Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (19 page)

BOOK: Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure
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But he could only be certain of what was missing if he checked the deck beside his feet. And that in turn led him to explore the room he was being held in. The darkness was strangely disorientating and it took him much longer than he would ever have imagined to establish that he was in a small, square, four-sided space whose height was taller than he could reach either standing or jumping. Four increasingly confident and forceful jumps into the air with his hands above his head established that the deck head was far above him – something confirmed by the slightly cavernous echoes as he landed. Four careful paces forward, arms out, fingers spread, brought him to a wall. The fingers discovered that the wall was featureless in all the areas that they explored. It was cool but gently throbbing to the power of the engines. When Richard sniffed his fingertips, they smelt of metal and paint. He was not surprised. But he decided he was more likely to be in the engineering areas where he had been captured rather than up in the bridge. He wasn't sure whether the strange, half-familiar chemical smell made engineering more or less likely. So he put that on the back-burner for the moment.

Being right-handed, Richard moved right and after six sideways steps the fingers discovered a corner, which he checked with his elbow, then his shoulder and knee. Richard turned right and after three sideways paces the fingers discovered on the wall a vertical seam which he assumed to be the frame of a door. The door was one and a half paces wide. He could not reach the top of it but the bottom stood on a lintel a couple of hands-breadths above the deck. Even before he found the big lever handles, he knew this was a bulkhead door, therefore. It would be secured from the outside. It would be metal – probably steel. There was no way through it unless someone opened it first. Three paces to the right of the door there was another wall. He followed that to the corner he assumed must be at the inner end of his prison cell.

Six sideways steps led Richard across the back wall but demonstrated a flaw in his method of proceeding. Made increasingly confident by the predictable smoothness beneath his fingers, he moved sideways more briskly – until, hands still spread on smooth paint-covered metal, he barked his right shin painfully on something that seemed to be sticking out of the wall just below knee-height. He crouched, cursing silently, hoping that the pain in his leg would distract him from the pain in his head, and discovered that there was a metal-sided chemical latrine in the rear corner of his cell, which explained the half-familiar smell. And the fact of its existence brought to the forefront of all his physical sensations the overpowering need to use it. He just had the good sense to confirm that whoever had placed the latrine here had also supplied toilet paper to go with it.

As Richard sat there with the walls that met in a corner behind him pressed against his back and shoulders, his mind cleared by the immediacy of physical relief, he noticed the next thing that seemed important to him. During the time he had been focused on exploring his invisible environment, the way the ship was moving had changed. That change was emphasized now not only by the disposition of the deck beneath his feet but by the constant need he felt to adjust the position of his torso because of the way the walls were moving. If he listened carefully, he realized, he could hear the gentle slopping of the restless contents of the latrine to which he had just added. And, if he closed his eyes and really concentrated, he realized he could hear the vastly larger liquid body of the Pacific Ocean moving equally restlessly just outside
Sayonara
's hull.

Frowning with increasingly disturbing thoughts, Richard closed the lid of the latrine and secured it as firmly as he could. He then followed the wall down to the corner by the door and sat, his back in the angle of the walls, his legs spread on the deck and his hands spread flat beside his hips. He closed his eyes once more and listened. In this position, it was the throbbing of the engines that dominated. Every now and then he thought he could hear footsteps and voices. But the sounds were so faint and dream-like that he could not be certain he was not imagining them. His mind drifted into speculation as to what was actually going on here – extrapolating the things he was certain of, adding in the things he suspected, seeking a wider pattern so that he could begin to formulate a plan of action; a plan to be implemented when he got out of here. And, oddly enough, perhaps, he never doubted that he would get out of here.

After some time, Richard pulled himself to his feet and moved to the inner corner of the cell, opposite the latrine. Here the throbbing of the engines was slightly fainter – though still strong enough to make all the surfaces around him vibrate in sympathy. The sound of the increasingly restless ocean was louder and, he now realized, the sounds of wind and spray. As logic dictated, therefore, the wall with the door was facing midships while the wall with the latrine and the corner he was sitting in now was closest to the outer wall of the ship's hull, probably a deck or two below the waterline. But the waterline was becoming increasingly restless. He nodded without thinking and bashed his tender skull against the wall.
Sayonara
was heading into a storm.

At first this fact did not seem to be particularly important. Storms were not uncommon in the waters the great ship was programmed to cross. She would be able to handle anything up to a strong typhoon. And if anything more severe than that were predicted, the vessel was programmed to receive early warnings from the FORMOSAT-7 weather satellites in constant polar orbit. A typhoon prediction from the weather satellite should automatically cause an alert at the NIPEX centre where it would be decided whether to guide the ship to temporary safety remotely or whether to send a crew out to her. But that was the system under normal circumstances; circumstances that no longer remained. Even if the guys at NIPEX knew that a storm was coming, they had no way of alerting the ship's systems if communications were blocked by that thing up by the bridge. No way of moving the ship to safety by remote control. No way, now he thought of it, of getting anyone out here and aboard her, unless Macavity and co. were willing to allow it. However, there was no reason to think that
Sayonara
was unlucky enough to be heading into anything too dangerous at this point in time. He returned to his brown study, trying to work out what Macavity and whoever had sent him aboard was really up to – and how to frustrate their plans.

But after a while longer, Richard found that the increasingly acute sensations his body was experiencing pulled his mind back into the present. The conditions through which the vessel was sailing were coming to him almost subliminally from the deck through the nerves of his palms, fingertips, calves and buttocks; from the walls by his back, shoulders, spine and cranium; from the whole hull's disposition and movement through the six degrees of freedom was transmitted to the delicate mechanisms of his inner ear. The semi-circular canals of the vestibular system inside his skull, just above the hinges of his jaw, were capable of the most minute discrimination. Normally this system served to keep Richard's massive body balanced. Now, as he rested his head gingerly into the corner of the wall behind him, they transmitted not his own movements but those of the ship as she began with increasing liveliness to heave, sway and surge back and forth, pitch, yaw and roll up and down.

Long before the first hesitation in forward movement – speaking to Richard of
Sayonara
's bows hitting an incoming roller like a car colliding with a house and smacking his head against the wall once more – he had realized that his earlier, almost careless, speculation had been correct: Macavity's interference with the computer systems meant that any warnings sent out by the weather satellite had not come aboard after all. Even if NIPEX had been alerted, the ship was almost certainly proceeding as programmed – into the heart of a severe typhoon. And he'd realized that he was likely to be the only man on board with the slightest idea what to do about it. Once he was certain of all this, all he had to do was to sit and wait for the big steel bulkhead door to open and for someone to get him up on to the bridge before
Sayonara
sank into the abyss, taking all hands on board down with her.

35 Hours to Impact

A
lerted by the sound of the handles turning, Richard was standing ready, eyes half-closed, when the door opened and the lights came on. The instant these things happened,
Sayonara
lurched again, hard enough to make even Richard stagger, then she tossed her head up, heaving and hesitating before surging forward and pitching almost sideways. The way she yawed and rolled allowed Richard to begin the conversation even before he was certain he was talking to Macavity. ‘You have big seas coming in on the port forward quarter,' he said, spreading his legs and standing fore-square. ‘From the
ten o'clock
position in military parlance. This means, unless you have changed course since you put me in here, you are sailing southwards along the Great Circle route as programmed into the leading edge of a large tropical depression which is in turn heading north. Depending on the composition of the depression and the eyewalls around it, you can expect stronger winds and much rougher seas from that quarter, swinging round to broadside-on from the port side until we get to the central eye. Then the weather will reverse and probably intensify even further. Not that we're likely to still be afloat by then if this is anything like a serious storm, because even a ship this size will roll over or break up under those conditions. I don't know how much worse you're expecting things to become,' he continued after a heartbeat, ‘but unless someone starts employing some elementary ship-handling immediately, we're going to find ourselves swimming.'

‘
Not waving but drowning
, eh?' quipped a familiar voice with a new, sneering tone.

Richard opened his eyes fully. Dom DiVito was standing at Macavity's shoulder, his face wearing a lop-sided grin. Richard's head twinged. ‘Hi, Dom,' he said, coolly, still uncertain of the best way to deal with this turncoat employee of one of his oldest and best friends. ‘I'll talk to you later.' Then he switched his gaze to meet Macavity's. ‘You won't get a chance to wave. You'll all go down so fast.' As though in support of his words,
Sayonara
gave another lumpy heave, swaying, pitching and rolling all at once. Richard staggered again.

‘Come,' said Macavity in his flat Dutch/Afrikaans-accented English. He gestured with a gun that Richard recognized. It looked very much like his own nine-millimetre Glock. He wondered briefly whether his watch and his Galaxy were close at hand as well. And, come to that, his men. Then he crossed the little room and stepped over the raised lintel into the main engine area. Macavity's men crowded round him and he immediately smelt the stomach-turning bitterness of vomit. At least some of the pirates were seasick, then.
Good. Serves them right
. On a less childish note, he thought,
That will make them less efficient. Maybe make them lower their guard. Give me an edge.
He looked around the engine area. There was no sign of anyone except Macavity's men and Dom.

Macavity took the lead and ran them forward out of engineering into the lower decks beneath the stubby bridge house until they reached the lateral corridor bisected by the stairwell. Then, staggering every time
Sayonara
heaved over a wave punching in on her left shoulder, he ran them up the companionway. The little squad moved with such speed and confidence that Richard had realized before they were two decks up – coming level with the weather deck itself – that his worst fears must be true: Macavity and his men must now be in total command. He paused for a moment, his mind racing. But his thoughts were immediately overwhelmed by another howling assault from the gale outside, strong enough to make the air in the companionway stir despite the fact that the bridge-house doors and windows all seemed to be tightly secured. Macavity and his men paused when Richard did, stopping dead in their tracks by the threatening roar of the storm. Richard looked at Dom, but for once neither of them had a clever quote or quip to offer. There was a serpentine hiss leading to a watery explosion of sound as a big wave washed across the weather deck outside and broke against the door at the end of the passage like surf on a reef. Richard felt the whole hull shudder and try to swing to starboard under the weight of the pounding sea. The throbbing of the engines reached almost cardiac intensity for an instant and the engineering sections below seemed filled with groans and whines as the automatic steering system fought to bring the ship back on to her pre-programmed course. A course that was likely to kill her unless the motors gave out or the computers were overridden.

If this weather continued or worsened, then it really didn't matter who controlled the bridge, Richard decided, turning to pound upwards once more. Just as long as they were willing to allow the computer engineers to disable the programmes – if such a thing was possible – and give him control of the vessel before it was too late. And so it proved. For as the squad ran him on to the command bridge four decks further up, Richard saw masked guards at the doors and at the corners of the wide, cold command space. A glance told him that this had been the situation for some time. There was no evidence of Aleks and his men. Presumably they were somewhere down in the dark depths of the engine room too, listening to the labouring engines spinning the thrashing turbines and the protesting servos swinging the battered rudders, puking and praying in equal measure. Rikki Sato and some of his men were working on the computers under the guns of the pirates exactly as they had done under the command of the Risk Incorporated men. And they needed to work fast, by the looks of things. Unless they wrested control back off the recalcitrant computer programme soon it would be too late – if it wasn't too late already. But, very worryingly indeed, they had been trying non-stop for twelve solid hours since they got on to the bridge here, thought Richard, frowning up at the ship's chronometer. Trying off and on for thirty-five hours since they came aboard, with absolutely no success.

BOOK: Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure
10.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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