Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (24 page)

R
ichard was as good as his word. By the time the watch ended
Sayonara
was heading a few degrees west of south with the wind behind her pushing her along through the moderating westerly seas. The watch ended, but no one appeared to relieve the lonely watch-keeper. He hadn't actually expected anyone to turn up, so he wasn't really surprised. In the nearest time zone – Japanese Standard Time – it was still four a.m. and the night remained overcast and utterly dark, although the chronometer read oh eight hundred. There was nothing to see outside the newly repaired clearview windows except the ship's lights, and precious little to see inside them except the illumination of the control systems and the increasing number of computer display screens that kept flickering into life quite unexpectedly – apparently with no rhyme or reason at all. And Richard's own reflection, looking haggard, gaunt and strung out. Hollow-cheeked, with dark rings under his eyes and thick black stubble around his chin. Looking, as the Pitman had observed,
like shit
.

Rather than bemoaning his appearance or trying to work out who must be fixing what down in the back-up computer areas, Richard concentrated on keeping a lookout for other ships. So, while the nerves of his body seemed to be part of the fabric of his temporary command, his eyes stayed fixed on the far horizons. He had no collision alarm radar yet and no communications to warn of impending crises. In spite of the fact that he had managed to turn
Sayonara
pretty handily in the emergency of the typhoon, she was by no means a nimble vessel. She wasn't quite the legendary super tanker which is so difficult to stop or turn according to the popular saying, but nevertheless, he didn't want to find himself on a collision course with anything. It would take a miracle to swing her off line in anything short of a mile. And it would take maybe five miles to stop her, assuming the computers allowed him full and immediate access to the engines. So Richard did his best to keep watch and prayed that
Sayonara
was big enough and brightly lit enough to keep anyone sharing these waters well clear of her. But although the typhoon might have eased, all the shipping nearby seemed to be staying in safe haven, just in case. So
Sayonara
sailed on through the black night utterly alone. And, given the frenetic activity of the last few hours, on top of the excitement of the voyage so far, Richard remained wearily unsurprised to find himself also alone on the bridge, hour after hour.

In the dream-like state of gathering exhaustion – not to mention mild concussion, though it was a good many hours now since Dom had cold-cocked him – Richard felt utterly at one with the ship. Indeed, through the vessel's movements along her course and through the six degrees of freedom, he felt at ease with the huge forces that made up the vast, invisible night that surrounded her. He knew from the slightly elevated throbbing of her engines that she was running at that unsettling twenty knots again, instead of the optimum eighteen knots, and that the rhythm no longer varied, no matter what he did to the engine room telegraph levers. Little by little the control he had over the helm was slipping away, and he suspected that by the arrival of the dawn – due around nine a.m. ship's time – he would be utterly redundant because the computers, still in the grip of Macavity's malware or the turncoat Sato's meddling, would have reassumed command and control as the power was fully restored – unless Harry had managed to hack them by then.

Leaning on the increasingly useless helm, he felt the way
Sayonara
pushed through the ocean, and from that judged the strength of the gale behind her and the way it was beginning to moderate. He considered going out on to the bridge wing but decided to leave that adventure for an hour's time. It would be more instructive and enjoyable at dawn.
Sayonara
's increasingly easy rolling, with the occasional half-hearted yaw told him all he needed to know about the sea. As the wind would be pushing them forward, so the waves would be pushing them westward. And, although the waves were still moving at the dictates of the powerful depression, they were now running in from Japan, whose north island, he guestimated, must lie little more than two hundred miles to
Sayonara
's lee. So they did not quite attain the size and power of the huge deep-water rollers that had come towering in from the heart of the North Pacific earlier.

At eight-fifteen, as though by magic, the GPS came alive. Richard crossed to it at once, but found himself staring at it with simple incredulity.
Sayonara
's current position, apparently, was forty-one degrees north, one hundred and forty-eight degrees east. According to Richard's reckoning, that put her five hundred miles south-east of Sapporo on the west coast of Hokkaido or three hundred and fifty miles south-east of Kushiro on the east coast and far further east and south of the position he had thought she must be in. According to these figures,
Sayonara
was five hundred and twenty miles north-east of the NIPEX facility, which was very surprising and not a little creepy. Because, even after the damage and distraction caused by the typhoon, it meant they were bang on time and bang on target, twenty-five hours' sailing time from the NIPEX facility.
The age of miracles is not yet past
, he thought, shaking his head in simple wonderment.

‘Penny for them,' came a flat, almost Afrikaans voice. Richard started, turned and found himself confronting a level pair of opal blue eyes which were crinkled at the corners with an ever-so-slightly self-satisfied smile. ‘Jesus, Pitman, you almost gave me a heart attack! It's like living in a Raymond Chandler novel – every time I turn round, someone with a gun comes into the room! What are you doing on the bridge?'

‘Talking to you. And from the state of everyone else on board, if we are in a Chandler novel, it'd be
The Big Sleep
. This is more like a dormitory than a ship. But I got a couple of messages.' She paused, registering that Richard was well from the helm. ‘Shouldn't you be driving this thing? As you seem to be the only person apart from Harry, Ivan and me who's actually awake?'

‘I'm redundant. Story of the twenty-first century – the computers have taken over.'

‘Hmmm,' said the Pitman sceptically. ‘That's part of the first message. Harry says don't trust what the computers are telling you.'

‘Does that include the GPS?' he asked, immediately suspicious.

‘Yup.' The Pitman nodded.

‘But I thought it was nearly impossible to screw with the GPS. Don't you need this special red control box? Don't you have to reposition the satellites?'

‘That's the way you do it in James Bond movies,' said the Pitman. ‘In the real world – well, in
Harry's
world – you just screw with the computer that interprets the signal. Or the one that relays the information to the screen. In my world, of course, you just buy a GPS blocker off the internet and no one knows where you are or what you're doing – speed-wise, even.'

‘So Harry's message is that the ship thinks it's in one place but actually it's in another.'

‘That's it. Given that you're cool with the idea that
the ship thinks …
'

‘But anyone observing the ship, like the automatic tracking satellites that read the black box info, for instance, will know she's in the wrong place,' he said. ‘So what's the use of fooling the ship?'

‘I guess they'll see
Sayonara
's not where it's supposed to be – no matter where it
thinks
it is. But I guess the question is
will they do anything about it
? I'd say it depends how far off-target the ship is pushed by the inaccurate readings. What sort of deviation is going to ring alarm bells on shore?'

‘That depends …' said Richard. Then he straightened. ‘Shit!'

‘What?'

‘The storm. No one will be surprised if
Sayonara
's a little off course or ahead of schedule if she's just come through a typhoon.'

‘OK,' said the Pitman, exploring – and extending – Richard's reasoning. ‘So, the ship thinks its bang on target and is programmed to proceed accordingly. But we know the GPS that's telling it where it is has been compromised.'

‘She's actually a good deal further along the course than she thinks …'

‘OK. We go with that. Everyone is happy to see the ship because it's ridden out the storm. No one's worried if it's a bit ahead of where it should be. How far ahead? Twenty kilometres? When do alarm bells start ringing?'

‘If NIPEX still can't get control of the ship when the master unlock codes click in for docking when she's fifty miles out because whatever Macavity's done and Sato's made worse is still keeping them out and Harry hasn't been able to counter it, then they'll start ringing pretty quickly – in twenty-four hours' time, in fact. Because instead of pulling up at the LNG unloading facility, she'll sail straight into Kujukuri's floating city. I was beginning to assess this when I was locked up down in engineering. But if they can take control of her at NIPEX, there'll be no alarm bells at all because they'll just override the computers, chopper out a skeleton crew and a ship's pilot if necessary, and bring her in safe and sound. They'll just do it at four-thirty a.m. instead of six a.m. Japan time. And that won't matter at all.'

‘So that's Harry's mission, then,' said the Pitman simply. ‘To make sure, no matter what else is going on, that these guys at NIPEX can get control of the ship twenty-four hours from now. Send out a pilot if they want or dock her by remote if they want. Whatever.'

‘That's it,' said Richard, surprised, somehow, that it should all come down to something as straightforward as that. He paused, thinking through what he and the Pitman had just discussed. And it seemed to him to hold water. It all
did
, in fact, come down to something as simple as ensuring the men at NIPEX could take control of
Sayonara
in exactly twenty-four hours from now, no matter how far ahead of schedule or how badly out of position she actually was, as long as she was still within the control parameters.

‘But why bother?' asked the Pitman suddenly. ‘Why go to all this trouble to make the ship think it's in one place when it's really in another? I mean, shit, even if this is some kind of Mafia insurance scam like Ivan says his father and your London Centre people suspect, then it hardly seems likely that it all turns on this boat being a couple of hours ahead of where she thinks she ought to be.'

‘The prime directive,' said Richard. ‘It's buried so deep in the programming that not even these guys can get at it. No one can. If
Sayonara
gets within fifty miles of her destination and is more than a few hundred yards off position, she's programmed to shut down, send out a distress call and wait for someone to come aboard and put her safely and securely where she's supposed to be. She's a bit like a super tanker, remember. She may behave well enough in the right hands and under the right circumstances, but she takes a hell of a long time to stop. Even longer to turn round. So, if there's any danger, then she shuts down. Prime directive. We thought it was foolproof.'

‘Cool. Like Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics.'

‘We took every precaution we could think of. Well, that Rikki Sato could think of. I mean, look at how far advanced the Japanese robotics industry is. What was the name of the voice-controlled robot they sent to the International Space Station in 2013? Kirobo?' He paused for a moment, then added: ‘But you have an important mission too, Pitman. You have to make sure that if and when
Sayonara
does dock at NIPEX tomorrow morning, that there's nothing on board designed to go
bang
at an inappropriate moment. I mean, these guys have gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to do whatever they're doing. If we're talking
surprisingly simple
, what could be simpler than fooling around with the programmes to distract us from the fact that there's a socking great bomb somewhere on board? Remember, Kolchak said there was a whole network of bombs attached to the signal blocker up above our heads. Why shouldn't there be something even bigger somewhere on board that we don't know about? Perhaps you'd better check on that. Now, what was the second part of the message?'

‘Oh. Right. That was from Ivan. As we're sure we're dealing with the 'Ndrangheta, he's got a list of people on board who have contacts with Italy. I mean, he threw the net pretty wide. Even counted this guy Aleks Zaitsev, just because he's skied there a lot.'

‘Do you have the list?'

‘No. He needs to talk it through with you. I mean, fair enough, Doctor Sato's daughter is in Italy and someone might well be able to pressure him through her. But does he count Zaitsev because he's skied there? Or this other guy because he served with NATO in Naples, or the cocksmith who's got an Italian firecracker girlfriend? I mean, where does he draw the line?'

‘He doesn't draw the line anywhere. Steve Penn has Italian blood, I'll swear. Not to mention Domenico Giancarlo DiVito …' He massaged the crusted lump on the back of his skull thoughtfully. ‘If anyone on board even likes Italian food, I want to know.'

‘Well, you can start with me then. I'd live on pizza and pasta given the chance. But I'll pass on the message.' The Pitman became just another shadow, moving silently to the back of the bridge.

‘If you lived on pizza and pasta you'd be the size of a house in no time,' whispered Richard.

‘Don't you believe it,' she breathed back as she oozed out of the door. ‘I have a lot of nervous energy. And I lead a
very
active life.'

By the time the Pitman left the bridge it was coming up to nine a.m. on
Sayonara
, and dawn in the outside world. Richard returned to the helm. He tested the telegraph again but the engines continued doing their own thing. Or rather, the computer progamme's own thing. He swung the helm hard over to port. And
Sayonara
continued on her pre-programmed course without deviation or hesitation, wherever that course may now lead them to. ‘OK, computers,' he said. ‘You have the ship. I'm going out on the bridge wing for a breath of fresh air. As if I didn't get enough when the windows came in.' He strode past the pilot's chair – which now looked a little the worse for wear having been blasted with shattered glass and hosed down with a considerable volume of the North Pacific Ocean. He opened the bridge-wing door, surprised at how stiff and unwieldy it was, and stepped out into the truncated tube-train carriage of the covered section. On his right was the doorway leading on to the external companionway, up which they had carried the wounded Kolchak uncounted hours ago. Straight ahead, at the far end of the covered section, was the door out on to the open area where the equipment necessary for docking was – if humans were doing the ship handling. There was a secondary heading readout, a slave telegraph for the engines and a gyrocompass. But Richard was planning to use none of these because they were all rendered redundant by the fact that the computers were back in control. Instead, he was going to take the binoculars from their pouch on the wall beside the bulkhead door that led outside and watch the dawn coming up.