The Accident Man (33 page)

Carver let him go. Trench might just have been inviting an attack. And there was no guarantee Faulkner was really asleep. He didn’t want to find himself fighting both men at once.

He picked up the Thermos and poured himself a mug of toddy, savoring the steamy fumes of brandy, honey, lemon, and tea. But just as he was about to take the first sip, he was distracted by a clack of hard plastic from the cabin floor. There were two mugs down there, knocking into each other. Faulkner must have had a drink too.

And now he was lying unconscious, passed out on the settee. Carver went over and shook him hard, but there was no response.

Well, that settled one thing. It would be a straight fight, Trench against Carver, master against pupil. And by the time Bobby Faulkner awoke from his drugged stupor, only one of them would be alive to greet him.

The
Scandwave Adventurer
was longer than three football fields laid end to end. It weighed around one hundred thousand tons and it could carry over six thousand standard shipping containers at a speed of more than twenty-five knots. That made it around fourteen thousand times heavier than Faulkner’s yacht and a little over three times as fast. The combination of size, weight, and speed also made it about as maneuverable as a runaway steam roller.

Knowing all this, its designers had given their vessel every possible assistance. It had state-of-the-art radar, satellite tracking, and telecom equipment. The skipper knew the precise position of his ship on the surface of the globe. He could track every other ship for miles around. In shallow waters he could map the precise contours of the ocean floor beneath him, making it virtually impossible to run aground. As the men who managed the Scandwave Shipping Corporation regularly told themselves, no one needed experienced crew these days. The technology sailed the damn boat all by itself.

So when the wind changed that night and the cold, biting rain came in from the north, the watchman posted on the exposed, narrow deck, high up in the icy air beside the bridge, did not stand up proud and tall, exposing himself to the bitter blast, because that was his duty and he was proud to do it. No, he sat right down, with his back against the deck’s low steel wall, cupped his hands to make a tiny shelter from the wind, and lit a cigarette. He was damned if he was going to get cold and wet on the pittance they were paying him, when the rain was so heavy he could barely see the bow of his own ship, let alone anything farther out to sea. And besides, there was a guy who sat by the radar screen. Let him watch out for passing traffic.

And so it was that the
Scandwave Adventurer
, bound from Rotterdam to Baltimore, sailed west down the English Channel, with its load of six thousand containers, while the
Tamarisk
, bound from Cherbourg to Poole, sailed due north, across the English Channel, with its load of three tired men. And neither had the faintest idea of the other’s existence.

Part of Carver wanted to confront Trench and ask him what had really happened, why he’d acted the way he had. But even if the old bastard told the truth, he wouldn’t say anything Carver couldn’t work out for himself. Whoever had been hiring Carver for the past few years must have already put Trench on the payroll while he was still commanding the Service. It made sense. He was the perfect recruiting officer and Carver had been the perfect candidate for an assassin’s job: capable, well-trained, and sufficiently angry and disillusioned to get his hands dirty for the right price.

There was no point feeling sorry for himself. He’d been bought and paid for. Once he’d outlived his usefulness, Trench had planned to dispose of him, just like any other redundant piece of gear. It wouldn’t be the first time Trench had sent men on suicide missions. Any commanding officer had to be willing to sacrifice lives for the greater good. Carver could moan all he liked about betrayal, he could play the wounded child wondering why Daddy was being so beastly, but Trench hadn’t asked to be his surrogate father even if he’d been happy to exploit the feelings Carver projected onto him.

In any case, Carver concluded, he’d spent his entire working life being paid to kill people. He wasn’t in any position to complain if someone wanted to kill him.

But he didn’t have to let them get away with it.

There was a deep pocket in Carver’s waterproof jacket. It was sealed by a vertical zipper, and it ran right down the left side of his chest. In it were two plastic tubes a little less than a foot long. They were colored red at their base, then lightened via an orange band to a yellow top, decorated with a silhouette of an archer standing on top of a logo that read “Ikaros.” At the bottom of the tube there was a red plastic tag.

Carver took one out and moved to the side of the ladder. He reached up and pulled the hatch open with one hand, letting in a blast of spray-soaked air and the crashing, pounding noise of the storm. Then he lifted up his other hand, holding the tube horizontally, level with the deck outside. He pulled the tag. There was a sudden propulsive “Whoosh!” like a firework being launched, then a man’s shout of alarm, the scrabble of ricochets on the side of the cockpit as the tube shot to and fro, and finally, less than a second later, the explosion of a distress flare.

As thick red smoke roiled through the open hatch, Carver hurled himself up the ladder, through the opening, and into the hellish scarlet fog. Ahead of him he could just make out the outline of a man. He saw his arm being raised, then came the flame of muzzle flashes and the crackle of small-arms fire as Trench fired into the smoke, toward the hatch. Three rounds slammed into the wooden door frame, somehow missing Carver on their way, and then Carver crashed into Trench’s midriff, pushing him backward onto the bench at the back of the cockpit.

Carver drove his right fist as hard as he could into Trench’s groin. His left hand reached out for Trench’s right, driving it against the side of the cockpit in a desperate attempt to knock the pistol from his grasp. The two men were fighting the smoke as much as each other, almost as if they were underwater, unable to breathe, desperate for oxygen, lost in a primal struggle for survival.

At last, Carver felt Trench’s grip slacken on his gun. Ignoring Trench’s desperate attempts to hit him with his free hand, and the swiping of the older man’s legs, he forced his right hand between Trench’s fingers to grab the handle of his gun. He caught hold of one of the loosened fingers and bent it back, making Trench cry out in agony as the lowest joint was dislocated.

The gun fell to the deck and skittered away across the bucking, rain-slick surface.

Carver scrambled to his feet, his chest heaving and eyes streaming with tears. Trench was sitting in front of him, holding his wounded hand, coughing and gasping for breath. The older man tried to get up, but Carver hit him twice, left and right to the face, putting the full power of his shoulders behind each punch. Then he grabbed a handful of Trench’s gray hair and smashed his head against the wooden rim that ran around the top edge of the cockpit’s perimeter, three savage blows that left Trench semiconscious and bleeding.

Carver grabbed the front of Trench’s jacket and hauled him into an upright position on the bench.

“Sit on your hands,” he commanded.

Wincing with pain, Trench forced his hands under his thighs.

The flare was still spewing out smoke, though the relentless gale was now blowing it away in a billowing red plume. For a second, the air around Carver cleared and he was able to drag some pure, clean sea air into his burning lungs.

“Where is she?” he snarled.

Trench looked at him through bleary, unfocused eyes. “Where’s who?”

Carver slapped him once, hard, to the side of the face.

“Alexandra Petrova, that Russian girl of mine you were going on about. Big mistake, that. Gave yourself away. Now, where is she?”

“Christ, her…. I haven’t a clue.”

This time Carver caught him with a backhander.

“I mean it,” Trench insisted. “I knew nothing about the Russians. They weren’t my idea.”

“So who’s idea were they?”

A weary, battered smile appeared on Trench’s face. He was leaning slightly forward, his mouth hanging open, still struggling for breath.

“I taught you everything you know about resisting interrogation. Do you seriously think you’re going to make me talk now?”

Carver looked Trench in the eye. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“So now what are you going to do?”

The question took Carver aback. He realized he did not have an answer. And in that fraction of a second’s indecision, Trench struck, drawing his knees up to his chest and then driving his legs forward into Carver’s body, catapulting him across the deck.

At that moment a wave hit the
Tamarisk
amidships, spraying the two men with foaming water and bucking the deck upward and sideways. As he staggered backward, Carver lost his footing and fell helplessly to the deck.

His head landed by a small black object lying on the cold, wet wood. As the boat lurched again, he realized that it was Trench’s gun and it was sliding past him, back across the deck, back to the man who wanted to kill him.

Carver’s old commander — his teacher, his role model — picked up the gun with his one good hand and swung his arm around to take his shot. His eyes glittered with fierce, gleeful triumph, then widened in a momentary flicker of shocked surprise as Carver fired the second emergency flare.

The rocket hit Quentin Trench in the face, the plastic tube driving up through his palate into his brain and sending him sliding across the narrow stern deck and over the side of the boat before the flare itself detonated, blowing his skull apart in a starburst of blood, brain, searing light, and bubbling smoke.

And as the flare cast its gory light across the water, illuminating everything in its path, Samuel Carver saw the gigantic bow of the
Scandwave Adventurer
bearing down on him, an unstoppable wall of black steel, as vast and irresistible as an avalanche.

The one-hundred-thousand-ton container ship was no more than two hundred meters away, its hull looming high over the top of
Tamarisk
’s mast, its superstructure lost to sight in the teeming rain, far beyond the glow from the flare. The ship was moving as fast as the weather would allow, forcing through the waves as if they were no bigger than ripples on a pond. Carver knew at once that even if the blazing flares had alerted the ship’s crew to the presence of the yacht sailing directly across their path, it was far too late for them to change course or speed.

He had around twenty seconds before the
Scandwave Adventurer
smashed into the side of the yacht. Carver gathered his senses. It wasn’t too late. If he could start the engine and loosen the sails, he could steer straight into the wind, maintain his speed, and twist away from the onrushing mass. The two boats would end up side by side, the container ship overtaking him like a juggernaut passing a moped. Even a glancing blow from the container ship would still be fatal, but at least there was a chance it might miss.

He dashed to the engine’s starter button. He pressed it. The engine coughed, spluttered, and died. He pressed again. Nothing. Five seconds had elapsed. The boat was still sailing directly toward its gigantic executioner.

Samuel Carver was not a yachtsman. But he was an ex-marine. He’d spent years studying, planning, and executing waterborne operations. He’d attended the military sailing courses with which the British armed forces, steeped in the nautical traditions of an island race, were obsessed. Now he prayed he could remember everything he’d ever been taught.

Carver disengaged the auto helm and crouched by
Tamarisk
’s tiller, the wind in his face, sea spray foaming around him, the rain beating against him so hard he had to screw his eyes into slits to maintain any vision at all. The massive hull was no more than a hundred meters away now, still traveling just as fast, still on course, still oblivious of the yacht’s existence. He could now see flecks of rust on its hull, the white depth markings running down from its Plimsoll line.

He breathed hard and pushed the tiller away from his body, directly toward the
Scandwave Adventurer
. For a long, endless, agonizing second nothing happened. Then the bow of the yacht turned into the wind, began to swing around, and the boom bearing the mainsail rushed across the boat, over Carver’s head. The jib at the front was jammed tight against the mast. The wind was pushing it over to the far, port side of the boat. But the sail was held back by the taut rope holding it in its previous position to starboard.

Moment by moment, the
Tamarisk
shifted its course. It slewed anticlockwise in the water, turning three-quarters of the way around the dial, till it was no longer running broadside to the container ship but pointing almost directly at the vast black-painted behemoth. And then the turning stopped and the
Tamarisk
lay there, dead in the water.

The container ship was now no more than fifty meters away. As the
Tamarisk
had completed its tack, Carver had frantically worked the rope holding the jib sail, fighting against the tension generated by the wind in the sail.

The line loosened and the jib flapped helplessly in the wind. The boat would not move again until Carver reversed the procedure. He had fewer than five seconds till impact.

He dashed to the jib winch on the port side of the boat, frantically turning the handle to tighten the line and heave the jib around the mast to the point where it could once again catch the wind that would power the
Tamarisk
.

The
Adventurer
was now so close that Carver could not even see the top of its hull, which loomed over the yacht, twice as high as its mast. Every second brought it another ten yards closer. There was no time left, nothing more he could do. And then, somehow, the jib caught a gust of wind, filled for a moment, and gave the
Tamarisk
a little push — no more than a few feet of movement, but just enough to bring the boat around a fraction.