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

filled the screen with a green peak in the distance. Against the distant scene was what looked like a cloud of white smoke hanging in the air. Then the smoke exploded. It turned from white gas into airborne fire instantaneously. The bus rocked. The camera fell.
    Immediately another shot replaced it, far closer to the accident, showing a fuming flood of liquid pouring along the highway. Figures were fleeing ahead of it, past a neatly loaded truck. Abruptly, incredibly, the white liquid simply exploded into nothingness. And the load, the figures, everything that had been close to it, was gone. The devastation was complete. A third angle opened, from the inside of a car. The date was 6 October 2012. And then the precise time: 10:45:57. As the hundredths started running and the cars in the picture slowed to a stop, Richard looked round the room. There was silence as the men watched the plume of distant gas with a new understanding of exactly what it meant. A woman in a striped top took a coat out of the back of the car in front of the car where the filming was being done. She ran past the window. The white plume exploded. The shockwave came roaring towards them. Within the roaring there were shouts and screams.
    â€˜Sixty thousand times the force of that explosion, as near as I can calculate,’ Richard emphasized quietly. ‘Sixty thousand times. Enough said?’
    â€˜Enough said,’ answered Ivan.

75 Hours to Impact
    T he Transaero A380 settled towards the newly extended runway at Yelizovo airport, thirty kilometres north of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, capital city of the Kamchatka
Krai
. Richard looked out of the window at the dazzling brightness of the early morning and the breathtaking backdrop of their destination. The Pacific lay like a lapis lazuli inlay below, filling Avacha Bay and seeming to overflow into the seaport’s docks and past a delta into a blue river running north. The conurbation clustered along the shoreline in regimented blocks, its rigid town planning relieved by roofs of vivid red and blue. But if the sea was flat, the land seemed to rise in great waves, rearing out of the water and heaving itself up to the snow-capped peak of a volcano.
    Alex Zaitsev appeared and stooped beside Richard. ‘Hell of a view.’
    â€˜Hell of a long way to come for it,’ replied Richard. ‘What am I? Literally halfway round the world?’
    â€˜Yes, Captain. The international dateline runs down out of the Bering Sea just east of here. Opposite Greenwich. You know what that means?’
    â€˜No. What?’
    â€˜It’s breakfast time again.’ The Russian lieutenant returned to his own seat on the far side of the aisle, but their conversation continued. As the plane levelled out and began its final approach, Richard got a clearer view of the runway. ‘That looks like the Greenbaum International jet,’ he said.
    â€˜I can’t see colours or logos from here,’ answered Aleks, shaking his head.
    â€˜Nor can I but there won’t be many other Gulfstream G650s parked in this neck of the woods. Even for Russia, this is as close to the edge of the world as it gets, I guess. We passed the back of beyond several hours ago. But those look like what Felix and Ivan promised us. The Mil-17 chopper has a Bashnev logo, and so does that truck beside it. Are the troops up and about?’
    â€˜Keen as mustard. Straining at the leash.’
    â€˜Hmmm. Well, we have to get them kitted up and all the others briefed and out before we
Cry Havoc!
And let them slip!’
    Fortunately the airport facilities at Yelizovo had been updated at the same time as the runway. Twelve billion roubles well spent as far as Richard was concerned, as although there were hotels nearby – the Eidelweis B&B in Yelizovo and the Best Eastern Avacha down in Petropavlovsk – they were too distant. No one had hours to spare for breakfast briefings and refreshment breaks. The whole team trooped