“Up and out,” she rasped. “Or I’ll hose the fucking lot with this!” She brought her gun down, drawing a steady bead on the nearest computer.
Harry reached over and snapped down one final rocker switch. The last screen died. She rose, bracing her body slightly against the chair to keep her balance with the belligerent woman so close to her. The soldier smelt of smoke, wet webbing, gun oil and sweat. Her golden hair was darkened by grease.
Like Dall, Pitman used her gun as a goad, herding Harry swiftly out onto the bridge companionway after the men. At the touch of the weapon, Harry jumped, whether because she was scared of the gun or because she was scared of getting grease on her nice clean whites Pitman was not sure. It did not occur to her that Harry had felt a shock of animal electricity. Pitman herself felt nothing except tension and impatience. She pushed again and Harry stumbled down the steps, half falling onto the next deck. She regained her feet quickly enough, squared her shoulders and moved on more swiftly. Satisfied, Pitman left her alone.
As they entered the dining area, Pitman turned and ran lightly back up to the bridge. She checked the radio room carefully, ensuring with practised fingers that everything was in the required disposition. Then she crossed to the helm and stood looking out at the featureless fog, lost in thought. Because the computers were of as little interest to her as the girl who operated them, she paid them no attention.
*
The passengers and crew of New England sat silently in the dining area. They were grouped round the tables and four of their captors were on guard, one in each corner, weapons cocked. In the middle of the room, the focus of every pair of eyes, stood Dall. He was unarmed and stood at parade-ground ease, his feet half a metre apart and his hands clasped behind his back. Every inch the professional soldier, every inch the commanding officer in the field, he said quietly, T thought it was time we met up and got one or two things straight.” He paused. Rode the silence. “My name is Peter Dall.” The way he said it in that flat, precise, almost accentless English could have made his first name Pjotr or Pieter, his last name Doll or Dahl. He could have come from anywhere between Alaska and Archangel, the long way round. “You will become acquainted with my command, collectively and individually, as and when that becomes necessary. It is enough for you to know that we are in complete control of this ship and will remain so for as long as necessary to complete our mission. You are no part of that mission and therefore we have no reason to harm you, as long as you remain passive. If you become active, however, we shall not let you live. I hope I am making myself clear.” There was silence.
“My command and I all speak English as well as a range of other languages. We are all trained in ship-handling though we will require you all to return to your duties in due course. Except for the radio officer. We have our own communications equipment. Do nothing except what you are told to do and you will not be told to do anything beyond your capability, your moral boundaries, or your laws.” He produced a piece of paper and flourished it.
“I have drawn up a schedule of the only major changes I deem necessary to your routine. These involve sleeping arrangements which have been varied to accommodate my people and their necessary routines. There will be no appeal, discussion or debate. Except with regard to Mrs Charleston. There will be a guard posted in your quarters, ma’am. Would you prefer to remain with your husband and a strange man or would you prefer to move in with the other women?”
“I will stay with my husband, please, Captain Dall.”
“As you wish. Everyone else, please familiarise yourself with these arrangements. It will be lights out and full curfew in half an hour.” He turned on his heel and walked out. The dazed crew crossed to where the piece of paper lay on the table in front of Bob Stark, but before anyone could look at it, Bob was on his feet.
“Listen, everybody, please!” He held up his hands and there was silence at once. “When I saw each of you with Captain Dall, I told you that we must do what these people say or they will simply shoot us. I meant what I said. We are not going to outguess or outsmart these people. We do what they say and we await events. Now, look to your sleeping arrangements and move your gear as necessary. Remember, curfew in twenty-five minutes.”
Ann Cable was up on her feet at once. The daughter of a workaday Italian bit-part actor and an Irish chorus-girl mother, her volatile mixture of Kilkenny and Calabrian blood was near boiling point. “Now just a minute,” she said, throwing her hair out of her blue eyes. “Just a — ”
“Miss Cable,” snapped Bob. “These people have twenty minutes to move their dunnage. Don’t slow them down unless it’s crucial. And you’ve got the same time to sort out your own possessions, remember.”
She paused. It seemed petty to consider it at a time like this, but there was a lot of stuff down in those bags she did not wish to part with.
Harry was perusing the list and looked up to tell her roommate that she had nothing to worry about, but Bob caught her eye and hushed her with an infinitesimal shake of his head.
So it was that when the lights went out at 03:00 on the first day, everyone was in bed except the members of Dall’s command who had taken over the watches. The watches ran to ship’s time and so at four Pitman came down to the cabin shared by Harry and Ann. Dall had told Pitman to keep a particularly close eye on Ann Cable who was far too volatile a mixture of temptation and disruption for his taste. The soldier left the cabin door ajar so that she could use the security light from the corridor outside to check on the sleeping woman — she had already gone through her suitcases while Dall was giving his briefing in the dining area. Then she swung the door to, spread out her sleeping bag on the floor, stripped to her T-shirt and shreddies, and re-strapped the holsters of her combat knife and her 9mm ASP to her naked thighs.
Neither Ann nor Harry was actually sleeping when Pitman came into the room, though both pretended to be. Ann lay wakeful, making and discarding a range of plans. As soon as she had realised someone had been through her cases and taken her personal phone, she had known that she was no longer capable of independent action. She found that even more disturbing than the sense of personal invasion that the detailed search engendered.
Harry’s mind was a whirl of thought as well. She found herself deeply disturbed by the powerful woman lying spread within arm’s reach on the floor. Even with her eyes tightly closed she could see every detail of the clinging combat cotton and the cold steel against the contoured flesh. With difficulty she turned her mind to more professional considerations, in particular Captain Stark’s orders to await events and follow instructions. She had the decided impression that she had been both overlooked and greatly underestimated by Dall and Pitman. No one aboard, whether among Captain Stark’s crew or Captain Dall’s pirates, had any idea how easy it would be for her to fire up the computers at almost a moment’s notice and take over any system aboard from the engines to the communications.
Such was Harry’s exhaustion that when she did fall asleep, she slept deeply and soundly. When she woke next morning she was half inclined to believe that the previous day’s events had all been a dream. Certainly the disturbing figure stirring on the floor beside her seemed better suited to fantasy than to the waking world.
Under the eyes of the two legitimate occupants of the cabin, Pitman unstrapped the holsters from each thigh, stepped into her trousers, replaced the weapons and laced up her boots. Then she caught up her jacket and belt and exited without a word.
“God,” said Ann the instant the door closed. “Doesn’t that woman need to wash or use the john? I only believe she needs to sleep because I saw her do it.”
“She’s probably gone to get something to eat,” said Harry practically.
“Gone to get orders from Frankenstein’s monster, more likely,” said Ann. “We’d better pray they don’t involve shooting us because I don’t think she’d hesitate.”
Harry slid out of bed and began to sort out a clean uniform for the day. Everything around her felt s
trange and out of joint. She crossed to the small window which looked out to the port side of the bridgehouse. The ship was drifting. Part of the strangeness came from the lack of engine noise, vibration, urgent purpose. And, she admitted, another part of it came from a feeling of helplessness, almost of listlessness. What was the purpose in dressing? She had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no responsibilities to fulfil. She didn’t even know whether she was allowed out yet.
The answer to that last question came at once. The ship’s tannoy sounded and Captain Dall said, “It is 08:00 local time. Curfew is suspended until 20:00 hours. Ship’s watch routine is hereby re-established. Watch officers and engineers to your posts, please. Non-watch officers, crew and passengers to the dining area. That is all.”
The smells which greeted the two women as they hurried towards the dining area were unexpectedly mouth-watering, but it was the interlopers who were shovelling away the ham, eggs and hash browns. Everyone else, from Bob Stark to GP Seaman Lee, the most junior aboard, was lined up along the wall under the guns of the only two men who were not eating apart from Dall himself.
“As you will have observed, ladies and gentlemen,” Dall began, “we have made no progress along our course during the night. I have no expectation of getting back on course before tomorrow at the earliest. My Magellan tells me to within a metre where we are and I have enough equipment to alert me to the approach of any other ship or hazard without bringing the bridge equipment on line. I am therefore content that we should drift generally eastwards, without power except what is necessary to provide light and heat. And this is why I have assembled you all here now. I shall require a certain amount of help and guidance from some of you. This help will not endanger any of your friends aboard, though refusal to co-operate may do so…”
The long and the short of the plan was that Dall and his men wished to establish in the minds of the concerned authorities that the ship was safe, that her crew and those they had rescued from Calcutta were fine; that the engines were not working well but that no help of any kind was required. Then they wanted to spend the day making use of New England’s officers, engineers and workshops to add to the natural fortifications of the bridgehouse.
As the day wore on, almost everyone aboard who might possess the time or the energy to pose a threat was given work to do — except for Ann Cable and Harry Newbold. Although Captain Dall continued to underestimate what damage Harry might do if she tried, he did see to it that she got nowhere near the computers.
After a light breakfast, Harry returned to her cabin. Ann was already there, and sharing the cramped quarters with her was a bit like sharing a cage with a short-tempered Siberian tiger. Harry was thinking of going somewhere else when Pitman tore through the cabin heading for the bathroom. “It’s always the fucking same coming off field rations,” she spat as she slammed into the little room. She tore her trousers down to holster level as though she was alone and unobserved. Then sat with the door open and her pistol on her lap, glaring out at them.
The voice of Harry’s mother came to her aid. “Let me show you the ship’s library, Ann,” she said in tones that would have done the chilly air of Lynn Harbour proud. The two women walked along the corridors and down the companionways to the small room filled with books and video equipment. Ann went through a shelf of books. “Does anybody actually read any of this stuff?” she asked, not really expecting a response, and not getting one. “Still, I’m glad to get away from that Pitman bitch. Pit bull more like. Bull dyke too, probably.”
She turned to a shelf of videos and did not see the expression that last sally brought to Harry’s face. But Harry was too preoccupied to pay much attention to Ann. At the back of the library, unused and unremarked, was a small computer console. It had a CD-ROM facility, a printer and an easy access word processing program. It also had network capability within the ship and if Harry could get the right codes and passwords typed in, she could access every screen and system of the massive machines on the bridge. And, if O’Reilley could be persuaded to throw the right switch unobserved, it had a modem facility through the ship’s sat-com phone dish and therefore access to the Worldwide Web.
O’Reilley’s help would have to be negotiated carefully. He did not like her and the feeling was mutual. He did not trust her and she felt the same. He might well turn her in just for the fun of seeing whether Dall would turn his men loose on her and do some of the damage she had no doubt the twisted little communications officer lusted to do to her himself. In any case, she was a member of a crew here, not a loose cannon. O’Reilley should not even be approached until after she had cleared things with her captain.
Leaving that to one side, her next priority was to get access to her computer programs. Through them she could find out about transmissions in and out, about engine status, heading, wind and weather. In the right hands, that sort of information would be priceless. She could also, if she got into the right programs, do an incalculable amount of damage. She could reverse the mechanisms of any circuit so that switches read off when on, and vice versa. She could re-program the guidance computers to go south when they read north, to go east when they read west. She could re-program the weather monitors to read hurricane force wind when it was dead calm. Quite simply, she could do what she wanted. Or, more sensibly, what Bob Stark wanted.
“Ann,” she said, “do you think you could get to the captain?”
“Get to him?”
“Persuade him to stop whatever he’s doing at the earliest possible moment without causing suspicion and come down here with you?”
“I guess I could. We go back a long way. I could get through to him if it was really important. But where’s the fire?”
“Here. This computer. I don’t know how much you know about computers, but…”
Fifteen minutes later Ann went off in search of Bob. Her mission was relatively simple but the fact that she had one at all cheered her enormously. She had already decided to make her appeal to Bob one that held plenty of scope for repetition. She wanted people to assume that she would wish to contact Bob and maybe spirit him away on a regular basis. And there was only one way she could think of to achieve this.
*
As a much younger man, Bob had been caught up in a situation like this on Prometheus II, flagship of the Heritage Mariner tanker fleet. The difference between then and now was that he had not been in charge then. Responsibility weighed heavy now, more heavily than it had since his days in command of a small coastguard unit in Vietnam. Perhaps age had something to do with it. The future no longer seemed to rest, gleaming, in the palm of his hand. Bob was following Captain Dall through the accommodation areas. Dall wanted every access point barricaded, monitored or defended. He seemed to be preparing for invasion by a considerable force. He worked out choke points and fields of fire, closed some accesses and opened up others.
“You’ve got welding equipment, Chief Bligh tells me,” he said. “I want this hatchway from the hull welded shut and then I want something heavy put behind it and welded in place. I want no direct access from the outside along this route, do you understand?”
“Yes,” Bob answered. “We can close it off against a small charge, maybe even a fairly big one, but I guess you know better than I do that there’s stuff out there that will blow it open and clear this corridor no matter what we’ve welded there. That’s independent of artillery.”
Dall was about to respond when a voice from the far end of the passageway stopped him.
“I have someone here asking to see Captain Stark.” The voice belonged to Dall’s closest associate, an American named Paul Aves. No matter where they were, Aves guarded the nearest landing or entry. Anyone looking for Dall had to come through him. Bob assumed that would also be the case in combat.
“Who is it?” asked Dall, his voice distant, still preoccupied with the problem of closing this corridor. He was giving it more attention than he had given the other areas so far, perhaps because it was the corridor along which his
own men had come.
“Woman. Calls herself Cable.”
“She your piece?” asked Dall.
“No!” Bob answered with perhaps more emphasis than he meant.
“Uh-huh…” said Dall, obviously unconvinced. “What’s she want then?”
“I don’t know. To tell me something, I guess.”
“Let her past,” called Dall.
Ann came down the corridor in a cloud of Calvin Klein and keen concern. She had paused en route to freshen her make-up and settle her beautifully tailored clothing to its best effect. She was one of those people who could turn on an extra sparkle, call it charisma, and dominate a room or turn heads at will. She was burning at full wattage now. Dall and Bob watched her coming with something akin to awe. Bob noticed that the stolid Aves leaned in round the corner for a rear view as she swept past. Whatever she was up to, thought Bob with sudden clarity, it had better be worth the risk.
“Bob!” she said, sweeping past Dall and wrapping her arms round her old friend’s confused neck. Her kiss left lipstick in places only maiden aunts had left lipstick. Dall’s amusement at finding Bob in such an obvious lie so soon after telling it was evident. It spread even to his chilly eyes.
“What do you want, Ann?” asked Bob, breaking away.
That was the question that had exercised Ann’s mind most forcefully while her fingers had been busy in her make-up bag. She had to have a reasonable, acceptable excuse for demanding the immediate presence of the captain of a pirated ship. Something simple, innocent, something so obvious and compelling that even the leader of the terrorists holding them would allow it without a second thought.
Unable to think of anything that would fit the bill, she had returned to the library to confess failure. Harry, unexpectedly acerbic, had sent her up to the bridge to talk to the watch officer. On the bridge she had come across Stubbs who, unprompted, was showing signs of genuine concern about something.
Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9) Page 13