Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  “We seem to be in business,” he agreed.

  But then the twisted figure of Dall tore itself out of its seat, rushed across to Lobo and ripped the guard’s gun from his hands. Shouting obscurely and silently, the distorted figure rushed out of picture, firing wildly as he did so.

  “God!” wailed Harry. “Oh my God, what have I done?”

  “Just a minute,” urged Richard as though the people on the ruined monitor could hear and might obey. “Just hang on one minute here…”

  *

  On the bridge all hell was loose. As though the sudden malfunction of the anchor alarm had been a kind of trigger, the communications room exploded into frenetic activity the instant after it stopped shrieking.

  “Jesus! What the fuck is it now?” screamed Dall, unnerved by the lights and the sound.

  “I’d guess we just entered US territorial waters,” answered Bob, still frowning with concern over the anchor alarm.

  “O’Reilley, get your idle little ass into the communications room!” snarled Dall.

  “Sure, Captain. But what in hell’s name am I supposed to say?”

  “Keep your hands the fuck off or it’s Armageddon in here.”

  “Think they’ll buy it, Captain?” whined O’Reilley, obviously worried.

  “I do not give one good God-damn. It’s part of the plan and it’s an order. Now just fucking do it, will you?”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” muttered O’Reilley and sidled away.

  Dall swung round, hurling his whole body about as though he was paraplegic. “What was it with that alarm?” he demanded, following the direction of Bob’s distracted gaze.

  “I don’t know. Just a glitch, I expect,” said Bob dismissively, giving himself a very vigorous mental shake. It was one of three things, he calculated, and all of them could do him good. The machine was malfunctioning, which might somehow give them an edge if it continued or worsened. Or the anchors were actually loose and slipping, which would sure as hell slow them down at any moment now. Or someone was tinkering with the systems.

  There was no telling where things would end if that was the case. Given inspiration by the train of thought, he stole a secret glance up to the security camera in the corner. The red light was on. Curiouser and curiouser. He hoped it was Harry and Ann. More especially, vividly, he hoped it was Ann, safe and sound and sexy as ever…

  “Captain.” O’Reilley came out of the radio room quite pale and obviously shaken. “I got the Coastguard. I got the Civil Defence. I got the Navy and I got Strategic Air Command. One and all say they are getting ready to blow us straight out of the water unless we explain ourselves pretty fucking quick. I kid you not. What do I do?”

  “I’ll show you what the fuck to do!” snarled Dall, hurling himself to his feet. He strode across the bridge, tearing the semiautomatic rifle out of Lobo’s hand as he passed him.

  As though in slow motion, Bob turned, looking after the madman in stark disbelief. Lobo, too, turned, spun by the force of having his gun wrenched from his hands. O’Reilley took two steps away from the door and then literally dived for cover behind the watchkeeper’s chair. Dix, his eyes fastened on the collision alarm radar, began to straighten and his movement summoned Stubbs’s attention down out of the clouds.

  As he moved, Dall flicked a switch on the side of the gun and brought it up to his shoulder. Sighting down the barrel as he walked, he pulled the trigger and automatic fire blasted into the air. Hot shell cases arced across the bridge in a bright brass rainbow. A wall of smoke and sound came out of the little radio room, shot through with flashes of fire and shards of flying debris.

  “’Nuff said?” snarled Dall at the cowering O’Reilley in the instant of quiet before the fire alarms came on.

  Bob swept past Dall carrying the fire extinguisher and sprayed the little room. Every machine, every display, every dial was dead. No, not just dead. Destroyed. Black plastic lay shattered and smouldering. Glass lay strewn on the floor or stuck like quills into every surface. Wires lolled like eviscerated entrails, their bright plastic coatings giving disturbing impressions of blood and bodily fluids. It was the radiophonic equivalent of Golgotha in there. Golgotha burning. Bob sprayed the inert-gas electrical-safe foam in carefully practised swathes, burying the hissing obscenity. Dall might not be sane but he certainly wasn’t joking.

  The Coastguards and SAC could whistle after this. They could send the Nimitz out and no one aboard New England would know a thing about it until the first wave of F18s hit.

  But then, he thought, maybe Dall wasn’t all that mad after all. “Turn off the alarms, please, Mr Dix,” he called. Maybe it was all part of what was going on here, whatever the hell that was. He passed the empty extinguisher to Stubbs and said, calculatedly, to Dall, “Lucky that lot wasn’t wired to explode like the rest of the equipment, huh?”

  “Screw you!” spat Dall, chucking the empty gun at Lobo. But Bob got the impression that the pirate captain was more relaxed now, perhaps even grimly cheerful about the result of his outburst.

  When the pair of them were back at their accustomed places before the main command console, O’Reilley wormed his way out from under the watchkeeper’s chair and sneaked off the bridge. The moment he was out of sight, Dall said to Lobo, “I want him watched. The Devil finds work for idle hands.”

  As he finished speaking, Senator Charleston strode onto the bridge. His nose twitched at the telltale odour of powder and burning. “What were those shots?” he rasped. “Captain Dall — ”

  “It’s all right, Senator,” said Dall, unexpectedly placatory. “I lost my rag and shot the radio. No big deal. No one dead but the air. Lot of dead air now, though. Lot of deeply pissed people. Let’s see what they’ll do when we start playing hardball. Helmsman, let’s head five more degrees west, if you please.” The helmsman, GP Seaman Lee, looked at Bob as he always did when anyone else gave an order. As he did so, Lobo snapped a new clip into his gun with a crisp, threatening sound. Bob nodded, depression washing over him in reaction to the last few minutes’ action.

  New England’s sleek head swung obediently five more degrees west of south and she ploughed at a sharper angle towards the rocky coast of the United States, cutting down and in at one hundred miles an hour.

  *

  It began to register on Harry that Richard was telling her to hang on and not to jump to conclusions. And when she began to understand that Dall had been shooting at the radios and not at people, she returned to her accustomed calm and suggested they try one more test.

  Richard agreed. He raised the little hand-held radio he carried to his mouth and pressed the button to contact Merrideth.

  The machine spat in his ear — there was a strict radio regimen based on the SAS men’s assumption that O’Reilley and Dall would be monitoring them.

  “Listen. I’ve just seen Dall blowing up the radio shack,” said Richard.

  Silence.

  “He’s probably got equipment like this aboard and can still monitor us, I suppose, but the big stuff must all be gone. That’s why the fire alarms are going off. They’re hosing it out with the fire extinguisher now.”

  “Right. I hear you. Is that all? Over.”

  “No. Expect the hold-lights to flash in a while. We have to run one more test on equipment down your end before we risk overriding the rear door mechanism from here. Out.”

  The alarm stopped. Eventually the hold-lights flashed. Nothing blew up. All was right with the world.

  Richard left Harry calmly fiddling with the systems and went back to the holds. It was time to dole out the second to last dose of the medicines. As soon as he arrived in the pallet-sized bivouac, Merrideth said, “We’ve changed course.” He gestured with a black-gloved hand at the Magellan equipment. Richard could see at once that New England was moving significantly inwards. Before, they had been on a southerly heading. Now there was a decided western bias. The list of positions and the current reading formed charts in his mind: the looming coast of Nova Scoti
a; behind it, Maine. “You’d better get organised,” he observed dryly. “Your Friends will be calling soon, I should imagine.” As he spoke, the lights flickered again. Off…two…three…four…On.

  Merrideth’s pale, gaunt face turned up to the glare of the lighting. “We’re ready,” he said. “If she is.”

  “She’s as ready as she’ll ever be,” said Richard. “If she can make the lights flash she can open the rear doors.”

  “Then all we need is the word.”

  *

  The word came through as the first wave of jets came in over the top of them at zero feet three hours to the minute later, just as they passed south of Cape Sable, still at sixty-five degrees west, 350 miles out from Portland, Maine. Even had Dall been as cunning as Richard supposed and set one of his own radios to monitor the SAS wavelengths, the speed of the encrypted transmission combined with the sound of the jet fighters scant metres above the deck would have confounded him. Merrideth’s plan proceeded.

  Ann had spent much of the interim re-examining the armaments loaded in Ireland as a way to stop herself worrying about Bob. Her activity became hampered when Merrideth’s men began moving it back along the cargo deck. Whatever Dall might have booby-trapped out in the accommodation and command areas, he had not thought to set any traps down here, though much of the Semtex seemed to have radio-controlled detonators attached to it. The IRA, or their representatives, had been careful, orderly packers. Apart from the boxes which had fallen at the first acceleration, everything else remained shipshape and easy to handle. Ann lingered, watching the soldiers. The weapons they were clearing had been loaded aboard in lorries and on fork-lift trucks and so much of what was there had to be unpacked before it could be moved by hand. When they had cleared a sizeable space in front of the stern wall of the hold, they started to set up lynch points on the ceiling of the hold, almost as though they proposed to hang someone up there. Several people, in fact, for the rope-work stretched from one side of the hold to the other. Ann watched with the same slightly sickened fascination with which she had watched ants devouring the rotting corpse of a dead bird as a girl. The soldiers looked like black ants, swarming everywhere in silent indefatigable industry. Ann was rather relieved when Richard turned up. “What are they doing?” she demanded.

  “Hanged if I know,” he answered breezily, and involuntarily Ann’s eyes were drawn up to the strange series of lynch points again.

  Merrideth arrived then, with Mac at his side. He looked coldly at Ann and hesitated, clearly wanting to say something to Richard which he did not want her to hear. She looked him straight in the eye, smiled and waited.

  “We must be ready in one half-hour,” he said at last.

  “Ready for what?” asked Ann.

  How exactly like gun barrels his eyes look in this light, thought Richard as Merrideth stared at Ann.

  “Guests,” he said, articulating the word carefully, like an amateur auditioning for a part in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The effect was so theatrical that Ann looked questioningly at Richard.

  “Friends,” he confirmed, a little over-seriously.

  “You’re joking!” said Ann.

  “Why don’t you go and check on the prisoners, Ms Cable,” ordered Merrideth. “Newbold is busy and I think they need tending.”

  “Now just one goddam — ”

  “Ann,” said Richard gently, “I think it’d be for the best. Honestly. I really don’t think you can stay here. And our patients haven’t had anyone anywhere near them for hours.”

  Perhaps only Richard or Bob could have got away with it. The heady combination of Kilkenny and Calabria in her blood gave her the most volatile of tempers, but it also made her particularly susceptible to charm. “Well,” she temporised. “If you say so, Richard.”

  She went.

  Merrideth watched her striding across the hold and the minute she was beyond earshot he tapped the tab of his personal radio. “Bruce,” he spat. “Watch the tart.”

  The SAS corporal’s black figure casually detached itself from the bustle of the welcome preparations and drifted after Ann. Abruptly, Richard looked squarely into those gun-metal grey pupils. “What do you need now?” he demanded.

  Merrideth did not answer at once but met his gaze with silent calculation. “We’ve got to risk a radio message to Newbold,” he said at last. “Even if Dall is listening on his own 319s or 349s now that he’s blown the big stuff away, we still have to send one signal to Newbold. Something simple. One word. The equivalent of “Open sesame”. We’ve only got ten minutes — we have to time it exactly.” He checked his watch. Even though the face was upside down, Richard could see that he had set the minute counter to “countdown” and there were less than twenty minutes left.

  “It could be anything,” said Mac. “Sausages…”

  “How about just opening the channel like this?” suggested Merrideth.

  The radio by Richard’s ear hissed. “It’d only work if I had one of those 349s with an earpiece like yours,” he said. “And even then, only if there was dead silence.”

  “Which is too much to ask,” acknowledged Merrideth. “OK. Choose a word. Any word.”

  “Gate,” said Richard without thinking. Heaven’s Gate lurked at the back of his mind. The association seemed appropriate. The unease he felt about the place matched the current atmosphere aboard New England.

  Merrideth flinched, as though he had been struck. “What?” he spat.

  “I just thought Gate would do,” said Richard, surprised. “It means nothing. It’s an easy word to hear. Easier than Sausages. But if you don’t like it, choose your own.”

  “No,” said Mac gently. “It’s cool. Gate should be fine. What do you say, boss?”

  “Fine,” said Merrideth, as though he had never demurred. “Gate is fine.”

  “Right,” said Richard. “We’d better get weaving then. We’ve less than fifteen minutes, by the look of it.”

  *

  “So,” said Harry five minutes later, “I have about seven minutes to get into the cargo hatch program. Then when someone says Gate, I press OPEN LOWER and pray.”

  “That’s right,” said Richard. “Except that we all pray.”

  “Oh well, that’s all right then,” she said, busy already.

  The seven minutes passed in a flash. Richard had vaguely supposed that they would stretch out as though he was waiting for a kettle to boil or a tedious watch to end. But as Harry worked her way through the last of the password codes to gain control of the required programs, the situation became a race against time. “Delilah” had no sooner yielded than the call came in.

  “Why Delilah?” Richard was inquiring, intrigued.

  “She controlled Samson, didn’t she?”

  Then the radio spat: “Gate!”

  “Gate,” said Richard at once.

  Harry punched in the directive. “Right,” she said. “That’s it. Do you send an acknowledgement?”

  “No need,” said Richard. “Delilah should be letting Samson’s hair down even as we speak.” Suddenly filled with excitement, he got to his feet. “You want to see what’s happening?” he asked. “I mean, since we don’t seem to have blown up, you might like to take a look at what’s going on in the hold.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Harry. “It’ll be more boys with more toys. I think I’ll go and see how Angela’s doing. I haven’t been taking care of her…”

  *

  Richard arrived in the lower hold at a dead run. He burst through the door — though he could have come straight through the wall — and was pitched straight into a constricted tempest. The rear hatch, right across the width of the hold, was opening. As soon as the great drawbridge started to swing downwards, the jets immediately behind it cut off, but the jets above were still roaring at full blast and the ship was still surging forward at one hundred miles per hour. There was a hurricane of back draught washing in over the top of the slowly opening drawbridge, bringing with it a torrent of sp
ray from the water jets to either side. The thick, wet wind set everything in the hold dancing and flapping. It seemed to thicken the atmosphere into ancient bottle glass, whorled, impenetrable and green. It battered against Richard’s eardrums like drumsticks in his head, and fluttered in his heaving lungs like a flock of starlings taking flight. The atmosphere closed around him like a wild typhoon — but such storms, of course, were familiar to him. As bone-deep familiar as battle conditions were to the SAS men all around.

  Richard saw the hooked lines being shot in over the top of the lowering drawbridge to catch among the lynch points suspended from the decking above. As the rear wall continued to fall outwards and downwards, he saw the lines tauten and begin to bear weight as the first great packages of equipment streaked down the lines to break away and fall onto the foam-washed spaces cleared by the soldiers earlier.

  As the lines flexed and heaved and load after load thundered aboard, the SAS men in the hold struggled against that bottled hurricane to secure the equipment.

  And then, as the great bridge slammed down flat, the forward section of a great hovercraft travelling at jet speed appeared, terrifyingly close behind. Its forward deck, magically in still air just beyond the maelstrom of New England’s wash, was swarming with black figures. The lines coming into the high points were supplemented by lower lines which carried men. The soldiers in the hold all ran forward into the blast and gathered in dense groups around the landing sights where the men from the hovercraft would finish their wild ride aboard.

  Just how many Friends came aboard in those few frenetic moments Richard could not calculate. But he saw them in over the drawbridge as it reached the horizontal and he saw them come in over the top of it as it began to shut again, directed by the command bridge override. He saw the welcoming committees of SAS men collect them and hurry them away out of the blast until the drawbridge was too high for any more to make it in. Two men came towards him. Both were dressed in the black uniforms, gloves and balaclavas of the Special Forces. Both were running with water, battered breathless by the blast. One he recognised as Merrideth. The other, taller, gaunter, was a stranger.