fore and aft. And a little over halfway down the hull there was a cavity, with what looked for all the world like a massive balcony projecting over the side.

The shadow of the helicopter crept across the Alpine whiteness, rising and falling as the pilot sought to keep clear of the skeletal uprights. But it settled beside the starboard balcony. The lieutenant, his warrant officer right-hand man and the operations and intelligence sergeant – Aleks, Konstantin and Vasily – put their heads together, clearly debating whether this would be a good point for at least one team to gain entry, for it was a far more sizeable feature than it had appeared to be on Richard's schematic. But eventually they nodded their heads. They had a plan. This was not the moment to deviate from it. Aleks spoke into his headset, clearly ordering the pilot to proceed.

At last the Mil arrived above its destination. The triangle of the forecastle lay like a massive arrow-head below them, the circle of the helipad drawn in white on the green of the decking behind the pair of huge winches supporting the anchors, and between the slightly lesser pair controlling the hawsers by which the great ship could be moored. As the chopper pilot began to descend, Aleks was in action once again. He strode up to the cockpit, then returned with the flight engineer. Richard pulled out his cellphone, switched it on, tapped in his code and hit the predial. Robin's face filled the screen. ‘We're going in,' he said tersely. ‘I'll contact you again within the hour.' Then he realized it must be nearly midnight in London.

‘Within the hour,' she said. ‘Got it. I won't be in bed by the looks of things so don't let the hour worry you. But this time, buster, you'd better be bang on time.' And she broke contact with unexpected abruptness.

Aleks Zaitsev broke into his thoughts. Not by what he said, this time, but by what he did. As he came down the length of the Mil's cabin, Aleks patted several shoulders. The men he contacted sprang erect. The Mil's descent slowed, and as it did so, the engineer opened the sliding door in the cabin's side. Aleks and his four-man squad clipped lines to a rail above the howling vacancy of the open side and – at a nod from their leader – stepped back into thin air. Richard, on the far side, looked out and down until the four figures appeared beneath the belly and landing gear that partially blocked his view. As though they too were all controlled by
Sayonara
's computers, they rappelled in perfect unison down towards the waiting deck, while Richard thought that skiing was by no means the only sport at which Aleks excelled. They all landed together precisely at the centre of the white circle of the helipad, unclipped and reached for their weapons. Then they fanned out, checking for anything that had been hidden from the binoculars' scrutiny – anyone concealed just inside the forward doors into the whaleback, lingering with evil intent. But soon they were signalling, and the pilots set the Mil on the landing pad so that everyone could climb out.