He did not move into action, however, until he heard that Titan and Niobe had been ordered hard north. Then he began to call the line watches, saying in a low voice, ‘Now listen. It looks as though we’re out of time. Here’s what I want you to do first…’
Ten minutes later Richard went back into the sickbay. There was an atmosphere of ill-controlled surliness as the men grudgingly worked through the room, tidying the mess they had just made under the eye of Asha Higgins. He paused on the threshold for an instant. Then, ‘Doc,’ he said quietly, ‘you want to earn another crate of Appleton Gold?’
The big man straightened up and a slow grin spread across his battered face. ‘Who’ve I got to kill?’ he asked.
All the way up the stairs, Asha held Richard in animated, enraged discussion but on the C deck landing, one deck below the bridge, he stopped her. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know it’s dangerous. It may be irresponsible, juvenile, stupid and everything else. I know you and John have been through this before and were lucky not to be killed. But look at the alternative. These people are going to run Manhattan at full speed up onto the coral reefs off Nigeria. The damage will be incalculable, both to the wildlife and the coast. The coral will just crush back like polystyrene until the berg hits solid rock. Then there will be floods. Earthquakes, probably. You can probably kiss the islands goodbye — Sao Tome, Ferdinand Po; to Cameroon, to Guinea. And all those millions of poor souls in Mau won’t get their water either. Except that they won’t need it because they’ll all be dead. The impact of that mass of ice moving north-east at thirteen knots is going to smash the black cliff back a good ten centimetres, open up the tectonic fault line and tear their whole country apart!’
While he talked, the men accompanying them had levered the lift doors open and they all stepped into die little car. The doors slid silently shut again.
‘Will you do it?’ he asked hoarsely.
She hesitated for an instant. But she knew what he said was probably right. ‘Yes, all right,’ she said gracelessly. ‘I’ll do it.’
Asha’s anger was still evident when she walked onto the bridge and the fact served her well. The four guards all glanced over towards her, but none moved to cover her for she was obviously alone. She strode across to Peter Walcott, spitting with obvious anger. ‘Well, you can take care of it this time. They’re all at it now and the whole isolation area is a total mess. I don’t want anything else to do with them and if I were you I’d put the whole lot of them under some kind of restraint!’
Peter reacted with rage, as any captain would in the face of such a report, and was halfway to the door when he remembered the situation. He stopped and looked at the paramilitary leader. The soldier spat a couple of words of Russian and two of the guards began to move.
‘I’ll show you,’ snapped Asha. ‘I don’t want you getting any bullshit excuses from the ringleaders!’ and she led the little group out.
She was so obviously in charge, lent authority by her rage, that they all followed quite meekly as she crossed to the lift and punched the button. When the lift came she stepped in and the others followed without a second thought.
There was just enough room in the car for a man to stand behind each door panel and be invisible even when the door was wide. Asha and Peter stepped through to the back of the lift and the guards followed them in. By the time they had turned, Lamia and Doc Duvalier had grabbed the unsuspecting guards and wrestled them silently to the floor. The doors closed and the lift departed with no one any the wiser.
By the time the doors opened on A deck to reveal the anxious faces of Richard and the men who had been waiting in the stairwell just in case, both the guards were unconscious and both the crewmen were armed.
‘Right,’ said Richard. ‘We go back up at once.’
This time he went up, with Lamia and Doc Duvalier. ‘Can you use those things?’ he asked tensely, his mind racing, recoiling from the logic of the situation but unable to see any way out other than immediate confrontation.
‘I’ve done a bit,’ said Lamia cryptically. ‘Used these Kalashnikovs before.’
‘Trained with the Tonton Macaute,’ admitted Duvalier. ‘Used the AK-47, but never the 74.’
‘Well, put them on automatic and shoot to kill,’ said Richard. ‘Don’t give them any chance at all.’
‘Right,’ they both said at once. And Richard realised he would only have got an argument if he had ordered anything else.
The three of them went in through the bridge door together. ‘DOWN!’ screamed Richard at the top of his voice.
But his order was lost in the gunfire as his two henchmen opened up at once. Neither soldier even managed to turn, let alone bring his weapon to bear. Neither stood a chance. They were dead even before the watch on the bridge hit the floor, their chests and heads simply blown open. Richard stood for a moment, sickened. He had forgotten about the noise, the stench. The gut-deep, soul-deep revulsion.
What was left of the two men was something from his worst nightmares and he could hardly bring himself to look at the wreckage as he wrestled the guns and grenades free. He had forgotten that blood and brains each have an individual smell when violently released from bodies. He had forgotten how vividly white teeth could be when blown free of their sockets in a mess of red slush; that eyes could still watch you even when they were white marbles blown free of ruptured sockets. He had forgotten that fists remain clenched while sphincters and anuses relax immediately after death. He had forgotten that the stress, the responsibility, the waste would make him immediately enraged.
‘Get down to the engine room now!’ he yelled. ‘That noise will have sent them insane down there!’
But no. The two men in the engine room had simply assumed that some member of the crew had irritated one of the guards. They were absolutely stunned when four fully armed crew members appeared, their leader fearsomely badged with blood. They were tank men, brought over to run and maintain the big T-80s. They were engineers, not infantry. They had managed to win the trust of their mad general by shooting a few naked African girls, but facing up to guns in the hands of desperate men and certain death no matter what else transpired was something else again.
‘Right,’ said Richard, breathing deeply with some relief and then regretting it because of the sickening stench on the bridge. Even though they had removed the bodies and made some attempt to clear up the blood during the last quarter of an hour, the whole place still reeked disgustingly. ‘We have some kind of control here. The first thing we need to do is to check with the others and see how things are going with them. How long until you are supposed to report in?’
The soldier to whom that final question was addressed stood with his trousers down and the full pouch of his scrotum resting on the eighteen inches of honed steel blade belonging to Doc Duvalier’s antique bowie knife. He was being very accurate indeed. ‘Fifteen minutes.’
‘OK.’ Richard breathed deeply twice and pressed the first channel button on his walkie-talkie. ‘Line watch on Titan, can you hear me?’
‘Captain Mariner? Line watch Titan here, sir. Captain Bell in command on the bridge, sir. All clear.’
‘Something’s wrong,’ snarled General Gogol looking at his watch. ‘Kraken is ninety seconds late.’
The ships were supposed to report in to their leader once every half-hour. There were six ships, so Gogol should have been receiving one message every five minutes; a delay of even ninety seconds was significant. He began to beat his fist against the side of the command helicopter, one beat per second. But this did not summon the message he required from the tanker, and he was just about to dispatch Kraken’s guard helicopter to see what was going on when the radio leaped into life.