Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  The ill-matched pair stopped directly in front of Richard, close enough for him to study the few details of face and eye visible behind the balaclava. He saw mottled black skin, the wide bridge of a thick nose, deep, thick-edged eye sockets surrounded by lined and mottled black skin. The eyeballs were the colour of pale egg yolk, the eyes so black it was hard to distinguish between pupil and iris. “So you’re Richard Mariner, are you? I hear you’ve been of some help here and I thank you. But we won’t need your help any more now. And when the action starts, stand well back out of it.”

  Richard’s teeth went on edge. He had not been addressed like this since his earliest days at Fettes College. But he held his peace and returned the black stare without flinching.

  The new man said, “You understand me?”

  Richard still did not answer. There was a silence behind which bustled the sounds of unpacking and the whine of the jets restarting.

  Merrideth said, “He understands, Marshall. Come on.”

  As the two men turned away, Richard allowed himself to relax a little, his mind racing. Merrideth and Marshall. The names went together in popular legend like Bonnie and Clyde, Robin Hood and Little John, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

  If Merrideth and Marshall were here, then doubtless all the legendary men from the British and American sections of 13 Int. were here as well — all who were still alive, at any rate. The Jellicoe Boys were back to full force.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Andrew Fawley, captain of the Heritage-Mariner super-cat Hero, met Robin Mariner, his boss and the wife of his boss, partway through the worst day of his life, about two and a half hours after he was placed under arrest. In the intervening time he had been hauled away from the breakfast table in the Dover hotel he usually patronised and read his rights at Dover central police station. He had been bundled, dazed and compliant, into the back of a police Rover and driven at speed to London. Two young men in dark suits and pale raincoats, who had flashed their warrant cards far too publicly for Andrew’s taste in the hotel dining room, remained with him through the initial process and the car ride. But they refused to clarify the charges, to explain his position or to reveal their destination to him. So he settled back and watched the road unreel past the windows, with no idea what on earth was going on, though he had a bone-deep, sick-making suspicion that it had something to do with Richard and the SAS men.

  The young policemen took him to New Street police station. All Andrew knew was that it was somewhere in London, over the river, north of the City, beyond St Paul’s, beside a huge, half-familiar railway station. His arrival was registered with the gaunt sergeant behind the reception desk. The sergeant took his watch, keys and tie; noted the fact that he wore no braces and had slip-on shoes. Andrew signed a docket to this effect. Then he was hurried to the holding area at the back of the police station, but not before he noticed a tall, tweedy man, startlingly out of place behind the desk, who glanced at him coldly and began to punch in numbers on a telephone as he was hurried away.

  At the end of a cream-painted corridor, Andrew found himself confronted by a large iron door. One of the young plainclothes officers inserted a key into its lock. Andrew assumed, almost with panic, that he was about to be secured in a cell, but when the door was opened he saw there was a table with a recording machine bolted securely to it and a range of chairs. An interview room, then. That was better, he thought. They ushered him in and left him there.

  At first, Andrew sank gratefully into one of the battered chairs, exhausted by the shock of what was happening to him. But he was an active man of generally forceful and commanding disposition. Soon restlessness began to fizz in him, and the beginnings of outrage. He rose and began to pace the room, not really taking in any details of the place, aware that he needed to order his thoughts. But as he paced, he became aware of a whining sound. It took a little while to cut through the blanket of his preoccupation but when it did, he looked up to find himself under the chilly scrutiny of a security camera. For some reason he found this particularly offensive and the passive machine formed a channel for his growing rage.

  “Now just you look here,” he began, bellowing up at the glassy eye of the lens, assuming there must be some kind of microphone behind it. “I don’t know who you think you are or what the hell you think you’re up to, but I — ”

  The door opened. A man and a woman entered, a couple Andrew was ever to remember as the bulldog and the Siamese cat. He was square, squat, deep-chested and many-jowled with an underslung jaw and a belligerent roll to his walk. She was taller, slighter, dressed in a business suit coloured somewhere between beige and cream with the faintest plain-chocolate stripe. Her hair, tights and shoes were one shade of brown away from black. Her eyes were the most extraordinary greeny-blue he had ever seen. She did not walk, she moved with something between a slither and a glide. When she sat — the bulldog remained bouncing on the balls of his feet — she placed a leather briefcase on the table, opened it and removed a folder of notes. Her movements were deft and precise. The tacky little room filled with the aroma of leather. She extracted a gold fountain pen and unscrewed the top. She slid a cassette tape out of a little pocket in the briefcase and slipped it into the machine. She looked up at Andrew, the light shimmering in those extraordinary eyes, then she snapped the cassette holder shut, glanced at a slim gold watch, and pressed Record.

  “Interview commenced at ten thirteen precisely,” she said in the accents of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. “Sergeant Bates and DCI Tracey in attendance. Captain Fawley, you were read your rights at Dover central at eight oh four this morning?”

  “Well, yes, but — ”

  “And you understand the nature of the charge?”

  “Well, actually…”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “I was charged with barratry! It’s like piracy. Something out of the age of sail. I didn’t know an offence with that name even existed anymore.”

  “Oh, sections of it still exist, Captain, though the offence itself was abolished by the Criminal Law Act of 1967. But that doesn’t stop people doing it. Like mutiny and piracy, it is still very current.”

  “Barratry of the master and mariners,” intoned Bates. “Any wrongful act willingly committed by the captain or crew to the prejudice of the owner — ”

  “Oh, come on, Inspector Tracey! What exactly am I supposed to have done?”

  “In that you did,” said Sergeant Bates formally, “on the sixteenth day of this month take the super-cat Hero, property of the Heritage Mariner Shipping Company, and, without due recourse to required company procedure, or to required pilotage customs, or to registered shipping directions in force for the Channel and the Western Approaches, take the said vessel at maximum speed into international waters, having taken aboard person or persons unknown for purposes deemed to be detrimental to the interests of the owners.”

  “That’s pompous bullshit. I did what I did, in contravention of whatever procedures, customs, directions or whatever, under the direct and personal orders of the owner, Captain Richard Mariner. Who, I might add, was transferred out of Hero safe and sound with the others.”

  “Captain Fawley,” purred Tracey’s voice with gentle insistence, “we have in our possession records from the Dover Port Authority and a range of other authorities along the coast which establish what Hero did, and we have witnesses who say that she did it while under your command. The ship’s movement records and log books, however, make no mention of the mysterious little trip you took, or of the presence aboard of Captain Mariner or of anybody else.”

  “The master must keep an official log,” observed Bates. “And this, with the ship’s papers, he must guard and show to the proper officers when required to do so.”

  “Yes, Sergeant, I am aware of that, but under the circumstances — ”

  “And what circumstances are those, Captain Fawley?” demanded DCI Tracey.

  “This is ridiculous! I was assured by Captain Mariner that this situation
could not arise, that using Hero to help the SAS…”

  Two pairs of eyes seemed to pierce Andrew as he said this. The red-rimmed bulldog brown ones were bad enough but the icy Siamese ones were really unnerving. He stopped speaking, a dull, formless dread filling him. This must be even worse than he had supposed. He took a deep breath. “I’m not saying one more word without my solicitor, a representative of my professional association or of the owners here with me,” he said.

  A minute later he made the acquaintance of Robin Mariner. She slammed the heavy metal door open as though it had no weight at all, then slammed it shut and leaned back against it. Her eyes were the most unnerving of all.

  DCI Tracey leaned towards the cassette recorder. “Owners’ representative Captain Robin Mariner entered the room at ten twenty-four,” she said.

  Robin was slighter than Andrew had pictured her. But she was burning with an energy jarringly at odds with her physical appearance. In a manner not even the Siamese cat could emulate, she dominated the room. Sparks seemed to fly from the busy gold ringlets of her hair and the long, grey-blue eyes. Her jaw was square, and right now her lips were thin. She paid no attention whatsoever to the two other people in the room and came at Andrew all guns blazing.

  “Right!” she snapped. “Let’s get on with this. You’d better have some pretty good explanations for all this, Captain, or I’ll charge you with a damn sight more than barratry. My husband was aboard, you say? And you were acting directly under his orders?”

  “Well, yes. You see…” Andrew explained about the midnight summons, the tense briefing, the secret preparations, the mad dash westwards.

  “Typical,” she filmed. “This is just flaming typical! Bloody man!”

  Andrew explained about the clandestine assignation by the prison ship Alcatraz, about the mysterious strangers, and their Special Forces kit.

  “It’s like Ian bloody Fleming!” said Robin.

  “More like Andy McNab!” corrected Bates, earning himself a withering look from both the women and a rather more grateful one from Andrew.

  “Can you describe this so-called Special Forces team?” asked DCI Tracey, her tone making clear her scepticism.

  “No. I never saw them up close. But I know who they were.”

  “Who?”

  “They were the Jellicoe Boys.”

  “Who?” demanded the young inspector.

  Andrew looked across at Bates, seeking some understanding, some sharing of the revelation. “The Jellicoe Boys. The Special Forces team from the Gulf War. You must have heard of them! They were almost as famous as Bravo Two Zero!”

  “How do you know this?” demanded Bates, his voice dry.

  “Richard told me. Then he went off with them. Asked me to wait five days before I told anyone…Still a while to go, you see.”

  “Richard went off with a bunch of strangers? Out of the blue? Just like that? That’s inconceivable, even for him!” said Robin caustically.

  “No, he had met one of them at a briefing in London. What was his name? Merrideth, I think.”

  This revelation gave Andrew’s interrogators pause. This was something of a relief to him, until his active imagination presented his mind with a couple of extremely disturbing possibilities. Either Merrideth was someone else disguised well enough to fool even Richard, or Merrideth was not the powerful official he had presented himself as being. Andrew’s fear for Richard increased, and it jolted his memory. “Richard mentioned someone else,” he added, inspired. “The person I was to contact. He was a wedding guest at Sir William’s reception aboard. The one who was called off to Ireland — something about Black Talons?”

  “Bull?” said Robin, more than a little off balance herself now.

  “Bull got him into this?” She slapped her forehead — hard enough to be audible. Andrew had heard of the gesture but he had never seen it done. “Of course!” she said. “Who else could? It had to be. We’ve got to — ”

  “Sir Justin has vanished,” said DCI Tracey quietly, and Andrew at once began to suspect that, like Merrideth apparently, she was something other than she seemed to be. “He disappeared on the night this phase of the incident began. There’s been no word. No sign.”

  This phase? thought Andrew. This phase? “And what incident is this?” he demanded. “Something rather larger than bloody barratry, I imagine.”

  Tracey reached over towards the cassette recorder. Her long, slim fingers hovered over the Off switch. “Interview terminated at ten forty,” she said.

  *

  They left Andrew there for another hour during which time his temperature rose and his self-control diminished. He was an outdoor sort. A captain. A man with a lively sense of justice, which he exercised to the benefit of his commands and expected to have equal benefit of himself. And yet here he was, confined in a small interview room, being bossed about by jobsworth officials, undergoing a very unjust experience at the hands of the woman from whom he should have been able to expect maximum help and support but who, it now seemed, had had him arrested and brought here instead. He had mentally rehearsed several increasingly acrimonious letters of resignation and was just adding a postscript to the last threatening extensive legal action of his own when the door opened again.

  It was a different Robin who came in this time. He had met the high-powered, ruthless and decisive business executive. Now he was to be introduced to the gentle, kindly, understanding wife and mother. She came in with a large tray laden with an electric kettle, a teapot, a jar of excellent instant coffee, milk, cream, sugar, a packet of ginger nuts and another of chocolate digestives. “I know it’s well past coffee time,” she said, “but I thought you could probably do with a little something.”

  “What I could do with,” he grated with unaccustomed rudeness, “is an explanation followed by some kind of apology.”

  Robin pulled out the cassette recorder’s plug and replaced it with the kettle’s. It began to grumble as the water heated. “Of course I apologise,” said Robin. “I am very sorry for several things. I am sorry Richard got you mixed up in this, whatever this actually is. I am sorry that you were summarily arrested. And I am sorry that I was not more supportive when I arrived. Coffee or tea?”

  “Tea. Strong. Please.”

  “A man after my own heart.” She busied herself with the tea things, her eyes lowered as she continued, “I cannot tell you exactly what is going on, however, because no one in authority seems to know.”

  Andrew digested this nugget while she poured hot water into the pot and let it heat through. “How could they not know about the pirating of a ship, the kidnapping of crew and guests, contacts with the IRA or whoever and heaven knows what else besides?”

  “Oh, they seem to know about all that,” she said, pouring the hot water back out of the pot carefully down the spout of the kettle, and reaching for the tea caddy as the water came back up to the boil. “But they say it all happened in international or foreign waters. The only thing that has happened within British jurisdiction is that a couple of corpses have washed up somewhere in Ulster. They have consulted the authorities in the Republic of Ireland.” She measured three heaped spoonfuls of black tealeaves into the gently fuming pot. “And they are in contact with the authorities in America, where New England seems to be headed.”

  The kettle boiled again and Robin poured the bubbling water over the leaves in the teapot.

  “But the problem is, no one in authority here seems to have been asked for official help of any sort by anyone. Intelligence and Security have monitored the situation. The Cabinet Office has received reports. But no action has been deemed appropriate. Milk?”

  Andrew nodded.

  Robin poured. “Stirling Lines has not been contacted. The SAS has not sent anyone out.”

  The tea, Andrew noted approvingly, was slightly lighter in colour and liquidity than creosote. Even when mixed with the milk, it remained the colour of teak. He reached for a ginger nut and dunked it thoughtfully. “But Merrideth,�
�� he said. “The Jellicoe Boys.”

  Robin looked up, her eyes luminous, fathomless, full of worry.

  “The British contingent of the Sabre Squadron was apparently disbanded soon after the end of the Gulf War,” she said quietly. “Something terrible happened during the final days of the conflict. Something very secret so I have no details. But something so bad that it has affected them all. Physically. Mentally. All of them, including Major Merrideth. They’ve been invalided out for years. Institutionalised, some of them. They are very sick men indeed. They may have managed to keep enough contacts and get access to enough information to fool Sir Justin and Richard. But they’re nothing to do with the British authorities. And no one seems to have any idea what they’re up to.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  As the great drawbridge closed behind them, Merrideth and Marshall, without apparently exchanging a word, moved off. They stepped through the wreckage of the wall and went to the foot of the main companionway up into the accommodation and command areas. Intrigued, though still fuming at Marshall’s patronising orders, Richard followed them and no one tried to stop him. At the foot of the half-ruined stairway he joined the two soldiers who were still deep in their apparently communicative silence.

  “You any idea what the son of a bitch is up to?” grated Marshall at last.

  Merrideth shook his head.

  “I guess it’s time to go ask him.”

  Merrideth nodded.

  “Your boys armoured?”

  Again, the infinitesimal nod.

  “Fully kitted?”

  “Yup.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Command bridge. Closing the back door.”

  “Let’s call the bastard’s bluff.” As he spoke, the American gave a shrug, easing his own black body armour across his massive torso.

  The pair of them started up the stairs, walking steadily, making no attempt to use anti-personnel tactics. The only gesture they made towards the seriousness of their situation was the fact that they both pulled out their side arms. Marshall held his in his left hand while he carefully fed the gloved fingers of his right into the trigger guard and round the grip.