Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘How long?’ yelled Colin.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ answered Richard.

  ‘Then they’re dead. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen, but we couldn’t get the back-up quick enough.’

  ‘Even so,’ bellowed Richard, ‘we have to find them, take them back with us.’

  ‘We do,’ called Colin. ‘Though it’s a bit like coming full circle.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ called Richard.

  ‘We started with one member of NASA, frozen, and now we’re ending with another one, frozen.’

  ‘That’s pretty grim, Colin. But I’m very much afraid you’re right.’

  The Zodiac skimmed over the placid misty water to the bright mark of T-Shirt’s parachute. Unerringly, without deviating from the wide parabola of his approach, Borisov brought in the Zodiac. And as he did so, Richard and Colin reached out over the bow, hoping against hope to find hands reaching up for them.

  It was Richard who saw them, side by side, their heads just above the water. As the Zodiac skimmed in, his ice-blue eyes, blue as the hearts of icebergs, fastened on them. Two soused black blobs of heads half sunk in the steaming water. He reached automatically, not really expecting any answer. They had been in the water for fifteen minutes after all …

  But as he reached for them, they both reached back for him, and the droplets of the water which fell upon the skin of his reaching arms were warm. As warm as a decent bath. And he remembered. Deception was a volcano. Sometimes the sea boiled in here. At least it was always warm.

  ‘Come on in,’ said T-Shirt cheerfully. ‘The water’s fine.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  All the major players left alive gathered in the main bar of the Hotel del Glacier in Ushuaia on the evening of Monday, 3 January 2000. It could not really be said that they did so on purpose or by prior arrangement, but most of them happened to be in the same place at the same time and there was just too much left unresolved for them all to drift apart so soon after the event. Like the survivors of any great experience, they came together to reassure each other that what they had shared was under control now; safely in the past, over at last — except, perhaps, for the occasional nightmare.

  Kalinin had docked with the afternoon tide, less than twelve hours behind her schedule, after riding out the second half of the storm in the calm heart of Deception Island then running hard and fast due north across the Drake Passage. Those of her guests moving on as part of their schedule, like Dai, Jilly, Max and T-Shirt, had rooms booked here in any case. Richard and Robin, Colin and Kate, and of course Jolene, also had accommodation on the upper floors with their spectacular views of ice, sea, and the distant fires of Tierra Del Fuego. The Ice Pirates had flown Special Agent Jones north, leaving Gene Jaeger still holding his battered command against the Big White like Travis holding the Alamo against General Santa Anna. They had set down briefly at the British Antarctic Survey base Faraday to pick up Andrew Pitcairn and his chief engineer who had come shopping for a new propeller, then brought them all north to the southernmost city in the world. There were rooms in the hotel for these visitors as well. All the rooms were booked just for the night. The Rosses, Andrew and the chief would be heading south again with the accommodating American chopper pilots in eighteen hours’ time, when all the rest would be heading even further north. The people from the FBI, NASA, Heritage Mariner and Kalinin’s passengers would fly up to Buenos Aires together, then away to all points of the northern hemisphere. They were returning, as T-Shirt put it, to all points from Carmarthen to Chattanooga. The cruise ship’s depleted officer complement would return aboard their battered vessel and await developments from one St Petersburg or the other. To none of them did tomorrow seem all that promising a day, except, apparently, to Richard, who was striving to lighten everyone’s mood.

  As though pulled together by some psychic bond, they began to assemble in a quiet corner of the main bar soon after 6 p.m. local time that evening. Richard and Robin had handed the twins over to the hotel’s excellent nanny service, and William and Mary were enjoying the novelty of watching Tom and Jerry in Spanish. Richard called Colin and Kate down for a farewell drink, and Robin discovered T-Shirt and Jolene side by side in the bar sadly considering the prospect of imminent separation after three days when they had not spent one second beyond arm’s reach of each other.

  Then Special Agent Jones appeared, to separate the young lovers and confer with Jolene apart. She had much to report. T-Shirt drifted over to Robin’s side, pleased to see a familiar face. But hardly had he sat down than Dai, Jilly and Max arrived, looking for him. Immediately, Irene Ogre came in looking for Richard, having thought of just one more thing she wished to get clear for the formal report she had spent the last hundred hours or so writing. No sooner had Irene got down to business than Andrew walked in as well. He hesitated when he saw Irene, but Kate caught his eye and called him over.

  As the crowd grew, tables were pulled together until everyone sat in one big circle like the Knights of the Round Table come unexpectedly out of the past. There they sat, with a variety of glasses in front of them and an awful lot to say to each other. But after Irene had cleared up with Richard their exact heading into Neptune’s Bellows at midnight on the New Year’s Day, they all sat silent and a little listless.

  At the far side of the bar a floor show was getting under way and Richard unconsciously hummed along with the little dance band which was playing a selection of popular tunes from the 1940s, looking around his dull companions with glittering ice-blue eyes. The only one there who would meet his bright stare was Robin, and she frowned ever so slightly, in wifely warning against doing anything too outrageous or inappropriate in pursuit of his all too clear ambition to snap these people out of their gloomy preoccupation. So he contained himself for the time being, beating a gentle rhythm against the table edge with his fingers.

  ‘Buy you folks a drink? Bureau’ll pick up the tab.’

  Richard recognised the drawl he had heard when Jolene was talking to Armstrong base on radio and VHF, and he turned. Special Agent Jones was tall, slim, angular, beautifully turned out in an Armani suit. And he was young. Jolene was standing beside him, frowning slightly, her water-coloured eyes sweeping round the glum group.

  T-Shirt stood up at once, his lean face breaking into its most insouciant grin. ‘Well, that’s just plain neighbourly of you,’ he said, just on the edge of over-acting. ‘Make mine a bourbon and branch water.’ He held out his hand, and Jones was able to take it easily, for they were quite close together, and much the same height. ‘Madrell, Thomas S.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, T-Shirt. Dr DaCosta told me. Jack Daniels or Wild Turkey?’

  ‘I’m easy. Jolene probably told you that, too.’

  ‘No, sir. She said you were a lot of things. Easy wasn’t one of them. Now, about you other ladies and gentlemen …’

  Special Agent Jones went calculatedly against stereotype in more ways than one. After buying a round of drinks, he sat at the head of the table and joined in the discussions that began to flow with the alcohol. He was happy to add what he knew to the pool of their knowledge. It was all a closed file now in any case, he said. Everybody who had done anything criminal in federal jurisdiction at any stage was dead, except for Fagan and he had given enough information to tie up any loose ends and establish himself as Killigan and Hoyle’s dupe. Jones had just finished interviewing him in his secure accommodation aboard Kalinin and would be taking him home in custody tomorrow.

  The pattern of evidence which would never now fill the closed file was simple enough. The story it told was unremarkable; the sort of half inevitable series of unfortunate coincidences which make up any part of life, said Special Agent Jones.

  Sergeant Killigan, in his youth, long before secondment to NASA, had been stationed in Europe. As with so many other servicemen at that time, an approach had been made by a down-market stringer ultimately working for the KGB. A proposition had been made. A contact number had been given. Noth
ing had come of it, of course. What could a Marine sergeant on a short tour offer to the KGB? But then, in time, Killigan had come south to the Big White and the game had changed radically. He now had access to something worth selling, and just as his retirement was coming up. He had access to the Power Strip.

  The KGB was no longer functioning, but his contact apparently was — and he knew a man who worked for the Soviet Space Agency who might be interested in a little industrial espionage. And so Hoyle the fixer, Mendel the scientist and Fagan the dupe were enlisted. Killigan promised them at least one million dollars each. No one’s life was ever supposed to be put at risk.

  The Power Strip would be removed from Major Schwartz’s suit. Mendel would study it in his seasonally quiet laboratory, put the design details on disk and Hoyle would send the details to an e-mail address in Moscow under the cover of the millennium celebrations before returning the Strip for the suit’s next outing, with no one the wiser.

  But Major Schwartz’s desire to do his job as well as he could threw it all into disarray. He called for the suit halfway through Mendel’s illicit work on the Power Strip. The conspirators could find no way to stop him going out. So out he went and, despite their best efforts, disappeared and died. Aware of nothing untoward except a missing man and, immediately, a missing search team, Colonel Jaeger had called in help and complicated things even further.

  Fearful now of discovery leading to serious charges and seeking to hide their tracks while he himself was trapped in the guise of Old King Pole at the colonel’s reception, Killigan had deputed Hoyle to get rid of anything incriminating which might be discovered at the place Major Schwartz had been found. Either Killigan or Hoyle had stolen explosives and detonators from the stores. But neither man was an expert with detonators. What they had supposed were simple explosive timers actually had a radio-signal override. The section of the detonator in the back of Leading Seaman Thompson’s head established that the detonation frequency, pre-set by the original supplier, was the same as Kalinin’s hailing frequency, which was unusually high, even for a Russian vessel. It seemed that Lieutenant Knowles had unknowingly set off the fatal explosion himself when he had tried to warn Kalinin that someone had been tampering with the Skiddoos.

  Then Jolene had arrived, which had really scared the conspirators. Killigan slipped almost completely out of control, coming after the inspector personally while doing his best to destroy all of the evidence, no matter how much of his base went with it. But Killigan himself all too nearly went with it, and Hoyle took over, with Ernie Mashall joining the action for his own reasons.

  ‘Poor Major Schwartz’s coffin was used to smuggle a range of things from Armstrong to Erebus and then across to Kalinin,’ Jolene supplied. ‘Firm lesson in security procedures for all of us there, I think.’

  ‘For all of us working as undertakers, that is,’ said T-Shirt quietly.

  Suddenly Richard threw up his hands with a sound of frustrated revelation. Everyone looked at him. ‘Fool that I am,’ he said. ‘That night. The night Marshall disappeared, when we were searching the major’s coffin. I smelt something out of place. And it was gun oil. It must have been from the Glock. I smelt it but I never realised what it was until now.’

  ‘So,’ continued Jolene quietly, ‘Killigan was strong enough to smuggle his gun and timers onto Erebus but too weak or too nervous to use them there.’

  ‘Or too restricted,’ suggested Robin. ‘Washington was in the bed beside him all the time.’

  ‘Yeah. And Washington was the one man there who wasn’t in on it,’ agreed Jolene.

  ‘Seemed like a straight guy,’ said T-Shirt. ‘He certainly trusted Killigan. Backed him all the way.’

  ‘Until the evidence got too strong,’ said Jolene.

  ‘Kalinin’s people seem to have presented the last complication,’ said Special Agent Jones. ‘Hoyle continued trying to keep Dr DaCosta here away from the truth of what they were up to while he waited for Killigan to get out of the sickbay. But,’ he shot a look at the morose Irene Ogre, ‘your Mrs Agran seems to have added all sorts of new curves.’

  ‘Like you said, Irene,’ said Richard gently. ‘The cat among the penguins.’

  ‘Shouldn’t that be cat among the pigeons?’ asked Agent Jones, diverted.

  ‘I prefer the captain’s version. It fitted so well with the situation.’

  ‘Right,’ said Agent Jones vaguely. ‘Anyway, Mrs Agran sidetracked Hoyle and damn near threw the whole plan off the rails. I guess we’ll never know the exact ins and outs of it all, but she managed to get Ernie Marshall and Billy Hoyle’s entire stock off them, including the Power Strip. Hoyle had to re-activate Killigan. Dai Gwyllim told us that. And when Killigan went to see her, she upped the ante.’

  ‘As far as I can work out she simply doubled the sum Killigan was talking about,’ said Jolene. ‘Whether she could have delivered is another matter, I guess. But suddenly they were looking at more than two million dollars each — Killigan more than four million. It gave them second thoughts. All they had to do was send the information off the disk to an alternative e-mail address.’

  ‘Which is what they were trying to do when the communications system all went down on Kalinin, at St Petersburg and Moscow,’ said Richard. ‘I remember the look on their faces, though I was pretty preoccupied myself at the time.’

  ‘But then,’ said Jolene quietly, ‘things must have started slipping badly out of control as the storm gathered and we started the run up to Deception. I’m certain Mrs Agran had the disk and Killigan and Hoyle began to realise that they might have lost the lot. All she had to do was send it out herself and they would be left with their backs to the wall, no way out and nothing to show for it. That’s when they started trying really hard to cover their tracks. Really putting the fear of God into me, trying to wipe my disks which I had informed them contained incriminating information which they thought they had erased from the network files. But still they hesitated to start any real mayhem because there was simply no way of escaping any unpleasant consequences, trapped on a ship in the middle of a storm so far from civilisation. Which brought them back to Mrs Agran in the end. Because only she had the power to guarantee safe passage out of the situation. I’m sorry, Captain Ogre …’

  ‘No, Dr DaCosta, you are right. What you say is true,’ Irene admitted bitterly. ‘If Vivien had ordered me to take the men somewhere safe, not too far off our scheduled route, and dropped them secretly, I would have done so. I hold my command — held it — on her say-so. And that of Vasily Varnek. This you all know, I think.’

  ‘But even then they could not trust each other,’ continued Jolene softly. ‘They all had to be side by side to be sure that the deal was done correctly. It is such an easy thing to send an e-mail, especially off a disk. If they had wanted, Hoyle could have even sent two copies, one to their original buyers and one to Mrs Agran’s. Two identical files marked dotEXE waiting in two in-trays to be downloaded at the recipients’ convenience. Two fortunes automatically wired in return anywhere in the world. The same as you do, T-Shirt — keeping all your banking in Lordsburg, able to get at it anywhere, anytime.’

  ‘Lordsburg,’ said Agent Jones. ‘Isn’t that where John Wayne was heading for in the movie Stagecoach?’

  ‘I’m sentimental,’ said T-Shirt.

  ‘Surprised you don’t keep your funds in Tombstone, Arizona, then.’

  ‘Did once. Bank got robbed.’

  ‘So the final stage of the plan probably shaped like this,’ Jolene went on. ‘With Mendel there to see his end OK and help with any problems with the disk and its information, they probably reckoned on taking Mrs Agran’s deal, even though they only had her say-so for the money. Then they could get a ride back on Kalinin and disappear. Rich men. Footloose and fancy-free. No one any the wiser.’

  ‘No one except for you,’ said Agent Jones.

  Jolene nodded. ‘Once they had taken Mrs Agran’s deal and saw a way out for themselves then I wasn’t coming
back. I see that now far more clearly than I saw it at the time. The disks from Armstrong and I were just going to vanish into the Southern Ocean like Ernie Marshall. Clean shot through the left breast and immolation in the generator house before they all came back, repentant, under Mrs Agran’s and First Officer Varnek’s jurisdiction seems the most likely scenario. And your two crew members, Irene, would have been witnesses to my unfortunate, accidental, death. Unless they had yet another double-cross up their sleeve.’

  ‘Which we will never know now,’ said Agent Jones. ‘All we do know is that the Russian Space Agency stopped anyone receiving any details from the disk by crashing Mir into the South Atlantic just at the crucial moment, and that Killigan had primed enough of the detonators to blow up all the rest at once when the radio channel to Kalinin was opened. An explosive error, you might say.’ He paused for an instant. ‘Another round? J. Edgar Hoover’s still in the chair …’

  ‘Well,’ drawled T-Shirt. ‘Seems to me as though old J. Edgar’s the only one who’ll likely get the full story now, so I reckon the rest of us should just score it up to experience and get on with our lives. You got to admit,’ he continued, leaning forward with his widest grin, ‘it was one hell of a trip.’

  *

  From eight until midnight on Monday nights the occupants of the Hotel del Glacier bar provided much of their own entertainment, for Monday was karaoke night. The compere was well-practised in selecting victims and was expert in allowing just enough negotiation to get the best performance possible from each — even from those who had never sung with a dance band before. Tonight she had her eye on the big, boisterous group of foreigners who had arrived in the hotel at much the same time as Kalinin down in the harbour. Rumours of their adventures were rife around the port already and beginning to spread through the city even as far as the Hotel del Glacier. She watched the group go from dull quiet through increasing hilarity to their current cheerful state; thirteen extremely lucky people clearly coming to terms with the fact that they had come very close to death and lived to tell the tale. Soon, by the look of things, they would begin to split up into pairs and groups, drifting away from the party.