Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9)

by Tonkin, Peter

  The powerboat’s hull and the black box itself, under the beacon, had been packed with explosive. The leader of the squadron forgot his perplexity at the failure of his first rocket to hit and triumphantly reported the total destruction of the target and all who sailed in her as he pulled his F18 up over the fireball on Cholera Bank.

  It was 10.30 local time. Ninety minutes to midnight. As Tom was enjoying his last laugh, New England, invisible, unremarked and unsuspected, was swinging round Montauk Point, turning south at a little over sixty knots, exactly ninety minutes north of Hell Gate.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The north shore of Long Island Sound is low and marshy for three miles or so before it gathers into the hills and bluffs of Connecticut and Massachusetts. The southern shore has no low plain but rises in cliffs and headlands straight from the water. On that night, the northern bluffs were shrouded in mist and the beginnings of rain. The southern cliffs, too, lost their heads in low clouds and their feet in the beginning of a sluggish fog which had begun to curl off the water soon after ten. Shipping in the three channels joining the Race to Throgs Neck was sparse, slow and careful. The pilots who had come aboard foreign vessels out at No. 2 Lightbuoy and who would give place to East River pilots down at Execution Rocks peered warily westwards through the gathering murk, feeling beneath their wise feet the surging of a spring tide which would crest in Hell Gate with a surge of more than four metres around midnight. It was lucky there was a calm this evening, they thought, or folks on FDR Drive might be getting their feet wet at the flood.

  New England swung onto her heading at 22:30 on the dot. The backwash of her wake spread across the Race and added further complications to the Plumb Gut before crashing onto the New London shore. In the near-dark of her command bridge, Merrideth and Marshall stood side by side, their bodies indistinguishable from the shadows and their faces made even more weird by the light from the illuminated displays. The Differential Shipmaster program had been carefully set with the route between here and the Throgs Neck Bridge and the onboard computer systems honed its accuracy from ten metres to less than three. The echo-sounder and the radar equipment were all factored in as well so that all the American Dick King at the helm had to do was to stand there watching in wonder while the ship swept down the Main Channel, heading south and west, directly towards the heart of New York City.

  Dick King knew these waters well; before the disease hit, he had been as keen a seaman as the late lamented Tom. Indeed, a neat little 30-metre ocean-going yacht was nestled in his berth on the Mystic River not very far north of here now. And she would remain there, unclaimed, for some time to come. But he had never dreamed of coming in past Rocky Point and the Six-mile Reef through East Long Island Sound at anything like this speed. The radar picked up the threat of a slow barge in the gathering fog ahead and adjusted the course slightly to sweep past her on the northern line, where the water was deepest. Then the echo-sounder called a discreet warning. The two commanders stepped forward. There beneath them, powering out towards the sea, was a submarine. But even as they registered it, they had passed it.

  Had it only been the barge captain who reported the passage of a huge vessel running at more than fifty knots in the Main Channel of East Long Island Sound, the report might well have gone unnoticed. But when confirmation came from the commander of USS Flatfish as well, interest was stirred. Unfortunately, the messages did not arrive until well after eleven and so rang alarm bells in offices recently vacated by men assured that the danger they had feared was past. By that time, New England had swept past Horton Point and Falkner Point, and the waves of her passage were washing over Stratford Shoal as she entered West Long Island Sound, less than sixty miles northeast of her goal.

  *

  “Jesus, girl,” whispered Pitman in a flurry of tension. “Will you shift that pretty ass of yours!”

  The ass in question was all that was visible of Harry Newbold as she knelt under the table making some final adjustments to the modem and the little handset which was linked to it trying to tune the one to the other. The bright screen above showed a maze of icons and in the middle of them sat the white arrow of the cursor. During the last hour and more Pitman had watched Harry’s nimble fingers tap in directions which complemented the shortcuts she had programmed into the computer in the engine control room. Now, each icon represented a whole program which would open under the cursor when the zero button on the handset was pressed. One wrong move on the keyboard, indeed any move at all on it, would trigger alarms on the bridge. Rather than think about this, Pitman watched Harry’s ass, literally as well as figuratively. It was, in fact, a distractingly well-shaped piece. And the combination of tight cotton, blue light and mysterious shadow presented it to disturbingly attractive effect.

  “There,” whispered Harry at last. “All done, I think.” The curves and concavities under Pitman’s eyes began to wiggle seductively as Harry backed carefully out from under the table. Bubbling with girlish glee which was seriously out of place in a whole range of ways, she held up the videophone for Pitman to see. The little screen showed exactly and clearly what was on the monitor in front of them. “I won’t move the cursor again,” said Harry breathlessly. “But I could and it would work. As long as this is in range, I can control the whole system. Well,” she temporised with that occasionally devastating honesty of hers, “I can for a couple of minutes until they break the connection or override me.”

  “But it’s the best you can do? It’s all we’ve got?”

  “Yup.”

  “OK. Let’s go.” Pitman knelt down and insinuated herself swiftly into the ventilation duct. Harry knelt to follow, automatically glancing around the room as she did so. Everything was exactly as they had found it.

  “Hurry!” hissed Pitman.

  Except for the computer! “You go on,” breathed Harry. “I’ll just…” She crossed to the computer and reached behind the monitor. She snapped the rocker to OFF and watched the screen die. Then she glanced down at her handset. It was still bright. In the same way that a video player attached to a TV aerial can record programmes whether the television is on or off, Harry’s handset was picking up signals direct from the computer via the modem to which it was now tuned. The monitor in here was incidental now. All that showed the machine was working was the red light on the computer box itself and the quietest of hums.

  In the sudden darkness Harry groped after Pitman and slid into the duct behind her. And just in time. As she picked up the grille to snap it back in place behind her, the library door was thrown open. A pair of black Danner-booted legs strode in.

  Stopped. Turned. The light came on. Harry remained where she was, frozen. “No,” said a harsh voice. Merrideth’s voice. “Nothing in here.”

  The relief made her begin to shake even before he turned. The grille, unsecured, trembled dangerously in its clips. But suddenly, unexpectedly and blessedly, an arm snaked round her waist and Pitman gave her a powerful, reassuring hug.

  The moment of danger passed. The light snapped off. The door clicked closed.

  “They know something’s up,” whispered Harry.

  “But do they have time to do anything much about it?” wondered Pitman.

  *

  New England surged past the Stratford Point light at nearly seventy knots and pounced towards the two Captain Islands while, all unknown to the two captains hiding aboard her, Merrideth continued his search. He had nothing to go on except a gut feeling and a firm belief in Murphy’s Law. On this mission more than on any other, if anything could go wrong it would. It had been some unregistered stirring of the bridge programs that had alerted him and he checked all the computers first. But Harry was a neat worker as well as a very careful spy. Everything she had used she had returned to the state she had found it in — on the surface at least. So there was nothing to reveal her passing except perhaps some mingled odours on the ether — the ozone scent of freshly used equipment, a hint of her perfume, the musk of Pitman’s body. In the
engine control room these would have been lost beneath engine smells in any case; in the library Merrideth had sensed nothing of them because the nerves in his nose, like those in much of the rest of his face, were dead.

  But still, with the disgruntled Bruce in tow, with Danny, Smell and Pain behind, he prowled onward and downward relentlessly.

  *

  Pitman and Harry dropped down onto the gantry on the wall of the lower hold. Apparently nothing had changed down here. The lifeboat’s falls among the hangings and anchorage points of the upper deckhead were difficult to see, but Harry knew what she was looking for and made straight for it. She met up with the other three outside the boat and told them what she had done. Pitman’s warnings cut through any congratulatory air, however.

  “Merrideth’s on the prowl,” she said as soon as she could get a word in. “My advice would be to get back in the lifeboat and hunker down. He can’t have time for a detailed search. This mother has to be coming down the Sound like a bat out of hell. And he can’t afford to be hanging around here with a brick of men behind him once we get into the East River, can he?”

  “No,” said Richard decisively. “You’re right. We’ll still have Throgs Neck and Hell Gate to get ready in. New England will have to slow a little there. Harry, can you call up some kind of navigational information on that thing without ringing all the alarm bells?”

  “That’s what it’s for.”

  “Right. Into the lifeboat and let’s have a look. Now is the time for a final briefing in any case. Pitman?”

  “Sir?”

  “You’ve got the best eyes. You’ve got stag. OK?”

  “Sir.”

  Things got very snug in the lifeboat. The three sailors lay side by side squashed along the keel. Ann squeezed in beside Bob so she could look over his shoulder at the tiny screen of the handset. Side by side, their flanks burned together from her knee to her breast. It was very distracting. Her body felt naked against Bob. Pitman crouched in the stern among their legs, her head almost invisible, using the lifeboat’s gunwale as a parapet. Every now and then she would glance down or move her fingers, repeatedly re-checking the disposition of her ASP, though what use even Black Talon bullets would be here she could not imagine.

  *

  As New England surged past the Great and Little Captain Islands, Merrideth swung into the lower hold. His eyes were beginning to go, he knew, just as his ears and nose were, but the lights were bright enough to show him all the details he needed to see. The Semtex was piled, netted and secured. The hold was empty and, apart from the muted thunder of the engines, it was silent. He glanced up at the maze of hangings on the deckhead above and frowned. He was a meticulous man and he would have preferred to go down with everything squared away shipshape. But sorting that lot out was out of the question now. Even doing this patrol was a dangerous indulgence. If the SAC jet jockeys showed up now, there would be an appreciable gap in their defences. But from the sound of things, Tom’s final ruse had worked well enough. SAC were too budget-bound to send more than one squadron of F18s. And now that they had been out, it would take someone very quick-thinking indeed, someone confident enough to break all the rules, to get them out again. Even so, that was one worry.

  Another was the possibility that the tide would not reach its critical surge at midnight. Or that they might somehow miss it. They wanted to blow away as little of FDR Drive as possible. Not because they cared about it but because the sea wall on its outer side was their last real barrier, so the higher the water was when they tried to sail across it, the less they would have to destroy to make a slipway.

  But everything would be rolling forward at the better part of one hundred miles an hour by that time anyway, so even if New England blew up on the Drive itself, everything ahead of it would be toast in any case, everything from the General Assembly building to the Empire State.

  Merrideth turned. “That’s it, Bruce,” he said quietly. “Back to the bridge.”

  And, tidy-minded man that he was, he switched off the lights as he left.

  *

  The clouds were low. The weather over the Atlantic was terrible, as it had been on and off for weeks. The weather over the Pole was worse. The flight from London was late and those from Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing later still. There was a stack of airliners building up above JFK which barred even the four F18 jet jocks, spoilt as prom queens though they were, from landing. The fighters were curtly told to circle over the submarine exercise area out over the Great South Channel — which they did for nearly half an hour at little more than stalling speed while their increasingly irate pilots sent increasingly urgent messages to their superiors at SAC. SAC checked with all the local airports, civil and military, up and down the East Coast and as far inland as Chicago, but it was a bad night for air traffic and the jets were better off where they were. It was a bad situation, for three of the F18s were still fully armed and the danger of an accident rose exponentially with every minute that the fighters sat out there, waiting for a chance to land. This point was made to the Eastern Region senior flight controller and to the Director of the Federal Airports Authority. The net result of all this was that just after eleven twenty the fighter pilots were told there would be a place for them at La Guardia. They would be given approach headings and finals in fifteen minutes’ time or so. In the meantime they should hang tight, stay calm, double-check the safeties on their weapons and burn a bit more fuel because they were more than likely going to take the big loop up over New York City before dropping in over Paterson, Paramus and Hackensack down beside the Triborough Bridge low over Riker’s Island on the northern approach across the East River near midnight. And with that they had to be content.

  *

  The five in the lifeboat had to be content with the darkness. At first this was no great burden; with the exception of Pitman, they were all glued to the bright screen of Harry’s videophone handset. This was currently alight with a bright schematic of the channel which they were following and the shores on either side of it. New England herself featured as a bright dot hurling at incredible speed along the channel. The Captain Islands were falling astern now and the Stratford Point light was scrolling inexorably towards the bottom of the tiny screen as well. The Old Fields Point lay up ahead and, near it, Cable and Anchor Reef over whose back the flood was making rapidly now, adding another four knots or so to the hectic progress of that bright green dot down the last few miles towards Execution Rocks. Up at the top of the screen sat a neat little tool bar and beside it the pointer of the cursor which would open any of the other programs.

  Richard began to stir. “We can’t hang about here watching videos,” he said in the paternally disapproving tones he usually reserved for the twins. “It’s time to swing the lifeboat out into the hold. Anyone seen the torch?”

  Working in the dark slowed them down dangerously, but turning on the lights was too risky. So by the light of the lifeboat’s two torches they disengaged the gears of the lifeboat winch and took as many turns round the drums as the falls would make, then one man and one woman each took the remaining rope in hand and strained. Bob and Ann pulled at one end, Richard and Pitman at the other, their plan simply to lift the lifeboat up out of its cradle, then swing it across the floor of the hold to the rear-facing slope behind the hill of Semtex.

  Harry stood back, her fingers busy as she guided the cursor over the icons to open the mysterious HG program — if she could find a way into it. She glanced at her watch. If she hadn’t broken into it within the next twenty minutes, she wouldn’t need to; it would be running for real.

  Richard and Pitman lifted the stern out of the cradle before Bob and Ann could lift the bow, but then the first two had to stop and hold their section still until the others caught up. As the bow came up out of the cradle, the boat swung out onto the falls — and the long cables groaned. Both teams staggered as the weight of the boat came onto the winch drums — but it was halved by each turn, according to the laws of physics, so the
four pairs of hands and the four pairs of feet held firm.

  “Harry!” hissed Richard. “Get the light on the boat. Quickly, please. We need to see where we’re lowering it!”

  Harry put the handset down, picked up a torch and pointed it at the boat which was swinging like a pendulum above the Semtex hill.

  “Right,” said Richard, “when I say “now”, I want us to lower the boat very, very gently.”

  With Harry illuminating the lifeboat as though it was a trapeze artist at a circus, the four of them moved the boat out over the middle of the hold and lowered it onto the rear-facing slope of the Semtex hill. The keel made contact with the netting, then settled sideways until the Semtex nudged its port side. The net tightened over the grey plastic slope and that was all.

  “She seems firm enough,” said Harry. “Yes. She’s settled fine.”

  “Right,” said Richard. “Stage two. And let’s be quick about it.”

  *

  “Execution Rocks,” said Merrideth. “We have to cut speed here.”

  “Pull back,” called Marshall to the man at the helm. “We go through here slow and easy or we lose control down in Hell Gate.” As he spoke, he glanced around the shadowy tomb of the command bridge. Sixteen men were at the wide, scooped windows, eight each side in pairs; Dick King was at the helm, Mac and Op at the opening into the dark, silent radio room, their last duty completed with Tom’s last laugh on the radio. Merrideth stood at the clearview, watching over the sleek white dagger of the foredeck as the bright arch of the first bridge on the East River came down upon them like the blade of a guillotine.

  “Slow and easy,” Marshall repeated, a break in the rumble of his voice.

  New England’s version of “slow and easy” was unique. She came down towards Throgs Neck and the East River at more than forty knots, her scanners and read-outs feeding straight into her control systems. The massive surge she created in the narrowing waterway lifted her high on top of the flooding tide and, fifty metres above, the upper reaches of her radio mast smashed into splinters against the central span of the Throgs Neck Bridge.