The Nemesis Program

Chapter Sixty-Four

It was from the rocky Estonian shoreline, just before the break of dawn, that the high-performance rigid inflatable boat cut rapidly across the waters of the Gulf under cover of darkness. It had no lights, and the men aboard were dressed all in black. It was cold. Their faces were hard, their eyes fixed purposefully on the dark shape of the ship on the horizon.

As the RIB approached, the Triton grew larger and larger ahead, like a vast mountain looming out of the pre-dawn murk. The small craft steered a course slightly ahead of the ship’s, then cut its motor and drifted silently on the swell, waiting for the towering prow of the cargo vessel to catch up. Closer, closer; the RIB bobbed precariously over the foam of the ship’s prow wave and down the side of the hull, a dangerous operation if the men on board hadn’t known just what they were doing.

As the rusted side of the Triton streamed by, close enough to reach out and touch, Ben clamped a short magnetic mooring cable to the hull. With a jerk, the dinghy was suddenly being towed along with the ship, attached like a tiny remora to some vast leviathan and tucked tightly into the concave curve of its flank so that it was invisible to anyone peering down from the edge of the deck.

Phase One had been accomplished.

Ben turned to Jeff, who grinned at him from behind his diving mask and gave the thumbs-up while Boonzie McCulloch helped him don his oxygen bottle. As the ex-Navy diver, Jeff was better qualified for the next job than anyone. This was Phase Two, essential to the success of the operation.

Crouching in the bottom of the boat, Ben unzipped a bag and lifted out a heavy metallic round object, the size of a dinner plate but several inches thick. Two carabiner clips secured it onto Jeff’s harness together with the life-line that would allow him to keep up with the ship once he went under. A moment later, the former SBS commando slipped with practised ease into the water and disappeared.

Ben waited tensely, counting the seconds by the illuminated dial of his watch. Nobody spoke — hand signals only.

Jeff resurfaced less than a minute later, pulled himself back to the dinghy by the life-line and clambered aboard, quite a few kilograms lighter now that the high-explosive limpet mine had been successfully clamped to the underside of the Triton’s hull. When remotely detonated it would rip a fatal hole that would sink her in minutes.

But sending the cargo ship to the bottom of the Gulf of Finland was just part of the plan. Jeff quickly stripped off his diver’s gear, mask and flippers and, shivering with the cold, pulled on his trousers, assault vest and boots. Ben tossed him a backpack like the one everyone else was wearing.

Now they were ready to move to Phase Three.

In the Triton’s command centre, a radar operator named Rick Yemm jumped up from his station to report to one of his superiors the anomaly he’d just noticed. The message quickly filtered up the line and reached Isaac Friedkin, who went anxiously to relay it to Victor Craine in the main control room.

The old man turned with an icy stare as Friedkin’s presence interrupted his thoughts.

‘I’m very sorry to disturb you, sir. But radar is picking up a signal nearby. We think it’s a small vessel.’

‘This is a busy lane, Friedkin. It’s full of small vessels.’

‘This is different, sir. Whatever it is, it came extremely close and then disappeared.’

‘It can’t have disappeared,’ Craine snapped, then quickly thought again. ‘Unless—’

Friedkin nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Unless it’s moored itself to us. It’s the only way the radar could miss it.’

Craine’s brow wrinkled. If they were being quietly boarded, then by whom? It wasn’t unknown for Finnish customs officials to mount surprise raids on the off chance of intercepting drug shipments, but even that sounded unlikely. ‘Send a team to investigate,’ he said abruptly. ‘Do it now, Friedkin.’

Friedkin nodded again and hurried off to alert the security personnel.

The grappling iron burst with a breathy thud out of the muzzle of the launcher and sailed up the ship’s side, trailing on its cable the lightweight rope ladder that unwound rapidly from the coil at the bottom of the RIB. The iron’s rubber-coated hooks cleared the railing, thumped softly to the deck and slid a few feet before gripping something solid.

Ben tested the ladder with his weight. It was secure. He signalled the okay to the others and began to scramble nimbly upwards. Quigley, Boonzie and Jeff watched him climb, a diminishing black figure swaying from side to side on the flimsy ladder, padding lightly with his feet when the ship’s motion swung him against the hull. He reached the top and signalled down before disappearing over the rail. Boonzie was next, powering up the rope rungs with the energy of a man half his age.

One by one, the team assembled on the deck to merge invisibly with the shadows between container stacks. In silence, each man opened up his waterproof backpack and emptied out the equipment inside. The MP5s emerged first. Loaded magazines snapped into receivers. Silencers were screwed tightly onto muzzles, bolts were cocked, rounds chambered. Tactical lights and lasers were kept off for the moment. They checked and holstered their pistols, and clipped on their grenades.

The scarlet dawn was just beginning to break in the east. Phase Three had begun.

Minutes later, the five-strong patrol who’d been sent out to check for a possible boarding party combed the deck, each man carrying his regulation M4 carbine with thirty-round magazine. So far they’d detected nothing suspicious. The tallest of them tried leaning out over the rail as far as he dared, with another two clutching his belt. All he could see was the ship’s side and the heaving slate-grey sea far below. He shook his head. Like the others, he didn’t see how anyone could have boarded the vessel, but they had their strict orders to search every inch of her thoroughly.

As they patrolled the aisle between two towering container columns, four shapes came flitting out of the shadows behind them. The dawn sun glittered redly on the blade of a Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger.

The guards were taken by surprise. It was all over with a few stifled cries and grunts, followed quickly by five faint splashes as the bodies were dropped over the side, minus their weapons and ammunition.

Ben’s team retreated behind cover and began stealthily weaving a path from one container stack to the next, heading for the towering superstructure. Ben led the way, followed by Quigley, then Boonzie, then Jeff. They knew exactly where they needed to go.

At fractionally over six hundred miles away, the Triton was now almost within range of its target and the buzz of anticipation in the command centre was reaching its peak. The targeting sequence was now complete, the coordinates entered and identified by the satellite. Victor Craine eyed the atomic clock on the wall. It was split-second synchronised with the digital countdown on the computer screen in front of him. In precisely twenty-three minutes, it would be time.

The Director trusted nobody. He climbed out of his chair, picked up his sticks and was hobbling over to the other computer to triple-check the coordinates when the control room door burst open and the red-faced, breathless and clearly agitated Friedkin hurried up to him.

‘Well?’ Craine demanded.

‘We may have a problem, sir. The patrol I sent to check the outside—’

‘They found something?’

‘That’s just it. I don’t know if they did, or what.’

The Director balked at such a reply. Was the man drunk, to come back to him with such vague information?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Friedkin repeated insistently, ‘because they’re no longer answering their radios.’

‘What? Then send another team out after them.’

‘I did. They’ve fallen out of contact as well.’

Craine opened his mouth to bark a furious reply, but the words were snatched out of his mouth by the loud explosion that rocked the ship and made him stagger.