Noah's Ark: Survivors (30 page)

“Ewan, the world didn’t end. Not for everyone. You’re still here. I’m here. There are three thousand people on the
Spirit of Arcadia
. And who knows how many others? Other submarines. Maybe other boats. Perhaps some corner of the world got spared, just like we did?”

Coote stuck his head round the door.

“Ah, awake! Excellent. Very good. Ewan told you that we’ve picked up a signal? We’re tracking it on the radar, it looks like it’s your ship. That or a bloody big whale with a radio transponder! When you’ve finished your breakfast, Ewan will bring you through to the communications suite. You need to meet Ralf. He’s something of an ace hacker, but I expect you can find us a quicker way in.”

Jake nodded. “I’ll be right out.”

He wolfed down the rest of the food on the tray. The previous night’s soup had settled his stomach, but he still felt like he hadn’t eaten in a week. By the time he was done the painkillers were taking effect, and he was starting to feel human again.

• • •

The communications suite was one of the rooms he had passed through when he arrived. Men sat at floor-to-ceiling workstations that Jake thought looked surprisingly old fashioned for such a recent vessel. It was something about the solidity of the equipment. He had no doubt it was state of the art, but it wouldn’t have looked out of place on Ewan’s father’s Cold War ships.

Coote beckoned them over to the end station. A young man with a shaved head and tattoos up both arms was sitting in a swivel chair. He was the only crew member in the room not to be wearing a headset.

“This is Lieutenant Ralf Cormack, he’s one of our senior communications officers. Ralf can do things with a computer that even the makers wouldn’t think possible.”

Ralf held out a hand. Jake shook it, all the time thinking that the Lieutenant looked like anything but a hacker.

“We’re closing in on your ship. Coote tells me that you have the latest anti-piracy measures on board?”

“That’s correct,” Jake said. “I just hope Flynn doesn’t know that and hasn’t disabled them.”

“That’s what I’m here to find out, sir.”

“Jake, please. Call me Jake.”

“No problem. Does the system have a live feed, or record only, Jake?”

“Both, live and record. There’s also a facility for remote playback. It can be triggered externally. There’s a website interface, you just need a username and password. We can try mine, but I think it only works from an on-board terminal. The navy are supposed to have some kind of access, though.”

“We wouldn’t be issued with that. Fighting civilian piracy is a skimmer’s job, not something that us dolphins deal with.”

Jake looked enquiringly at Coote.

“Dolphins are submariners. Skimmers are surface ships,” he said. “You’ll have to excuse us, we have our own dialect down here.”

Jake was starting to sense how the crew really was like one family. Shared language, like code. Mutual respect, despite the banter he had heard around the place. He wondered if it had been like that for Lucya, when she was in the Russian navy, and whether she missed that camaraderie on the
Spirit of Arcadia
.

He brought his attention back to the task in hand, and reeled off some technical details to the communications officer, information about how to connect to the ship’s anti-piracy system remotely. Ralf bashed away on his keyboard at an impressive rate. The screen in front of him seemed even more incomprehensible to Jake than the submariners’ lingo. Tiny green text against a black background. But when Ralf hit “Enter” and sat back, the text was replaced by an image. It looked like a website was loading, but very, very slowly.

“We’re too far away to get decent bandwidth…good connection speed. It will improve as we close in,” Ralf explained.

“I think it’s about time we made ourselves less visible,” Coote said.
 

He picked up what looked like a phone handset from the console, punched a button and relayed orders. Before he’d even replaced the handset, red lights began to flash, a speaker crackled into life, and a voice called “Dive, dive!”

A klaxon sounded throughout the submarine, resonating around the confined space, blaring out its deafening message for ten full seconds before stopping as abruptly as it had started.

“You might want to hold onto something, Jake,” Coote said, smiling. “We’re about to dive.”

Jake grabbed onto the back of a chair. Ralf and Coote both burst out laughing.

“Sorry, old chap,” Coote said, grinning. “Couldn’t resist! We don’t see many newbies. At ease, sailor. This sub is as smooth as they come.”

Jake felt the submarine tilt very slightly towards the front as it pushed itself below the surface. A minute later, the ride changed entirely. Since he had spent months at sea it was quite an unusual sensation to no longer be rolling. The submarine slid through the water with such stability and precision it was as if they weren’t moving at all. To Jake, it felt for all the world as if he had stepped off onto dry land.

Someone called across from another console on the other side of the room.

“Sir, I believe we have established visual contact.”

“Come with me,” Coote said to Jake.

The two men crossed the confined space of the suite to find another officer operating a colour screen. There was an image in the middle. It was distant, magnified, and pixelated. But it was without question the
Spirit of Arcadia
.

“That’s her,” Jake said. “That’s my ship.”

Coote picked up another handset, pressed a button, and relayed more orders to an unseen helmsman.

“Maintain periscope depth and heading, reduce speed to 15 knots. We’re closing in on them.”

He hung up and turned back to Jake.

“We’re not deep, but they won’t see us coming. Staying at this depth means we can keep the photonics mast up and get a good visual approach. I daresay we’ll get a better signal for accessing the computers too.”

Jake nodded.

“About another thirty minutes and we should be close enough to have a look at getting into that system. In the meantime, maybe you’d like to get cleaned up a little? No offence, but you do look like you’ve been through the wars somewhat. Ewan can show you where the bathrooms are. We have some spare uniforms. I’m sure there’s something in your size.”

“That would be great, thank you.” Jake was glad of the diversion from the mix of emotions he’d felt upon seeing his ship again.

Sixty-Two

J
AKE
SPENT
TOO
long in the shower, but he didn’t care. The hot water was bliss. When he was done, he found a clean pair of navy trousers, a shirt, and a navy jersey all laid out for him. They fitted almost perfectly.

Ewan was waiting for him outside the bathroom, and escorted him back through the submarine. Jake couldn’t imagine spending weeks or months cooped up in such a confined space. The ceilings were low and, although the fixtures and fittings were modern and clean, the complete lack of any natural light was oppressive. The crew had tried to make the place homely. Photos adorned many surfaces, and drawings sent by children were common, too.

Every room they passed through looked to have more than one use. Food was stored everywhere, even under bunks. The efficient use of every tiny nook and cranny reminded Jake of caravanning holidays, and of his first trips on small pleasure boats back home.

All the submariners he encountered were polite. Many were keen to talk to him, to hear first-hand what he had seen outside, on the surface. Ewan did a good job of fielding these requests, hurrying his charge through bulkheads to the next room each time they were slowed down by inquisitive sailors. Jake didn’t mind answering their questions, but they didn’t really have the time for it.

He was struck by the ways the crew kept themselves occupied. There appeared to be at least two separate poker tournaments going on. Ewan explained that these could last for weeks. When they went through the junior ratings’ mess, he saw a group of young men huddled together, studying materials for a test that could see them promoted. They must have known that the exams would never happen now, but he could totally understand the desire to carry on as normal. Indeed, down here, under the water, cut off from the rest of the world, it was easier to just keep pretending everything was normal.

They called in on the medical berth, and Vardy changed the dressing on Jake’s hand. The rest had done it some good and it was starting to heal nicely.

When they eventually got back to the communications control room, Ralf called them straight over.

“We’re right behind them, less than a nautical mile between us. We’ve got excellent visual contact, and a high bandwidth connection to the computer system. I’ve had a go at cracking the security. It’s not bad, not great. With time, I can get in. But it would be worth trying your own password first.” He moved to one side, making his keyboard accessible.

Jake leaned over and tapped in his username, and then a password below. It was masked by dots as he typed it. He hit “Enter”, and the page refreshed in the web browser. A message written in red informed them that his account was not valid for remote access.

“Sorry,” Jake said. “I didn’t think it would work.”

“That’s okay. Actually, what I really needed was your username. I can get into the authentication database. It’s one-way encrypted, hashed, and salted, difficult to break without a lot of computational horsepower and time. We’ve got the power, but my understanding of the situation is that time may not be on our side.”

“I have no idea what any of that means,” Jake said, feeling dumb.

Ralf laughed. “No probs. It just means I can’t crack your password quickly. But I don’t need to, I just need to change your access level. I already hacked into the database, and now I know your username, I only have to do this.” He tapped a button and his screen switched from the web page back to the green text on black. He bashed away furiously at the keyboard, sending lines of text scrolling up the screen, then sat back, tapped “Enter”, and the screen flicked back to the web page.

“Try again,” he said.

Jake leaned over once more, and re-entered his username then his password. He hit “Enter” and this time, the page refreshed, and a message read “Processing…” A few seconds later the screen changed and a complex page came up. It was headed “
Spirit of Arcadia Anti-Piracy Security System Console
.”

“Shit!” Jake said. “It worked!”

“Of course. That’s what we do here. Okay, let’s see. We should probably get Coote back before we do anything else.”

“I’m on it,” Ewan said, and sprinted off out of the console room.

“Do you have any idea of the date and time we need to access?” Ralf asked.

“The date was May third. The time, I’m not sure. Let’s see…the election meeting was called for twenty-one hundred hours. It would have been nearly an hour later that they marched me up to the bridge. Flynn didn’t come up straight away, he had to get his shoulder patched up where he took a bullet. I would estimate twenty-two hundred hours, that would be a good starting point.”

“Okey dokey. Let’s see here.” Ralf navigated his way through various menus relating to archived security information. He found a page labelled “Bridge Feed”. There was a list of dates. He selected one. The page reloaded, and in the middle was a large video player. He looked up at Jake and grinned.

Coote stepped through the bulkhead door.
 

“Righto, lads, what have we got?”

“We’re about to find out. Ready when you are,” Ralf replied.

Coote took up position behind him. Ralf moved the playhead on the video window to 22:00 and hit the play button.

A circle of dots animated in the middle of the black video window, indicating that the file was buffering. Suddenly it filled with a colour image. The video couldn’t capture the whole of the bridge, but it showed enough. The camera must have been hidden somewhere above and in front of the captain’s seat, looking back over the room. Visible in the background was a chair, and Jake was tied to it. Flynn’s henchmen milled around close by. The sound quality wasn’t great, and they were talking in hushed voices. It was impossible to make out what they were saying.

“He’ll appear any minute,” Jake said without taking his eyes from the screen. “The guys guarding me were all together in a group like that just before he arrived.”

The three men continued to watch the footage. Sure enough, three minutes later they saw the door open and Flynn stride in.

“Mr Noah, congratulations.” His voice could clearly be heard from the console’s little speaker.

“That him?” Coote enquired.

“That’s him,” Jake confirmed.

They watched for ten minutes as the video confirmed everything that Jake had told Coote about Flynn and his plan.

Sixty-Three

H
ALF
AN
HOUR
later, Jake, Coote, Ralf, and two dozen submariners including Eric and Ewan were assembled in the junior ratings’ mess. The video of Flynn and Jake on the bridge had just been screened to all the men present. Ralf tapped at the touchscreen of a small tablet he was holding, and the big screen on the wall flickered, then settled.

“This is the live feed from the bridge,” he said.

“Jake, can you give us a quick who’s who? For the benefit of these men?” Coote looked around the room.

Jake stood up and walked to the screen.

“This man sitting in the captain’s chair is Flynn, as you just saw. He’s in charge, no doubt about that. He took a bullet to his shoulder, but I don’t think it affected his mobility in any way. This man here on the helm, that’s Pedro. The man watching him, the one with the gun, is called Zhang. He’s dangerous. I watched him kill a man, one of their own. It certainly looks like Pedro is acting under duress. He’s a good man, I don’t think he’s working with them by choice. These other men, I don’t know their names but they are all working with Flynn. They’re some of the disciples you heard him talk about.”

“He said there were twelve disciples in all,” Eric said. “With Zhang, I see five on the bridge. Where do you think the others are?”