Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘That why you haven’t come after me for hitting you in the head?’

  ‘Could be. Anyway, my nose has been broken before and I’ve survived. Or it could be that I have a cunning plan and I’m just biding my time. You never can tell.’

  ‘I’ll be able to tell soon enough if you start winding up the lieutenant,’ answered Dom.

  ‘Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,’ Richard needled cheerfully. ‘What I may or may not have planned is for me to know and for you to find out.’

  Dom opened his mouth, about to ask a question in turn. But then he registered how Richard had turned the tables on him and closed it again. ‘For us to know, and for you to find out,’ was all he said in the end.

  Richard soon found out. Or thought he did. ‘What can I do for you, Lieutenant?’ he asked, as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth the moment that Dom led him on to the bridge. He used the English form of lieutenant, as they do in the South African Navy. ‘I notice you seem to be having a little difficulty keeping the hull stern-on to the weather. Is that what you want to see me about so urgently?’

  ‘Very smart!’ snarled Macavity. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Let’s just say I felt it in my bones. Now, what can I do for you?’

  ‘For me? Nothing,’ answered Macavity. ‘But you can help the ship out. Help those on board who are still alive, especially those who have started puking their guts up once again. And see about getting back on course and schedule into the bargain.’ The flat, South African tones were raised almost to a shout. But this time the noise they were riding over did not come entirely from the storm. The bridge was bustling with teams of men – led, Richard noted, by the engineers he had brought aboard – purloined from the engine control room, clearly. Two teams of them, under close guard by Macavity’s men. The most obvious difference between them being that one set had all sorts of tools while the others had all sorts of weapons. Though not quite as many, Richard observed happily, as the Pitman.

  But, Richard realized at once, the fact that the engineers were here meant that Macavity and his men had managed to restore a good deal more of the basic control system, if nothing much of the higher systems as yet. Clearly, the engineers could only be spared for bridge maintenance if the engine and rudder-control computer system could be relied upon to transmit the helmsman’s orders on the telegraph directly to the engines and the steering gear. So the systems were coming back online, even without Rikki Sato’s help, and despite whatever Harry was up to in secret down below. One team led by an engineer was clearing up the broken glass. Another was working on replacing it. And, with the typhoon still squarely astern, Richard reckoned, they should not be having too much trouble positioning the big squares of glass in the bridge’s wind shadow. But they were. Those on the starboard especially, caught by sudden, unexpected side drafts. And the way the ship had been riding since he left Angela checking her armaments, Harry working on her computers and Ivan searching through the personnel files looking for other unexpected Italian connections, also alerted him to changes in the conditions through which Sayonara was sailing. ‘You got the weather predictor up yet?’ he asked.

  ‘Partially,’ answered Macavity guardedly. ‘The GPS is still offline.’

  Richard walked across to the digital display and glanced down at its blank screen. Then he looked out at the sea and the sky, his eyes narrow and his expression thoughtful. Everything confirmed what he had been calculating deep in his subconscious since he first felt the new movement of the hull at the start of his all-day breakfast. ‘As I’m sure you remember from your meteorological training, Lieutenant, a northern hemisphere depression is basically a whirlpool of winds and water running in a circle anti-clockwise round the eye,’ said Richard quietly, but with such authority that even Macavity stood and listened. All around him the noise of the work stilled as even the engineers waited to hear his explanation of what he had saved them from already – and what he needed to do next. Soon the only sound was the wind through the half-fixed clearview. ‘They all work in roughly the same way. The eye is the low-pressure centre sucking air up into the troposphere and the Coriolis effect makes the winds rushing in to replace it spin, while the pressure gradient pulls warm, wet water vapour up into high, cold air and causes the precipitation. And the only real variable – as in our case – is that the tighter the whirlpool, the lower the pressure at the centre, the steeper the pressure gradient, the stronger the winds, the more powerful the rain and storms and the higher the seas.’

  Richard walked to the gaping clearview and peered out into the drizzling darkness above the watery glow of the deck lights. ‘The way Sayonara was programmed meant that we sailed south straight into the northern edge of a very tight depression – a typhoon, in fact – as it in turn ran north to meet us. This meant that the wind and the seas came in from our port quarter. Strongly enough to threaten the ship, even before the bridge windows came in and the electrics all went down. So we turned and ran west with the weather behind us, best to keep out of the wind and keep on top of the waves – in every sense. Now we’ve come far enough west to be running out of the leading edge at last, so the airflow is swinging round again. And, I suspect, the typhoon itself may have turned quite sharply east. Meanwhile, the eyewall of thunderstorms that nearly swamped us has probably choked off the central eye and closed the whole system down. It happens sometimes. In any case, our new position relative to the depression means we have winds swinging round to the north, and fairly large swells beginning to run in from the west – moderating, thank God.’

  Richard turned to Macavity and his helmsman. ‘If you continue to keep the wind to your back, you will slowly circle southwards and, although things will get a little uncomfortable again as we start taking sea coming in from starboard, they won’t be big enough to roll us over. And we should be back on course – perhaps even on schedule – within twelve hours or so. I can’t give you our precise course or headings until the electronic navigation chart system comes back up. Until then, you’ll just have to do it by feel.’

  ‘No!’ snapped Macavity. ‘You’ll do it by feel. And I’ll feel much happier with you at the helm, Captain. At the very least, I’ll have a fair idea of where you are and what you’re up to!’

  ‘Better than the brig, or wherever it was you had me locked up,’ allowed Richard. ‘But, as someone’s already remarked, I look like shit because I’m exhausted and strung out. I’m feeling a bit better since I’ve had something hot to eat, but you’ll need to relieve me at some stage. Someone else will need to take over the watch and let me get some rest.’ He moved the helmsman away from the wheel and took it over. ‘In the meantime, unless you want me asleep at the wheel, I need coffee. Jamaican Blue Mountain High Roast Arabica for preference, but anything hot, black and full of caffeine will do.’

  Macavity gave a curt nod and one of the men guarding the engineers fixing the windows turned smartly and doubled down the companionway. The South African stood for a moment, looking calculatingly at Richard as he eased himself into a comfortable position towering over the helm, resting his right hand on the engine room telegraph, adjusting the levers slightly and feeling the engines’ response. He remained there until after the coffee arrived, and even then he lingered suspiciously as Richard began to ease Sayonara’s head southwards until the wind stopped thundering across the window frames and the hull, which had been pitching like a see-saw, began to roll like a cradle.

  Richard looked up at the ship’s chronometer, the only piece of equipment which had been unaffected by the flooding of the bridge. ‘Oh six hundred ship’s time,’ he said. ‘Captain Mariner takes the wheel halfway through the morning watch. State of sea westerly, five on the Beaufort Scale but moderating. State of wind northerly, gale force but also moderating. Sky one hundred per cent occluded. Ship’s heading just south of due west, swinging towards south-west and planning to be due south by the end of the watch. It should almost be dawn, but dawn’s a long way off.’ He paused, then
added, as though the thought had just occurred to him: ‘We’re due at the NIPEX facility at oh six hundred hours tomorrow. But that’s Japanese time. We’ll be four hours adrift of that. So we don’t have exactly twenty-four hours left – we have precisely twenty-eight.’

  25 Hours to Impact

  Richard was as good as his word. By the time the watch ended Sayonara was heading a few degrees west of south with the wind behind her pushing her along through the moderating westerly seas. The watch ended, but no one appeared to relieve the lonely watch-keeper. He hadn’t actually expected anyone to turn up, so he wasn’t really surprised. In the nearest time zone – Japanese Standard Time – it was still four a.m. and the night remained overcast and utterly dark, although the chronometer read oh eight hundred. There was nothing to see outside the newly repaired clearview windows except the ship’s lights, and precious little to see inside them except the illumination of the control systems and the increasing number of computer display screens that kept flickering into life quite unexpectedly – apparently with no rhyme or reason at all. And Richard’s own reflection, looking haggard, gaunt and strung out. Hollow-cheeked, with dark rings under his eyes and thick black stubble around his chin. Looking, as the Pitman had observed, like shit.

  Rather than bemoaning his appearance or trying to work out who must be fixing what down in the back-up computer areas, Richard concentrated on keeping a lookout for other ships. So, while the nerves of his body seemed to be part of the fabric of his temporary command, his eyes stayed fixed on the far horizons. He had no collision alarm radar yet and no communications to warn of impending crises. In spite of the fact that he had managed to turn Sayonara pretty handily in the emergency of the typhoon, she was by no means a nimble vessel. She wasn’t quite the legendary super tanker which is so difficult to stop or turn according to the popular saying, but nevertheless, he didn’t want to find himself on a collision course with anything. It would take a miracle to swing her off line in anything short of a mile. And it would take maybe five miles to stop her, assuming the computers allowed him full and immediate access to the engines. So Richard did his best to keep watch and prayed that Sayonara was big enough and brightly lit enough to keep anyone sharing these waters well clear of her. But although the typhoon might have eased, all the shipping nearby seemed to be staying in safe haven, just in case. So Sayonara sailed on through the black night utterly alone. And, given the frenetic activity of the last few hours, on top of the excitement of the voyage so far, Richard remained wearily unsurprised to find himself also alone on the bridge, hour after hour.

  In the dream-like state of gathering exhaustion – not to mention mild concussion, though it was a good many hours now since Dom had cold-cocked him – Richard felt utterly at one with the ship. Indeed, through the vessel’s movements along her course and through the six degrees of freedom, he felt at ease with the huge forces that made up the vast, invisible night that surrounded her. He knew from the slightly elevated throbbing of her engines that she was running at that unsettling twenty knots again, instead of the optimum eighteen knots, and that the rhythm no longer varied, no matter what he did to the engine room telegraph levers. Little by little the control he had over the helm was slipping away, and he suspected that by the arrival of the dawn – due around nine a.m. ship’s time – he would be utterly redundant because the computers, still in the grip of Macavity’s malware or the turncoat Sato’s meddling, would have reassumed command and control as the power was fully restored – unless Harry had managed to hack them by then.

  Leaning on the increasingly useless helm, he felt the way Sayonara pushed through the ocean, and from that judged the strength of the gale behind her and the way it was beginning to moderate. He considered going out on to the bridge wing but decided to leave that adventure for an hour’s time. It would be more instructive and enjoyable at dawn. Sayonara’s increasingly easy rolling, with the occasional half-hearted yaw told him all he needed to know about the sea. As the wind would be pushing them forward, so the waves would be pushing them westward. And, although the waves were still moving at the dictates of the powerful depression, they were now running in from Japan, whose north island, he guestimated, must lie little more than two hundred miles to Sayonara’s lee. So they did not quite attain the size and power of the huge deep-water rollers that had come towering in from the heart of the North Pacific earlier.

  At eight-fifteen, as though by magic, the GPS came alive. Richard crossed to it at once, but found himself staring at it with simple incredulity. Sayonara’s current position, apparently, was forty-one degrees north, one hundred and forty-eight degrees east. According to Richard’s reckoning, that put her five hundred miles south-east of Sapporo on the west coast of Hokkaido or three hundred and fifty miles south-east of Kushiro on the east coast and far further east and south of the position he had thought she must be in. According to these figures, Sayonara was five hundred and twenty miles north-east of the NIPEX facility, which was very surprising and not a little creepy. Because, even after the damage and distraction caused by the typhoon, it meant they were bang on time and bang on target, twenty-five hours’ sailing time from the NIPEX facility. The age of miracles is not yet past, he thought, shaking his head in simple wonderment.

  ‘Penny for them,’ came a flat, almost Afrikaans voice. Richard started, turned and found himself confronting a level pair of opal blue eyes which were crinkled at the corners with an ever-so-slightly self-satisfied smile. ‘Jesus, Pitman, you almost gave me a heart attack! It’s like living in a Raymond Chandler novel – every time I turn round, someone with a gun comes into the room! What are you doing on the bridge?’

  ‘Talking to you. And from the state of everyone else on board, if we are in a Chandler novel, it’d be The Big Sleep. This is more like a dormitory than a ship. But I got a couple of messages.’ She paused, registering that Richard was well from the helm. ‘Shouldn’t you be driving this thing? As you seem to be the only person apart from Harry, Ivan and me who’s actually awake?’

  ‘I’m redundant. Story of the twenty-first century – the computers have taken over.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the Pitman sceptically. ‘That’s part of the first message. Harry says don’t trust what the computers are telling you.’

  ‘Does that include the GPS?’ he asked, immediately suspicious.

  ‘Yup.’ The Pitman nodded.

  ‘But I thought it was nearly impossible to screw with the GPS. Don’t you need this special red control box? Don’t you have to reposition the satellites?’

  ‘That’s the way you do it in James Bond movies,’ said the Pitman. ‘In the real world – well, in Harry’s world – you just screw with the computer that interprets the signal. Or the one that relays the information to the screen. In my world, of course, you just buy a GPS blocker off the internet and no one knows where you are or what you’re doing – speed-wise, even.’

  ‘So Harry’s message is that the ship thinks it’s in one place but actually it’s in another.’

  ‘That’s it. Given that you’re cool with the idea that the ship thinks …’

  ‘But anyone observing the ship, like the automatic tracking satellites that read the black box info, for instance, will know she’s in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘So what’s the use of fooling the ship?’

  ‘I guess they’ll see Sayonara’s not where it’s supposed to be – no matter where it thinks it is. But I guess the question is will they do anything about it? I’d say it depends how far off-target the ship is pushed by the inaccurate readings. What sort of deviation is going to ring alarm bells on shore?’

  ‘That depends …’ said Richard. Then he straightened. ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The storm. No one will be surprised if Sayonara’s a little off course or ahead of schedule if she’s just come through a typhoon.’

  ‘OK,’ said the Pitman, exploring – and extending – Richard’s reasoning. ‘So, the ship thinks its bang on target and is prog
rammed to proceed accordingly. But we know the GPS that’s telling it where it is has been compromised.’

  ‘She’s actually a good deal further along the course than she thinks …’

  ‘OK. We go with that. Everyone is happy to see the ship because it’s ridden out the storm. No one’s worried if it’s a bit ahead of where it should be. How far ahead? Twenty kilometres? When do alarm bells start ringing?’

  ‘If NIPEX still can’t get control of the ship when the master unlock codes click in for docking when she’s fifty miles out because whatever Macavity’s done and Sato’s made worse is still keeping them out and Harry hasn’t been able to counter it, then they’ll start ringing pretty quickly – in twenty-four hours’ time, in fact. Because instead of pulling up at the LNG unloading facility, she’ll sail straight into Kujukuri’s floating city. I was beginning to assess this when I was locked up down in engineering. But if they can take control of her at NIPEX, there’ll be no alarm bells at all because they’ll just override the computers, chopper out a skeleton crew and a ship’s pilot if necessary, and bring her in safe and sound. They’ll just do it at four-thirty a.m. instead of six a.m. Japan time. And that won’t matter at all.’

  ‘So that’s Harry’s mission, then,’ said the Pitman simply. ‘To make sure, no matter what else is going on, that these guys at NIPEX can get control of the ship twenty-four hours from now. Send out a pilot if they want or dock her by remote if they want. Whatever.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Richard, surprised, somehow, that it should all come down to something as straightforward as that. He paused, thinking through what he and the Pitman had just discussed. And it seemed to him to hold water. It all did, in fact, come down to something as simple as ensuring the men at NIPEX could take control of Sayonara in exactly twenty-four hours from now, no matter how far ahead of schedule or how badly out of position she actually was, as long as she was still within the control parameters.