by Peter Tonkin
‘Ready to go?’ she asked as she strode up to Richard, still in defiant mode, clearly stuck in reaction to her shopping adventures with her father and his mistress.
‘Ready as soon as Andre gets off again,’ he said. ‘Captain Zhukov?’
‘We’re ready,’ growled the captain, clearly old-school, even compared to Max, and approving of none of this. Starting with women on his bridge.
‘Then what are we waiting for? There he goes!’ called Anastasia from beside the window. She put her hands on her hips and spread her legs, settling her feet solidly on the suddenly rising deck. She was wearing black boots that looked almost as indestructible as Richard’s own; black jeans, skintight, with a thick black steel-buckled belt at their waist and their cuffs tucked into the boot-tops. And a T-shirt that was black as well – except for a phrase printed in blood red across the front. ‘LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR’ it said.
TWENTY
Scavengers
The Zubr Stalingrad eased past the Shaldag FPB002, which was secured to Otobo’s stern, and settled on to the mudbank where the crippled corvette’s forecastle was securely beached. The hovercraft’s wide front section opened with a semi-liquid splash and Richard ran down on to the slippery red surface, grateful for the fact that his boots were waterproof as well as nearly indestructible. ‘Where are you going?’ demanded Anastasia, materializing at his shoulder like a malevolent genie.
‘Aboard,’ he answered shortly, looking up the corvette’s towering side, the top of which was outlined against the hard mid-morning sky.
‘Why?’ she demanded truculently.
‘Come with me and you’ll see.’ He was enormously pleased with himself and was quite keen to have someone to show off to. Like the villain in a James Bond story with a compulsive desire to explain his plans for world domination to the one man able to stop them. It went far deeper than reason or logic; or sheer good sense, come to that. It was to do with the fact that he was missing Robin, his usual muse. He was Holmes without his Watson. And, besides, what she would see was bound to lighten her mood, he thought fondly and not a little paternally.
The pair of them ran across the surprisingly solid surface towards Otobo’s sloping side. Behind them, on Zhukov’s orders, Stalingrad’s crew were already busy, and the soldiers were preparing to join them under the command of Colonel Leon Mako, Kebila’s opposite number at field brigade rather than security.
‘How are you with rope ladders?’ Richard threw over his shoulder, as he grasped the bottom rung of a vertiginous Jacob’s ladder reaching right up to the slight overhang of the gently tilted deck. ‘At least there are rungs instead of ratlines,’ he continued cheerfully. ‘And chain rather than cable. But you’ll find it easier if I hold it steady from the bottom.’
She gave him an old-fashioned look that bordered on the wifely. ‘Thank God I didn’t let Irina talk me into a skirt,’ she said. ‘Or yet another Mariner would be getting far too closely acquainted with my knickers.’
‘Up you go,’ he said severely. ‘And don’t be ridiculous. I’m old enough to be your father.’
‘Now that,’ she said, swinging nimbly upwards, ‘never seems to make any difference to my real father, does it?’
When Richard joined her on the slightly sloping deck five minutes later, she had already made the acquaintance of Chief Engineering Lieutenant Oganga, who looked old and grizzled enough to be her grandfather but who, thought Richard, was looking at her in a way that was anything but paternal – or grandpaternal. Having read the front of her T-shirt, he obviously fancied himself head of the neighbourly queue. But thankfully Anastasia was amused rather than offended and proved happy to manipulate the impressionable officer. To manipulate him right round her little finger, thought Richard. But although Chief Oganga’s eyes remained firmly on Anastasia’s bust – greatly flattered, thought Richard, by precisely the kind of push-you-up-and-shove-you-out bra he would have expected the delectable Irina to favour – his attention had to focus on Richard. It was Richard’s plan they were bringing to fruition here; his orders they were carrying out.
Otobo’s electrical circuitry was waterproof, but the fire in the engine room and the subsequent soaking from the firefighting ships had closed down her main power sources. Chief Oganga had been supplied with a powerful generator, therefore, and a team of his own electrical officers and men capable of using it to reawaken some of the corvette’s power. In particular to the ammunition hoists.
Richard remembered all too clearly Max’s boasts during the ill-fated war-game. The corvette and the Zubr shared so many systems it was uncanny – and all the Zubr lacked was the actual live ammunition to deliver her potential firepower in full measure. But there were no such problems aboard the crippled corvette. In every respect except propulsion, she was fully armed and battle ready. ‘It’s the exact opposite of Stalingrad,’ he explained to Anastasia as he guided her below and showed her around the oddly angled arms lockers and ammunition movement systems. ‘The Zubr has propulsion but no real armaments. So we’re scavenging one for the benefit of the other. You see these? These are boxes of 30 millimetre rounds for the Gatlings. They’re on their way up to the main deck. They will be followed by every shell they have aboard for the 125 millimetre gun on the forecastle head there. And finally by the RAM missiles and the eleven kilo blast and fragmentation warheads that go with the RIM116 system. All in all, when we have finished scavenging from the crippled corvette, almost all the weapons systems aboard the Zubr will be fully armed and battle ready.’
Richard and Anastasia accompanied Chief Oganga and his team down the slanting companionways to the sloping decks and back again as Richard explained what he had caused to be done. ‘It’s lucky,’ the engineering lieutenant told Anastasia’s expensively enhanced bust, ‘that the angle is no greater than it is or the lifts would not function. But we have performed miracles and everything is working well enough.’ He dragged his eyes reluctantly towards Richard. ‘However, we have not been able to power both the ammunition lifts and the cargo winches . . .’
‘That’s OK,’ answered Richard easily. ‘There’s a plan B.’ He reached for his telltale Benincom cellphone.
Anastasia watched closely as Richard ran her through all this – literally and figuratively. Frowning fiercely to conceal her wide-eyed astonishment, as the cases and crates of ammunition, explosive warheads, missiles and rockets were piled on to the after deck. Not piled randomly, she observed as she prowled restlessly and impatiently around them as he spoke forcefully into his Benincom cellphone – arranged carefully on flat wooden pallets. Even with his handset wedged between his shoulder and his ear, Richard was seemingly able to climb everywhere, assessing the piles of armaments, discussing with Chief Oganga – and whoever was on the other end of his phone call – obscure matters of weight and stability that seemed utterly arcane to her. Neither of them at the moment paying any attention to her at all. And it seemed to Anastasia that their overcareful preparations were something of an irrelevant waste of time – as though they were rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Until she heard the first distant throbbing and understood everything.
‘The lift weight on these things is nine thousand kilos,’ Richard explained to her, appearing at her shoulder as the Super Pumas appeared low in the sky behind them and pocketing his mobile as he spoke. ‘The chief and I have had to be careful but the ammunition hoists have built in weight assessors and we’ve calculated how each load was added to each pallet. So we should be all right according to the experts at the helicopters’ HQ. Two choppers, three lifts each. What do you reckon?’
‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘For some ancient geezer old enough to be my father . . .’
‘Ah, but there’s more . . .’ Richard pulled one specific box from the final pile the chief had sent up from the arms locker. He flipped the top and swung it back. ‘Don’t you ever tell your father,’ he admonished her, but she hardly heard him. Nestled in the box’s black foam interior three semi-automatic carbines sat
side by side. ‘They’re special forces kit,’ he said. ‘SIG SG 453s. Folding skeleton stock. Curved clip like your AK. Special order – fifty rounds per clip instead of the usual thirty. Three settings: single shot, three tap or fully automatic. Fire rate: eight hundred rounds a minute on automatic. Happy now?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Oh yes.’ She glanced almost coyly up at him as she stroked the nearest gun. ‘My shrink used to say it was penis envy, my fascination with guns. But she was an old-school Freudian.’
‘You had a shrink?’
‘How do you think I got over Simian Artillery and their aftermath? And anyhow you should know. You paid for her. Or Robin did. My bastard father most certainly did not!’
She crouched forward possessively and, as he digested all this, Richard registered for the first time there was writing on the back of her T-shirt. The front said ‘LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR’. The back said ‘AND F*** YOUR FAMILY’.
The Pumas hovered over Otobo’s poop, and lowered ropes that split into four strands, each with a carabiner designed to clip to the corner of a loaded pallet, then they lifted them off the corvette and lowered them on to the mudbank in front of the Zubr, where they were unloaded by the crew and their passengers working smoothly together. It took less than half an hour for everything from the ship that might be useful to be moved over to the hovercraft, as Richard planned.
Richard and Anastasia rode the last pallet down, standing side by side on the clearest corner, holding on to the guy rope – with Richard’s arm ready to reach round her waist if she slipped or panicked. Neither circumstance seemed likely to him. He knew that Max would find it hard to forgive him for giving his little girl a gun. But he would never ever forgive him for letting her get hurt. His Russian friend loved his petite printyessa – even if he still refused to talk to her. Or pay to fix her mental wounds, come to that. Too busy with his own penis – to the envy of most of his friends.
Stalingrad was a quiet bustle of activity as she lifted herself back on to her skirts and slid off the mudbank and back on to the surface of the water. The missiles, rockets, warheads, shells and ammunition were all taken to the places they would be needed most, and, where appropriate, loaded into the weapon systems that would use them. A burly sergeant took Anastasia’s gun box to her quiet corner of the bustling area and she called Ado and Esan over to look at her new toys. It was coming up to midday and the Zubr’s galley was preparing food designed to enhance the battlefield rations Colonel Mako’s three hundred soldiers had brought aboard with them. Up on the bridge, Richard looked at his steel-cased Rolex Oyster Perpetual, calculating. He had promised to get up the river within six hours. And that was his plan. He wanted to arrive six hours from now, in fact, for the timing itself was a crucial element of his exhaustive calculations.
‘Full ahead, Captain Zhukov,’ he said quietly and the silver bear of a commander nodded. ‘Pulniv piot,’ he said quietly – or something approximating to that; Richard’s Russian was a little rusty and the captain’s accent was thick and unfamiliar. The helmsman’s hands pushed the throttles forward, however, so the message had got through well enough. The message was also immediately transferred to the engine room. The power to the three huge turbines behind the bridge house cranked up to maximum. With the whole of her massive hull vibrating gently, Stalingrad lifted up her skirts and flew.
The mouth of the main channel closed before her with shocking rapidity, in Richard’s eyes. But Zhukov stood on spread feet, hands clasped behind him, relaxed. He spoke a word or two in his gruff Russian to the officers, ship-handlers and navigators around him. They answered equally tersely. What Richard’s rusty Russian was too unpractised to follow, the situation made clear enough. There was no sonar because the vessel did not break the water’s surface. But there was radar – wide band and collision alarm. All the captain seemed worried about was the width of the channels ahead. The radar would show him anything rising more than two metres above the water’s surface – and, if it was solid enough to present a threat, the collision alarm would sound.
But the monosyllabic conversation established that although the bank was gathering in on their right, and although there were islands looming midstream on their left, these two stood more than fifty metres apart, and all that lay between them, except water, was a solid mat of water hyacinth. Richard could well understand how this would slow even the speedy Shaldags, but the Zubr soared across it at more than a mile a minute, leaving a wake of shattered vegetation behind it.
They reached Citematadi just after three. Richard knew all too well what lay behind the wide sweep of the bend at the apex of the embankments rising up like square escarpments on their right, so he called to the captain, ‘Slow!’
‘Meadimna,’ said the gruff captain, and slowed his command for the first time since midday.
Stalingrad came round the wide bend below Citematadi with just a little more caution than she had showed coming upstream so far. The ruin of the bridge stretched across the river ahead of her, and even as the eyes aboard the command bridge registered it, so the collision alarms started sounding. The huge hovercraft sailed circumspectly forward, the 3D display of her Doppler radar calculating and displaying measurements – the heights of the piers still standing; the distances from one to the other. The massive blocks of masonry lay half submerged like boulders between the bridge’s solid piers, their surfaces rearing three and four metres above the roiling wilderness of foam around them. There was simply no channel anywhere near thirty metres wide. ‘It is a solid wall,’ growled Zhukov at last in English. ‘There is nowhere I can take her through.’
‘I know there’s no way through,’ Richard answered confidently. ‘But I’d thought of that. I believe there’s a way round.’
‘What do you mean?’ The captain looked away from his displays and his fierce blue gaze rested like a weight on Richard.
‘The south bank,’ Richard explained. ‘Look. Just beside that burned-out boathouse, the bank rises quite gently on the inward side of the curve. And, if you can get up on to the shore beneath the embankment there, the first span of the bridge is still intact, you see? The roadway actually projects out over the river like a huge ramp before the real destruction starts. But the bridge and the highway behind it are still intact. There’s a roadway coming down off the embankment to the boathouse, so it’s not too easy to see, but I think if you take it carefully, you’ll just be able to squeeze her under that first span and slide back down the bank on the upriver side.’
‘I see,’ said Zhukov, grudgingly. ‘That is very clever. We will give it a go. But take it one step at a time. Helmsman, come right. Navigator, you see the slope of bank below that burned-out boathouse with the truck parked behind it . . . ?’
Richard stiffened as the penny dropped. He had been so focussed on his own plans he had forgotten what he had seen of Caleb and Robin’s reports from the Shaldag. What Anastasia had told him of her adventures. ‘Captain!’ he said. ‘Can you call Anastasia Asov to the bridge, please?’
‘For what reason?’ Zhukov was still understandably nervous at having his owner’s daughter aboard without Asov’s specific directions.
‘You see the boathouse?’
‘Of course. We are swinging round towards it . . .’
‘It was Anastasia and her friends who burned it. She was on this bank a matter of hours ago. If anyone can give you updates on current conditions then she can. And, come to think of it, you might get in touch with Shaldag FPB004. Captain Caleb might have some relevant intel for you.’
Anastasia was on the bridge four minutes later, as the Zubr eased itself delicately ashore on to the long slope of bank behind the burned boathouse. Ado and Esan came with her. She brought her gun but they did not. Richard looked at her as she surveyed the place. She was pale and seemed a little shaky. The three of them crowded together for mutual support and the Russian woman in her black jeans and childish T-shirt suddenly seemed hardly older than the teenagers beside her. She held on to her S
IG SG carbine with an almost disturbing intensity. ‘The parking area where that truck is standing is just concrete slabs laid over the mud of the bank,’ she said quietly, her voice a lot steadier than her hands. ‘It was dark when they brought us down here, so I can’t be certain of the details, but I got the impression that the road out on to the bridge was as solid as the road down here.’
‘I got the impression there was lots of room behind me when I climbed out of the back of the truck,’ Esan added. ‘I was looking around for enemies and it was dark – but the moon was up and I certainly thought there was a wide, deep space back there.’
‘What was actually in the back of the truck you hid in?’ asked Richard, sidetracked. ‘Did you notice that?’
‘Crates and stuff. I really have no idea what was in them.’
‘There were MANPADS in the other one,’ said Richard. ‘Shoulder-fired guided missiles. Nothing like that?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Esan. ‘But I’m certain that there was something like a huge wide tunnel stretching away behind me when I got out . . .’
‘OK, boy,’ said Zhukov. ‘We proceed. Into your tunnel, if it’s really there.’
Stalingrad eased herself right up on to the bank and swung her face eastwards. The slope of the bank canted gently downwards from right to left, from bank to waterline, but nowhere near steeply enough to cause the hovercraft any trouble. The first span of the bridge reached out above them, soaring upwards a good twenty metres to the underside of the roadway. The first pier of the bridge, with its solid column of masonry towering to the shattered end of the road it had carried more than forty years ago, stood out on the water, leaving a gap on the shore side at least fifty metres wide. But the collision alarm continued to sound stridently. Because the second truck was parked in the middle of their path, in the shadow beneath the bridge.