Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  “Just the docking facility?”

  “So they want to load and unload something more?”

  “They did enough of that in Ireland, surely.”

  “Maybe they need more supplies of something easier to get here than in Ireland.”

  “That could be anything from doughnuts to drugs,” said Ann.

  “I thought I saw a gas bowser start up the deck on our way in here,” volunteered Harry, whose eyes had been busy.

  “Yes, I saw one too,” said Bob. “What would they want petrol for? Did anyone else notice this?”

  A couple of the others thought they had, then Airs Charleston ventured, “I think Harry’s right about the bank truck too. I certainly saw some kind of armoured car.”

  “Well, there you go,” said the Senator. “Gas and dollars. Two things which are definitely in greater supply here than in Ireland.”

  “They’re not going to like that,” said Harry suddenly.

  It was such an unexpected observation that it brought the other speculation to a halt.

  “Who’s not going to like what?” asked Ann.

  “Well, the only reason a bank truck could be in a place like this is if someone hijacked it.”

  “That seems likely,” said Ann. “They’ve had no qualms about hijacking a whole great ship, after all. So?”

  “Well, if the Special Forces men are staying aboard New England the money in the bank truck must be for the mercenaries — for Pitman and the others. I bet they’ll just pull them off New England, hand them their cash and wave them bye bye. But they’re not going to like being paid in stolen money. That’s all I meant. They’re not going to like it at all.”

  “Right,” agreed Bob. “But they won’t be able to do anything about it, will they? Really only Dall had the forethought to organise any comebacks. Which may be another reason Marshall killed him out of hand like that.”

  The others nodded in silent agreement. Except for Harry. “Oh no,” she said quietly. “Dall wasn’t the only one who could organise a little comeback.”

  The door slammed open and two guards ushered Richard in at gunpoint to join the others at last. There was a general movement of relief and welcome. Richard was eager to tell them what he had discovered about their captors, and as soon as he had their attention, he began. “Right. The situation is this. In the latter stages of the Gulf War, the Jellicoe Boys were tricked by some sort of smooth operator pretending to work for UNICEF. The outcome was that they spent the whole night of the invasion of Kuwait fighting a bloody retreat along a long spit of land called the RasAl’I.”

  “No wonder they’re bitter,” mused Ann.

  “It gets worse,” warned Richard. “The Ras Al’I has been a leper colony since the Middle Ages. It was only closed in the nineteen twenties. Their retreat has infected them with a mutant bacillus. They aren’t infectious. They’re absolutely clear about that and I believe them. But they’ve all got it and they’re all dying.”

  “Oh my Lord!” said Mrs Charleston, her ready sympathy engaged far more swiftly than her senses of horror, disgust or self-preservation. “Those poor boys…”

  “But don’t you see?” spat Dix in outrage. “They’re lepers! Lepers.”

  “Lepers with a mission,” said Richard quietly. “And whatever that mission is, I am personally very keen to screw it up if I possibly can. I’ve been made to look a fool by these people and I don’t like it. I’ve been lied to and used. And you’ve all been put through a thoroughly unpleasant experience. What’s more, there’s a fair chance most of your careers will be ruined with this lot on your references. Jet-Ship Inc. will be lucky if it doesn’t face a massive lawsuit from Federal Motors for the loss of those cars, and what the insurance boys are going to make of this I hesitate to think. All of our lives are going to be greatly complicated courtesy of this little lot and I personally would be happy to get some retaliation in if I can.”

  “The problem is,” said Mrs Charleston, “even if you could break out of here — which looks impossible to me — you’d probably only succeed in getting yourself killed, wouldn’t you, Captain Mariner? And what sort of revenge would that be?”

  “You’re right, Mrs Charleston. If I do manage to formulate a plan, I’d be very careful indeed about how I put it into action. I would like to know what Merrideth and Marshall are up to and I would go to most lengths short of death to stop them if I could.”

  “Well, it seems to me,” said Senator Charleston slowly, “that they’re getting ready to take New England into battle. Why else would they have taken aboard all those arms in Ireland?”

  “And not just arms,” added Ann who had explored the lower hold most thoroughly. “Some of those containers contain explosives. It all looks to be the same and the bits of it I managed to get closest to seem to be Semtex.”

  “If you’re right,” said Bob, “there must be a thousand pounds of the stuff, maybe more.”

  “That’d make a big bang,” said Richard. “But even that much Semtex isn’t going to amount to a hell of a lot unless it’s set off in a special place or in a certain way.”

  “Or unless it’s used as an accelerator of some sort,” said Bob. “I mean, if Harry’s right and they’ve a warehouse full of petrol bowsers out there, they could turn New England into one heck of a Molotov cocktail.”

  “Big enough to take out a couple of city blocks,” agreed Richard.

  “A couple of city blocks in Atlantis maybe,” said Dix. “I mean, where else would they be able to take it?”

  “Anywhere with an inland waterway, of course,” said Harry rather fiercely. “We were supposed to be on our way into Philadelphia. If they actually took her in there, they could blow away a good piece of Wilmington, Gloucester City or Camden if they wanted.”

  “Would anybody notice?” sneered Dix dismissively.

  “Harry’s right,” said Richard. “If they filled the upper hold full of petrol and sailed her into a waterway at the heart of a big city they could do an enormous amount of damage.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” said Dix. “What city has a waterway wide enough to allow them to move at anything like full speed? A city that counts, I mean? If they’re not going to go at full speed, why take New England in the first place? And what’s to stop the Coastguard boarding them? And even if they are going at full speed up this big waterway through this big important city, what’s to stop Strategic Air Command from blowing the crap out of them?”

  “Well,” said Ann, “they’ve a fair number of Stinger rocket systems in the lower hold. A Stinger would make most things think twice, even jets out of SAC I should imagine.”

  “Oh, this is just fucking fantasy!” said Dix. “I mean you haven’t even answered my first point! Where are they going to go at one hundred miles an hour? The Hudson fucking river? Niagara, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Where they were practising for in Ireland. Wherever Heaven’s Gate was standing in for,” said Harry.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, woman,” bellowed Dix. “That was a different set of people!”

  “But it was the same ship,” she shouted back. “It was the same guidance system. The same computers. Dall programmed them at Heaven’s Gate for these people! Don’t you see? He programmed my computers to take New England somewhere with millimetre precision at one hundred miles an hour whether there’s someone at the helm or not. Somewhere that has the same layout, the same structure, the same conditions, islands, the same — ”

  “The same name,” said Richard remembering suddenly Merrideth’s strange reaction to the code-name “Gate”. “The same name or near as dammit. My God, I think I know where they’re going.”

  CHAPTER XX

  “Hell Gate is here,” Richard said, pointing to a section of a rough map drawn on the cleared table top. “Where the East River narrows down at Ward’s Island. The Triborough Bridge goes over it, stepping onto the island and running up to the expressway and St Mary’s Park. There’s a point which pushes out into the river qui
te a way, here, making it narrow and fastrunning. Almost like rapids when the tide’s moving. Hence the name. Then immediately to the south there’s the north-eastern end of Roosevelt Island. What’s the road that runs down the east coast of Manhattan Island here?”

  “Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive,” supplied Senator Charleston. “It sits a couple of metres above the high-water mark. Some of it’s pretty open on the river side. It has eight lanes. Backed by high-rises. The odd park.”

  Even Dix was paying attention now, peering at the makeshift map of New York City.

  “And here?” asked Richard. “On the Brooklyn side, south of the point?”

  “Vernon Boulevard,” answered Ann. Richard glanced up, alerted by something in her voice. Raised in the Hollywood Hills, she had adopted New York as her home and workplace, and she loved the vibrant city with all the fervour of an immigrant.

  “OK,” he proceeded. “The Queensborough Bridge comes over here, steps over Roosevelt Island and then on westwards over Roosevelt Drive.”

  “It joins Second Avenue, just north of 57th Street,” said Ann.

  “Right. Then on south we get the end of Roosevelt Island, and the next hazard for shipping as I remember it is the Queens Midtown Tunnel which joins the Long Island Expressway with 34th Street here.”

  “I’m due to be here tomorrow,” said Senator Charleston suddenly, apparently apropos of nothing. His long finger indicated a point just north of the angle made by the tunnel and Roosevelt Drive, on what was effectively the eastern coast of Manhattan Island.

  “Why is that?” asked Richard.

  “Big reception at the United Nations. They’re swearing in the first ever American Secretary General tomorrow night. Great big fireworks party, the lot. Everyone who is anyone in the UN will be there, plus invited guests. Biggest occasion in the UN”s history, so I’m told. Though I think they could have got a better man for the job than Hiram Hoover. Still — ”

  “Wait!” said Richard. “Who did you say, Senator?”

  “Hiram Hoover,” repeated the Senator, mildly surprised. “You’ve heard of him surely. He must know where the body’s buried with a vengeance. I can’t say I’ve ever warmed to the man but he must have something to have been accepted as the first American Secretary General…”

  “Let me get this quite clear,” said Richard slowly. “This is the same Hoover who came up through UNESCO?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” confirmed the Senator. “How did the Post put it? “Out of total obscurity and into the brightest spotlight on earth…” Something of the sort. He did good work in the Gulf, I understand.”

  “That’s it,” said Richard. “That has to be the trigger. And he’s the target.” He looked around the assembled faces. “It was Hoover,” he said. “He was the man from UNESCO who sent the Jellicoe Boys onto the Ras Al’I. The UN building’s not far from Hell Gate and New England has been programmed to take them in through Hell Gate at full speed, so they must be planning to go in there. And maybe come out again, but I doubt it.”

  They looked at each other, stunned by the enormity of their conclusions.

  “So, what are we going to do about it?” asked Ann.

  “What can we do?” demanded Dix. “We can’t get out of this room. Look at it, it’s a bond store. Thick brick walls, concrete floor, iron-bound door. Solid roof. No windows. We might as well be gold bricks in Fort Knox. Even if we could find some way out, we’d like as not get shot like Captain Dall. The only way we’re likely to survive out there is if these SEALs and their Limey leper buddies have gone. No disrespect, Captain Mariner. Then what do we do anyway? We’re in the back of beyond, by the look of things. We walk out to civilisation and try and raise the alarm. Like maybe in a week’s time or so.”

  “Yes,” said Richard. “They must reckon it’ll take us too long to get out of here to be in time to raise the alarm. The only other course of action guaranteeing absolute security would be to kill us all, and they could have done that more easily and efficiently long ago.”

  “What about Dall’s men?” said Bob. “They’ll presumably be sent on their way once they’ve been paid, but that seems a bit risky.”

  “Particularly if they’re paid off in hot money, like Harry said,” observed Ann. “The minute they try to spend it they’re liable to be picked up. And if they are arrested they’ll tell everything they know.”

  “So if Merrideth and Marshall aren’t worried about that then they expect whatever they’re doing to be over by the time that happens, or at least too far advanced to stop,” said Richard. “That sounds like a twenty-four-hour time frame to me.”

  “But I still don’t get it,” said Dix. “I mean, how can they let us go? We can identify them. Especially you. Captain Mariner. You can identify almost all of them.”

  “But that doesn’t matter, does it? The men I can identify aren’t coming back alive. Hiram Hoover’s adventure for the Jellicoe Boys in the Gulf has turned them into a bunch of terminal lepers. They’ve nothing to live for. But it seems they’ve found something to die for.”

  “But their friends, family…”

  “Someone related probably works pretty high up either in Jet-Ship Inc. or in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Miles, can you remember anyone mentioning to you that they were related to a Gulf War veteran? Especially, I should think, someone who’s just left your employ and maybe even dropped out of sight.”

  The professor shook his head and continued to stare at Richard’s roughly sketched map. “What you’re saving,” he said, in the voice of a man contemplating the death of a loved one, “is that these lunatics are turning New England into a huge bomb and tomorrow night they plan to go charging at full speed into the middle of New York City where they are going to blow the hell out of themselves, the United Nations and anyone nearby.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Richard.

  “Then you have to stop them.”

  “Excuse me?” said Ann, taken aback by the childlike demand in the professor’s voice.

  “Captain Mariner brought them aboard. He helped them gain control of my ship. Now that they have control they’re going to destroy it and maybe kill hundreds of people and it’s his fault. He’s responsible. He’s got to stop them. You’ve got to stop them, Captain Mariner.”

  Ann and Bob gaped at him, shocked by the accusation in his voice and by his selfish twisting of the facts.

  “Like I said, I was thinking the same thing myself,” responded Richard quietly. “What sort of people are we if we sit here and do nothing? In two days’ time there’ll be reports in the newspapers and on the news channels about all the people killed by this bunch of madmen in New England and we’ll go through the rest of our lives thinking that we might have done something to slow them down or stop them. And we did nothing. I couldn’t live with a thought like that.”

  “Better be ready to die with it, then,” said Dix soberly. “If they catch you trying anything, they’ll kill you out of hand.”

  “We can cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Richard. “We start our own game in safe waters and see how far we can get. They won’t kill us just for speculating and planning. If we can settle on a course of action which has a chance of succeeding at relatively low risk, we can weigh the odds and think about moving past the planning stage. For now let’s just organise what we know, assess what we can do and start to make a plan.”

  *

  Most of the crew were shocked and apathetic, active only in their fierce wish to remain inactive. They slowly withdrew to the piles of bedding, taking food and drink with them. The rest gathered round the table, discussing alternatives and examining possibilities. Dix, with Stubbs in tow, crossed to the door to keep an ear, if not an eye, on what was happening outside.

  As the evening wore on, some sort of plan did begin to emerge. Like one of Merrideth’s classic military stratagems, it had three parts. Get out of the bond store. Get aboard New England unobserved. Stop the attack. So
elegant. So simple. And absolutely impossible to carry out. There was no way out of the store. A thorough check was undertaken by Bligh’s engineers under Engineering Officer Macleod. They were trapped and that was that. Dix observed, through a crack in the rusting though still solid door, that there was so much activity on the quayside between them and the ship that they would stand no chance of getting across to her unnoticed.

  If they could overcome these obstacles, getting aboard might be feasible. The doors in the side were open. The upper tailgate was down. Pallets of Federal Motors four by fours were being replaced by petrol tankers in the holds. And, observed Professor Miles, even had these access points been secured, there were other ways into the hull if New England was tied up at the dock. The deck hatches Merrideth’s men had used with Richard could be reached from the main or after decks. There were doors and more hatches in the bridgehouse, though access to some of them was complicated by the absence of external companionways. The big cradles in the side containing the lifeboats were also accessible from outside, but, again, only if the ship was at rest against a dock or platform at the correct height, for there was no way up and down the sleek composite hull. If all else failed, a couple of people could conceivably climb the anchor chain and sneak into the chain locker through the hawseholes, which was how rats traditionally came aboard.

  Once aboard, there were only a limited number of ways to stop New England. Both the engine room and the engine control room would doubtless be manned and guarded, so they considered the possibility of breaking into the lower hold and making use of some of the explosives. They discussed the idea at some length before they realised that no one had the faintest notion how to make a bomb. Breaking into the communications somehow and signalling for help was not an option either because Dall had blown the radio shack away. And in any case, like all the major equipment aboard not secured in the engineering areas, the remaining radio equipment was on the bridge where the bulk of the soldiers was bound to be. So if they couldn’t switch off the engines or blow them up or send for help, what was left?