Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  Computers. Harry, for reasons of her own, had already said that if anyone else was going to go aboard, she wanted to go with them. Gaining access to the computers would be even more difficult than climbing like a rat through a hawsehole into the chain locker, but the fact was, only Harry’s computers, the web of machines accessible from any point by any strand, seemed to offer any possibility of hope. This brought them right back to square one, for of course there was no hope at all if they could not get out of the building they were in and across to the ship.

  At this point Dix, still on look-out by the door, noticed an abrupt change in the tempo of work outside, as though a close deadline had suddenly been moved much nearer. Then, over the dockside noise of machines and orders came a massively amplified voice followed by a vicious fusillade of shots. Out of the night sky a helicopter swooped downwards, searchlight ablaze. The men on the dockside froze, then their activity became frenetic. Another fusillade of shots rang out and the helicopter soared upwards and away.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” yelled Dix. “I think the FBI just arrived!”

  Richard was at his side in an instant and straining to see through the crack in the door. “But they’re too late to stop New England!”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Christ, I wish there was some way through this door. They’re far too busy to bother with us now. We could maybe make a difference if — ”

  “Someone’s coming!” hissed Dix.

  A pair of legs in black Danner boots and camouflage trousers filled the crack they were looking through. Two bolts slammed back and the door burst inwards. A square, solid, familiar figure filled the doorway Blonde hair glinted in the light. Blue eyes raked across their incredulous faces. “MOVE!” yelled Pitman. “It’s going to hell in a handcart out here and you really do not want to be caught in the middle!”

  The better part of twenty people ran out of the building and headed inland. Pitman was already moving in the opposite direction when she noticed that a group of people led by Richard were also heading out towards the ship.

  New England was obviously preparing for a rapid exit from Great Egg Head. Her tailgate was closing, the gangplank fell just as the party arrived, and the door in New England’s side slammed shut. The after line was a pile of cable on the quayside as they leaped over it, sprinting down the ship’s side, Richard’s knees beginning to complain for all that he kept himself generally fit and active. Then Professor Miles was out in front, reaching up to grab a handhold in the sleek side of his brainchild. New England was not moving forward yet, but her side was no longer snugly up against the buffers. Her fore lines were still attached, seven hundred metres further down the quay, but her hull was swinging outwards onto the tide. Alan Miles was swung upwards and outwards over the water as his grip twisted the handle he had caught. And as it did so, a panel in the ship’s side swung out and down, dropping him back onto the quay. There in a great cradle, her davits automatically swinging out over the dockside, lay one of the lifeboats. “Up!” gasped the professor. “Up and in!”

  Pitman needed no second bidding. The FBI helicopter was on its way back behind them, the accusing finger of its searchlight rapidly approaching. She was into the boat in a second. With no hesitation she swarmed forward to grab at the handle which would close the cradle again. Bob Stark swung up into the little craft and turned automatically to catch at the next arm behind him. By the time Pitman had the lever in her hand, Richard was aboard and both men were reaching back.

  The soldier releasing the fore line turned and loosed a stream of bullets at the FBI helicopter, making it pull upwards. New England began to gather way. The shoulders of the two men in the lifeboat threatened to pop with the strain as they hauled Ann Cable and Harry Newbold aboard. Then New England was moving too fast for human legs to follow and Pitman had pulled the handle. Wind thundered over the closing cradle and the five boarders huddled down into the bilge of the lifeboat.

  On the quayside, Alan Miles fell gasping to his knees. It was fortunate he did so, for as he fell forward, the air immediately above his head was blasted into a writhing inferno by New England’s outer jets. A horrific thundering came and went in the professor’s reeling consciousness and he found it difficult to breathe. Then the outwash of New England’s water jets came pouring down upon him like the wrath of a tropical storm. After that was silence, largely because the professor had been temporarily deafened.

  After a while he stirred and rolled into a sitting position. Then he began to pull himself erect, but as he did so a hurricane wind battered him to the ground again as the FBI helicopter landed not far from him. Doggedly, indomitably, Professor Miles began to haul himself into the blast. “Help!” he called. “You must help. I know exactly where they’re going and I know what they’re planning to do!”

  *

  Hiram Hoover’s office in the United Nations building sat on the north-east corner of the fortieth floor. Its windows looked down across the plaza and Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive to the East River. The view east was spectacular. In the middle distance Southpoint, the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, parted the slow mahogany water, and the sprawling ruins of the old sanatoriums, hospitals and laboratories that had stood there for a century mouldered picturesequely in ten acres or so of weeds and wisteria. Here the men from Macey’s fireworks department were busy preparing the display they would set off tonight at midnight, a display set to outdo any they had ever presented for New Year’s Day or the Fourth of July. Beyond lay the bustling heave of Queens, and beyond that the rest of Long Island. The view north was striking also, the perspectives of FDR Drive, the long, slim island and the narrow, busy river seeming to pull the arch of the Triborough Bridge closer as though the very geography of New York wanted to bring Hell Gate a little closer too.

  The windowed corner framed Hoover’s shoulders as he faced the room. The decade since the Gulf War had added to his stature and his consequence. He had become fat and pompous. “So what you’re saying,” he said to the men from FBI and UN security, “is that I have to tell the President, the ex-President of South Africa, seven premiers and a dozen prime ministers, their parties and their families that the reception and inauguration tonight are cancelled. I have to call up the Mayor, the City Council, the fire service and the police and tell them there will be no party tonight, take down all the bollards, pack up the bunting, and cancel the overtime. I have to contact every celebrity invited from Tom Hanks to Elton John and say sorry, guys, we have to take a raincheck on this. I have to call up every fucking news network from here to Ho Chi Minh City and explain that the fireworks are off after all. And all of this because half a dozen Gulf War vets have hijacked a boat down in Great Gatsby country. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “There’s more to it than that, sir. The ship is full of explosives. It’s incredibly advanced, fast and dangerous. They’re well-armed and apparently they have nothing to lose. And they’re coming here, sir. To Hell Gate, at least. And to be fair, sir, the Jellicoe Boys are more than just a bunch of vets.”

  Hoover’s eyes narrowed. “They were good ten years ago,” he said. “In the winter of ninety-one, 13 Int. were the best. Now they’re has-beens. Sick has-beens. You stop them. Or you kill them. I’ll be damned if I’m going to cancel my party.”

  *

  “He’ll be damned if he doesn’t,” said the security man in the elevator on the way back down. “What’ve you actually got that’ll stop these guys if push comes to shove?”

  “The Coastguard, the Navy and the Strategic Air Command, if we can get the clearances in time.”

  “You’re keeping a close eye on them and all your options open?” The UN security chief was responsible for what happened in the secretariat building, the General Assembly building, the conference building, the Hammarskjold library, and that was it. His power and authority did not stretch to First Avenue and certainly not to the East River. His ass was on the line here, he knew; and his power was absolutely zero.

/>   “Close eye,” said the FBI man with unexpected sympathy. Unexpected sympathy but not a lot of veracity. The FBI were being fed information from SAC and the Coastguard. SAC had the ship on its satellite-generated map of the East Coast area, but New England’s signal moved erratically and flickered wilfully as her automatic identification beacon struggled to function — presumably because 13 Int. had attempted to deactivate it but with only partial success. It wasn’t much, thought the FBI man, but any sign of a mistake or weakness in what appeared to be a faultless operation so far had to be encouraging. The Coastguard had New England on their long-wave radar, but again only sporadically. Because of the composition of the ship’s hull, it treated radar waves much as it treated magnetic force — in a strange and unpredictable manner. The FBI man’s director, who had been in charge of the assault on Great Egg Head, had attended a short briefing by the Coastguard and had been told that should New England come anywhere near full speed, she might effectively become a Stealth ship as far as coastal defences were concerned. Indeed, she had dropped off their charts and disappeared altogether once so far, only to turn up again at Great Egg Head, providentially before anything too disastrous had happened — and having the ship placed there, apparently immobile, had prompted immediate FBI action. It had seemed like over-kill at the time. Now it looked like too little too late.

  The FBI man was not happy about the current situation or Hoover’s reaction to it. He felt that he had been too lightweight a messenger. But he knew that the next few men up the pecking order were briefing more senior dignitaries. The United States may have paid the UN all its outstanding contributions and the organisation might have reacted by proposing an American Secretary General, but there was still something fundamentally un-American and suspicious about it, and not just in the FBI man’s mind either. Still and all, Hoover was going ahead with his party, so the FBI”s duty was clear.

  As he stepped out of the elevator, the FBI man tapped the pressel on his personal radio. “He’s going ahead,” he said to the team parked outside on the corner of First and 42nd.

  “You can’t use that in here,” said the UN security man, without thinking.

  The FBI man stopped in the middle of the concourse and turned. He looked like what he was, very Brooks Brothers, very Men in Black. He turned heads among the bustling crowd. “Do tell,” he said.

  There was a moment of silence. Then the security man asked, “What about the civilians? The ones who went back aboard?”

  Again, the FBI man seemed to react with unexpected humanity. “We’ll do our best, of course,” he said. “If we send in the SEALs, they’ll be briefed. They’ll be careful and we’ll have to hope none of the bystanders get into the line of fire. It’s all we can do.” That’s what he said. What he thought was, unfortunately they don’t make smart bombs smart enough to tell the difference…

  *

  Hoover made the decision to proceed at noon. New England had been moving in a generally north-eastwards direction during the morning, shying away from any near-approach by ship or aircraft, well out towards international waters. Had the ship not been in the hands of rogue and dangerous men, she would hardly have attracted any official interest, but the fact that she was being held illegally by well-armed professionals with a target, a grudge and, apparently, a plan, changed things radically. But the problems which had faced the Irish authorities — and the British ones when they became involved — remained. The ship could outrun anything waterborne sent against her and the chances of transferring any kind of law-enforcement unit aboard from anything airborne were zero. The FBI advised that for the moment the situation should be treated as a hostage negotiation and everyone should stay calm and inactive — though there was no negotiation actually going on because New England and the men aboard remained stubbornly silent. Only Professor Miles, the other ex-hostages and one surviving, severely wounded, pirate had anything to say. Senator and Mrs Charleston were on their way up to New York by limousine, being debriefed on the way. In spite of everything, they proposed to be at the United Nations building tonight.

  “There were more mercenaries than the five you have,” the Senator was saying. “And the wounded man, O’Reilley, seems to have been a member of the original crew who changed sides. I see no mention on your lists, for instance, of anyone called Copeland or Aves, and they were both there. You’ll have to check with First Officer Dix. Or wait until you can speak to Captain Mariner or Captain Stark, of course.”

  The likelihood of that receded as noon passed and Hoover made his decision. The situation was simple, as far as the authorities saw it. The inauguration and reception would proceed tonight between eight and midnight Eastern Standard Time. The men on New England would know all about it simply by tuning to any commercial radio or TV station. If the men on the ship were going to carry out their assumed threat, they would have to move at that time. And the closer they got, the more limited the options became. If they couldn’t be boarded, they would have to be stopped. If they couldn’t be stopped then they would have to be destroyed.

  There was some discussion about the possibility of disabling New England, but no one could see any way of doing it — not the man who had designed her, or the USAF colonel liaising from SAC. The precision of fire needed to hit the engine with no collateral damage was simply not available, especially if she started to move at speed, and precision was essential given that she herself seemed to be one big bomb. As far as anyone could see, they would simply have to wait until the last safe moment, allow the lunatics aboard as many chances to give themselves up as possible, and then just blow the sucker away.

  At no time did anyone seriously entertain the idea that the ship might actually get through into the East River and complete her explosive mission, in spite of the fact that 13 Int. had outguessed and out-gunned everyone who had come against them so far.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Time in Great Egg Head had been well spent. The later than anticipated arrival of the FBI had allowed one or two more embellishments than Marshall had planned for. It had also meant that Dall’s mercenaries had got in the way of the FBI and slowed them down. Richard and Harry’s speculations had been quite correct. Dall’s men had been less than happy at being paid off in stolen money fresh out of the back of a hijacked bank truck, but under the guns of 13 Int., even the well-armed amongst them — including Pitman — had accepted their wages and faded into the night. Less than a mile inland the first of them had stumbled onto the approaching FBI and someone had opened fire.

  Twenty minutes later the original crew of New England had added to the confusion and only the quick-thinking leadership and stentorian voice of Senator Charleston had averted a bloodbath as the unarmed ex-hostages strayed into the crossfire. In the confusion, most of Dall’s men had managed to vanish inland.

  In the event, only the helicopter among the FBI contingent had got anywhere near New England, and even that useful vehicle had been damaged by a riff of automatic fire and then sidetracked by the importunities of Alan Miles. So that, by the time the authorities arrived in any force at the quayside itself, there was no one there for them to talk to, and nothing left for them to see except empty, night-bound sea.

  New England spent the last hours of darkness that night picking her way carefully out of the busy coastal waters to an area where, unobserved, 13 Int. could practise their run a couple more times before they did it for real.

  They had attained that unit-wide focus again, as they had on the Ras Al’I. They were one machine, like a colony of ants; defined by objective, function and relationship within the group. There was no speculation, no doubt, no second thoughts. No one mattered but the men of 13 Int. Nothing else existed but the mission.

  It was well for the five interlopers in the hold that no one else aboard had the slightest idea that they were there.

  If Bob Stark had been on the command bridge, he would have been astonished by how much had been achieved in so short a time by such a small group of apparently unsk
illed men. For a start, the foredeck, over which the clearviews looked, was no longer empty. Secured upon it was a powerful-looking matt black powerboat; a wedge of shadow perhaps eight metres in length from needle to bow to square stern. It was designed to take two people, a driver and his passenger, somewhere very fast indeed. Like the petrol tankers and the First National armoured van, the powerboat had been collected in the last couple of weeks by Marshall’s men in one of a series of carefully planned but apparently unrelated robberies up and down the coast and inland as far as Ohio. Over the powerboat crouched a makeshift davit obviously designed to swing it overboard easily and quickly. The passenger seat had been removed and in its place was a big black box which had been secured to the body of the boat as close to the centre of gravity as possible, but not too near the stubby speed controls or the thickly-padded little steering wheel. The remaining seat had as many webbing straps and buckles as an old Martin Baker Zero-Zero ejector seat in a jet.

  The forward section of the command bridge was untouched, but the windows on either side of it had been removed and scoops of light, strong steel had been bolted and welded onto the solid metal frames. These open ports gave an unrivalled view, and an overlapping field of fire, down either side of the bridge, to port and starboard. The first two might, at a pinch, also give some possibility of forward fire too, and the prospect of firing at full speed was supported by the fact that there were heavy harnesses secured to the floor, as though the men destined to stand there might be fishing for monster sharks.

  Through the wreckage of the radio room on the port side and through Harry’s domain to the captain’s bridge day room on the starboard, tracks along the deck told of heavy equipment swiftly and carelessly moved. Here the stern-facing walls had had openings cut into them, which gave fields of fire from the front and sides towards the stern. Between these two openings, the rear bridgehouse divided the field of fire and created a blind spot on the afterdeck and down towards the water immediately behind the massive jets. Clearly, the architect of these fortifications had been concerned to protect the bridgehouse against attack from above rather than below.