Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  “Hey, Newbold, did we do it right?” First Officer Cohen’s sneering voice broke into Harry’s reverie.

  “We’re tied up all safe and sound, Larry, so I guess you must have.”

  Larry Cohen pushed his way into Harry’s work area uninvited. His face darkened beyond the normally sour expression and the sarcastic tone became genuinely belligerent. “Hey! You got a schematic of the lading up.”

  “It’s the three-d of the whole hull, Larry. I’m not looking at the cargo areas.”

  “I thought I told you I was the only one to call up the lading schematic.”

  “It’s the whole hull, Larry. You’ve got the lading schematic on your own computer, for God’s sake. I don’t want to look at the thing. It’s not as if we’ve any cargo aboard yet anyway.”

  “Damn right. And you just remember, when we do have a cargo in, you keep your snoopy little eyes out of my area. I don’t want any jumped up, button-pushing little anorak — ”

  “Larry, Larry…”

  Harry and Larry both swung round. Captain Stevenson was standing nearby, his thin, ascetic face folded into a frown of concern. “I don’t want you two fighting now,” he said, sounding like an exhausted parent chiding two warring children. “Come on, shake and make up.”

  Harry shoved out a hand obediently. Cohen looked from one to the other then turned away. “What’s the point, Herbie? It’s not as if Officer Newbold here is really one of us. You know? I mean we’re off into town for a drink and a bit of fun, right? Officer Newbold here’s off to the Schubert or the Wang, or Symphony Hall, for Christ’s sake. If we’re off to Quincy Market, Officer Newbold will be down at Harvard Square. Down at the old alma mater, eh, Newbold?”

  “Well yes, but — ”

  “See what I mean, Herbie? You’re wasting your time!”

  The captain lingered after his first officer’s exit. “What do you say, Harry?” he ventured after a while. “It’s our last night ashore in a while. Certainly before the Southampton run next week. It’d help morale if you could mend a few fences here. Cohen and O’Reilley say they know this first-rate place down in Quincy Market. Even Bligh and some of his men will be going down there later. What do you say to a drink with the boys? Just to show willing?”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” said Harry, with deep reluctance.

  *

  It should have been called the Cat House or the Beaver Bar. It was just the sort of place Cohen would know about, and he and O’Reilley were happy as pigs in filth. While the traffic came and went on Chatham, Clinton and State outside, Harry, Stevenson and the two other senior officers sat back in a booth sinking long jars of Boston Beer. On the floor in front of them a chorus of girls went through an ill-rehearsed but graphic bump and grind. Every now and then one of the more adventurous dancers would come across and the increasingly lively officers would wedge five dollar bills into smaller and smaller sections of her clothing. Harry was positioned at the back of the booth and so kept hold of more money than most. But the girls, either by chance or under the direction of Cohen or O’Reilley, made more and more spirited attempts to get nearer.

  Harry was rapidly running out of patience with this. The opposite of Herbie Stevenson’s plan was happening as the radio officer and the first officer vied with each other to add insult to injury. Harry had never felt so isolated, so patronised, so threatened.

  “Hey!” bellowed Cohen suddenly. “Hey, I got a great idea!”

  In a moment the table was cleared and the most persistent of the dancers summoned. By this stage, the well-curved, sweat-gleaming body was almost totally uncovered. The last remaining thread, a tiny thong, only left room for question in the area of pubic hair because its rudimentary gusset was so tightly packed with money. In an instant she had been helped up onto the table and was cavorting graphically with her wad immediately above Harry’s head.

  A hand, thrust between the wide-spread thighs, pushed a glass of beer into Harry’s face then rose to try and wedge another note into the gyrating bundle. Harry took the beer and looked away. It was not that the woman was ugly or unattractive. It was not that Harry felt nothing at the sight of her admittedly well-designed body. It was the atmosphere. The sub-text. The lack of control. This situation, the whole show was not about sex but about power. It was not about this girl and her body; it was about Harry and the computers. Cohen wanted Harry under his thumb.

  The girl crashed to her knees and the whole table shook — but not as much as the glistening breasts. The full, pale orbs were thrust into Harry’s face. A spray of salt perspiration hit the young officer’s skin. A massive cheer went up and Harry sprang erect.

  But the cheer was not for the dancer, it was for the arrival of Bligh and his engineers. In a trice the girl was gone and Harry was thrust out to the edge of the booth as the rest of the party was packed in. Bligh and Cohen exchanged looks. This was clearly prearranged. In spite of a natural antipathy between the deckhouse and the engine room, and between the men themselves, necessity had made them bedfellows. They had united against the greater threat. And that threat had Harry Newbold written all over it.

  The arrival of the engineers cranked up the action. The beer was replaced by bourbon. The conversation got louder and lower. The jokes got bluer. And the management of the dive they were in moved to match the floor show to the mood of the clientele.

  From the rudimentary wings on one side of the performance area there came a throbbing roar, echoed by the throats of the men who clearly knew what was going on. Slowly, arrogantly, a gleaming black and chrome motorcycle eased into the light. Astride it was a black-helmeted, square-shouldered, black-leathered biker and a short-skirted, tight-topped moll. No sooner had the machine stopped than Meat Loaf started, “Bat Out Of Hell” first, then a selection of greatest hits. Almost independently of the music, the biker and his moll dismounted and then remounted, using the long black-leather saddle as a sofa and a bed.

  The blonde girl’s tight top was lingeringly removed, then the black skirt, followed by the black fishnet stockings and the red lace underwear. At last, when she was nude, she undertook the revelation of the biker’s body. Lingeringly, missing no opportunity to rub herself against the gleaming outfit, the blonde removed the jacket and the waistcoat to reveal a grubby grey T-shirt. The helmet remained tantalisingly in place. The pants were unzipped and peeled away to reveal faded Wranglers which in turn slid away to reveal army-style green shorts clinging to square-sculpted thighs…

  “Your round, Newbold,” bellowed O’Reilley.

  “Oh really?” said Harry, but staggered stiffly erect anyway. Ten strides to the bar obscured the show, but the raucous bellowing of Harry’s shipmates revealed that it was still going on. Harry leaned on the bar and waited until the barman noticed.

  “Two bottles of bourbon,” Harry bellowed over the combination of Meat Loaf and co-workers.

  They came with the same arrogant slowness with which the barman had moved so far. “Hundred dollars…”

  “You’re joking!” Harry’s face burned. “Fifty dollars a bottle for cheap bourbon?”

  “That and the floor show. It’s your treat.”

  Harry swung round, rage threatening to explode. But just at that moment the moll pulled down the biker’s shorts and no one was paying attention to the situation at the bar. Even Cohen who had set it all up was entranced at the vital moment by the all too graphic revelation that the big butch biker was a woman.

  Harry turned and left.

  “Hey!” yelled the barman, breaking the moment of almost religious silence. “Hey!”

  “What’s the matter, Harry?” yelled Cohen.

  “Newbold! Come back!” called the captain.

  But Harry hit the door and strode out onto Clinton. There was a cab rank at the corner of State, less than one hundred metres away, but even closer was a cruising cab. By the time Cohen erupted onto the street, yelling insults, Harry was in the back and speeding towards Lynn and home.

  A grudging whip-rou
nd settled things at the bar, but the failure of the trick on Harry left the men a little short. The proposed night of licentiousness with some of the chorus had to be put on hold and Cohen and Stevenson were hard put to it even to find the cab fare back to New England’s berth. In the cab, the beer and bourbon really began to hit home, particularly in the aftermath of the adrenalin rush engendered by the strip show. The cabby took a bit of a liberty with the two drunken, loudmouthed sailors and had taken a firm dislike to Cohen in any case. So he dropped them early, just after they had crossed the bridge, and drove away.

  Which is why they were walking, unsteadily, arm in arm down the middle of Revere Parkway when the big Mac truck from Chicago hit them as its tired driver hurried in from Interstate 93 to deliver a load of car spares to a body shop in Chelsea.

  Harry, in blessed ignorance, was just crossing the Lynn Harbour Bridge, at the point where North Shore Road became Lynn Way and home. “Next right,” ordered the young officer wearily.

  “You from round here?” inquired the chatty cabby.

  “My mother lives out on Nahant.”

  “Hey! Some primo properties out there.”

  “I guess.”

  “You going home on furlough?”

  Unlike the others, Harry had remained in uniform.

  “I guess.”

  The question sparked off all sorts of unwelcome associations. For the fact was that Harry was not really welcome at home. Home to Harry was a mansion out on Nahant Point overlooking Nantasket to the south across the reach of Boston Harbour and Marblehead to the north across Nahant Bay and Swampscott. The house would be Harry’s one day and maybe then it would really be home again but at the moment its empty rooms housed only a bitterly disappointed, widowed mother who felt that Harry had betrayed blood and breeding, education and family. Ever since climbing aboard, Harry had been regretting giving the cabby this as a destination. And as the big car pulled to a stop outside the gate and the first swathes of misty rain rolled in over the familiar iron scrolling, Harry came to a new decision.

  “I guess not, after all. Here. That’s the fare so far. Now take me back to Boston, please. Do you know Harvard Square?” Harry had found the house behind Harvard Square in late student days. Quite how or why were lost in depths of memory now. It had probably been something to do with loneliness and isolation even then. The cab pulled up beside an all-night cafe on the square and Harry walked stiffly round to the familiar door. “Shave and a haircut” on the bell signalled a regular client and the black portal opened welcomingly onto a formal, over-ornate hall. When Madame Rose saw who it was, she smiled. “Hello, Harry,” she said. “Home from the sea again?”

  “Hi, Rose. Yeah. Home again, I guess.”

  “Will you be staying the night?”

  “Yes. And I don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Naturally. Will you take a look at the book?”

  Within ten minutes, Harry had made a selection from among the Polaroid portraits in the house book and was following Madame Rose upstairs. Not for the first time, the young officer was struck by how theatrically old-fashioned this place was. They could have been mounting the stairs of a Victorian bordello, not a modern whorehouse. Only in Boston, thought Harry and began to feel a little more at home.

  The girl Harry had selected was quiet, willowy, stylish. Everything that the women in the sailor’s bar had not been. Rose introduced her as Veronica, and the pair shook hands almost formally.

  “Get you anything?” asked Rose on the way out of the little chintzy bedroom.

  “Champagne. How much is it?” Once bitten was enough for one evening.

  “Domestic. Seven fifty. You won’t notice it on your account.”

  “Is that to your taste, Veronica?”

  “Fine, thank you, Harry. Here, let me make you more comfortable…”

  By the time the champagne arrived, Veronica was in her modest silken lingerie and Harry’s uniform trousers were neatly folded over the back of a chair. They sat on the edge of the bed and sipped the icy liquid from wide-bowled tulip glasses. Between sips they kissed and caressed with increasing urgency.

  But it was not until the bottle was almost finished that Harry at last lay back and let Veronica undo the buttons of her white uniform shirt and reach beneath it to the front fastenings of the computer officer’s sports brassiere. “Call me Harriet,” Harry ordered quietly. “No one’s called me Harriet since I left Radcliffe…”

  CHAPTER IV

  Sir Justin Bulwer-Lytton’s flight touched down at Belfast City airport at ten on the morning after Bill and Helen’s wedding day while Richard and Bob were on their way west over the Pole. Ulster lay under a blanket of grey cloud and the run out to Lisburn was dull.

  “We’d make an excellent target for a terrorist strike,” observed Sir Justin dryly as the introductions were completed. “Best since Phoenix’s chopper went down on Kintyre.”

  “D’you think that’s what this is really all about? To get us all in one place?” asked Pat Conroy, the Garda liaison man, a little nervously.

  “Five and I Corps have nothing,” said George, the Deputy Director of Intelligence’s representative, an ex-SAS man. “Nothing on the big computer, no word from the street. Nothing from the Shed or the Cousins. Nothing from your people, Pat.”

  “Not a thing, George, as I’ve said.”

  “Then this doesn’t look local at all.”

  “Murder must go on, even here,” said Sir Justin. “Ordinary, non-political crimes of passion. Same as everywhere else.”

  “There’s the hands and the feet, d’you see,” said Pat. “That’s not the sort of thing we tend to find in our average crime of passion.”

  “And the second blast, from the shotgun. That’s not right either,” supplemented George.

  “Aye, that’s a fact. Nor is the dead man’s car burned out on the Bloody Foreland. Or under it, at any rate.”

  The car, so carefully precipitated into the bay, had been swept by an ironic vagary of ocean humour into a tunnel leading to a blow hole close to the castle. It lay there now, at the bottom of the chimney, on its nose, with its boot in the air and its number plate on clear display. As soon as the tide went out again the Garda would winch it up. But it wasn’t the car that had sparked this, nor the ease with which it had been linked with the male corpse, which had in turn been easily identified because of an unusual tattoo on the left buttock.

  “It’s the gun that makes the difference, Bull,” said George. “Well, not the gun so much as the bullet. That’s a very exclusive piece of kit.”

  “But there’s no doubt?”

  “You’ll see for yourself.”

  “Oh, wizard.”

  In fact, Bull did not see the corpses. Instead he was briefed by a pathologist from the Musgrave Hospital in Belfast, a renowned expert on gunshot wounds. Dr O’Neill had brought the corpses with him, but they remained in bodybags below while he concentrated on detailed photographs.

  A long, artistic finger pointed to a pale fragment on one bright photograph. Without scale, it could almost have been the peak of a distant alp, mused Bull.

  “The bone ends here are in the wrong place and pointing the wrong way. Once I’d spotted that it was clear that something odd was going on.”

  “I’d have thought that the absence of hands and feet would have given a hint or two,” said George wryly.

  The doctor nodded. “Of course. The hands and feet were the reason I was brought in, and why I was looking so closely. That and the wounds to the jaws, of course. Whoever placed the shotgun did so with practised expertise. That was very worrying. At least, I should imagine it’s worrying the hell out of you chaps.”

  “That’s as may be,” said George, holding a hand up like a fencer acknowledging a hit. “But meanwhile, the bullet…”

  “Ah, indeed. The bullet. I’ve heard of them of course, but I’ve never seen one used. I saw what it had done to the bone, there.” Another photo. Another pale alp. “And I was scratc
hing around for an explanation. It’s a very particular signature, you see.”

  “So Dr O’Neill asked a colleague of mine in the Greenjackets to take a look,” said George.

  “Indeed. And the whole thing sort of snowballed from there.”

  “I can see that it would have,” agreed Bull. “Your friend in the Greenjackets?”

  “Reading the Official Secrets Act in solitary at Aldershot as we speak.”

  “How to dispose of friends and influence people,” said Bull, and George shrugged. “But I see your point. So, suddenly in our most risk-filled theatre, we have, as you put it, George, a very exclusive piece of kit. Special Forces stuff. It’s as worrying as if the Provos had got their hands on those Stingers the Cousins have lost.”

  “And who’s to say they haven’t,” mused George.

  “Irrelevant at the moment,” said Bull. “But the fact is, Provos don’t have access to kit like this. No one in this theatre does except some of the more specialist SAS teams. And none of them should be using them beyond the Pale. We are sure about that, aren’t we, George?”

  “One hundred per cent.”

  “So, what you’ve called me in to assess,” continued Bull slowly, “is do we have a current player with access to dangerous new kit or a new player altogether.”

  Bull was uniquely placed to give an overview. His days in Security had given him an unrivalled expertise in the Middle East theatre and in the inter-linking of the terrorist groups that moved through it — and, indeed, with the shipping in which they moved. It had been Bull’s men who had watched the meetings between the IRA and the Libyans in Tripoli. It had been his men who had watched the links form with ETA, with elements in Cyprus, with the PLO. It had been his men who had shopped the Claudia, who had fingered the team on the Rock. He still had close contacts with Lloyd’s intelligence section the International Maritime Organisation, SO13, and MI5.