Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure Read Online Free PDF Page A

particular operation,’ said Ivan in a stage whisper, ‘but during my initial briefing of Aleks Zaitsev, I discovered that he is an Olympic standard skier. He’s master of the black piste at Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus and holds the records for the black pistes on Mount Cermis and Crevinia in Italy. Both the Matterhorn and the Zermatt runs. The Pitman would have trouble keeping up with that, eh?’
    Zaitsev stood up as Ivan finished speaking and there was immediate silence. The slim, broad-shouldered young officer swivelled his shaven head as though his grey eyes were gunsights, sweeping round the room. ‘We will go through,’ he said in a forceful baritone. But it was Richard who led the way. Then, while the others were crowding into the conference room behind him, he put his laptop on a table beneath a white screen and connected it to the OHP system so that when Aleks eventually called them all to order, the two men were standing on either side of a screen filled with a detailed schematic of
Sayonara
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    The Russian pointed to the bow section of Richard’s schematic. ‘You see the whaleback on the weather deck – or main deck – begins several metres aft of the forecastle head,’ he said in near-perfect English. ‘There is just room for a helideck and this is our main point of access from the air. These marks in the forward wall of the whaleback immediately aft of the helideck are access points designed to allow maintenance and oversight of the Moss tanks in the interior during the various processes involved in loading and unloading LNG. The schematic makes it clear that these points, like these here and here and here’ – he pointed – ‘between the tanks themselves and these here at the aft, and of course these into the bridge itself – all give access to the interior of the hull.’ He traced passageways and galleries that ran between the double-hull of the vessel’s sides and the five perfectly spherical tanks it contained, like five beach balls in a banana boat. Inevitably, the tanks almost met at their widest points – but equally inevitably, there was much more space between them where they sat on the keel, areas where the lower halves of the ball-shaped structures curved away from each other. Areas where the strangers on board might hide themselves – or anything else they brought aboard with them. And, above the deck level where the spheres all but touched, there were equally inviting maintenance and work areas, runways and pipe sheaves under the whaleback of the bulbous deck-covering.
    In the bridge house there were rudimentary accommodation and ship-handling areas as well as computer areas – no longer sealed, unfortunately. And beneath these, in the engine rooms at the lower rear of the schematic, the big steam turbines that used the LNG as fuel to power the screws that drove the thing and moved the rudders that steered her according to the dictates of those computers. That still did so, in fact, following the course as pre-programmed – unless the computers controlling her course had been hacked into, just as the rest of the vessel had been pirated, and tampered with. He explained the fundamental set up of the computer programmes, each with its own set of back-ups. One that controlled the propulsion and steering. One that communicated with the orbiting GPS and guidance systems and used their information to vary the first set as proved needful depending on wind, weather and current. One that monitored the safe disposition of the cargo. And one that oversaw the on-board security. All apparently hacked and under the control of the pirates. Only the ship’s black box automatic broadcasts were still alive, allowing them to know the position of the vessel, her heading and her speed. But for how long? No one knew. She was now beyond the control of the remote command team still sitting hopefully but uselessly at the NIPEX