Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  100 Hours to Impact

  99 Hours to Impact

  88 Hours to Impact

  84 Hours to Impact

  75 Hours to Impact

  70 Hours to Impact

  69 Hours to Impact

  68 Hours to Impact

  66 Hours to Impact

  63 Hours to Impact

  60 Hours to Impact

  57 Hours to Impact

  55 Hours to Impact

  53 Hours to Impact

  50 Hours to Impact

  48 Hours to Impact

  42 Hours to Impact

  39 Hours to Impact

  36 Hours to Impact

  35 Hours to Impact

  32 Hours to Impact

  30 Hours to Impact

  28 Hours to Impact

  25 Hours to Impact

  23 Hours to Impact

  20 Hours to Impact

  18 Hours to Impact

  12 Hours to Impact

  6 Hours to Impact

  4 Hours to Impact

  2 Hours to Impact

  Impact

  240 Hours After Impact

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  THE FIRE SHIP

  THE COFFIN SHIP

  POWERDOWN

  THUNDER BAY *

  TITAN 10 *

  WOLF ROCK *

  RESOLUTION BURNING *

  CAPE FAREWELL *

  THE SHIP BREAKERS *

  HIGH WIND IN JAVA *

  BENIN LIGHT *

  RIVER OF GHOSTS *

  VOLCANO ROADS *

  THE PRISON SHIP *

  RED RIVER *

  ICE STATION *

  DARK HEART *

  DEAD SEA *

  BLACK PEARL *

  DEADLY IMPACT *

  * available from Severn House

  DEADLY IMPACT

  Peter Tonkin

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Peter Tonkin.

  The right of Peter Tonkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Tonkin, Peter

  Deadly impact. – (A Richard Mariner adventure; 28)

  1. Mariner, Richard (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Piracy–Fiction. 3. Liquefied gas carriers–Fiction.

  4. Remote control–Fiction. 5. Sea stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8365-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7801-0511-6 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For Cham, Guy and Mark, as always.

  And with thanks to Jason Prout.

  100 Hours to Impact

  Liquified Natural Gas Transporter Sayonara heads out of Rat Island Pass west of Hawadax Island, through Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain from the Arctic Ocean’s Bering Sea south into the North Pacific. It is ten minutes before six a.m., ship’s time, twelve hours adrift of London time and slightly out of synch with the Hawaii-Aleutian Daylight Time of the nearest land. In this as in so much else, the great ship is a law unto herself. But Sayonara is precisely on schedule.

  As Sayonara pushes south out of one ocean into another, from a distance she seems to be like any of the other ships which follow the route from North America to the Orient. But she is not. A close observer would note her strange, bulging foredeck that looks like the hull of a second, smaller vessel secured upside down between her forepeak and her bridge house. This white steel whaleback covers the upper hemispheres of the huge spherical gas tanks containing her cargo. It stands so high that the stumpy little bridge house seems only just tall enough to peep over it. The restricted view from the command bridge is not important, for she is being guided by her on-board GPS system, not a helmsman or watch officer.

  The nearest thing she has to a captain is her main command programme which governs the systems controlling her engines and rudder as well as those overseeing her cargo and her security. The only thing it does not control is the black box voyage recorder which transmits its information separately from all the other systems on board. She is as independent of humanity as she is of their terrestrial time zones. Keen eyes might note that there is no one about any of the numberless jobs which usually need doing when a vessel is at sea. But even the keenest eyes would never discern that she is being guided by computer – and by computer alone. There is not one living crewman on board her. She is, in effect, the world’s largest robot.

  Deep in that strange little bridge, instead of a complement of officers and men, stands an on-board system which is even now – at six a.m. precisely according to the on-board chronometer – reporting Sayonara’s position to a satellite in low orbit above, confirming the information sent by the black box. She is exactly five one point five seven one degrees west and one seven eight point four four three degrees north. She is experiencing a counter-current that threatens to slow her. The satellite immediately contacts her ship’s management systems. These in turn adjust the steam turbines powering her, raising the revolutions, the pitch of the propellers driving her and the angle of the rudders guiding her.

  Likewise, the control systems have just reported her heading as two hundred and fifty degrees exactly – with no adjustment necessary for magnetic variation, because the GPS satellite observes with absolute accuracy precisely where on the surface of the globe she is – and knows her heading with extra-terrestrial exactness. She is as independent of the magnetic forces that affect navigators’ compasses as she is of human time. The computers helm her along her pre-programmed course with complete exactitude no matter what the pressures of wind, weather, tide or current. And that course lies along the Great Circle route towards her destination at the newly constructed NIPEX floating gas storage facility and terminal off the Kashima-Nada Sea Terminal, Choshi City, Japan. She is due to arrive there in precisely one hundred hours: four days and four hours. In ship’s time that will be 10 a.m. on the morning of the fifth day, but on arrival Sayonara will come under the control of Japan Standard Time, which will stand at 6 a.m., local.

  The NIPEX terminal, still remote in time and distance from Sayonara, stands at the point of a promontory protecting the floating city of Kujukuri, which is currently taking shape in the bay immediately south of it, east of Tokyo City. The floating city
is designed to extend the metropolis already there, to add much-needed living space to the mega-city covering the Boso Peninsula. It is a child of the Shinzo Abe administration’s neo-Keynesian policy of government investment in infrastructure development – and of that overwhelming need to house people in the megalopolis of Tokyo and the suburbs closest to it.

  When Sayonara and her sisters begin their regular LNG runs, the whole area, on land or sea, will be powered by the brand-new NIPEX gas-fired power station there. In the meantime, the power to the growing city – and to those still building it – comes from the Bashnev/Sevmash floating nuclear facility Zemlya, which will be tugged away from the nervously anti-nuclear islands as soon as NIPEX is fully operational. NIPEX has been co-financed by the Heritage Mariner Shipping Company, which is expanding eastwards much as BP once expanded westwards. Sayonara herself has been entirely financed by them, though her insurance is with a Lloyds of London syndicate. The profits promised by the overlapping projects are all-but incalculable. But so are the dangers.

  Consequently, once an hour, on the hour, a zipped file of information is flashed at light-speed from the ship’s management systems via the satellites monitoring Sayonara to a control room on the top storey of Heritage House in London. The file is also copied to Mitsubishi in Kobe, who are responsible for the engineering, and to the NIPEX facility in Choshi, where a team stands ready twenty-four seven to take remote control of the ship in case anything major goes wrong – like the USAF handlers in Creech Base, Indian Springs or their British counterparts at RAF Waddington, controlling drones in the skies above Afghanistan.

  As Sayonara heads sedately into the North Pacific, the low sun outlines the chain of islands through which she has just passed and the vastness of the Arctic Ocean to the north behind them. It also illuminates the windswept hunk of land that has been recently rechristened with its Aleut name Hawadax after the rats that had caused it to be known as Rat Island since the 1820s were finally exterminated. The near-horizontal sunbeams also illuminate an arrow-head of fast rigid inflatable boats or RIBs racing out of the shadows on the dark side of Hawadax Island. Like a squadron of black jet fighters, they power across the calm dawn seas of Rat Island Pass towards Sayonara’s cliff-like stern. They bounce across the big vessel’s wake, catching up with arrogant ease thanks to their big, powerful outboards capable of twice Sayonara’s top speed. Within a very few minutes, the RIBs are clustered around the huge vessel’s stern.

  Each is packed with men dressed in black cargoes and roll necks under black bulletproof vests. They wear black boots and gloves. Some of them wear black balaclavas while the rest carry them. They all wear MTM black-faced combat watches so precisely synchronized that the seconds click by in unison. The men in the bows put stubby rifles to their shoulders, aiming high. Lines soar upwards. Hooks grapple on to the aft safety rails – positioned to protect the long-departed skeleton crew and the pilot who guided Sayonara out of the LNG facility in Anchorage and down to the Unimak Pass. There she had joined the Great Circle Route heading north into the Bering Sea, and gone into full automatic mode. Lines allow the first few men to swing up over the stern. Once they are safely on the poop, under the shadow of the one big twenty-four-seater lifeboat that hangs there sideways behind the truncated bridge, it is only a matter of moments before they have set up winches to pull the rest of the men on board – and the bags and boxes of equipment they have brought with them.

  As the RIBs cut loose and race back, the men beneath the lifeboat set to work. The bags and boxes are opened. A range of equipment is unpacked. The tallest man seems to be the leader. He opens his silver laptop and brings up a schematic of Sayonara’s bridge and internal sections, overlaid with her safety and security systems. As his companions finish emptying the boxes, he examines the vessel’s most intimate systems with pale, cold eyes, nodding with satisfaction as everything he sees seems familiar, just as he’d expected it to be for a state-of-the-art LNG transporter. Around him, the bustle of activity slows and ceases. The others, kitted up, look expectantly at him. ‘You know your points of entry,’ he says in English, coloured with a Dutch accent that could come from Amsterdam or South Africa. ‘You know what you have to do.’

  The toe of his boot pushes the last kitbag across the deck towards them and they fall upon it silently, unzipping its top and pulling out an assortment of weapons. No more is said. They split into four teams with oft-rehearsed ease and vanish forward, past the low wings of the stubby bridge house. The leader, with his own team, lingers longest. He gestures at the other men who pack the bags and boxes out of sight. Then they too pick up their weapons and run forward.

  At the starboard bulkhead door which opens into the bridge’s A-Deck corridor, they pause. The leader consults his laptop, and then punches a long, complicated number into the security lock. The door swings wide open. All in all, it has taken the men less than an hour to get aboard, equip themselves and break into the unmanned vessel.

  99 Hours to Impact

  As soon as the bulkhead door to Sayonara’s A Deck swung wide open, a light on top of the receiver equipment in Heritage House started flashing red. The team keeping an eye on this new equipment went into a routine as carefully rehearsed as that of the men on board their vessel on the far side of the world. This was probably a security drill; the latest of many, but on the other hand …

  It was seven p.m. London time and Richard and Robin Mariner were dressed and ready to attend the Old Vic Theatre for the premier of Kevin Spacey’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night. Heritage Mariner was one of the theatre’s sponsors. The Mariners were to be seated with other VIPs in the dress circle and were attired appropriately. The instant the red light flashed, however, Richard’s cellphone started ringing. He put his brand-new Galaxy to his ear and a robot voice alerted him. ‘It’s Sayonara,’ he said to Robin. ‘Red alert.’

  ‘Another security check?’ she demanded from in front of the long mirror, settling her cocktail dress on her hips.

  ‘It was last time. But of course, you can never tell …’

  When in London, Richard and Robin always stayed in the company flat which shared the top floor of Heritage House with the offices where the computers were located – just beneath the mass of communications equipment on the roof. Richard strode into the huge, computer-filled room minutes later, with Robin at his side.

  ‘That’s it,’ Robin said, grimly, looking at the flashing red alarm. ‘Again.’

  ‘Yup,’ Richard agreed. ‘Code Red as ever was. Someone unauthorized has gone aboard. What do the remote control team at NIPEX say, Indira?’

  The computer operator glanced across at the monitor that linked to the NIPEX facility in Japan. ‘They’re locked out,’ she said. ‘It happened the instant the red alarm went up, before we were even sure what was going on. They can’t communicate with the on-board systems let alone override them. They’ve lost control of Sayonara. Same as the last drill.’

  ‘Looks like we’ll have to send apologies to Mr Spacey and get a team of our own aboard,’ Richard said grimly. ‘Indira, can you get some visuals on this? It’d be good to have some idea what we’re up against.’

  ‘Visuals just coming, Richard,’ promised the young computer expert, her fingers busy. She glanced up at her tall employer almost shyly. She had seen Richard and Robin under a wide range of circumstances during her time here, but never in full evening dress. Richard towered behind her now, his slim-hipped, deep-chested frame clad in black braided trousers and evening jacket with satin lapels. His waffle-patterned shirt front was held closed by onyx studs and he favoured the current fashion for Continental cross-over ties which sat neatly beneath the snowy wings of his collar.

  It looked to Indira’s fashion-conscious eyes as though he had taken a holiday from his usual tailor at Gieves and Hawkes. His evening dress had Alexander McQueen written all over it. A shock of his black hair fell over his forehead as he leaned forward, rapt. His lean face was angled
down, the blue of his gaze fastened on the screen. The scar along his cheekbone was a straight white line against his tanned cheek – like a Prussian aristocrat’s duelling trophy. Robin had told her long ago it was the result of a broken retaining clip lashing back during a typhoon in the China Sea. Which, to be fair, seemed excitingly piratical and just as romantic as a duelling scar.

  Robin, too, was dressed in McQueen and her little black number complemented his outfit perfectly. It also set off her figure as it sat just on the voluptuous side of fashionably slim. The midnight velvet seemed to add sparkle to the gold curls of her hair and depth to the still, calm grey of her eyes – and was simply made to go with the Chanel No. 5 she was also wearing. She had taken off her jewellery before coming through but Indira knew she had been wearing a long rope of black pearls, a Rolex dress watch in a silver case and bracelet earlier. Richard, as always, stuck to his steel-cased Oyster Perpetual. Individually, they were arresting enough. Together, they were simply dazzling.

  Indira turned her attention back to her work, her mind ranging rapidly over the basics of what she would have to deal with. Sayonara had several discreet computer systems on board, all of them serving different functions, controlled in different manners and accessed in different ways. There was a system controlling propulsion and ship-handling – basically, the engines and the rudders. That system in turn was overseen by a higher system, fed with information by the ship’s management systems and by the satellite systems, including GPS, all of which were programmed to assess how the ship was progressing and allow the ship-handling systems to vary their control of such matters as speed and heading to make sure the hull stayed at its programmed point on its course in spite of such variables as wind, weather and current. Zip files containing information from these systems were broadcast to Heritage Mariner and the other interested parties on an hourly basis. As well as these, the vessel had an automatic tracking device onboard like an airliner’s black box flight recorder, which also recorded and broadcast the ship’s position and heading on a protected channel on a regular basis. Beyond these, there were the ship’s security systems designed to keep the bridge house and all other access points secure unless emergency override codes were punched into them. If that was done while the vessel was at sea, alarms were triggered and a secondary security system was also switched on, giving access to on-board cameras capable of recording what they videoed in every spectrum, from ultra-violet to infra-red. Within seconds of this occurring, unless counter-codes were entered by whoever went aboard, control of the ship was automatically passed to the remote control section at the NIPEX facility, where a twenty-four seven command and control team was ready to take over.