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

Peter’s in Rome. Beyond that, St Mark’s in Venice or the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg. In fact, he thought, simply dazed, if you lined those domes up one after another, you would still have to add the great dome of Santa Sophia in Istanbul to make up the set.
    Five great domes rose out of the deck before him, swelling and receding as the green nonslip decking sat around them with great circles cut out of it to accommodate them below. They differed from the greatest architectural domes fashioned by the greatest church-builders only in that they were larger than anything Palladio, Brunaleschi or Wren had ever dreamed of, and as smooth as the surfaces of gargantuan balloons, blanketed in the steel cladding of the whaleback’s interior. Shrinking away from it, like breasts beneath a nightgown as they receded towards the nipples at their apexes where the pipes stood ready to conduct their liquid cargo in and out.
    Each hemisphere had a radius of twenty-two metres from centre point to outer edge, and a radius of twenty-two metres from centre point to topmost curve. Five metres each way bigger than St Paul’s, in fact, thought Richard, tricked into plundering his encyclopaedic general knowledge. How much bigger they were than the other great domes only Heaven knew. And, sitting in shrinking holes in the decks below, did the domes continue to make perfect spheres? He fought to remember the detail of the schematic on the laptop he had left back with Ivan. So he did what any of the techies blinking owlishly around him would have done: he pulled out his Galaxy and called up the schematic on that – the detailed one he kept in the cloud rather than the basic one stored in the memory. Or rather, he would have. But there was no signal. He checked, frowning with simple surprise. There was battery. There was memory. There was everything pre-programmed. Everything stored on the hard drive. But nothing from the cloud.
    He had been talking to Robin little more than an hour ago and only a couple of hundred feet up in the air. But now there was no signal whatsoever.
    The implications of the last conversation he had had with Robin hit him with breathtaking force, for the overconfident joking looked as though it would turn into a very unfunny fact very soon indeed if he couldn’t get a message out. Because if he didn’t find a way to stop her, she really would be sending in Harry and the Pitman. ‘Aleks,’ he said, his voice as always becoming deeper, slower and calmer the louder alarm bells started ringing in his head, ‘how’s the reception on your headset? How’s the big communications centre your man over there is carrying? Any contact going out? Any external signals coming in?’
    He showed the Russian his phone. ‘I mean, this is the latest Galaxy smartphone. Worldwide reception guaranteed.’
    Rikki Sato came over and took it. He looked at it, touching the screen gently and frowning. ‘Signal’s being blocked,’ he decided after a while.
    And Aleks nodded, tapping the equipment that filled his right ear. ‘Mine too,’ he said. ‘I have internal comms, though, I think.’ He turned to his communications man – distinguished by the size of the radio pack he carried on his shoulders and the whip antenna soaring out of it. ‘Well?’ he asked.
    â€˜The battlefield unit’s working fine,’ came the reply. ‘But nothing else is. You and Senior Warrant Officer Roskov ought to be able to talk to each other fine – for the time being, at least. But we should be able to talk out to Moscow, or the moon, and we can’t. We’re being blocked, like Doctor Sato says. Nothing in. Nothing out. Nothing I can do about it, I’m afraid, until we find out what’s responsible. Or who.’
    Harry Newbold is sitting with the Pitman on the patio behind their combined house and office in Amsterdam when