As they all mentally counted down the five minutes before the nameless leader of the dead pirates secured the door and locked his unwelcome guests in the hold, Richard located Merrideth’s medication. “Major,” he said, “I think now’s the time for two of these and if you’d just roll up your sleeve…”
Merrideth’s face, disturbingly formless behind the black balaclava, turned towards him and the red-rimmed eyes squinted at him as though he was a complete stranger. When he saw the pills in Richard’s hand, however, he pulled up the balaclava. Richard gasped, but the sound was drowned by the next announcement from the tannoy.
“Two minutes and counting…”
Merrideth’s face was dead white, but the eyelids, lips and nostrils were livid. The exhausted soldier took the pills into his black-gloved hand and tossed them into his mouth. Richard had an instant impression of bleeding gums.
Radiation! he thought, his mind seeming to jump awake. What was it he had heard about depleted uranium ammunition in the Gulf? He wished he could remember more clearly, but what he did recall was that the affected people suffered from a kind of radiation sickness, like the men who had fought the fires at Chernobyl. He felt his hair stir and his neck prickle. He wondered urgently whether Doc’s black combat webbing contained a Geiger counter in its capacious pockets as well as the pens, pencils, flashlights and the rest. But Merrideth was exhibiting signs of prolonged exposure to radiation. Damage to mucous membranes came only after weeks, perhaps months of exposure. No. This was something else, but Richard had no idea what.
“Your time is up!” announced the tannoy.
A metallic bang echoed through the hold. The lights went out. There was a moment’s silence, then Merrideth said, “Check the door and secure the area, Bruce. Then switch the lights back on. I’ll be dammed if I’ll let the captain here needle me by lamplight.”
Two minutes later, the lights were back on and Bruce reported that he had taken the switch apart to remove the main bridge override. The lights were in their control now, he said, and then added that there was a funny-looking handset on the wall by the door. Videophone maybe. Merrideth, answering with the needle still in the dead white skin of his upper arm, told Bruce to leave it alone and go back to standing guard. He would check himself as soon as he was finished here. “I’ll come and take a look at it too,” said Richard. “There should be a couple in each hold.”
The pills and the injection worked quickly on Merrideth and soon he and Richard and Mac left the men and crossed to the doorway. They found two videophone communicators, each the size of an old-fashioned telephone, with a screen about ten centimetres by ten sitting above a standard panel of telephone buttons. “They’re like radio phones,” Richard explained. “They communicate within the hull, with each other and with the security system. When you use it you look into the screen and a small camera lens sends the face as well as the voice to the receiver.”
“Have you any idea how to use it for our advantage without giving too much away to the enemy?”
“Not yet. But maybe Mac here can tune one into the security system. That’d be useful.”
“Probably patches into the computer network somehow,” opined Mac vaguely. “Wouldn’t need a specific receiver then. Plenty of computers and screens all over the shop.”
“But you’d need to re-tune it. Take one apart. See how it works.”
“Maybe do that later,” said Merrideth, slipping one of the videophones into a pocket in his webbing.
They went back to their base.
“What next?” asked Richard.
“We need to disable the fire-fighting equipment,” said Merrideth. “Any ideas about that?”
“There’s an inert gas system,” Richard said at once. “Follow me. Do you think he’ll try to gas us out, whoever this man is who has control?” he asked Merrideth as they began to work their way over towards the pipework.
“His name’s Dall. It’s an option. I don’t want Dall to have it any longer than necessary.”
“How do you know his name? No, don’t tell me — intelligence.”
The outer edges of the pallets were mercifully more than a metre from the hold wall and here ladders allowed access to the topmost plateau. As soon as Richard, Merrideth and Mac went up, Tom and his men followed, spreading out automatically around their superiors as though someone might be hidden up here on top of the load to spring a deadly surprise.
The tops of the pallets were two and a half metres below the ceiling. They were exactly level, and it was almost impossible to see the one-metre gaps between them as they stretched like an endless prairie to the far wall and the even further reaches of the bow. In the middle rose the enclosed stairwell whose walls contained the closed and guarded doorway.
Immediately above their heads a pattern of lights were clamped to the white-painted ceiling. Around these snaked the great silver convolutions of the ship’s ducting system. Above and around those writhed the white-painted worms of the water systems — fresh water for drinking, treated water for washing, salt water for the sprinkler systems. Among the water pipes ran electricity cables which carried not only current but signals and directions to the great lading, ship-handling and cargo-protection machines lying dormant all around.
“This is it here,” said Richard, “the inert gas roses, the equivalent of the water sprinklers over there.”
“Good,” said Merrideth. “Any idea of the pressure generated by the IG equipment?”
“High. In a tanker it can flood an area half this size in less than five minutes. This has to be similar or better. No sense in having it if it takes a lot of time.”
“Taping the roses would be no good then.”
“No. Find the main feed pipe and block that.”
“You heard the man, Tom.”
“Yes, boss. Martin, you want to come with me? Russ, you and Mike go that way.”
While they were waiting for Tom’s men to report, the three of them inspected the rest of the pipework. The ducting was particularly interesting. “You think any of us could fit in that?” Merrideth asked Mac.
“Doubt it. None of the men anyway. You might be able to, Major, you’re the slightest.”
“Not good strategy, isolating the commander. A bit too Star-Trek for me.”
The phrase made Richard think of the people trapped with the men they were here to fight. Harry Newbold would be able to fit in the ducting, and so would Ann.
“This looks like the lead pipe,” called Tom a minute or two later. It was one of a sheaf of pipes running up the central column whose square walls enclosed the stairwell which connected the accommodation and command areas above to the engineering areas below. It reached up to the ceiling then branched out into the pattern they had just been examining.
“We need to be very sure, though,” warned Richard. “Check the other side. Often several pipes feed individual sections.”
On the other side they found another pipe. Bruce’s men traced it down to the floor where it vanished, apparently through to the lower hold. “Any sign of a central feed point?” asked Richard. “Any way to tell which way the gas runs?”
“Nothing I can see,” answered Bruce, down on his knees on the deck.
Richard craned over the edge of the pallets, straining to see the detail more than twenty metres below. “Bruce, that area immediately inside the door is very different to the flooring beneath the pallets. There’s nothing obvious from here but can you see anything like a catch or a handle? It seems logical that there should be inspection hatches there.”
“Just a minute. Well, I’ll be damned. You’re right, Captain. Shall I open up, boss?”
“Hold it there a minute, Bruce.”
Merrideth and Mac went into a huddle, and for the first time Richard was included.
“What are the risks, Mac?” Merrideth asked.
“As long as we know the stairwell is empty, they seem low.”
“OK. I’ll set up the image intensifier up here right at t
he head of the well. If anyone comes anywhere near the first step we’ll have a warning. It’ll alert us to lift use too if I place it right. Captain Mariner, where would you advise?”
“Let’s see. These pallets go right in close on that side. You can reach across and set it up there. Yes. That’d do nicely.” And the major did as he advised.
“Go ahead, Bruce, have a look under the floor,” called Richard a few moments later on Merrideth’s signal.
Looking over Merrideth’s shoulder, he strove to make sense of what the sensor was revealing. “What can you see?” he asked.
“Silence, inactivity, lack of body heat,” came the terse answer.
“It’s looking into an empty stairwell from the level to the top stair,” said Richard as the patterns began to come clear. “There’s no one on the steps there and there’s no one approaching down the corridor. This is a very impressive piece of kit. You can forget about doors here,” he went on. “This wall is much thinner than that bloody great thing down there. And they’ll be expecting you to come and go through doors rather than walls in any case. That’s where they’ll be watching and waiting, by the door. If you positioned your charges carefully you could come straight out into the corridor. Through the wall here.”
“I’ve got the pipe under the floor,” called Bruce. “Comes in through the wall on a couple of supports then splits. One bit goes up into our system. The other goes down. Standard T junction.”
“What size pipe?” called Richard, turning away from Merrideth’s monitor.
“Four centimetre.”
“But how to shut it off,” mused Merrideth.
“That’d be easy enough. I could do it for you myself,” said Richard without thinking, “if I had a hacksaw and a fifty pence piece.”
Five minutes later he was crouching beside Bruce, a hacksaw blade gripped in his long, strong fingers. He sawed at the junction of the pipe, exactly across the T-junction, as though beheading the upright. “Where’s the fifty pence piece?” he asked.
“This do?” A coin rang on the deck by his side. He gasped — something he had warned himself against doing since he was cutting through a pipe full of inert gas here. In place of a five-sided coin there was a larger, golden one. “That’s a sovereign!” he exclaimed. “Where’d you get one of those?”
“Standard issue,” said Bruce. “Haven’t you read Bravo Two Zero?”
“I’d forgotten,” said Richard, as the blade went through. He wedged the sovereign across the sawn top of the upright pipe. “Now,” he said, “we just need to tape that securely into place. The coin will stop anything that tries to come through, and the more pressure builds, the more securely will it be held in place. Think you can do the same on the other side?”
“Yup. The world lost a great plumber when you went to sea, Captain.”
“And what did it lose when you joined up?”
“Olympic standard bouncer,” said Bruce.
“Pimp more like,” supplied the dry voice of Mac, who had been listening in.
*
Peter Dall and Paul Aves sat side by side on the bridge looking at the blank screens which should have revealed what was happening in the holds below. Around them, the men of New England’s crew went about their duties grudgingly and mutinously under the guns of the guards. Dall’s gruff order to Pitman to hurt Harry had in an instant destroyed the growing co-operation between the mariners and their captors. All they offered now was the basic minimum required to make the ship secure and be passage safe — except for O’Reilley, who was openly with Dall’s men now, though even he was still watched by one of the guards.
“Those women couldn’t have taken out Slogett and Newby,” Dall said again. “That’s simply not possible. There is simply no way two unarmed tarts could have taken out those two. With a gun maybe. With grenades sure. But there were no shots. There was no explosion.”
“Grillo and Bacon heard nothing,” supplied Aves. “Traps?”
“They didn’t have time.”
“Could they have set it up? They fucked up the lights. They screwed the surveillance.”
“They did those things from outside, through the computer. They couldn’t have got into the holds themselves. Jesus, we were only in there ourselves this morning.”
“So. No traps.”
“Looks that way.”
“So they could not have taken care of Slogett and Newby. They were a very fine team, Captain.”
“Agreed. And we assume that Grillo and Bacon were reporting truly and accurately what they saw.” Dall dropped his voice slightly as he said this.
“We don’t assume it, we know it. We were monitoring them.”
“Then either Slogett and Newby changed sides…”
“Not possible. They’re one hundred and ten per cent, you know that, Captain.”
“Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or we are no longer alone.”
*
Merrideth and his men were well aware that they were operating on borrowed time. There was bound to be some sort of recognition soon that they were aboard.
As far as the SAS men were concerned, the correct way to deal with such a potential threat was to pre-empt it. The preferred method of doing this was to mount an unexpected and preferably overwhelming attack. But at the moment they could only hope to break out into an isolated and certainly guarded stairwell. The passages leading to and from the stairwell would also be defended, perhaps even fortified. Hope of surprise was nil, the chances of casualties among the unit high and any hope of rescuing the hostages before they, too, started dying zero.
On the other hand, Dall had found that sending men into the hold was fatal. He would realise that the hold as a battleground was unthinkable, for all the advantages he held in the rest of the ship were held by the men in here. Further, it seemed highly unlikely that Dall could have any idea of the number or disposition of his enemy. With any luck, he was still in some doubt as to what exactly had happened to his patrol and was, therefore, in two minds how to proceed. It might suit him to sit tight and play a waiting game. Certainly, unless there was something like the inert gas system that could get rid of them with little collateral damage to hull or cargo, then they were effectively unassailable in here. Even replacing the water in the sprinkler system with something more toxic, if it could be done, seemed fraught with more difficulties than advantages, for the only toxic agent likely to be aboard in sufficient quantities was jet fuel. And spraying the highly volatile fuel in here would be an invitation for all aboard to undergo a Viking funeral.
But the SAS men had no intention of throwing up a defensive perimeter and sitting tight. Merrideth took Richard’s suggestion that, with the explosives available to them, the walls were as much an option as doors for access to other parts of the ship, and he extended the idea vertically. Sections of the ceiling above them were removed, and the pipes, lines and ducts up there pushed aside where possible. Image enhancing equipment was pressed to the metal flooring above and slowly the floor of A deck was charted. Possible access points were noted but none of them seemed promising. Such was the size and disposition of the upper hold that the line between the footing of the bridgehouse itself and the open foredeck could be charted as well. When they traced the outer edge of the rear bridge sections, they discovered that the weather deck immediately behind the upper works appeared to be in a wind shadow similar to that which had protected Hero, This might allow a team to get up the back of the bridgehouse and break in unexpectedly from outside after all. But the only way of testing this was to do it, and risk potentially disastrous results.
The flooring was examined too, though as Richard had warned them, its composition made a way down through it unlikely. Instead he advised them to look near the central tower of the companionway, and there they discovered four hatches. The possibility of exploration in the lower hold was balanced against the possibility of infiltration and attack from the same quarter.
Next they turned
their attention to the pallets. They had trap doors as well as ladders built into them. The containers inside the pallets had trap doors also. All those opened and inspected contained Federal Motors off-road vehicles, and not even the most imaginative among them could think of a use to which such a squadron of vehicles could be put at the moment.
In the meantime, Op had been inspecting the videophone that Merrideth had pocketed earlier. Having completed a sweep of all the wavelengths in the nearby ether, he had tagged those being used by all the equipment aboard and was preparing to listen to everything broadcast in the ship, not just on the battle band of the personal radios carried by Dall’s men. And he flicked it on and off in short bursts to explore the areas it might observe, hopefully without alerting anybody as to its use.
All in all, a great deal of exploration was completed in a little under two hours and a range of possible actions was on the table for consideration when the next move in the game was made.
*
In sharp contrast the all the brightly-lit, highly organised activity in the upper hold, things in the lower hold were sadly antediluvian. Ann and Harry elected to leave the lights off, especially after the disturbing announcements over the tannoy. Once Dall had worked out the reversal in the light switching mechanism, the only illumination in the lower hold was a series of bright red dots high in the Stygian gloom which denoted the position and activity of the surveillance cameras. The women had neither the training nor the equipment to disable the cameras and so they preferred to remain in darkness.
As soon as it became clear that, whatever had been threatened in the tannoy message, they were not about to be pursued or recaptured, they began to explore.
Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9) Page 18