V4 Vengeance

by Nigel Seed

  In her own office, the Vice President was calling all heads of government of the allied nations who could be relied upon for support. The President was taking the difficult ones. His next call was to China and again he was surprised at the full and open offer of support from Beijing. It began to appear that this tragedy might have a positive outcome after all, if managed carefully.

  Chapter 27

  In the dark of the Atlantic night, the cargo ship carrying the ten Humvees and their crews plowed eastwards at full speed without lights. They did not know it but during the night they passed within a mile of a small rubber dinghy with four lost, cold men huddled in it. The men in the dinghy did not see them either. Given the recent performance of the people aboard the freighter, it was a blessing in disguise.

  The speed of the cargo vessel was not impressive by modern standards but every hour they were another eleven nautical miles from their victims and more importantly, their avengers. Aboard the ship, the bags from the ten Humvees had been unloaded and taken aft to the crew’s mess. Now it was a counting house for cataloguing the spoils of the raid. Money was piled on one set of tables being sorted into piles by currency and denomination. Those piles were impressive. Another set of tables held jewelery which was being expertly appraised and sorted. Artwork was stacked against a bulkhead to be dealt with later. The largest table was the one dealing with Bearer Bonds, the untraceable documents that allowed large sums of money to be moved around without coming to the attention of the tax authorities. Since these documents are not registered, whoever holds them can claim to be the legitimate owner, making them highly attractive for money laundering and tax evasion. Safety Deposit Boxes in reputable and secure banks are usually the safest way to keep these valuable assets secure, at least they were until the assault teams had visited. Walking between the groups of tables was a tall, thin, studious looking man with a calculator that he continually keyed numbers into, until he gave up trying to follow the enormous value of the haul.

  Every now and then, men who had been the raiders on the ground would stick their heads around the door to observe what was going on with the accounting. He, or they, would then wander back to the area allocated to them to report to the rest.

  Aristotle Christophides, the Captain of the freighter, a suitably scruffy looking Greek, went to the leader of the assault group to pass on the instructions he had been given. The men were to change out of uniform and into civilian clothes. The uniforms and weapons were to be loaded into the Humvees and these were then to be pushed over the side of the vessel to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic. It was a shame they were not going to pass over the final resting place of the Titanic; it would have been amusing to read about a convoy of trucks being found alongside the great ship next time it was visited by scientists.

  The assault teams objected. They had no problem with dumping the vehicles or the uniforms, but were vehemently opposed to dumping their weapons before they were safely away. The Captain shrugged and turned on his heel, it made no difference to him whether they kept the weapons or not. As he left, the assault team leader galvanized his men. They changed and took the uniforms and chemical protective equipment down to the hold where the ten vehicles stood in darkness. The spot welds holding the side hatch in place had been cracked open. They could hear the deck cranes moving above their heads and then the side of the hold opened as the large hatch was lowered to below the horizontal by the cables that had raised it in the dock. It took a few men to push each of the heavy four wheel drive vehicles on to the ramp formed by the ship’s open side. Once on the ramp, they rolled slowly and then faster over the end and somersaulted into the water. The job was quickly done and the hatch was closed. The welder who had unsealed it for this task set about re-welding it, more permanently this time. The men returned to their quarters to finish watching the recorded film on the TV in the corner of the room.

  The counting continued through the night and well into the next day. The numbers were higher than even the highest estimates. The number and value of Bearer Bonds in particular had been wildly underestimated. Americans appeared to be very keen to keep large amounts of money away from the attention of the Internal Revenue Service. Estimating the value of the art would take weeks, but it was obvious that there were some startling pieces in the haul. Disposing of these would need to be managed carefully with discrete approaches to selected private collectors, who could be trusted to enjoy secret ownership.

  The freighter continued on its way, untroubled by the P3 Orion aircraft that flew over them from time to time. After a low pass they always flew on, satisfied that this was just a harmless cargo ship. The name of the ship had changed since she left New York as it had when she left Baltimore. The false deck fittings that gave her a distinctive shape had been collapsed and the company colors on the funnel had changed. They had changed the tattered flag that flew at her stern. She was of no interest to the US Navy now. The real ship that bore this name and registration had sunk in Malaysian waters well over a year ago, but no insurance claim had been submitted, so she still plowed the seven seas as far as Lloyds of London was concerned, and through them the authorities now searching.

  The ship’s Captain and Smith stood in the radio shack surrounded by an extremely high tech array of equipment for a rusty old freighter, listening to the sounds of the search coming across the airwaves. They would know as soon as there was any hint that they were suspected. The captain waited until the scheduled time for the call to come in. Every day at this time he was contacted to be given his instructions and to report his progress over the secure channel. Yesterday he was told to dump the vehicles and weapons. Today he would report his position, course and speed as well as the fact that his passengers were clinging to their weapons. He wondered how his employer would react to that.

  He made his report and was greeted with a silence from the other end of the call. His employer was used to being obeyed absolutely, that had been made painfully clear to him over the last few years. Then he was told that, should a US Navy or Coast Guard ship appear, the weapons were to go over the side immediately. There was to be no evidence that could connect the ship to the assault. He was told to check that the hidden storage was ready to take the haul presently being counted. The Captain agreed, but knew it was in perfect condition. He had been smuggling drugs and weapons in there for years and he had lost count of the Customs searches in various ports that had been unable to find anything of interest.

  It was unusual for his employer not to react with fury at being disobeyed. Maybe he was mellowing with age? He chuckled at the thought, Romanov would never mellow. In his business any sign of weakness could be fatal. It could also be fatal to ignore his orders. His first mate had found that out, two years ago in Singapore. A shame about that, he had been a good mate, but headstrong and he had been warned. The body had not been a pretty sight when the police had fished it out of the harbor.

  He was surprised not to have been given a destination by now. He was plowing toward the distant coast of France, but was pretty sure that would not be their objective. The French police and customs were way too efficient and would be cooperating with their friends, the Americans, on a job of this seriousness. Still, he knew enough not to ask. He would be told when the time came.

  Chapter 28

  In Washington the intelligence continued to flow into the command center. There had been no further clues from the banks; no fingerprints, no DNA and no descriptions worth a damn, the chemical protection suits and masks had seen to that. The five surviving crewmen from the submarines were still unconscious and the doctors were being difficult about waking them prematurely. The President had issued instructions that they were to be treated humanely in view of the worldwide media scrutiny and the medical staff were taking his orders seriously.

  Laboring forgotten at a small desk pushed against the wall of the situation room, the junior analysis clerk read and re-read the lists of shipping spread in front of him. He had called up the Lloyds Registe
r of Shipping on his computer and was comparing everything he could find about every ship on the list. It was tedious and time consuming, but the clerk chosen was ideal for the job. He had a high threshold of boredom and found puzzle solving fascinating. He worked long hours and had been all but forgotten by the rest of the analysis team. They even forgot to include him when they went to collect coffee. He did not mind. While working he had no need for human interaction and he was uncomfortable among the smart uniforms anyway.

  He found nothing in common between Baltimore and New York that could help the search, so started to check the previous ports of call logged for each ship by Lloyds. It was fascinating to see where they had come from and the range of cargoes they carried. Then he saw it. One cargo freighter had come to Baltimore from Palermo in Sicily. Nothing unusual in that, but something was wrong in the figures he was seeing. He pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and concentrated on the data. He stared until it became clear. The time taken to sail from Palermo to Baltimore was too short. He called up the distances and using the high school math that Mrs. Brindle had taught him all those years ago, he found that to reach Baltimore in that time the ship would have been traveling at 57.6 miles an hour. Not even the Queen Mary, with her powerful modern engines, sailed at that speed or even close to it. He raised his head and looked across at the big conference table in the middle of the room. His analysis training had emphasized the need to share information to ensure every snippet was brought together. So why was he the one not at the table? No matter.

  “Got something,” he said.

  His words fell into the gloomy silence around the big table. Every head turned to him. Very gratifying. He explained his findings. A ship had traveled across the Atlantic at impossible speed to Baltimore, it had rested there for three days and left again, it had collected no cargo and delivered none according to the port records. The next entry had it entering harbor in Walvis Bay, Namibia. The speed required to travel from Baltimore to the African city was again excessive. But the dates to travel from Palermo to Walvis Bay gave a perfectly reasonable speed for a ship of that type. The ship that entered Baltimore harbor could not have been the one it claimed to be.

  The junior clerk found all his papers lifted and taken to the central table where senior analysts pored over them until they declared that there was nothing else to find. He had found an anomaly, but it led nowhere. He was then allowed to return to his quiet, cluttered desk to continue his painstaking search. The senior analysts might be right, but he had been given a puzzle to solve and nobody had told him to stop yet.

  The ship that left Baltimore could possibly have been employed to deliver the stolen Humvees to New York. But if he took an average speed of a freighter and calculated a time to sail to New York no similar ships had entered the harbor at a suitable time. There had been a delay of some two and a half weeks between the ship leaving Baltimore and the attack in New York. That ship had to have been somewhere during that time. Normally, with his clearance level, he would have had no access to high grade satellite imagery, but the senior analysts at the big table did. He went across during a lunch break and asked the two investigators still sitting there if he could use their access codes to check something. They were about to be dismissive, but he had found something earlier so they agreed.

  Once he had entered the correct codes into his computer, the junior analyst turned down the lighting over his desk and watched as the images passed across the computer screen before him. The clarity of pictures taken from space was impressive. He had never had the leisure to admire the results before now. Maybe he should ask for a transfer to photo interpretation after this was over?

  There was a lot of empty ocean on the pictures he scanned. There was an occasional iceberg and just once he saw a whale breaching over the Stellwagen Bank, just off Boston. There were numbers of nondescript freighters working up and down the coasts and across the Atlantic. None stood out until he saw one turning sharply out at sea. Now why would a freighter need to turn like that? Surely the Captain was not changing his mind about where he was going? He filed that image and then looked in that area again and again. The freighter reappeared in a number of images all in the same area spread over a period of days. He logged all the images of the ship and saved them to be examined later. He zoomed in as closely as he could on his desktop screen. There was something going on, on the deck of the freighter, but he could not make out the detail. With a few keystrokes he managed to put the image up on the large plasma screen above the conference table. The analysts, now back from lunch and clustered around the big table, looked up.

  “What’s that about?” the team leader asked.

  The junior analyst didn’t answer, but walked over and stood before the screen staring hard. He brushed his dark hair back from his forehead and stared up at the big screen. The clarity was stunning and the level of detail hard to believe. He walked back to his desk and called up another image of the ship on a second plasma screen. He walked back and looked between the two images.

  “I said, what’s that about?” said the senior analyst again, coming to stand next to his junior.

  “That, sir, is a pair of pictures of the ship that took the stolen Humvees out of Baltimore. And if you look at the funnel and the after deck you will see why we couldn’t find her.”

  The senior analyst looked, as did all the others, who had come to stand behind them. Structures on the deck that would have changed the ship’s profile were being moved and it looked like there was a boatswain’s chair at the side of the funnel with a man in it painting.

  “Damn me, you did it again!”

  He turned to the rest of the analysts, “OK people, we now know how they did it, but I want to know what that ship looked like when it came into New York and more importantly I want to know what it looks like now. Get on it!”

  He turned to the junior clerk who had found what the rest had missed.

  “This is embarrassing,” he said, “but I don’t know your name”

  “It’s Malcolm, sir, David Malcolm.”

  “Well David, it looks like we need to take a little more interest in your skills. Ignore what the rest are doing and tell me what you would do next.”

  “Well sir, the appearance of the ship in New York does not matter much until after we catch them and get them into court. What matters is where that ship is now and probably where it’s going.”

  “So if it has changed its appearance again how do we find it?”

  “The satellite images are clear and we know how high above the earth the satellite is. So the math to work out the size of the ship should be simple enough. Mrs. Brindle taught me that back in High School in Cedar Rapids. We have lots of ships and planes out there so if we give them the ship’s dimensions they should be able to round up any likely targets.”

  “Get on it and if you get this right we send Mrs. Brindle a ‘thank you’ note from the President. How long will you need?”

  Chapter 29

  Cruising at eleven knots the freighter had now reached some seven hundred nautical miles out into the Atlantic in the three days since leaving New York. Her engines were now still as a second ship came alongside them. This one was considerably smaller, but had the look of a deep sea trawler.

  In fact it had been converted to be an underwater research vessel with accommodation for a large number of scientists and crew, though not in any great comfort. It had been retired from research duties when the cost of an upgrade to more modern technology exceeded the value of the ship itself. It had then been sold for conversion to a private cruising yacht but that conversion had never taken place.

  The deck cranes on the larger ship lifted large crates across and dropped them directly into the laboratory of the smaller vessel through what had once been the fish hatch when she had served as a trawler. The crew and passengers climbed down the accommodation ladder that had been lowered down the side of the freighter and stepped across onto the deck of the smaller ship. The uncommon
ly calm weather in the North Atlantic made this exercise easy and quick. Normal weather would have made it considerably more difficult and risky. Within a half hour the transfer was complete and Christophides, the Greek skipper of the freighter, was standing on the bridge of the research vessel with his colleague and Smith. The research vessel’s crew cast off the lines and the ships pulled slowly apart.

  As the gap between them grew to five hundred meters the freighter skipper produced a gray plastic box from his jacket pocket. He flipped a switch and a red light illuminated above a row of four buttons.

  “Ready?” he said to the other captain.

  Without waiting for a reply he pressed the first button. The rumble of the explosion rolled across the water, a moment later smoke issued from the open doorway beneath the bridge. A second push and a further explosion resulted in smoke boiling out of the second deck hatch. The third button push brought smoke from the forward hatch after the customary rumble from deep inside the ship.

  He turned to the bridge crew “You might want to see this one.”

  The bridge crewmen walked to the starboard side of the bridge. As he pressed the last button the explosion was followed by a loud roar and a huge gout of flame as the fuel bunkers ignited. The ship was already settling into the sea before the last explosion and fire so the smoke and flames were soon wiped out by the inrushing water. The freighter slipped beneath the gentle waves and left hardly a trace except for some burning fuel oil.