The Covenant of Genesis (7 page)

‘If you aim the thing at anything worth seeing.’ The remote camera unit had no manoeuvring abilities of its own, and was reliant on the divers to move it around. ‘We should have got Matt to make us one of his little robot subs. At least that way I could control it myself.’

‘Yeah, it’s not like you buzzing an ROV round my head would get annoying.’

Gozzi lumbered down the gangway carrying the larger of the two vacuum pumps. ‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Have we got everything?’

Chase nodded at the equipment lined up along the pontoon. ‘Yup. All the suits are charged and gassed up.’

‘Okay,’ said Nina. ‘I’ll get back to the lab and set up the remote. Now . . . you
will
remember to take it with you, won’t you?’

‘Ah, get moving, Hopalong,’ said Chase, waving her away. Nina grinned, then started back up the gangway as Bejo and two other crew members began helping the IHA team into their suits.

She paused on the main deck, surveying the ocean. As Lincoln had promised, it did indeed look as though it would be a beautiful day. The sun was steadily rising into a deep blue sky, and the only hints of cloud were mere wisps above the island chain. The white boat she had noticed earlier was now out in open water and seemed to be heading in their general direction, but apart from that everything was quiet. Perfect for a day of potentially world-shaking archaeological exploration . . . even if she would have to experience it second-hand.

Taking a last look at the glittering sea, she entered the ship.

 

‘What do you see?’ Chase asked a few minutes later.

‘I see . . . some English guy with a funny face,’ Nina replied into her headset. On her monitor screen in the lab, Chase was holding up the remote with the camera pointed at him, the fish-eye lens ballooning his features.

‘Can’t be me, then. I’m devilishly handsome.’

‘Devilish I can agree with.’

He made an amused noise, then put down the remote on the dock, pointing out to sea. The horizon tilted at an angle.

Two dots were visible against the blue water, small boats heading side by side towards the
Pianosa
. But Nina, setting up the rest of her equipment, barely registered them.

 

On the bridge, Branch
had
noticed the two boats, and another one besides. The pair off the starboard bow, he saw through binoculars, had five or six people in each, but they were too far off for him to make out any details.

The other, larger vessel, off to port, was a motor yacht, an expensive-looking white and blue cruiser. He had spotted it earlier, but paid it little attention until now. Someone was standing on the forward deck, leaning against something covered in a colourful sheet of fluttering cloth, and he caught a glimpse of others moving about in the raised bridge.

It only took him a moment to realise that all three boats were on approach courses. He looked back along their wakes. They were travelling in subtle zig-zags, tacking to disguise their movements, but were definitely converging on his ship.

His immediate thought was:
pirates!
But that didn’t make sense. Even before the Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian governments had cracked down on the menace, most attacks had taken place in the Strait of Malacca between the three nations, hundreds of miles away. And a forty-year-old tub like the
Pianosa
was hardly a prime target.

He glanced at the radio, for a moment considering alerting the Coast Guard, but decided that was paranoia. They were still a mile away, and their appearance at the same time could be mere coincidence.

But he kept watching them, just in case.

 

Chase rocked uncomfortably, trying to shift the deep suit’s weight. Out of the water, the casing was supported almost entirely on his shoulders. It wasn’t unbearably heavy, even for someone of Nina’s modest build, but it was cumbersome enough to be annoying.

Bobak climbed into the water. Gozzi was having difficulty with his helmet, so Bejo had gone to help secure the heavy bubble, leaving Chase waiting to don his own headpiece. He looked out to sea past the moored floatplane, which its pilot Hervé Ranauld was refuelling, to see two boats heading in their general direction. One was a speedboat, the other a larger RIB - a Rigid Inflatable Boat, a staple transport of his time in the Special Air Service.

‘There!’ said Bejo as Gozzi’s helmet finally locked into place. ‘I can help you now, Mr Eddie.’ He padded back across the dock to Chase and picked up his helmet.

‘Great. My ears were starting to get sunburnt.’ The boats had changed course, Chase noticed, and were now definitely heading for the
Pianosa
. ‘Who’re this lot?’

The cruiser was turning towards the
Pianosa
, Branch saw through the binoculars. A man clambered down to the foredeck, carrying what looked like a golf bag.

He panned back to the two powerboats, trying to get a clearer look at their occupants. No nets or poles, so they weren’t out fishing—

Fear clenched at his heart. One man had just raised a gun, the unmistakable shape of an AK-47 silhouetted against the blue water.

His companions did the same.

Branch whipped round, looking back at the cruiser. One of the men on the foredeck pulled the coloured sheet away to reveal a machine gun on a stand. The other had taken a tubular object from the bag and was hefting it over his shoulder as he kneeled, aiming it directly at the watching American.

A rocket launcher.

Flame and white smoke burst from its muzzle.

Branch hit the button to sound the ship’s alarm, then grabbed the radio handset—

Too late.

The missile, an Iranian-made copy of the American M47 Dragon guided anti-tank missile, slammed into the
Pianosa
. Its warhead, over five kilograms of high explosive, obliterated the bridge, Captain Branch . . . and the ship’s radio masts, which toppled like blazing trees into the water.

 

The shock pounded through the ship, knocking Nina from her chair in the lab.

‘Jesus!’ she gasped as she pulled herself up. A loud alarm wailed. What had caused the explosion? And had anyone been hurt?

She looked at the monitor. The remote’s camera still showed the view from the dock. Bobak was in the water, burning debris raining around him. Beyond him, two boats were roaring towards the ship.

She stabbed at one of the camera controls, zooming in. The men in the boats were all holding guns, aiming them at the dock—

 

Encumbered by the bulky deep suit, all Chase could do was throw himself to the deck behind a stack of equipment cases as the pirates opened fire, the flat thudding of AK-47s rolling across the water. Some of their shots fell short, little geysers kicking up from the waves.

Others found targets.

The inside of Gozzi’s bubble helmet was suddenly painted with a gruesome splash of red as a bullet pierced the transparent polycarbonate. Darker, thicker chunks of bone and brain oozed down the inner surface, then the dead Italian keeled into the ocean.

Bejo landed beside Chase, yelling in fear as more shots punched into the boxes beside them. Chase looked along the dock. Ranauld threw down the fuel hose and jumped into the Otter’s cockpit. A scream, closer - one of the crewmen had been hit. Through a gap in his minimal cover, Chase saw Bobak in the water, flailing a hand at something burning on his suit.

Dive, you idiot, get under the water
—

A line of angry waterspouts snaked towards the Pole. Found him. Shattered fragments of the deep suit’s casing spat into the air. Bobak stiffened, then slowly dropped beneath the surface in an expanding circle of red.

The firing continued as the boats closed in. The pirates were barely aiming, Chase realised - just hosing the dock with machine-gun fire, relying on sheer weight of lead to hit their targets. They weren’t professional soldiers, but amateurs intoxicated by the rare chance to rock ’n’ roll with automatic weapons. In one way, that was good - they lacked training and tactics, which might give him an opening to fight back.

In every other way, it was bad . . . because it meant they were here to kill every single person on the
Pianosa
.

 

The video feed from the remote jolted, then went black. The camera pod had been hit.

‘Dr Wilde!’ Nina looked round as Lincoln opened the lab door. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, but they’re shooting at the people on the dock! We’ve got to help them!’

‘We don’t have any weapons aboard,’ he told her grimly. ‘Come on, I’ve got to get you out of here.’

‘To where?’

Lincoln didn’t have an answer as he pulled her to the exit.

 

The Otter’s engine spluttered, the propeller blurring into motion. Chase saw Ranauld leaning from the cockpit door, desperately fumbling to untie the mooring rope. Bejo rose to a crouch, about to make a run for the aircraft.

A hissing roar from one of the boats, horribly familiar to Chase . . .

He shoved Bejo back down. ‘Duck!’

The Otter’s left wing exploded, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Shrapnel tore through the plane’s aluminium skin. What few of the windows remained intact were splattered with Ranauld’s blood.

Chase opened his eyes. The Otter’s engine was still running, but fire was licking up its ravaged port side.

Another engine started up, an outboard. The other crewman on the pontoon dock had leapt into the
Pianosa
’s boat. He revved it to full power, turning as hard as he could to swing round the burning plane—

He barely got twenty feet. Another RPG lanced from the speedboat and hit his craft square in the side, flipping it over and reducing him to a red haze amidst a storm of splinters.

More bullets smashed into the boxes. Chase fumbled for the catches of his deep suit. ‘Get me out of this thing!’

 

The cruiser closed in, dropping another speedboat from its stern hoist into the water with a frothing smack. It leapt away from its parent vessel, heading round the survey ship’s stern.

The pirate manning the heavy machine gun on the cruiser’s bow took aim at the
Pianosa
’s superstructure, pulled the trigger—

 

Lincoln led Nina along a passageway, seeing another crewman ahead wielding a fire extinguisher. Black smoke billowed round him. ‘Shit!’ Lincoln said. ‘We’ll have to go back around—’

The crewman’s chest exploded in a spray of gore as a .50-calibre round tore through him.

The passageway echoed with a rapid-fire metallic
bam-bam-bam
as more thumb-sized bullets punched a line of holes straight through the hull and inner walls, searing across the corridor and ripping out again through the other side.

The holes got closer, advancing with frightening speed—

Nina dived to the deck. She tried to pull Lincoln down with her, but too late. A bullet hit his upper arm - and blew it off below the shoulder.

 

Chase and Bejo had managed to unlock the deep suit’s shoulder fastenings and some of the clips on its side when the sound of the machine gun reached them. Chase recognised the distinctive chugging booms immediately - a Browning M2, a weapon in service all over the world, practically unchanged for almost eighty years . . . because it was exceptionally good at ripping apart anything unlucky enough to appear in its sights.

‘Shit!’ he gasped as ragged holes burst open in the
Pianosa
’s superstructure. He clawed at the remaining clips on his suit - then looked round sharply at a sound from behind.

Another speedboat, rounding the ship’s stern. More pirates aboard it.

They saw him.

 

Nina screamed as splintered metal and scabbed paint showered her. More bullets slammed overhead . . . then stopped. The machine gun’s rattle paused, then resumed, now aimed at a different part of the ship.

She sat up, horrified by the sight before her. What was left of the dead man at the end of the corridor was mercifully obscured by smoke, but Lincoln was slumped against the wall at her feet. The white wall above him was stained with red, a lopsided hole at its centre where the bullet had continued on after inflicting its carnage. Nothing remained of his upper arm but a sickening stump of torn meat, streams of dark blood running down on to the deck.

‘Oh, Jesus . . .’ Ignoring the pain in her leg, she crouched beside him and checked his pulse. It was weak, irregular. ‘Can you hear me?’

Lincoln’s eyes fluttered open, struggling to focus. ‘What happened?’ he mumbled, trying to sit up.

Nina gently pushed him back. ‘Keep still. You’ve been shot. Don’t move.’

‘My arm hurts . . .’

She choked back a sob. He hadn’t yet realised what damage had been inflicted upon him. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, unsure what to do. There was a first aid kit in the lab, but she had no idea if it would be any use on a wound of this magnitude.