by Peter Tonkin
During the last three weeks, the Russian freighter had completed lading, pulled out of the port just ahead of the furore which greeted Anna Tatianova’s murder, and nosed her way steadily southwards. She had come due south across the sea for which she was named, picked her way through the barrier of the Kuril Islands which join the south of Kamchatka Peninsula to the north of Hokkaido Island. Then she had traced that abyssal channel which coils its way south-westwards off Hokkaido and Honshu down as far as Yokahama before she swung a little west of south-west and sailed quietly, unremarkably, along the outer edge of the Ryuku Islands past Okinawa down to Taiwan. Here, the increasingly westerly line of her progress swung her into the Bashi Channel, north of Batan and through the Luzon Strait into the South China Sea.
At once, Okhotsk’s progress appeared to falter. The certain, sure heading of her forepeak seemed to waver. So many destinations seemed to offer themselves. Anywhere from Surabaya to Haiphong lay within easy reach. Manila beckoned one way and Da Nang another. Her destination might be Balikpapan or it might be Bangkok. The names of the ports written on the ship’s papers meant as little as the identities of the men on her manifest. In fact she surged towards the Paracels, swinging out between the Macclesfield Bank and the Scarborough Reef, down towards the area where the charts are marked, prophetically, ‘Dangerous Ground’.
The storm pounced out of the east, taking them by surprise — much as it would do in thirty hours’ time to the Macau jetcat. Had the captain of the Okhotsk, Leventri Zhukhov, reported the foul weather with more speed and precision, the jetcat might never have sailed. But he, like Captain Song, was concerned to keep a low profile. Like Twelvetoes Ho, and for much the same reason, the men who really controlled Okhotsk insisted upon radio silence except in extremis. But as things turned out, the storm made their ruling academic in any case.
Grozny was the only one who really saw it coming. Psychopath and smuggler he might be but he was a seaman as well. During his watch the storm built with unnerving rapidity from a black line along a vibrant lapiz horizon away to port up to a towering black wall sweeping towards them like a mountain in the sky. The Okhotsk was an old ship, well weathered and widely experienced. Her crew were surly but seamanlike. Her equipment was ancient and unreliable. There were no Decca navigation systems here. No echo-sounders. Precious little radar and no collision alarm. Certainly no satellite link for local microclimate weather prediction. They learned what little they knew from general forecasts on the radio and from Grozny standing on the port bridge wing outside the navigation bridge with a pair of binoculars which might have been used in the naval engagements of the Great Patriotic War.
Considering the quality of the equipment in the containers on deck and below, the state of things on the ship transporting them was a severe miscalculation. But state-of-the-art ocean greyhounds worked out of higher profile establishments than Magadan; and the men who were ultimately in charge of Okhotsk, unlike Twelvetoes Ho, had never been to sea.
There was a brief squall line running before the storm front, little more than a curtain of rain blowing forward like a battle flag, followed by a sharp gust of wind instantly backing. But further south there were half a dozen waterspouts which Grozny could see. In spite of the fact that the afternoon was still swelteringly hot, he had put on his wet-weather gear at the same time as he had warned Captain Zhukhov of the deteriorating situation and ordered the whole ship battened down. As he leaned against the rail, watching the wavering beauty of the distant waterspouts at play, the deck teams tightened the cargo lines under the watchful eye of Uri Engels. Grozny crossed the bridge wing and stepped on to the bridge itself. Beside the helm, sprouting out of the bare and battered fascia of the spartan control panel under the clearview, was a microphone like that in an old-fashioned recording studio. Grozny pressed one of the buttons at its base and twisted its articulated metal stalk until he felt the cold mesh of the mouthpiece against his lips. ‘Better come to slow ahead,’ he ordered Pjotr Orshov in the engine room. As he spoke, he let go of the microphone and pushed the handle of the engine room telegraph. This had been playing up of late. All propulsion orders had to be confirmed directly by word of mouth. Then, as he felt the revolutions slow, he turned to the helmsman. ‘Come round on my mark,’ he ordered. ‘We need to be heading straight into the heart of this thing when it hits.’
And even as Grozny spoke, the sun went out as though God Himself had switched off the lights.
In little more than a day’s time, Sally Alabaster would be terrified by the power of the electricity within the storm and it was this power that began the damage now. Behind the squall line came a wall of water formed by the fierce rotation of the wind pulling spume up from the writhing surface of the sea into the precipitation being tom from the black hearts of the clouds. In the sea, in the spray and, perhaps most powerfully of all, in the writhing hearts of those towering clouds minute particles of water were in constant and violent collision with each other. Each particle carried a tiny charge of static electricity and each collision intensified it.
Into this static-powered generator Okhotsk thrust her forecastle like the point of a pin into the toe of a mad Gargantua. Power leaped down upon her. It was not like lightning any of them had seen. The storm hurled clinging bolts of red and yellow fire. It was impossible to see in the mad battering whirl of the storm where these tentacles of bright force originated. But right from the first entry of the ship’s forecastle head into the storm, they fondled its metal sides and clung to every mast, line, jut and wall of her superstructure.
Immediately behind the raised section of the forecastle head, immediately forward of the first pile of containers, stood a stubby mast. In a circular housing on top of this, most of Okhotsk’s geriatric navigation equipment was located. From the first electric kiss of the storm, it fused, flickered and died. All the ship’s communications equipment was contained in the mast which crested the bridgehouse and from the first burning touch of the storm this, too, fused.
Gregor Grozny stood on the bridge with the metallic taste of the electrical discharge on the back of his tongue, watching all his equipment die. The lighting flickered and faded, only to pick up again as the emergency generators clicked in. Of all the men aboard, Grozny trusted Chief Orshov and his trust had yet to be misplaced. He would have light and power even though there was nothing to switch on and, for the moment, nowhere to go.
During the moment of darkness when the lights failed, the light show on the deck was thrown into sharp relief and it was dazzlingly beautiful — almost as beautiful as it was dangerous. But the electricity and the blindness it brought represented the least of the dangers to Okhotsk. The wind and the sea would kill her long before the lightning — unless a bolt hit something far below and triggered one of the warheads. Far more likely than this was that the forces being exerted on the hull by the relentless battering of the hundred-mile-per-hour wind above and the heaving, sucking of the storm swell below would blow her over, beat her down, break her back, tear the cargo loose on deck or in the holds and batter the ship to death.
But here again, the watchful care of First Officer Grozny stood against all dangers. As lading officer it had been his job to ensure that the cargo was loaded in such a way that the weight of the containers was evenly distributed so that there were no imbalances which might make the vessel tip to port or starboard, no unexpected, unacceptable load or buoyancy, no stress lines which might crack her keel and break her back, however steep and vicious the seas. And, having calculated the stresses and fulfilled the lading requirements, it had been Grozny’s eagle eye that had ensured that every line was in top condition, every coupling and fastening tight and sure. Nothing would be more fatal to the hull than if the hold cargo started sliding about. Nothing could be more dangerous to the bridgehouse — or the balance — than if the deck cargo surrendered to the walls of water which came smashing down upon it, a hundred tons a time.
But the flaw in the system was that even a lading offic
er like Grozny could not be responsible for the disposal of the goods within the containers themselves. Someone else, someone far away who neither knew nor cared about the force of a full typhoon, had been responsible for that. And that was where the system broke down.
At the height of the storm, with Okhotsk down by the head and walls of water washing across her deck, with the last of the radiance still sparking from her upper works and the wild black wind gusting across her at one hundred miles an hour, with every single line, clasp, coupling, connection and plain old-fashioned knot overseen by Grozny and his men holding firm, the after end of the topmost container in the last pile before the bridge burst open. One second there was a steel wall there, the next a gaping hole.
Grozny felt the alignment of the ship change. In another moment her head was high, trying gamely to surmount yet another mountainous wave and the stunned first officer found himself looking at the business end of a 122mm D-30 field howitzer. With awe-inspiring majesty, the artillery piece rolled out of the suddenly gaping container, its six-metre barrel pointing straight between Grozny’s unbelieving eyes. A cascade of shells tumbled out and were whipped away down the wind like leaves in an autumn gale. Had he been less hypnotised by that terrible barrel, Grozny might have had leisure to pray that none of the ordnance was spreading biological or chemical warfare agents all over his ship. But he gave the possibility no thought at all. He simply watched the mouth of the howitzer as a bird watches a snake. For he knew in his heart it was going to topple forward and plunge through the deck straight into the cargo in the number four hold. His understanding of the firing mechanism of a multistrike nuclear warhead was sketchy but he was chillingly certain that a six-metre howitzer barrel right through the middle of one would do it no good at all.
But then a miracle occurred. Okhotsk went down by the head again, taking on a couple of hundred tons of water over the forecastle. The great gun lurched backwards and vanished into the container. It reappeared at the other end, having smashed through the forward wall as well. Slowly, with almost balletic grace, it rolled through and tilted backwards out of its open-ended container. The last Grozny saw of the thing was the barrel twisting out of the side railings — twisting like a pretzel — as the water washed it away.
After the storm had cleared, after he had consulted the captain who had taken to his sickbed at the first sign of rough weather, as soon as it was safe to go on deck, Grozny got Orshov and Engels to put together teams of men. After the incident with the howitzer, he wanted to check for damage. He would have been looking to his lines and his deck furniture after a blow like that one in any case but now he wanted everything checked in detail. He even considered sending men into the containers themselves but shrewdly calculated that that would probably do more harm than good. If they were lucky, he calculated, they would not get another blow as serious as that one had been. The memory of those shells cascading down on to the deck gave him some sharp concerns as well and, knowing that there might have been anything at all in them, he gave each team a chemchecker, a bioscan and a Geiger counter.
In Engels’ team, the man with the Geiger counter was Oblomov. He was a stolid, unimaginative man who seemed to have been a leading seaman since Khrushchev’s day. He was uncertain of the way in which the Geiger counter functioned and kept interrupting everybody else’s work by asking them to check it for him. So it was with a great deal of scepticism that Engels heard him call, ‘Sir! I have a high reading here!’
The call turned many heads, not least of them Grozny’s, and he hurried aft with his second officer to see what Oblomov had found. They rounded the after edge of the last pile of containers on the foredeck to see Oblomov standing on top of the hatchway into hold number four, looking at his Geiger counter with frowning concentration. ‘Give it here,’ ordered Engels.
Oblomov obediently stepped back off the hatch but just as he did so Okhotsk buried her head in the last big sea. Oblomov, waving his arms comically, stepped forward on to the hatch again. The cover was designed to slide like the top of a roll-top desk. It should have been secure. It was not. As soon as the seaman’s foot hit it, it slid open and simply gulped him down head first. His waving arms sent the Geiger counter flying and Grozny snatched it out of the air. Engels ran across to the hatch, calling for Orshov as he did so. By the time the three men were at the open top, there was no sign of Oblomov. Orshov pulled a flashlight free of its clips immediately below the lip of the hatch and switched it on. Its feeble beam illuminated the not quite geometric pattern of slightly shifting container tops. Between two of them was a smear of wetness such as a damp seaman might make slipping bodily down the gap. Automatically they looked up at Grozny.
While they had been fiddling with the torch, Grozny had been checking the Geiger counter. It was set solidly in the red.
The writing in this section said ‘Extreme Danger’. Thinking it might be broken, Grozny turned away and shielded the little machine with his body. At once the needle trembled with lively sensitivity and fell out of the red. Grozny turned back and held it over the open hatchway. Even though the sound was turned down, they could still hear the urgent clicking the machine was making.
Then they heard something else. A distant groan. Oblomov was still alive somewhere down there among the source of these readings. Either a battlefield nuclear shell from the howitzer had gone straight down the broken hatch or — heaven forfend — there was something wrong with the nuclear warheads packed down there. Grozny really did not want to look into the matter any further. He decided to close up the hatch and tell the captain. That, after all, was what captains were for.
Through his grim deliberations came the voice of Pjotr Orlov, talking to Engels. ‘He’ll be lucky to survive that.’
‘He won’t survive,’ said Grozny decisively, switching off the Geiger counter and making the biggest mistake of his life. ‘He’s dead already. Close the hatch.’
*
They came for Richard three days later just as he was landing the jumbo at Kai Tak. The days of boredom and physical inactivity had been relieved by good food, increasingly revealing conversation with Sally Alabaster and use of the Virtuality machine.
They very actively did not wish to speculate about the fate of Lawkeeper, about their own likely fates at the hands of the mysterious crew, and about what was happening at home as their absence continued unexplained. Their one hope was that Lawkeeper had convinced Su-zi to send a signal to Twelvetoes and that he had passed it on. But they had not seen her again so they could not ask her. Their conversations, at first bland and formally social, were spun out of the ordinary by their scars.
The physical intimacy was unavoidable. They each wore a minimum of ill-fitting clothing. The days after the storm cleared were bright, dry and hot. They showered regularly and there was no door on the stall. At first they were religiously careful to conceal their occasional nudity from one another but they soon became more blasé. On the second morning, Sally was luxuriating under a steaming shower when the hot water cut off for some unexplained reason. With a scream she hopped out of the suddenly freezing deluge, slipped, regained her balance and staggered out into the day room. With a soldierly oath, she swept the combination of soap and hair out of her eyes and saw Richard standing there. She noted with no surprise that his eyes were fixed right between her legs. ‘Hey, Richard,’ she rasped, ‘pass me a towel, hunh?’
‘Of course. That’s a terrible scar. Are you all right?’
‘Fine.’ As she dried herself she explained how she got the scar. And, inevitably, when she caught sight of his long, gaunt, battered body, she began to ask about his scars, beginning with the fact that the top joint of one of his fingers was missing. Richard’s scars had been won in interesting ways; ways which brought back to her snippets of news which had caught her attention over the years. And more than once she said in revelation, ‘You’re that Richard Mariner … ’ or ‘You were there? I never knew that … ’
Their conversations never became dull,
and after the second night, which they spent talking until the early hours, they were becoming so intimate so suddenly that both of them pulled back. Friendships which built this closely, this intimately, this quickly could be dangerously hard to control, and they both knew it all too well.
And that was where the Virtuality machine came in. They withdrew from each other into the fantasy worlds that it offered. They eschewed the disks marked ‘Adult’ in Chinese, Japanese and English and started instead to explore the games. Soon, fed up with winning gunfights and kick-boxing competitions, they moved from pure entertainment on to the more educationally orientated stuff. Thus on that third afternoon when they came for him, Richard was learning how to pilot a 747. It was not a skill he ever expected to use, but it was an undeniable thrill.
When Sally tapped him urgently on the shoulder, he lost concentration and the great blade of his right wing ploughed into a block of flats, immolating several thousand people spectacularly and very loudly. He pulled off the headset and blinked at Sally, still trying to get the sight of all that explosive, blazing death out of his vision and memory. Then he saw the three men standing behind her and real reality slammed into place with a sound like a cell door.
‘Have they come for you or me?’ he asked.
‘You.’
He got up slowly. They had talked this through and had agreed that they should do nothing to challenge or antagonise the crew. They both had agendas that they wished to meet; agendas which became more urgent with each empty, wasted day. But they had both been in situations like this before, and had seen others in them too. They knew that the worst possible way to proceed was to shout demands, make empty threats and, as Sally put it, generally piss their captors off. And a quiet captive with his eyes busy rather than his mouth sees a lot more. So they had agreed after a good deal of speculation and planning, whispered while the cold shower ran in case of ‘bugs’, that they would only make a fuss as a cover for something else.