Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (11 page)

‘Indeed,' shrugs Oleshko dismissively. ‘But now we have a Western Front towards Italy and Eastern Europe with a new enemy opening up. And one cannot win a war on three fronts. Hence our reliance on espionage. A reliance that has resulted in this situation, and our request that you attend this meeting. Do you know this man?'

The newspaper on the overhead is replaced by a passport photograph. It shows a lean, dark-eyed Mediterranean face. ‘Yes,' answers Ivan, surprised. ‘That's Leo Gatti. He's one of our senior men at Bashnev Oil and Power …' He pauses, his mind racing as he fights to recall the details of Leo Gatti's position and responsibilities. ‘His main job is as executive liaison up in St Petersburg. He's our man overseeing the docks, the cargoes, containers and so forth. Which makes him our chief liaison officer with Heritage Mariner Shipping up there.'

‘He was also,' the federal prosecutor interrupts his son's sudden flow of information, ‘working for us.'

Ivan doesn't pick up on the past tense at once. But he picks up on the rest of the words. ‘For
you
?' he snarls, swinging round to lock his gaze with his father's, making full eye contact for the first time.

‘He was our eyes on the Third Front,' explains Oleshko.

‘Keeping us as up to date as possible on what was coming in. Especially from the Italian port of Gioia Tauro,' adds Ivanov.

‘Have you heard,' demands the federal prosecutor, ‘of the 'Ndrangheta?'

‘Of course I have!' snaps Ivan, his mind a whirl of speculation. Were these people telling him Leo Gatti was some kind of Mafioso? No. Ivan had read his personnel file and recalled some of the details now – Leo had been a member of the anti-Mafia ‘
Now Kill Us All
' group. He had joined it years ago while visiting his father's parents in Calabria before the whole family settled in his mother's home town of St Petersburg.

‘He was shot this afternoon,' explains Oleshko. ‘Automatic weapon. Fired by a man on a motorcycle as he stopped at the lights at the intersection between Nevsky and Sadovaya.'

‘Shot,' echoes Ivan, stunned.

‘Eleven times,' confirms Oleshko. ‘They weren't pissing about.'

‘But, and this is the point,' rasps Ivan's father, ‘he didn't die …'

Ivan's mind reels.

‘Or rather, he didn't die
at once
,' the federal prosecutor continues brutally. ‘He was able to say a few words to the first officer on the scene, who seems to have been sharp and reliable, in spite of being a GAI traffic cop. Gatti was able to dictate several words and phrases to him, but he was dead by the time the paramedics arrived.'

‘OK.' Ivan nods. ‘So what did he say?'

‘He had some information. Apparently, we're not the only ones under attack. Bashnev Oil and Power is too. It's being targeted for some sort of illegal takeover. Or so the scuttlebutt in Petersburg seems to suggest.'

Ivan shrugs. ‘Sharks have been circling ever since Max Asov died.'

‘This is different. This is 'Ndrangheta,' the federal prosecutor whispers. ‘Gatti seemed pretty certain …'

‘But what would the Calabrian Mafia want with …' Ivan's voice tails off as the pieces began to fall into place.

‘Precisely,' nods the federal prosecutor. ‘Your distribution system. You supply oil to the entire country – in road tankers as well as pipelines. Since your arrangement with Heritage Mariner you also have a country-wide distribution network for the delivery of containers shipped in from all over the world. All coming in through St Petersburg and Archangel …'

‘And such a system could deliver heroin as efficiently as it could deliver everything else. I see. But how is the 'Ndrangheta planning to take control?'

‘We were wondering the same thing,' inserts Oleshko. ‘Perhaps it will turn around the one element we can make neither head nor tail of. The one word we simply do not understand …'

‘Unless he was trying to play Paco Araya or James Bond and die with a clever quip on his lips …' temporizes Ivanov.

The federal prosecutor sees the confusion on his son's face. ‘Sayonara,' he rumbles. ‘It's Japanese for ‘goodbye'. Sayonara. It's the last thing Gatti said and we can't work out whether or not sayonara is important …'

R
ichard and Aleks crouched on the top of
Sayonara
's whaleback cover at midship. The vista of sea and sky was interrupted only by the stunted bridge house half the length of the hull distant. Other than that, there was only the horizon, beginning to draw inwards as the light failed. It was ten p.m. ship's time but they were still in high latitudes. Neither man was interested in the view. All of their attention was on the cover's top immediately beneath their feet. ‘No slip-marks,' said Richard.

‘No footprints of any kind,' agreed Aleks. ‘But what does that tell us?'

‘Nothing concrete,' Richard admitted. ‘But it makes you wonder. If he didn't slip then how come he fell?'

‘He was pushed, you mean?'

‘Yes,' snapped Richard impatiently. ‘That's exactly what I mean. Or attacked in some way, at least. I can't get the picture of his face out of my mind. That black mark on his forehead – could it have been a bullet wound?'

‘I didn't hear a shot,' said Aleks.

‘But there was the wind in the deck furniture down there and up here. The motors. The waves. The conversation. If someone had used a silencer …'

Aleks nodded grimly. ‘I suppose. But then, on the other hand, he could have hit his head as he fell.' He sat back on his heels, looking around in perplexity. ‘I see your point. Is it coincidence? After what happened to Yoichi Hatta … Two fatal accidents one after the other, so close together.'

‘We need to go back down,' said Richard decisively, ‘and talk this through with the others. If we don't have a plan of action before nightfall, we'll be on the back foot with a vengeance. And that is
not
where I like to be!'

‘Let's go for the bridge,' Richard advised the team twenty minutes later. ‘It's the closest thing to taking to high ground aboard. It's where we want to be – where we have the best chance of exercising control. It's where there's accommodation. Supplies, even. We'll get up on to the top there where Aleks and I were and charge straight up to the bridge. There's a walkway up there the entire length of the ship. Full frontal assault. Let's go for it!'

‘I don't know,' temporized Aleks. ‘We'd be awfully exposed running along up there.'

‘The alternative could turn into a siege,' warned Richard. He had thought one of Ivan's best Risk Incorporated men would have been more decisive. But Richard was still of a mind to give him the benefit of the doubt. This was a situation that young Zaitsev had never encountered. And the fact that he was out of his depth was probably just further emphasized by the fact that the whaleback looked like the kind of Italian Alpine skislope that Aleks was the real king of. ‘Especially if we have to go through the hull inside and find more unwelcome surprises waiting for us. We'll have to make up our minds quickly or we'll be doing it in the dark.'

They were all assembled on the midships balcony where Boris had died. The night was drawing on pretty quickly now and they really needed to weigh up their options and get into action, as Richard had already observed. Richard had been in situations like this before and was keenly aware of the need for level-headed balance. On the one hand they didn't want to waver and lose momentum – they needed to keep going before morale sagged further and they started fighting amongst themselves. But on the other hand, they needed to avoid recklessness. They couldn't afford to go charging ahead with no clear objective or shared purpose, or the opposition would be able to spring any number of traps on them. That would be worse than inactivity, just as the loss of life was worse than the loss of morale.

‘But what's actually
going on
here?' demanded Dom, shaking his head in frustration. ‘If this is an exercise to test security and anti-terrorist systems – as it was supposed to be, I thought – then it's going too far now that people are actually getting killed. Even if they are getting killed by accident! We need to call it all off, shake hands and head for home – certainly before Harry Newbold and the Pitman stick their oars in. What is the alternative? Are we actually facing a team of real terrorists who really want to kill us? If so, they're going about it in a pretty funny way!'

‘That depends,' countered Aleks. ‘What if it's a small team who haven't quite got full control of the ship yet? Who don't want to face us down because we're a far larger – and better armed – force. They want to fight a guerrilla campaign for a while.' He looked at Richard, frowning.

‘That would make sense,' said Richard. ‘It's certainly the way small terrorist cells work. But it begs several questions, doesn't it? Not least of which is
precisely what sort of opposition are we actually facing
?'

‘I don't know,' answered Aleks, looking round their increasingly shadowed faces. ‘I just know that I'm doing my best to play the hand we seem to have been dealt here. And, unless their deaths are genuine accidents, then we seem to be stuck in a real situation, facing some actual opposition. Not a test, but the real thing. With real dangers.'

‘And in real time,' added Richard. ‘With a sixty-hour time limit, unless they plan on changing course, or speed.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Aleks.

Richard gestured at his Rolex. ‘In sixty hours, unless we change course or slow down,
Sayonara
will arrive at the new NIPEX facility twelve hundred miles south-west of here. Six a.m. Japanese time in two and a half days. Sixty hours and counting. We'd better find some answers.'

Eight hundred miles north-east, way back in the Rat Island Pass, the long Arctic evening is stretching out all around Inuit fishing skipper Nanuq Aareak as he brings his boat
Chu the Beaver
under the cliffs of Hawadax Island on an unusually high flood tide. He slits his eyes against the low sun as it rolls along the northern horizon and silently thanks his guardian spirits for the tide. A quarter of a million ton oil tanker is pushing out of Rat Island Pass at eighteen knots, making what should have been the calm at the top of the water dangerously turbulent. Twelve hundred feet – nearly three hundred and seventy metres of her – with a wake like a tsunami. The power of her passage sets the waters all around her churning and roiling.

Nanuq yells back to his crew to make a virtue of necessity and drop some lines over the stern. The crew consists of his mate, Chulyn and his mountainous brother, Chugiak. And Nanuq's nephew, Aput, his dim sister's idiot offspring.

The sky is alive with birds, and that is usually a sign that there are big fish running. Nanuq watches the black-backed gulls, the terns, skuas and oystercatchers as they follow the trail of oil and garbage left behind the tanker which has just swept past. His wise eyes remain fixed on the columns of birds as he steers
Chu
towards the point where they meet the heaving surface like waterspouts. With luck
Chu
might hit a tuna run and pull in a haul that will keep the little crew's families fat for a month, and allow him to attract the attention of his potential third wife, Immuyak, who lives up to her name of
Butter
in almost every respect
.
‘Watch that line, Aput,' he bawls to his imbecile nephew. ‘Don't let it snag on the weed. We're further inshore than usual. Chulyn, keep an eye on the
narpok
.'

‘I'm busy,' calls Chulyn. ‘Let Chugiak help him. Or do it yourself.'

Aput raises one hand to show that he has heard all this bellowed byplay, but as he does so the line is all-but jerked from his other. ‘Help!' cries the boy in surprise. ‘Chulyn! Chugiak!'

Nanuq throttles back and comes stumbling down off the bridge to give the boy a hand as the rest of his crew are militantly attending to their own business. ‘What have you got there?' he calls. ‘A whale?'

‘Feels like it, Uncle Nanuq,' answers the boy cheerfully. The pair of them start pulling the line together, and Nanuq feels the dead, unmoving weight for himself.

‘You've snagged some weed,' he announces in disgust. ‘There's nothing alive on the end of this line.'

But as the way comes off
Chu,
the dead weight on the end of the line seems to ease and there is suddenly something floating at the surface among the hunting birds. Nanuq has fished these waters as man and boy for half a century, and he knows all too well what it is long before they drag it alongside.

‘Looks like it will be a lean month after all,' he says sadly as he looks down into a bloated face, so fat, pasty and chewed over that it scarcely seems human at all. ‘And a hell of a lot of paperwork and time at the police station into the bargain,' he adds grimly, as he sees the black hole of the bullet wound in the gaping cavity of the corpse's left temple.

T
hey waited for absolute darkness after all, moving at one a.m. ship's time, as
Sayonara
entered yet another human time zone, eight hundred and sixty miles south-west of Rat Island Pass, according to the precise measurements of the low-orbiting satellite passing invisibly overhead. But it was another celestial body entirely that finally made them take action. Under the menace of a rising moon that threatened to be low and full, they worked their way along the whaleback, relying on their black gear to keep them invisible among the absolute darkness of the shadows and their infra-red headsets to guide them, all too well aware that their enemies were identically dressed and similarly equipped. And that the moon was rising more quickly than even Richard had anticipated.