Free Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure by Peter Tonkin

were ’Ndrangheta?’

68 Hours to Impact
    R ichard tore the headset off his streaming eyes, blinking fiercely and shaking his head. His vision cleared almost at once and he saw his teammates floundering blindly all around him, their night-vision goggles overcome by the brightness. He stepped forward, fearing that this was a trick to incapacitate them before springing some kind of trap. But no. Apart from the men nearest to him – and the sounds of the second group echoing over from the port side, there was nothing. No movement. No challenge. Just the distant buzz of fluorescent strip-lighting. The sighing of the wind against the canopy. The stirring of the waves. The restless
sotto voce
rumbling of the turbines.
    Richard crossed to the reeling figure of Rikki Sato and caught him by the shoulder. It took a moment to calm the jumpy computer expert, then he was able to pull off the headset and offer the blind man the glasses hooked into a breast pocket on his bulletproof vest. ‘Doctor Sato, it’s Richard Mariner,’ he said. ‘It’s just the ship’s lighting. Do the systems on board switch on automatically?’
    â€˜Yes! There are sensors …’ The computer expert actually slapped himself on the forehead with frustration and anger, hard enough to send the black-framed glasses skittering down the short slope of his nose. Richard stepped back. He had never seen anyone do that before. ‘The lighting system works on the motion sensors. I should have remembered,’ the distraught man wailed.
    â€˜Don’t beat yourself up, Doctor,’ he said. ‘There’s more than simple slips of memory at work here. When the first team went into the bridge house thirty-one hours ago, they didn’t set off any motion sensors to switch on any lights or we’d have seen it on our systems in London. This is all being done on purpose. As was that.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜I mean that they had the emergency override codes – the same as your guys do, and only Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Fujitsu men have access to those. They came aboard, went into the bridge house and set off the red alert. They set off the cameras, but not the motion sensors, or the lights would have come on. They wanted to work in the dark because they wanted us to be in the dark. They wanted us to know someone was on board, perhaps, but not who. And then, when the transmissions from the on-board cameras stopped and we couldn’t keep such a close eye on them any more – I’ll bet that’s when the motion sensors for the lights came back online; the ones we tripped just now, so they could do whatever they wanted to do without having to fuss with inconvenient headsets and infra-red night-vision equipment.’
    â€˜But if it was motion sensors that switched the lights on now,’ said Sato, ‘it was not a trap, or else something would be happening.’
    Richard looked around as soon as Sato finished speaking and waited for the others to sort themselves out. After Sato, his next priority, of course, was Aleks. Dom would have to take care of himself. But neither needed his immediate assistance. They were all pulling off their goggles and mopping their eyes. He turned away from the group of men he had entered with and caught his breath at what he saw, losing his train of thought as the immediacy of what he was seeing simply overwhelmed him. It was even more than he had imagined in the vast, echoing darkness just before the lights went on.
    True, as he had sensed, they had stepped into a long, narrow passage immediately inside the bulkhead door, for the wall of the whaleback cover rose seemingly less than a metre beyond his square shoulder, coming in over his head like the wall of a tunnel. But on the other, equally close at hand, rose a dome. A dome like the dome of St Paul’s in London. And there, beyond it in the brightness, another, like the dome of St