Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  Her clear eyes followed him, taking a little cloudiness from the day. She continued speaking to his departing back, at a level calculated to be inaudible to him, ‘Well, yes, actually. If they were trying to scare me they did a pretty good job. They got me jumping at shadows and asking strangers for help. The guys at Safety and Mission Assurance simply would not believe it if they could see what a mess I am becoming here.’

  Having delivered the last of this monologue to the door which closed behind Richard’s departing back, Jolene pulled herself to her feet and crossed the room. She had work to do. The investigation could not proceed without more detailed facts. She really needed to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding Major Schwartz’s final mission a little more precisely. And she had the ability to do that if she just bestirred herself. She could examine his failed space suit. She had some briefing notes about it and would be able to see if anything was obviously wrong with it. She could call on the expertise of at least one of the wounded beards, both of whom had been involved in aspects of the design. She could talk to Killigan again, but about security this time — of the vehicle compound, the explosive store, the off-limits area where the priceless, revolutionary, experimental, clearly flawed space suit was kept. She could talk at greater depth to Billy Hoyle who had been involved with the practical applications team as well as with communications and back-up and who had helped the major dress. She could also talk to him about how the search was organised in its early stages and so forth.

  Filled with a bit more energy and assurance, she made her next decision. Billy Hoyle knew most. Start with him. Pity he seemed such a scumbag.

  As she passed a decorative mirror, she caught a glancing reflection of herself all bundled up in pullover and jeans, not so much dressed as fortified. The way to Billy Hoyle’s brain, she reckoned, if not to his heart, probably lay through his gonads. She had a tight, executive little office number in her case, all cleavage and the promise of a glimpse of panties. That would distract him while she dug a little deeper.

  She ran up the companionways to the corridor where her cabin was with a good deal of bounce, but as she turned into the corridor, some of her excitement dimmed. The doors were all closed. The corridor itself was shadowy, lit only by a glimmer of light from the porthole in the big door at the far end. Apart from the all-invasive background rumble of a ship at sea, it was silent, deserted. She walked slowly, stealthily, rising onto tiptoe. She began to linger outside the cabin doors, listening for sound, movement. She would have given much to have had even Richard’s terrible twins in tow.

  She reached her own door. It was closed. Exactly as she had left it. And yet … She checked the jamb, scanned all round its edge. No hairs. She put the slightest of pressures against it as she checked. It moved. Not only was it unlocked, it was open. She jumped back, as though from some venomous creature; sucked in a silent breath, hoping it would still the thumping of her heart.

  A scuffle of movement. There was someone in there. Another nearly silent slither of sound.

  Jolene stood back. She regretted the absence of the dock even more keenly. But she was not absolutely defenceless. Since she took up this job she had changed her preferred form of keep fit, giving up dance aerobics in favour of martial arts. She knew the falls, rolls, kicks and strikes. She had sworn a timeless oriental oath that she would only use these skills for exercise and never against any person. Screw oriental oaths for a start, she thought. They never stopped Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, come to that. So she kicked the door wide and hurled herself inward, using the momentum to set up her first attacking blow.

  And nearly killed the sailor changing her bed sheets, through a heart attack if nothing else.

  *

  The day proceeded. Erebus picked her way slowly and carefully through the still-gathering brash out of the Grandidier Channel and into the Bismarck Strait. Her course was carefully laid to swing her out around the western reaches of Anvers Island, a preferable if slightly longer route than the cramped inner waterways between Graham Land and the chain of islands just off it. As Andrew put it to Richard, looking at the next ice-warning sheet, ‘With this lot packing in on the west wind, I’d rather have sea room than speed. Not that speed’s all that much of an option.’

  ‘I’d have to agree,’ said Richard, looking at the satellite picture and the chart. ‘The ship is well found and in no danger. Ice-strengthened hull, the works. All you need to be worried about is further damage to the propeller. And that’s more likely to happen in choked-up channels than with nothing up wind of you.’ He stopped, frowned, the chart of the Antarctic Ocean in his mind. ‘Nothing upwind of you at all.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ asked Andrew vaguely, his mind elsewhere.

  ‘It’s nothing important. Just a fancy. But it’s literally true, I think. There is nothing up-wind of you round the whole of the world.’ He turned to the starboard bridge wing. Its far end looked almost due east at that moment, onto the distant mountain spine of Graham Land. ‘That,’ said Richard, ‘is the next land, the only land, to the west of you.’

  Andrew looked at him as though he had taken leave of his senses. ‘To the east,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, to the east. But to the west as well. At these latitudes, that thin little mountain chain, and a couple of islands beside it, is all the land there is.’

  *

  Jolene did not stand naked in front of a mirror and say, ‘Right Billy Hoyle, which bits of me will distract you most if I give you glimpses of them while I ask you questions?’ But she might as well have done so. Perhaps she was getting a touch of cabin fever too. Perhaps it was reaction to being a victim, a sex object, having been already the subject of Hoyle’s voyeurism, but she decided coldly to use her body as a weapon against him. And once she had made that decision, she followed it through to the hilt. Perhaps it was fortunate that the mirror in which she checked her armoury was fairly small, for she did not in truth look much like Sharon Stone.

  Jolene had one see-through bra. She slipped it on. One pair of lacy panties — thankfully white. Thankfully clean. Miraculously still here. She stepped into them. Her tights were all heavy and sensible, chosen for the environment, not the fantasies of the men trapped in it. It was a bit obvious, but she would have to leave them off. Thinking that the term ‘obvious’ was being given new meaning here in any case, she reached up for her one light blouse. It had a sensible button-front, which became less sensible as fewer buttons were fastened. She possessed a tailored skirt. She pulled it high, sucked in her tummy and rolled the waistline discretely. He wouldn’t notice the waistband if she got the hem line right. There was a matching jacket, fashionably baggy; plunging lapels emphasised how much sense was now lacking in the buttoning of her blouse. Seeing the way her cleavage looked, she fastened two more buttons.

  Then unfastened one. She sprayed a little Tommy Hilfiger, not too much — there were limits to what she wanted to waste on Billy Hoyle. She put on her black slingbacks with the thickish soles and the half heels and went out hunting.

  *

  Richard arrived when Jolene was little more than a fragrant memory. He had the chippie in tow, the junior engineering officer who doubled as ship’s carpenter. Chippie was possessed of a new two-cylinder door lock with a pair of keys, though as he pointed out, he had to ensure the door could also be unlocked from the outside in an emergency. ‘Unlocked’ was a fine term. At Richard’s request he also had a small bolt. ‘Nothing fancy,’ Richard had insisted. ‘And nothing large. It has to be strong enough to calm the lady’s fears and at the same time, when push comes to shove, it has to be weak enough to yield to a good firm shoulder in an emergency.’

  ‘Right, Captain,’ said Chippie, diplomatically. ‘I understand.’

  Richard watched as he took off the handles, extracted the shaft, unscrewed the plate and eased out the lock; slid in the new one and reassembled the door. Fortunately, the doorframe itself was quite thick so his second task, securing t
he bolt, was easy enough. ‘That’ll come loose with a good hard shove?’ asked Richard.

  ‘It’s not something I can demonstrate, really Captain,’ said Chippie. ‘But you just take my word for it. Will it be you doing the shoving, Captain?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll make a point of it.’

  *

  ‘I’m looking for Billy Hoyle,’ Jolene told him. Ernie Marshall was sitting with his feet on a chair cushioned with an old and rather dusty kitbag. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Just stepped into the head, miss. He won’t be a moment, I’m sure.’ Wide blue eyes crinkled trustworthily. Open, boyish countenance grinned, full of innocence. Jolene didn’t notice.

  ‘I need to talk to him alone,’ she said. ‘Where can we go to be private?’

  ‘Well, you can talk in here if you’d like, miss. I’ll be popping down into the sickbay in a tick myself. Duty calls.’

  Jolene looked around the little area. It was not quite a room — one door and one archway down into the ward; but it was not quite a vestibule either — the door closed and the archway had a curtain for privacy. It boasted a central table, with four plastic chairs. There were three easy chairs put side by side like a sofa along one wall. It would do very well. ‘Can we get a cup of coffee in here?’

  ‘If you don’t mind instant, miss, I’ll fetch it along myself.’

  Billy Hoyle returned to find Jolene waiting for him, loaded for bear. She was sitting on the mock sofa of three easy chairs. She had beside her a cup of coffee and there was more awaiting his attention on the table. ‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘Take a cup.’

  He took both and looked down at her. ‘She’s setting me up,’ he thought. But he put the cup to his lip and sipped, sneaking a long look over the rim at the way her blouse had sagged to reveal the inner curves of two surprisingly well-filled lacy cups. ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’ he asked.

  ‘There are some details I have to get straight,’ she said.

  ‘Anything I can do …’

  ‘You mind if I tape this?’

  ‘Not at all’

  As she turned to the little recorder beside her, her blouse gaped wider, allowing him a far more intimate glimpse than anything she had planned for. His eyes lingered appreciatively. His memory flashed up some shots from Ernie’s Scandinavian selection. His libido stirred. It occurred to him that maybe she had been aroused by his attempt to spy on her in the john. That this was a genuine come-on. Had he been the man she thought him, his fantasies would have switched off his intelligence there and then. But there was a little more to him than that.

  Jolene sat back, uneasily caught between her twin roles as interrogator and vamp. She adjusted her blouse. Fastened two buttons without thinking. Long fingers played with the third.

  ‘The day Major Schwartz died,’ she said, ‘no excursion had been planned?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So how much notice did you have that he was going out?’

  ‘Minimum allowable. He got the colonel’s OK then came to me. Told me to get him geared up.’

  ‘Were you surprised? Taken by surprise?’

  ‘Yes and no. We’d been working on the suit. Mendel had been checking it the night before for something — it’ll be in his log.’

  ‘I have that.’

  ‘Normally we’d have had enough notice to do another set of checks. Six hours was the usual. But not this time. It was up and out, more or less. But we did the basics. Got it all set up by the book. “According to Hoyle”, like they say. It’s in my —’

  ‘Log. Yes, I know. I’ve scanned the top-copy digest. I have all the detailed logs downloaded from the network on Armstrong.’

  ‘Well, you’ll see what we did then.’

  ‘I see what you logged.’

  ‘It’s the same thing. Mendel and Fagan checked the suit according to the rules. The major came in in a hurry; weather was closing and he wanted out in it. I helped him, checked the life support, comms, other stuff, by the book —’

  ‘According to Hoyle, yes. I know a good deal about the suit. Not as much as Mendel and Fagan, though.’

  ‘You can check that out whenever. They’re both in the sickbay.’

  ‘I know. Though Professor Mendel may be out of communication for some time.’

  ‘At least until his beard grows back. I understand.’

  ‘So you checked the major’s suit and all was well?’

  ‘Couldn’t have been better.’

  ‘Then what went wrong?’

  ‘Damned if I know. I mean, it was one of those things, you know? You could almost feel fate closing in. Like it was going to go wrong right from the outset. I guess that’s why we were so fast off the mark — when his line went dead and I realised we’d lost him.’

  Jolene uncrossed her legs. Paused. Re-crossed them. ‘Fate, Billy? You felt fate closing in?’

  ‘Well, ah …’ he drew his hand over his mouth, like a silent movie actor trying to portray lust. ‘Well, you know, it was an extra test. The suit was up and packed away. Mendel and Fagan had checked it and bagged it for the duration. It wasn’t due out again until next millennium, you know? And the major, he just comes in out of nowhere demanding one last run out into the worst weather of the season. “Make or break”. That’s what some of the guys called him, you know. Make or break Bernie. Well, he didn’t fucking make it, did he?’

  Jolene uncrossed her legs, placing her feet flat on the carpet half a metre apart. Without thinking, she leaned forward, elbows to knees, eyes fixed on his like a couple of steel rivets. He had not seen so much warm lace since his last visit to a girlie bar.

  ‘So the suit was packed away. It wasn’t due out again for weeks.’ She leaned even further forward. ‘He came unexpectedly because he wanted to test the thing one last time in the unforeseen squall. The beards had closed it down and packed it away for a fortnight. Logged it off. Procedure requires at least a twenty-four-hour start-up schedule if a suit is logged off, so you doctored your logs and gave it a quick once-over. The major took it out. And all of a sudden it didn’t work. Why?’

  Billy Hoyle was so shaken by her summation he stopped trying to see through the shadowy lace of her panties. ‘Total powerdown,’ he said.

  He may have been hoping that the jargon would faze her. No such luck. ‘Powerdown would kill his life-support and communication,’ she said. ‘But it wouldn’t kill him and it wouldn’t kill his back-up communications or his locator beacon fix on your laser grid.’

  Billy looked at her, stunned by how much she knew. ‘Of course it would,’ he said. ‘Total powerdown would do all of those things if the stupid, arrogant little fuck went way out in weather better suited to midwinter than midsummer. You got the weather records for the day? In the heart of that squall it was thirty below. Thirty Celsius with the wind-chill. So he had powerdown in the back of beyond with no chance of calling in or registering on the monitor. He tried to call us up and he tried to walk back and the sorry fucker froze to death. End of story.’

  ‘Not quite. Not from where I’m sitting, Billy. Because you know and I know that even with total powerdown the major could only have frozen in that suit if some part of it had been left wide open. Wide open or missing altogether. I don’t see any record of that in your logs. Or did you tidy them up again?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at. I never —’

  ‘Yes you did, Billy. You, Mendel, Fagan; you three at least. You tidied up the whole shut-down procedure so you could get it out again for the major with a minimum of fuss. What else did you erase from those logs before you saved them down for the record?’

  Billy Hoyle looked at her, open-mouthed. Her eyes were blazing. She stood up. The hem of her skirt was exactly level with his chin. ‘It’s fortunate for me,’ she spat, ‘that the network automatically saves each old file as a back-up each time a new one is saved on top of it. The system has been programmed to do that not just once but four times. So I have yo
ur top-copy official log, Billy; yours, Mendel’s, Fagan’s and the rest. The top copies and the four separate back-up copies, one on top of the other.’

  *

  ‘Who’s the lucky man?’ asked Richard a little later, gesturing at Jolene’s outfit.

  ‘What? Oh, Billy Hoyle,’ she answered distractedly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She looked down again. Buttoned up her blouse. ‘It’s an interrogation device.’

  ‘Really? In my day they used thumbscrews.’

  ‘Well. It worked. Maybe too well. But that’s not your problem. What can I do for you?’

  ‘In that outfit? You’ve already done it, my dear.’

  ‘Very funny. And I expect that’s why you’re following me to my cabin. What is it really?’

  ‘Here we are. Now I can show you. New lock, see? New key, and new bolt. Good and solid. No more casual break-ins. Better?’

  ‘You are a life-saver, sir.’ Spontaneously she went up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his cheek.

  *

  Far below, Billy Hoyle was sitting glumly, looking across the little alcove at Ernie Marshall. ‘I think she suckered me,’ he said. The English sailor, an obvious soul mate, had become friend and confidant almost instantly. Confidant for much that Billy wanted to unburden himself of, but by no means all. ‘It was that get-up she was wearing. Screwed with my head just when I needed to think straight.’

  ‘Tarts,’ sympathised Ernie. ‘What can you do, eh? Still, if you’re into her, so to speak, I can let you have the nightie she was wearing last night. And I’ve got a magazine somewhere that shows a Scandinavian bit that looks just like her doing some really interesting things with a bowl of fruit. Well, not the bowl so much …’

  ‘Aw, come on, Ernie. Get real. This is serious. The bitch can really hurt me.’

  ‘I thought she was going to hurt me this morning,’ admitted Ernie feelingly. ‘When she came through the door of her cabin like that I thought she was going to kick my head in where I stood. I kid you not.’ He paused. ‘God, I wish she’d been wearing that little miniskirt then, I tell you.’