‘It’s fine, it’s fine . . . no, it’s not fine, ow, oww, son of a bitch!’ Nina hobbled to a nearby chair, rubbing her thigh. ‘Oh, dammit, it’s cramped up. I must have been standing on it for too long.’
‘That and, you know, swimming for hours,’ Chase said, with not nearly as much sympathy as Nina had hoped. ‘What if that’d happened a hundred feet down? That settles it. There’s no way you’re going in the water tomorrow.’
‘I could still use the suit’s thrusters,’ Nina suggested plaintively, but she could tell from Chase’s expression that he wasn’t going to give way on this occasion. ‘Crap. I hate watching through the remote feed. Nobody ever points the camera at what I want to look at.’
‘We do eventually. After you moan at us for five minutes.’ He held out a hand. Nina took it and tentatively stood up, trying to straighten her right leg. ‘Does it still hurt?’
‘No,’ she squeaked untruthfully.
‘Come on, hold on to me. I’ll take you down to the mess.’
‘Just a sec - let me send these pictures to the IHA.’ She hopped to the table and tapped at her laptop. ‘Okay, done.’
‘You’re pushing yourself too hard,’ said Chase, putting an arm round her waist to support her. ‘I know this is what you do and that it’s really important to you, but if you’re not careful you might get hurt. Like with that bloody eel. How far are you willing to go for this stuff ?’
‘Far as it takes.’ She smiled at him. ‘Okay, let’s go eat.’
Half a world away, banks of supercomputers analysed the photographs Nina had just emailed, breaking down the digital images and scanning them for patterns matching any of a vast range of criteria in just a fraction of a second.
No human had been involved in the process, yet: the machines of the National Security Agency in Maryland routinely examined every piece of electronic communication that passed through the networks of the United States, hunting for anything that might potentially be connected to crime, espionage or terrorism. All but the tiniest fraction of the constant deluge of data was deemed to be harmless. Of the remainder, most were passed on to human NSA analysts to make a proper determination.
But there were some search criteria that were kept secret even from the NSA itself, only a handful of people in the entire country - the entire world - being aware of them.
Nina’s pictures matched one of those criteria.
The supercomputers processed the images, picked out the strange characters, compared them against a database - and raised an alarm. Within minutes, three men in different countries had been informed of the discovery.
The Covenant of Genesis had a new mission.
A new target.
3
‘Good morning, Captain Branch!’ said Nina brightly as she limped on to the Pianosa’s bridge.
Branch, an angular, tight-faced American, acknowledged her with a sullen nod. ‘You know the currents are stronger here than at the original site?’ he began, not wasting any valuable complaining time with pleasantries. ‘I’ll have to run the thrusters to hold position. That means I’ll be using more fuel than I expected.’
She forced a polite smile. ‘The IHA will cover any overages, Captain.’
‘It better. And I’d like that in writing sometime today, Dr Wilde.’
‘It’s at the top of my to-do list,’ said Nina, making a mocking face at him as he turned away. The other crew member in the room grinned. ‘How about you, Mr Lincoln?’ she asked him. ‘What’s the weather forecast for today?’
‘Well,’ said Lincoln, a handsome young black man from California, ‘it’s gonna be a very pretty morning, with about a five-knot easterly wind and a thirty per cent chance of rain in the afternoon. Although I foresee a one hundred per cent chance that our guests from the IHA are gonna get wet.’ He gestured down at the pontoon dock, where the day’s diving preparations were under way.
‘Not me today,’ Nina said. ‘Got to sit this one out.’
‘Damn, that’s a shame. Still, if you need something to do, may I invite you to take advantage of the Pianosa’s extensive range of leisure activities? By which I mean a deck of cards with the aces marked, a box of dominoes and the PlayStation in my quarters. I got Madden!’
‘That’s enough clowning around, Mr Lincoln,’ Branch snapped. ‘Go make yourself useful and check the galley inventory. I’m sure somebody’s been helping themselves to the canned fruit.’
‘Yes, sir !’ said Lincoln, giving Branch an exaggeratedly crisp salute and winking at Nina as he exited. She smiled back at him, then looked through the windows. The ship was about six miles from the nearest island, a low shape at the head of a chain stretching off into the distant haze. The sea was calm, the only other vessel in sight a white dot rounding the island. Away from the shipping lanes, the Pianosa’s only company over the course of the expedition so far had been the occasional passing yacht or fishing boat.
Although it meant negotiating several steep sets of stairs and ladders, she decided to head down to the dock; anything was better than hanging around with Branch. Compared to other survey vessels Nina had been aboard in the past, the Pianosa was relatively small, a 160-foot piece of rust-streaked steel that was a good decade older than she was. But while Branch was far from the most charming ship’s master she had ever met, he knew his job, and his ship was up to the tasks the IHA needed of it, even if it lacked creature comforts.
‘How’s the leg?’ the drysuited Chase called as she reached the bottom of the steep gangway running down the ship’s side to the dock. Only one of the Pianosa’s boats was in the water today, the other hanging from its crane on the deck above.
‘Oh, just fine. Y’know, I think I feel up to diving after all.’
He eyed her right foot, on which she was conspicuously not putting her weight. ‘Sure you do.’
‘Oh, all right, it still hurts like hell. It sucks when you’re right.’
‘But I’m always right!’ Chase said smugly. ‘Your life must just be one crap thing after another.’
She gave him a sly smile. ‘You really want me to go down that road?’
‘Maybe not, then. Did you get the weather?’
‘Yeah. Looks like it’s going to be fine - maybe some rain later, but nothing serious.’
‘Suits me. Oh, here we go.’ Bobak and Bejo made their way down the gangway, carrying a plastic case between them. They put it down and opened it to reveal a bright yellow pod the size of a large pumpkin, a spotlight and a bulbous lens cover giving it a lop-sided ‘face’. Bobak connected one end of a long cable to it. ‘At least you’ll be able to watch.’
‘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. Ano
ther 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.
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