Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (18 page)

Which was just as well, thought Robin: there would be at least nine more executives joining her here within the hour. And they, like her, would bring a range of laptops, tablets and smartphone devices. This morning she was there first, in spite of the fact that she had slept for little more than six hours, stepping out of the humidity still lingering after an almost tropical night into the air-conditioned, fragrant freshness of the place just after the doors opened. Within five minutes she sat solitarily sipping Earl Grey with lemon and thanking God that she had over half an hour to plan how she wanted the meeting to go.

The small board of Heritage Mariner Shipping consisted of personnel director Rupert Bligh, ex-Royal Navy, whose grandparents emigrated from Grenada; financial director, Stanford-trained Hong Kong Chinese Anthony Ho and Crewfinders director Audrey Gunnel. Then there was Richard's back-up, Will Cochrane, director of shipping, as often as not accompanied by his number two, captain Morgan Hand – his ‘
right-
hand
man
', according to the company in-joke, which turned not only upon Morgan's surname but the fact that the captain, like Robin, was one of the most senior female officers to command the Heritage Mariner ships. LSE and SOAS-trained company secretary Jada Newton completed the list of board members. Alex Garner, Robin's PA, would also be there to record the minutes, and was due any second now with his laptop and printer to produce the order of business – when she had finally settled on precisely what it was going to be. This morning, the board would be augmented by company solicitor Andrew Atherton Balfour, intelligence man Pat Toomey and Lloyd's representative Gerry Overbury, for they all had direct input to make.

While she waited, Robin slipped out her tablet and scrolled through her online news apps as she began to assess her priorities and consolidate her plans, but found herself distracted when her email icon lit up with an incoming message. The London
Daily Telegraph
sent her its front page packed with top stories every day at seven a.m. and five p.m. She rarely, if ever, saw the seven a.m. edition arrive, for she was by no means a morning person. Frowning, she opened the message and the familiar masthead came up. She swiftly scrolled down the page, pausing only to smile at today's wryly cutting cartoon. There was a follow-up in the news section to yesterday's story about Tristan's mysterious drowning, which at first glance offered nothing new. The financial section speculated about his assets and commitments, promising a list of those involved in his Lloyd's syndicate, whose names Robin already knew. Their names and a hell of a lot more. The social section speculated about his marriage. There might be something there, Robin thought; she'd check later.

Robin did not click on any of these. Instead, she found herself distracted by the most-viewed videos section. Here there was a click-through entitled: CLIMATE:
The Storm of the Century?
With a note promising
video footage from the North Pacific showing the effect of Tropical Cyclone FUJIN on the seas east of Japan
. Robin clicked on the link and her screen filled with a clip from a news report. At the top of the picture was the logo TV Japan 24/7. Yesterday's date stood beside it. The bows of what seemed to be a deep-sea fishing vessel plunged into a wall of white water. It was a marvel that the Japanese fishing boat climbed up it and broke through the foaming crest. The picture shook as the cameraman staggered. The clearview, through which the pictures were shot, went white with spray. It seemed almost miraculous that the water did not smash through the glass and flood the bridge. Instead, the spray washed downwards to reveal wall after wall of white-topped water. The vessel was running with her stern to the storm, trying to sail just a little faster than the huge swells which surrounded her. It was the safest way to proceed in seas as dangerous as these. The caption scrolling across the bottom of the screen read:
Fishing vessel
Etsu Maru
runs through the outskirts of typhoon Fujin.

‘Penny for them?' growled a familiar voice. Robin glanced up and met the bright blue gaze of her PA. Once again, she was struck by how much Alex resembled the thrusting, youthful Richard Mariner she had first fallen in love with. Physically, at any rate, but he lacked Richard's simple commanding power. The only thing the two men shared, apart from physical similarities and a warm regard for Robin herself, seemed to be an excruciating sense of humour. And, to be fair, she could certainly do with a laugh at the moment. But when she simply, wordlessly turned the tablet round and let Alex see a re-run of the Japanese footage by way of an answer to his greeting, the last of the humour drained out of the young man's angular face. ‘That looks very nasty indeed,' he observed. ‘Speaking as an inveterate landlubber, that is. Or should that be “
invertebrate
”? Spineless, certainly. You know I get seasick just looking at a muddy rugger pitch if the puddles are big enough.'

‘Be that as it may,' she said, ‘it's what Richard seems to be heading into the middle of. Or rather, it's heading straight for him. Unless,' she glanced at her watch with a worried frown, ‘he's already in the middle of it.'

Alex immediately changed the subject and got down to business, pulling his laptop and collapsible printer out of the carry-case and getting ready to process and reproduce. A huge mug of cappuccino arrived at his elbow as he settled to work. ‘Now, what do you want me to put on this morning's agenda?'

‘Insurance scams, organized crime, murder, mayhem …' she answered.

‘Right,' he said. ‘Business as usual. Where d'you want to start?'

‘With your breakfast,' she replied, coming over all motherly. ‘Full English?'

Pat Toomey was the next arrival and both Robin and Alex watched with a mixture of awe and envy as he settled into the Full Irish, which seemed to be the Full English with extra fried potato bread and pancakes, wheaten toast, soda bread and lashings of butter and marmalade. Pat was still partway through this when the others turned up and, like Robin, settled for a start to the day that would do less for waistlines and more for cardiovascular health.

The most pressing order of business was
Sayonara
. Gerry and Pat brought the others up to speed about the current situation. Pat added his suspicions about the links between Diusberg Reinsurance of Vancouver and the 'Ndrangheta. ‘The long and short of the matter,' concluded Andrew Atherton Balfour, ‘is that
Sayonara
is sailing effectively uninsured. The Duisberg Insurance Company seems to be less than legitimate so we can't rely on them paying out. So is her cargo. The paperwork is all in place and everything seems to be above board. But it is clear that if anything should happen to her, Heritage Mariner and Greenbaum International would be locked into years of litigation before one penny could be claimed.'

‘If anything significant could in fact be claimed,' added Gerry Overbury. ‘Because we at Lloyd's are planning to close Duisberg down and put most of its employees in jail. With the help of The Combined Special Enforcement Unit of British Columbia; the Mounties' anti-organized crime people.'

‘In the meantime, what do you suggest?' asked Anthony Ho, the finance director. ‘We can't risk
Sayonara
proceeding uninsured. What can we do?'

‘I suggest,' said Gerry, leaning forward in turn to stare the stony-faced Hong Kong accountant down, ‘and I've been thinking this through quite carefully – I suggest that you take out another, entirely legitimate insurance with a copper-bottomed, one hundred per cent reliable syndicate …'

‘What's that going to
cost
?' demanded Anthony, throwing himself back in his chair so forcefully that his salmon sushi skittered across the table, slopping soy sauce.

‘In the short-term, certainly, I can guarantee preferential rates. Under the circumstances, I can promise that,' answered Gerry and Pat nodded.

Robin's tablet lit up as a Skype message came in. The screen which had made Alex almost seasick earlier was suddenly filled with a face familiar to Robin if not to the others. ‘Robin,' said Anastasia Asov. ‘Robin, are you there?'

Robin picked up the tablet without thinking. ‘Yes, Anastasia. What is it?'

‘I think you'd better get out here as fast as you can, Robin. The Japanese media are reporting that
Sayonara
's vanished. She went into the cyclone Fujin late yesterday and even the automatic ship-tracking systems in contact with the black box seem to have lost all sight of her.'

Robin was on the Austrian Airlines flight OS452 out of Heathrow just under two hours later. She had her laptop with her and the Airbus A320 was set for wifi so she was able to keep on top of what the board discussed and then decided via Alex's Skypes and emails. It all seemed academic to her now, for if
Sayonara
had been swallowed by the storm they were too late to change anything in any case. But then, as she was passing through Vienna airport, hurrying purposefully from European Arrivals to International Departures as she found herself fighting the almost overwhelming temptation of apple strudel piled high in Strock bakery, her cellphone rang. In spite of the fact that she was already late for the connecting flight that would get her to Naruto just after seven-thirty a.m. tomorrow – twenty-two-and-a-half hours before
Sayonara
was due to dock at the NIPEX facility, she stopped and pulled the slim machine out
.

It was a text from Indira, who was back in position at her computer in the huge room at the top of Heritage House, waiting for a zip file update as she and her team had been for the sixty-eight silent hours of the crisis so far. The text simply said:
New zip from
Sayonara
. 12.00 noon BST. No info re: position, speed, disposition or situation. Automatic distress call, repeated three times, then all silent again.

T
hey came for Richard a little after ten p.m. ship's time and by then it was already too late. He had spent some of the intervening hours in dazed sleep, having nightmares about the men he had led aboard and what was happening to them. Some others were in partial wakefulness, cursing Dom DiVito and probing the tender back of his skull where there was a large matted lump. But he had also a good number of them in full wakefulness, during which he had disregarded his discomfort and explored his surroundings and his situation with increasing insight and success. He might be unable to escape and uncertain as to the fate of his team – trusty and turncoats alike – but he could prepare to take action when the chance arose.

When he came to, clear-headed, some uncounted time after Dom laid him out, he sat up, heart racing and eyes wide. He had a dream-like half-memory of feeling the back of his head in brief moments of painful wakefulness and he did so again without thinking. Thus he discovered that he was not tied up or taped. The lump on his skull was large, tender and crusted with dry blood. He had no idea how long it took for blood to dry, but he assumed he had been out of things for several hours. He brought his left wrist in front of his eyes to check the time and two other facts he had known but not yet really registered became obvious: he was in utter darkness and his Rolex had gone; where the luminous face should have revealed the time, there was nothing. Where there should have been a forearm, there was blackness so absolute it seemed to have been painted on the backs of his eyes. His right hand closed round the wrist. Bare flesh. For the first time in how many years?

Richard was not a man who panicked easily. He wasted no time in worry or recrimination, therefore. At this stage he didn't regret the loss of his watch any more than the loss of contact with Aleks and the others. Nor did it occur to him that Dom's blow had somehow caused him to go blind. He put the most positive interpretation on things that he could – he would get his Rolex back, he was not blind and he would escape from this lightless prison. If his men were captive, he would release them. He accepted the position in which he found himself and began to try to work out how to escape from it. His first order of business was to establish what exactly
was
the position in which he found himself. He was immediately in a quandary. Should he search himself to discover what else was missing? Should he explore his surroundings to determine how – and perhaps where – he was being imprisoned? Either course of action might furnish the first chance to start planning his escape. Both alternatives seemed to require that he stand up and so he pulled himself to his feet and stood, swaying a little at the heart of an immense darkness. But the act of coming erect triggered another series of impressions which formed distracting multitudes of thought. Because he could not see, he found himself relying on his hearing and his sense of smell. One deep breath gave him an array of odours which he catalogued almost subconsciously as he thought of other things. Metal, paint, a faint but piercing chemical stench.

But what he could smell abruptly seemed much less important than what he could hear. And he realized immediately that the loudest noise in the soundscape surrounding him was the rhythmic pounding of the engines. He frowned. He had spent much of his adult life on board vessels like this one, powered either by diesel motors or by steam engines. The vast majority of those vessels had proceeded for almost their entire voyage at eighteen knots. He knew the rhythm as well as he knew his own heartbeat. And
Sayonara
's engines were running too fast. Just a shade. So little that he hadn't noticed until now. But now that he had, he frowned as his mind whirled off into new areas of speculation and suspicion.

As Richard began to assess the implications of his suspicions, he began to sort through his clothes to see what had joined his Rolex in the possession of his captors. The Galaxy was gone, of course. His pockets were empty, but he was still wearing everything he had been when he crawled into the ducting, except for the protective vest. His laces still secured his boots so, whatever else they thought he might be, they didn't consider him a suicide risk. And, he suspected, they could be confident enough that he wouldn't be able to use the laces to garrotte anyone either. He had taken it for granted that his communications equipment would be gone. And he had also taken it for granted that his guns would also be gone. Laces were one thing. Carbines and nine-millimetre Glocks were something else entirely.