by Peter Tonkin
When Sally was as comfortable as possible and covered with a sheet, Richard let himself be taken over by Lawkeeper and Su-zi. They were both keen to discuss their current situation with him, and a moment more revealed why. Both Captain Song and the intrepid First Officer Wan lay severely wounded. Wan was asleep — or dead; it was difficult to tell which. Song was wide-eyed and restless with pain. With their words weaving in and out of each other, the three of them described to Richard the events which had followed his own escape, some of which he had seen distantly from the island hilltop.
The moment of impact had done more than to drive the Luck Voyager up on to the Rifleman Reef. It had broken her back, destroyed her centre-ship holds, flooded the engine room and cost them propulsion and power. For reasons they still could not fathom, their battery-powered emergency system collapsed soon after. For some time immediately before the collision and then since, all the bridge equipment had faltered and failed, including the radio.
As Captain Song described the overwhelming cloud of disaster which had overtaken them as a weird part of the collision, Richard felt a prickle of horror running up his back. He was like a physician hearing the first symptoms of an untreatable plague being described — himself the only one there to recognise them. Certainly the captain gave no sign of recognising the symptoms he was describing, and neither Lawkeeper nor Su-zi gave any sign of worry beyond their simple incomprehension of what had happened next.
After the collision, in the face of enforced radio silence, Captain Song had considered sending a messenger across to the other ship and First Officer Wan had volunteered to go. It was a dangerous journey. The storm was in full swing. The deck cargo of both ships was hurling down the wind in sections weighing many thousands of pounds travelling at more than a hundred miles an hour. All the lifelines had gone by the board with the cargo. Even the safety rails were for the most part flat.
But the danger of getting down Luck Voyager’s foredeck and across onto the Russian vessel was as nothing to what came next. Under the shocked eyes of the men in the bridgehouse, the Russian’s deck lights had come ablaze — in the disorientating patches that were still working — and a fusillade of shots had cut the crewmen down like com. It had been at that point that Song had decided to release Lawkeeper, and the intrepid young policeman had led a rescue party which brought only Wan back alive.
And so the night had passed. The storm had abated slowly and watery sunlight had illuminated the scene of destruction. Both ships were wedged on the rocks. Neither would ever float again. Their only hope of rescue was if the Russian ship’s radio was working more effectively than the Luck Voyager’s. But their attempts at communication were met with stony silence. They waved, used flags, sent Morse with a battery-powered lamp which all too soon died. There was no response until, all of a sudden, shots burst out of the Russian’s bridgehouse and, immediately after this, a wave of Russian seamen, armed to the teeth, came pouring down the deck. It was open war at once and a fierce firelight ensued. In spite of the fact that they were relatively safely ensconced in the bridgehouse like medieval soldiers in a castle under siege, the Chinese crew did not escape unscathed. Although they repulsed the desperate boarders, they were in no fit state to hold out any longer. Su-zi and Lawkeeper had effectively taken over the running of the ship. Competent though the junior officers and crew were, no one had any real idea what to do in these extreme circumstances. The chief and some of his engineers favoured abandonment but since the storm swell had passed, only desperation such as Richard’s, and a very lightly laden boat, would have got them across the vicious top of the reef. And other than the island, the nearest land was many hundreds of kilometres distant.
But, if Richard’s suspicions, as yet unvoiced, were correct, their situation was desperate and the sooner they abandoned ship the better. As he listened to their final bemused summation of their position, he narrowed his weary eyes and sank into a brown study of thought. The kind of thought that, with him, usually preceded action. Su-zi knew him well enough to suspect this and so she was not surprised when he asked, ‘What guns do you have?’
‘Your favourite sort,’ she answered at once. ‘Glock 17s. With Beamshot laser sights.’
Richard turned to Lawkeeper and asked, ‘You game for a little scouting?’
But it was both of them who answered, ‘Yes.’
Richard looked at the slight but intense Chinese woman. He knew her of old and had underestimated her before. She was not here as decoration. She was the youngest but most powerful of her father’s daughters. Twelvetoes loved her best so he had trained her the fullest and worked her the hardest. She had risen to become one of the leaders of that little group of amahs who accompanied the old man almost everywhere he went — apparent nursemaids, actually deadly bodyguards. Richard was careful not to look at Lawkeeper for his thoughts on Su-zi’s word now. She was her own woman and he would be glad to have her at his back.
‘You have to know what we are getting into first,’ he warned. ‘The symptoms you have described — the disruption of electrical equipment, interference with radio signals — everything points to one thing in my experience. The Russian ship is carrying nuclear material which is badly unprotected and leaking dangerous levels of radiation. If we can get over there, we want a Geiger counter — if they are carrying nuclear material, they should be well supplied with them. We should try to get a look into one of the holds or something. I don’t know. But I warn you, it could be dangerous, and I don’t mean just bullets.’
Su-zi answered slowly. ‘We need to know if your suspicions are right. If they are, we must get my father’s people off here at once. Is that not so?’
‘If I am right then there is no risk greater than staying here.’
Su-zi looked across at Lawkeeper. ‘We must go at once and we must make our visit short. There is very much at stake.’
They looked like young lovers just starting out on family life together, thought Richard. So that was a masterly understatement. Lawkeeper’s narrow eyes became narrower still. It was his gonads, after all, which would be at stake first. Richard got the impression that only Su-zi could have dragged the careful police officer into this harebrained scheme. But she did and he agreed to come.
The three of them went out of the lower door of the bridgehouse on to the debris-littered deck that had trapped Richard a while earlier. Without the burden of Sally on his shoulders, he found it easy enough to pick his way forward and if one was careful it was possible to see obstacles clearly enough in that weird mixture of waning starlight, gathering dawn and manmade illumination from the bridgehouse and deck lighting ahead of them.
All three of them were familiar with the writings of Sun Tsu, the Chinese military theorist, but Richard for one could not recall what the wise old general had to say about dawn sorties. If they had to go across on to the enemy vessel, however, this seemed to be the best time to do it. The light was dull and patchy, and they could slip easily enough from cover to cover. Dawn was gathering behind the bridgehouse and extending a further shadow down the freighter’s deck. All the Russian’s lights were on so anyone keeping lookout was likely to be confronted by a bewildering pattern of absolute darkness, glimmering starlight, harsh deck light and blood-red dawn light. The only disadvantage was that everything was still; a little pitching and rolling would have made the three of them effectively invisible.
They had to scramble up from the twisted wreckage of Luck Voyager’s midship section on to the equally twisted wreckage of the Russian’s forepeak. It was an easy manoeuvre, however; they all managed to do it without help. Once on the forepeak of the Russian, they stopped. The whole atmosphere of the waning night seemed to have altered the moment they stepped from one vessel to the other. It was a disturbing change, almost as though they had entered a haunted house. Richard obscurely felt the need for assurance and control. At the very least he wanted to know the name of his enemy. ‘Do you read Cyrillic?’ he asked Lawkeeper quietly. The Chinese policeman sh
ook his black-haired head once.
‘I do,’ said Su-zi.
‘Did you see the name of this ship?’
‘Okhotsk.’
The knowledge made him feel better as he looked along the wreckage of the weather deck. It was a wilderness of half-open containers, like a massive three-dimensional puzzle which had been assaulted with a titanic hammer. The maze of splintered packing revealed glimpses of military hardware within. Anything from personnel carriers to trucks to tanks, by the look of things. All that was missing in those snaggle-toothed caverns was the silvery glint of aircraft skin. Whatever else it was, it was perfect cover. ‘Let’s go,’ he breathed.
Richard felt ancient, decrepit and well out of practice for this sort of thing. The other two moved like quicksilver, scouting in front of him. As he stumbled woodenly along, he would come across them, crouching side by side, scrutinising the lie of the land.
Richard knew what they were up to, they were taking care of the old man, and it was balm to his wounded pride that at the fourth such vantage point he was able to gesture up into the container they were sheltering behind and whisper, ‘I can drive one of these.’ The vehicle he was pointing at was a big BTR-80 armoured personnel carrier which was standard equipment for the Soviet motorised rifle divisions and, as such, one of the vehicles to have a section to itself on the Russian equipment disk for Twelvetoes’ Virtuality machine. Richard would have preferred to be pointing to a T-80 main battle tank or a Hind D gunship, both of which also had sections to themselves, but the BTR would do. The youngsters just glanced at it and then at him, their expressions unreadable. And then they were off, side by side, like black cats hunting.
The last place they waited for Richard was immediately outside the port door on to A deck of the bridgehouse. He was still well behind them, but this time he had a good excuse. He had lingered over the main inspection hatch of the number four hold. Where there should have been just a little metal trap door raised on a metal rim secured against water on the weather deck, there was a recently fabricated barricade which at once spoke of damage to the original deck fitting and more than usual nervousness about what that damage meant. In the absence of a Geiger counter, Richard held himself alert for the minutest sign of trouble. Over the last decade he had been far more intimately involved with radioactivity than he would have liked and he knew what to watch for. Prickling of the eyes and burning in the nostrils. Unexpected sensations of heat upon the skin. The errant taste of chocolate in his throat — so innocent, so sinister. Try as he might, he could sense nothing immediately untoward, but that lashed-up mess on top of the number four hatch, about the only thing on deck strong enough to have withstood the typhoon, disturbed him very deeply indeed.
He came round the comer and found them crouching there waiting for him. Neither of them was a seaman but Richard was. He noticed at once what they had not — both of the main lifeboats which should have hung above their heads were gone. And the davits were swung out, so the boats had not simply gone by the board in the storm or the collision. Silently he gestured upwards, directing their attention to the empty space above them. ‘Some of the crew seem to have left already,’ he whispered. ‘We may not face too much opposition in there.’
‘Maybe,’ said Lawkeeper.
‘Maybe not,’ said Su-zi.
Richard shrugged. They were right; there was no way to be sure at this stage. But he could see why a desperate crew might want to get off this tub, either on to the Luck Voyager or into the lifeboats when that passage was closed to them. ‘Look for a Geiger counter,’ he breathed.
‘Look for the enemy first,’ breathed Su-zi in reply.
‘OK. But then you must look for a Geiger counter. I’ve got enough kids already … ’
Lawkeeper stirred; the point had obviously struck home.
The port door swung open silently until it rested in its restraining clip. Whereas the Luck Voyager lay over on one side, Okhotsk rested up by the head. The three boarders had effectively been running downhill since they came aboard and even now the floor canted appreciably towards the stem of the still, dead ship. But no. She was still but not quite dead. As soon as they stepped in over the threshold, they were gathered into the fussy world of muttering air conditioning and grumbling alternators. Silently beneath this rumbling restlessness they scurried across to the companionway and looked at each other. Two major decisions confronted them. Should they go from room to room, deck by deck, or should they go straight up to the command and control areas? If the latter, should they creep slowly up the stairs or should they risk the swift danger of the lift? Richard gestured upwards with his chin, answering all these questions at once. They needed to find the man in charge as quickly as possible. Then at the very least they would have a decent hostage.
The youngsters went first, instantly forming a formidable combat team as though they had been working together for years. They went up the stairs like black wraiths, one high, one low, with Richard bringing up the rear, feeling old but pulling his weight as though he, too, had been training with these two for some time. Deck by deck they rose, each lateral corridor emptier and more silent than the last; not a sign, not a sound of a crew to this ghost ship until they attained the D deck level of the navigation bridge. And here, suddenly, the most unexpected sound of all. Blaringly loud, disorientatingly garish, the poundingly overwritten, half-familiar title music of a Russian news programme. The sudden sign of human life in this dead place stopped them all and it was not until the volume was turned down slightly that they began to move again. A babble of hyperactive, tinnily over-amplified Russian burst into the air, to be met by an even louder babble of live conversation. They froze again. Moments passed and the mad conversation continued for a while. The broadcast voice lost nothing of its hysterical tenor but the timbre of the sound seemed to fade in and out patchily as though the broadcast was being subjected to passing interference. The live answer to the hysterical broadcast seemed to come and go too, as though the conversationalist was terribly short of breath; or his throat was giving out. Richard knew only a few phrases of Russian but it seemed to him that the live words were also badly slurred, as though the speaker was drunk — or worse. He looked across at Su-zi; she read Russian, perhaps she spoke it too. She was frowning in a way that brought an answering furrow to his own brow. Clearly there was something disturbingly amiss here.
Of course there was, Richard thought fiercely to himself, suddenly overwhelmed by the utter strangeness of the ship. And on the thought, he stood up and strode forward, dock at the ready, looking for a target and the red dot upon it which would tell if his sight was well targeted. But the whole bridge was bathed in red light from the sunrise. Every wall and surface, all the equipment and the wild figure sitting watching the portable video recorder wedged against the clearview all seemed to have been liberally slopped with blood. And his red dot was all-but invisible.
Richard did not pause, however. He strode forward, eyes fixed upon the strange man slumped in the port-side watch officer’s chair yelling at the ghostly picture on the television screen. The faintest whisper, half movement, half sound, behind him told him that he was not alone. ‘My name is Richard Mariner, captain in Her Majesty’s merchant marine,’ he said. ‘Are you in command of the Okhotsk?’
At the name of the derelict, the man in the watchkeeper’s chair looked round and smiled. Richard went cold from his hairline to his toenails. Like everything else around him, the strange man’s teeth were red. But while his face and clothing were painted by the spectacular sunrise outside, his teeth were red because his gums were pouring blood. And as he noticed these, Richard suddenly thought of chocolate.
‘English,’ said the watchkeeper. ‘Jes. I speak.’
‘Are you in command?’
‘Gregor Grozny. Firs Off.’ He swung back round and began to bellow once again at the video player wedged behind the useless wheel of the helm. On the screen, as though behind a thickening snowstorm, an earnest young woman with a pron
ounced cleavage was speaking rapidly while staring into the camera.
‘What’s he saying?’ Richard tossed the question quietly over his shoulder to where Su-zi was standing.
‘He is telling this woman Anna Tatianova to stay inside the television, I think. There is not much sense … ’
Lawkeeper added, slightly more loudly, ‘Anna Tatianova was murdered in Magadan a few weeks ago … ’
At the sound of her name the wild man swung back, glaring at them. Framed in the red dawn, unkempt and bleeding as he was, he would have been hard put to look sane, but Richard had no doubt that the man was in fact mad, or very nearly so. The sudden torrent of words he let loose seemed to confirm his suspicions. ‘She will not stay in there. She keeps to come out and will talk to me. To me! I tell you it is incredible! What for should she come this far after me? It is too far from Magadan, I tell you. But then perhaps she was always here. I think perhaps she called down the lightning upon us and struck us blind. I think maybe it was her hand which broke the cable and let the mortars fall. The warheads are hers. This I know … ’
Anna Tatianova’s killer swung back to look at the almost invisible picture on the video. Su-zi leaned in to breathe a commentary into Richard’s ear as, through the static and the interference, the last few coherent magnetic particles on the radioactive video tape tried to reconstruct Anna Tatianova’s final broadcast and, behind her shoulder, the crate full of nuclear warheads was lowered into the number four hold of the good ship Okhotsk.
‘Where are your captain and crew, First Officer Grozny?’
Grozny turned, blinking his thick, red-rimmed eyelids over his swollen, whitening, pink-streaming eyes. ‘Dead and gone,’ he said simply.