Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (33 page)

‘But we’re talking about nearly seventeen
tonnes!’
  Mako protested.  ‘That’s seventy tonnes of street drugs!’

‘Well?’  Hali said.  ‘There are what, ten million addicts on Chartsey?  A kilo will supply about five hundred hits, right?  So seventy tonnes is only thirty five hits per addict.  That’s not going to last them very long, really, is it?  It’s probably a couple of months’ supply for the dealers.  Which is a major result for us, of course, but that
is
the kind of scale these people work at.’

Mako felt cold. 

‘I know it’s a major thing, of course,’ he said.  ‘And I’ve met both ends of that trade, in prison, the dealers and the addicts.  But somehow, you just never think of it in terms of
tonnes
.  I’ve never heard of any seizure on this kind of scale.’

That caused a ripple of amusement, and he was assured that it did happen.

‘There was a motherload cache found oh, sixteen, years ago, over near Klenghorn.’  Ali told him.  ‘Not as much as this, but same kind of thing, a container full.  But the ship that found it was a gunboat, see?  Not a cat in hell’s chance of tackling a container ship.  They destroyed the cache, though opinion is divided on whether they were right to leave.  Many in the Fleet feel that they could have stayed longer than they did and tried harder to at least identify the ship involved.  Customs certainly felt so.  They often complain that they don’t get the commitment and support from the Fleet that they feel entitled to.  They certainly wouldn’t think it okay for us to just blow up the cache and clear off, anyway.’

‘I don’t think we can judge, really, not having been there ourselves at the time,’ Hali observed.  ‘And the skipper
was
very young, in the first few months of his first command.  You can’t blame him for being overwhelmed.’

This did not go down well with many of the crew gathered around, one of them stating emphatically that
their
skipper would never have bottled it like that, not even on his first day in command.

‘Well, no,’ Hali conceded, with a grin, ‘but he’s one of a kind.’

This was accepted, though it was apparent that the conduct of the gunboat skipper still wasn’t winning any acclaim from the Fleet crew.

‘The skipper said he’d only blow up the container ‘if he had to’,’ Mako recalled, and looked questioningly at the CPO.

 ‘We need them to pick it up, see?’  Hali confirmed, and seeing incomprehension, ‘In fact, ideally, we need more than for them to pick it up.  We need them to fail to report it.  If challenged straight away, they could simply say that they’d heard the same information as us, that there was something here, and were, as good citizens, checking it out.  They could come it all innocent, see,’ she adopted a mock-angelic manner, ‘‘Thank goodness you’re here, look what we found!’ 

‘It also has to be the actual drugs they take.  You can’t take the drugs away and substitute something else because then you would have to prove that they
believed
they were picking up drugs, which is virtually impossible. 

‘So, to secure a conviction, you need to see them pick up the drugs.  Then you need to come up on them as if by chance, giving them every opportunity to report their find to you before you can act on a seizure warrant.  That’s a tricky call, obviously, if you’re going to be sending a boarding party into a shootout.  If the skipper feels there’s too much risk, he won’t send them in.’

‘He said something about not being allowed to fire on them unless they fire on us first.’  Mako remembered.

‘Well, yes,’ Hali said, with a grin.  ‘If you were in pursuit of a vehicle, back when you were a cop, which you believed to be carrying drugs and armed suspects, would you have been allowed to pull out a bazooka and blast them out of the skies?’

‘No, of course not.’ He couldn’t help but grin at the absurdity of that, though he was shocked too.

‘Or a high powered rifle,’  she pressed,  ‘to try to shoot out their engines so they’d be forced to make an emergency landing?’

‘Good grief, no, that would be insanely dangerous!’  He said.  ‘The only thing you
can
do is to follow, contain the situation as best you can, warning other traffic and using box manoeuvres, working on the basis that they will have to land somewhere eventually.  And ah, right, I
see
, similar situation, here – you can’t fire missiles or cannon at them as fleeing suspects.’

‘Absolutely not.  We can fire warning shots across their bows, but they know very well exactly how close we are allowed to get with that, and unless they fire heavy weaponry straight at us, we are not allowed to fire at them.

‘I doubt we would, anyway.  Freighters are so very fragile, you see, compared to warships.  Even if we pulled our guns back to a tenth their usual power, they could still slice through a freighter’s hull.  And however strongly we feel about the death and misery they’ll cause with the trafficking of those drugs, that doesn’t justify us killing them. 

‘And we do have to be mindful in this that there may well be innocent people on that ship, who genuinely have no idea that they are involved in drug trafficking.  They may well have been told, see, that they’re picking up a ‘heavy’ cargo of tetracitrine or cindar.  Which makes them culpable, legally.  But me, personally, I would not feel the slightest bit good about blasting some teenage first voyager dead because he’d believed what he was told by the skipper.  There may even be kids aboard, you know?  So we do have to be very careful how we handle it, and blasting at them with missiles is not an option.  The skipper will only authorise firing on the container if it’s the only way to stop the drugs hitting the streets. 

‘Ideally, we’d want to take the lot back into port, see?  Lawyers have been known to claim, where drugs have been destroyed in space, that the Fleet faked all the evidence they are presenting, challenging the validity of the forensics on the ‘alleged’ drug haul.  But it’s hard to challenge that when you have, you know, seventeen tonnes of drugs right there that the defence can see and have tested for themselves.  So that’s what we’ll be going for, best possible outcome.’

‘And worst case scenario?’  Mako prompted, and saw wry looks.

‘Worst case scenario, it all goes belly up, we’re not able to destroy the drugs and have to let them go,’ Ali said.  ‘But don’t worry, the skipper won’t let it come to that.’

‘He’ll come up with something,’ Hali agreed, with a confidence that was echoed in the nods and murmurs of agreement around her.

Mako could only hope they were right.

____________________

Chapter Ten

The next three weeks of waiting were a very tense time for Mako.  The day he knew they would be late back to Chartsey even if they left right then and made their own best speed was a tough one.  Alex promised him that the Fleet would reassure his family when the time came and Minnow did not return, but Mako knew that would not be much consolation to them.  Inda, his wife, would take it calmly, at least on the surface, staying strong for the kids.  Knowing Arcus, he’d capitalise on it, working up the drama on campus.  Pia would be worried sick, though, and the thought of his daughter going through that made Mako feel tight stomached too.

At the same time, he hardly needed the skipper to tell him that they could not abandon this operation to head back to Chartsey because their passenger was concerned that his wife and kids would worry about him.  That would cut no ice with either Customs or the Admiralty.  Mako himself would be ashamed even to make such a request.  He had known when he came aboard that his stay would be for the duration.  Everyone had assumed that would be for a routine six week patrol but he had been warned that it might be for longer.

And nobody, he knew, had been expecting this.  It was even a joke aboard the ship that this was ‘mission zero’.  It had never been intended to be the Fourth’s first mission, it was just a makework assignment to get them out of the way.  It had turned into a real mission now, though, and with the conspiracy theory already kicking off there, few people at Chartsey would believe this was any kind of coincidence.

‘And it isn’t, really,’ Mako observed, discussing that with Buzz as they had lunch together.  ‘I mean, yes, obviously, this wasn’t planned.  There’s no kind of conspiracy.  But there is, you have to acknowledge, a certain amount of cause and effect.  I mean, for a start, we’re out here mostly because of the furore that kicked off in the media, right?  And the 469’s skipper clearly only passed that information to Skipper von Strada because he trusted him, right?  It was touch and go.  You could see that on the command deck, that he was hesitating over it, making his mind up.  I think he was very unlikely to have passed that information to any
other
Fleet skipper.  It was because he knew how straight Skipper von Strada is, and how he’d laid his own career on the line to sort out a miscarriage of justice, that he was prepared to trust him.  So we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the media frenzy, and we wouldn’t have had that tip off, if this was an ordinary Fleet ship.  So it isn’t random; there’s a causal nexus there.’

‘Unarguably,’ Buzz agreed, with a placid manner,  ‘and wherever there is a causal nexus or any degree of coincidence, as with our encounter with the 469 at Paradise Gardens, people often don’t believe that things could really have happened that way.  I’m afraid,’ he observed, prophetically, ‘that we and the Admiralty are going to have long term credibility issues over this.  But honestly, what choice do we have?  It isn’t as if the skipper could have ignored that tip off.  And now we’ve found drugs, obviously, we can only do our duty to the best of our ability.  Backing off from this because we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile just isn’t an option.’

‘No, of course not.’  Mako looked a little uncomfortable and ventured, ‘I only hope that it doesn’t, you know, kick off such a row that the powers that be feel that it would be politic to end the scheme.’

Buzz broke into a broad grin.  ‘Are you
kidding
?’ he said, and displayed, again, a percipience that saw far into the future.  ‘If we can bring this in,’ he told the inspector, ‘and it’s established that we got that tip off because the freighter community has high respect and trust for Skipper von Strada, both the Admiralty and the Senate will go to the wall to protect us. 

‘You have to understand the immense damage that was done by the Carolina incident, and the agonisingly slow, frustrating efforts to repair relationships.  We have not had one major tip off from the freighter community, you know, not one since the Carolina, and for a skipper to trust us with something this big, well, that’s
huge
.  They will not be able to deploy the Minnow fast enough.  They’ll send us into any area where it’s felt that something big is going down, hoping that spacers will trust
us
enough to tell us about it even when they won’t tell anybody else.  So if we can pull this off, you know, the Fourth is going to be more than secure both with the Admiralty and the Senate, regardless of what ranting conspiracy mobs might yell.’

Mako felt relieved.  ‘Good,’ he said.  ‘You’ll certainly have my support, for what that’s worth.  Speaking purely from a rehab point of view, it is obviously just excellent what you’re doing.  Highly specialist, of course, and as successful as it is largely because of how selective you are in your choice of candidates, but both the rehab scheme and pastoral care provided here are second to none and I will make that clear in my report.’

Buzz looked at him with amusement and some affection, too.

‘You do realise, of course, that by doing so, you will condemn yourself to a lifetime of having people believe you were part of a government cover up?’

‘Yes, I realise that,’ Mako said, and lifted his chin.  ‘But if you think that will stop me doing
my
duty and putting in a full and honest report, you haven’t got to know me very well.’

‘Oh, we’ve got to know you pretty well, Mr Ireson,’ said Buzz with a grin, ‘and nobody is questioning your integrity, believe me.  It’s just that we feel responsible, you know?  You’re here at our invitation after all and we do realise that this will up the ante in terms of media harassment for you as well as for us.  And while we can head off into space to get away from it, you can’t, can you?  You’re going to be stuck there on Chartsey, with widespread public belief that you helped to cover up us ‘using prisoners’ for ‘secret, dangerous operations’.  That won’t be easy for you either professionally or personally.  So you may just want to think carefully about how much you say publicly when we get back.  Trust me on this, we will not take offence if you feel you need to distance yourself from us.’

Mako gave him an affronted look and Buzz apologised, though with a chuckle.

‘Sorry – just felt it had to be said,’ he said.  ‘And something else that does have to be said, too.  If this does turn into a chase, we will be making every effort to send word back to Chartsey.  We may either pass close enough to Paradise Gardens to send a shuttle there, or make passing encounters with other shipping.  Failing that, if the ship heads straight out into off-route space, the skipper may send away our number four shuttle with a petty officer and a couple of crew to go back to Chartsey.  It’s perfectly capable of making intersystem journeys,’ he assured him, as Mako’s eyes widened, ‘all our shuttles are.  Number four is actually intended
for
courier work like that.  It’s smaller than a starseeker inside, but a great deal faster and safer – faster than we are, in fact.