Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (23 page)

‘Hi, Ivan, Harriet,' Richard said easily. ‘Nice to have you on board. I'm sorry to say Rikki Sato's not likely to be well enough to talk to you. Can you do without him?'

‘If I have to.' Harry shrugged philosophically. ‘It'll just take longer to sort this stuff out and make sure I've broken in to everywhere I want to. Then, I believe, with luck, I can take full control of most of the computer systems on board …' She didn't look at either of them as she talked, her fingers too busy with circuit boards and brightly coloured wires.

‘What's all that stuff?' Richard just had to ask.

‘Back-ups and spares,' she answered. ‘Mirrors the main system up on the bridge. MC4510-C23 marine computer system with the MD 220 display integrated with the MPC-220W-C23 marine panel …'

‘You had to ask,' Ivan said wearily. ‘Harry's only just finished explaining it all to me.'

‘Good,' said Richard brutally. ‘You can talk me through it all later, then. In the meantime, Angela says you brought my laptop aboard.'

‘I did. Seemed like a good idea …' Ivan began defensively.

‘It was,' interrupted Richard. ‘There's stuff on there I really need and couldn't access on my Galaxy before I lost it.'

‘You lost your Galaxy? That's tough.'

‘That's not the half of it. But we don't have time to go through all my adventures now. I want you to access Rikki Sato's personnel file for me. I want to know about Yukio. His wife's name is Seiko.'

‘Like the watch,' said the Pitman.

Richard looked down at his wrist. ‘Let's not talk about watches,' he said.

‘Got her,' said Ivan suddenly. ‘Yukio. She's Sato's daughter. Born, let's see, twenty-three years ago. Attended Seitoko Elementary School. Top of her class in everything. Went to Kobetokiwa Girls' High. Top of her class again. Prizes galore. Special commendation from the principal. Speaks several languages pretty fluently, including Mandarin, English, French, Spanish and Italian. Graduated from Kobe University, Rokkodai Campus Number One with First Class Honours in Applied Economics. That was eighteen months ago. She went back into the graduate school just over a year ago to start her first postgrad degree. Invited back by the faculty, apparently. Joined the European Erasmus Mundus programme. Special recommendation once again. Currently halfway through her Master of Applied Economics course …'

‘At Rokkodai?' asked Richard. ‘Her father works at Kobe. The family lives there.'

‘No. The Erasmus Mundus programme has allowed her to do an exchange year. She's partway through it, according to this.'

‘If she's not in Kobe at the Rokkodai campus, then where is she?'

‘She's in Cosenza, Italy,' answered Ivan. ‘At the University of Calabria.'

W
hen Dom DiVito caught up with him a little while later, Richard was alone in the makeshift mess, using a box labelled Air Conditioning as a seat and a slightly larger one as a table. He was consuming something that had been called all-day breakfast on the tin. Though where it had come from God alone knew. The brightly printed ‘contents' section boasted that it consisted of baked beans, button mushrooms, sausages, bacon slices and pork bites filled with scrambled egg. It tasted of nothing in particular, and was more slimy than chewy. The only strong flavour seemed to be coming from the plastic plate and fork he was using. And that was of fish. But Richard didn't care. The food was steaming hot, filling, and of all the assorted tins and packets piled between the microwave and the kettle, it was one of the few whose label was in English and which did not consist largely of seafood with rice or noodles.

In any case, Richard could have been eating anything between sirloin steak and sewage and he would hardly have noticed, for his mind was simply not focused on the here and now. It was hardly, in fact, on board at all. Such was the depth of his brown study that he noticed nothing of the food, of Dom's hurried entrance and first question, or of the new, uneasy motion of the ship.

‘WHERE. DID. YOU. GET. TO?' repeated Dom suspiciously, slowly and loudly – as though speaking to a deaf man.

‘What? Oh. Hi, Dom. After I tested the plumbing, I came up here. Got a bit lost on the way, but ended up following my nose.' Richard wrinkled the organ in question and Dom looked around as though suddenly becoming aware of the strong briny stench which Richard's all-day breakfast stood no chance of overcoming. Not, frankly, that it actually smelt any better.

Dom nodded once, clearly unconvinced, and Richard kept his vague but innocent expression in place as he finished his meal in two hasty forkfuls and plonked his plate in a bowl full of lukewarm water, scum and fish bits. ‘Coffee?' he asked, reaching for the kettle and shaking it to establish that it was half full. As he did so, the deck stirred again and he rode the movement with all the ease that came from his years at sea. ‘Tea? No milk or sugar, I'm afraid.'

‘No time,' answered Dom. ‘You're wanted back up on the bridge. The lieutenant started calling for you some time ago.'

Richard put down the kettle and followed. ‘Speaking of which, does our beloved leader have a name, or shall I just call him
Leutnant
for the duration?' he demanded as the pair of them strode out into the corridor. He used the German for lieutenant on purpose. ‘Or, considering he's Afrikaans,
Kapitanleutnant
, perhaps. What do you think? And, now that we're asking questions …'

Dom threw him a questioning look over his shoulder, as though he was wondering how far Richard was going to push his schoolboy confrontation. Whether, perhaps, he was planning on playing this game with the lieutenant himself. ‘Are you going to push him like that? Needle him all the time? I mean, it's getting nowhere with me. With him it might get you a broken nose …'

‘I'm considering it, though. He doesn't seem exhausted or seasick. The next best thing is to make him angry. Angry people don't think straight.'

‘That why you haven't come after me for hitting you in the head?'

‘Could be. Anyway, my nose has been broken before and I've survived. Or it could be that I have a cunning plan and I'm just biding my time. You never can tell.'

‘I'll be able to tell soon enough if you start winding up the lieutenant,' answered Dom.

‘Maybe you will and maybe you won't,' Richard needled cheerfully. ‘What I may or may not have planned is for me to know and for you to find out.'

Dom opened his mouth, about to ask a question in turn. But then he registered how Richard had turned the tables on him and closed it again. ‘For us to know, and for you to find out,' was all he said in the end.

Richard soon found out. Or thought he did. ‘What can I do for you, Lieutenant?' he asked, as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth the moment that Dom led him on to the bridge. He used the English form of lieutenant, as they do in the South African Navy. ‘I notice you seem to be having a little difficulty keeping the hull stern-on to the weather. Is that what you want to see me about so urgently?'

‘Very smart!' snarled Macavity. ‘How did you know?'

‘Let's just say I felt it in my bones. Now, what can I do for you?'

‘For me? Nothing,' answered Macavity. ‘But you can help the ship out. Help those on board who are still alive, especially those who have started puking their guts up once again. And see about getting back on course and schedule into the bargain.' The flat, South African tones were raised almost to a shout. But this time the noise they were riding over did not come entirely from the storm. The bridge was bustling with teams of men – led, Richard noted, by the engineers he had brought aboard – purloined from the engine control room, clearly. Two teams of them, under close guard by Macavity's men. The most obvious difference between them being that one set had all sorts of tools while the others had all sorts of weapons. Though not quite as many, Richard observed happily, as the Pitman.

But, Richard realized at once, the fact that the engineers were here meant that Macavity and his men had managed to restore a good deal more of the basic control system, if nothing much of the higher systems as yet. Clearly, the engineers could only be spared for bridge maintenance if the engine and rudder-control computer system could be relied upon to transmit the helmsman's orders on the telegraph directly to the engines and the steering gear. So the systems were coming back online, even without Rikki Sato's help, and despite whatever Harry was up to in secret down below. One team led by an engineer was clearing up the broken glass. Another was working on replacing it. And, with the typhoon still squarely astern, Richard reckoned, they should not be having too much trouble positioning the big squares of glass in the bridge's wind shadow. But they were. Those on the starboard especially, caught by sudden, unexpected side drafts. And the way the ship had been riding since he left Angela checking her armaments, Harry working on her computers and Ivan searching through the personnel files looking for other unexpected Italian connections, also alerted him to changes in the conditions through which
Sayonara
was sailing. ‘You got the weather predictor up yet?' he asked.

‘Partially,' answered Macavity guardedly. ‘The GPS is still offline.'

Richard walked across to the digital display and glanced down at its blank screen. Then he looked out at the sea and the sky, his eyes narrow and his expression thoughtful. Everything confirmed what he had been calculating deep in his subconscious since he first felt the new movement of the hull at the start of his all-day breakfast. ‘As I'm sure you remember from your meteorological training, Lieutenant, a northern hemisphere depression is basically a whirlpool of winds and water running in a circle anti-clockwise round the eye,' said Richard quietly, but with such authority that even Macavity stood and listened. All around him the noise of the work stilled as even the engineers waited to hear his explanation of what he had saved them from already – and what he needed to do next. Soon the only sound was the wind through the half-fixed clearview. ‘They all work in roughly the same way. The eye is the low-pressure centre sucking air up into the troposphere and the Coriolis effect makes the winds rushing in to replace it spin, while the pressure gradient pulls warm, wet water vapour up into high, cold air and causes the precipitation. And the only real variable – as in our case – is that the tighter the whirlpool, the lower the pressure at the centre, the steeper the pressure gradient, the stronger the winds, the more powerful the rain and storms and the higher the seas.'

Richard walked to the gaping clearview and peered out into the drizzling darkness above the watery glow of the deck lights. ‘The way
Sayonara
was programmed meant that we sailed south straight into the northern edge of a very tight depression – a typhoon, in fact – as it in turn ran north to meet us. This meant that the wind and the seas came in from our port quarter. Strongly enough to threaten the ship, even before the bridge windows came in and the electrics all went down. So we turned and ran west with the weather behind us, best to keep out of the wind and keep on top of the waves – in every sense. Now we've come far enough west to be running out of the leading edge at last, so the airflow is swinging round again. And, I suspect, the typhoon itself may have turned quite sharply east. Meanwhile, the eyewall of thunderstorms that nearly swamped us has probably choked off the central eye and closed the whole system down. It happens sometimes. In any case, our new position relative to the depression means we have winds swinging round to the north, and fairly large swells beginning to run in from the west – moderating, thank God.'

Richard turned to Macavity and his helmsman. ‘If you continue to keep the wind to your back, you will slowly circle southwards and, although things will get a little uncomfortable again as we start taking sea coming in from starboard, they won't be big enough to roll us over. And we should be back on course – perhaps even on schedule – within twelve hours or so. I can't give you our precise course or headings until the electronic navigation chart system comes back up. Until then, you'll just have to do it by feel.'

‘No!' snapped Macavity. ‘
You'll
do it by feel. And
I'll
feel much happier with you at the helm, Captain. At the very least, I'll have a fair idea of where you are and what you're up to!'

‘Better than the brig, or wherever it was you had me locked up,' allowed Richard. ‘But, as someone's already remarked, I look like shit because I'm exhausted and strung out. I'm feeling a bit better since I've had something hot to eat, but you'll need to relieve me at some stage. Someone else will need to take over the watch and let me get some rest.' He moved the helmsman away from the wheel and took it over. ‘In the meantime, unless you want me asleep at the wheel, I need coffee. Jamaican Blue Mountain High Roast Arabica for preference, but anything hot, black and full of caffeine will do.'

Macavity gave a curt nod and one of the men guarding the engineers fixing the windows turned smartly and doubled down the companionway. The South African stood for a moment, looking calculatingly at Richard as he eased himself into a comfortable position towering over the helm, resting his right hand on the engine room telegraph, adjusting the levers slightly and feeling the engines' response. He remained there until after the coffee arrived, and even then he lingered suspiciously as Richard began to ease
Sayonara
's head southwards until the wind stopped thundering across the window frames and the hull, which had been pitching like a see-saw, began to roll like a cradle.

Richard looked up at the ship's chronometer, the only piece of equipment which had been unaffected by the flooding of the bridge. ‘Oh six hundred ship's time,' he said. ‘Captain Mariner takes the wheel halfway through the morning watch. State of sea westerly, five on the Beaufort Scale but moderating. State of wind northerly, gale force but also moderating. Sky one hundred per cent occluded. Ship's heading just south of due west, swinging towards south-west and planning to be due south by the end of the watch. It should almost be dawn, but dawn's a long way off.' He paused, then added, as though the thought had just occurred to him: ‘We're due at the NIPEX facility at oh six hundred hours tomorrow. But that's Japanese time. We'll be four hours adrift of that. So we don't have exactly twenty-four hours left – we have precisely twenty-eight.'