Shadow Strike. Don Pendleton

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      CHAPTER TWO

      Azores Islands

      The sea foamed white and clean before the cutting prow of the HMS Reliant, while behind the destroyer a school of bottlenose dolphins played in the churning wake.

       Staying close to the Reliant were three heavily armed frigates. Their overlapping Doppler radar ceaselessly swept the sky above, and state-of-the-art sonar probed the murky depths below. The missile pods were primed, depth charges and torpedoes were ready for action, and sailors stood on the decks cradling L-85 assault rifles. But they lounged against the gunwales, kept their faces to the sun and mostly talked about women.

       The entire crew of the convoy was fully prepared for battle, but expected nothing more serious than a mild case of sunburn to happen. Everybody knew the monthly trip to South Africa was about as dangerous an assignment as standing guard at Buckingham Palace when the royal family was away on vacation. Boring, but necessary for the general good of the United Kingdom.

       It was early in the morning, with the sun still low on the horizon. But the sky was clear, the wind warm. And standing on the flying bridge of the Reliant, Captain Olivia Taylor, wearing a pair of nonregulation sunglasses, was watching the dolphins splash and play, and occasionally feed on the smaller fish that were attracted to the churning foam, incorrectly thinking it was food. Evolution in action.

       Opening a bottle of suntan lotion, Taylor spread some on her exposed arms and neck, working up to her cheeks. This assignment was a cakewalk, as her American father had liked to say, a task so easy it would border on dull if it hadn’t been for the vital nature of their cargo.

       Roughly a hundred years ago, Great Britain had owned most of South Africa, and was making a serious attempt to get the rest of the continent, when the Boer War erupted, closely followed by Zulu uprisings. Then there was the Great War, World War II…and every conflict seemed to whittle down their African holdings a little bit more until they were reduced to being landowners in just a few locations.

       Closing the cap on the bottle, Taylor had to smile. But those last few were choice locations, indeed. Snug in the bowels of her destroyer was the yearly run from the Imperial Gold Mines UK Limited—a hold full of gold bullion worth millions of pounds. Which was why the Royal Navy had been assigned to convey the gold from Johannesburg to London, the final destination being the main vault of the Bank of England, the most impregnable fortress this side of Fort Knox in the United States.

       “Cup of tea, Skipper?” a young officer asked, stepping onto the flying bridge. He was carrying two large plastic mugs, the bottoms oddly curved.

       “Lord, yes, James! My thanks,” Taylor said with a smile. Taking the mug, she drained half of it in a single gulp. “Ah, like blood to a vampire!”

       Chuckling, Lieutenant James Jones set his mug on the railing of the platform. Its curved bottom fit perfectly over the steel pipe and locked into place with a snap. “Now, that sounds like a line from a bloody Hammer film back in the seventies.”

       “Ah yes, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.”

       “To be honest, Skipper, I was thinking more along the lines of those curvy Hammer Girls, and their rather famous low-cut gowns.”

       She took another sip. “I’m sure you were, Lieutenant. To each his own. Peter Cushing is more to my liking. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat!”

       The officer laughed. “As you say, Skipper, to each their own.”

       Just then, a wing of fully armed RAF striker fighters streaked by overhead.

       “Cheeky bastards, rattling our chains like that,” Jones muttered, squinting at the disappearing jets.

       “Just doing their job, Lieutenant,” Taylor replied, finishing off her tea. “Any sandwiches in the galley?”

       “Yes, ma’am. What would you like?”

       She laughed. “I’ll get them myself, James. No sense—”

       Unexpectedly, a loudspeaker bolted to the armored wall of the warship crackled to life. “Captain to the bridge, please! Captain to the bridge!”

       With a sigh, Taylor hurried inside, passing off the empty mug to a waiting rating. The young sailor took it, saluted and scurried away.

       “Trouble?” Taylor asked the room in general.

       Control panels lined the room, a dozen computer screens showing the exact state of everything important on the navy ship, from the temperature of the main bearings in the Rolls-Royce engines, to the amount of 30 mm ammunition left in the bunkers for the forward Oerlikon miniguns. A dozen men and women were sitting at their posts, heads bent solemnly over the controls like priests in prayer.

       “Unknown, ma’am,” said an ensign, rubbing the back of his neck. “But with this much glimmer in our belly, I thought it wise to be safe instead of sorry.”

       “Fair enough,” Taylor said, pushing back her cap. “Status, please, chief.”

       “We’re traveling the exact same route we took going down to South Africa,” Chief Michelson replied crisply, his gaze locked on a glowing sonar screen. “We know every hill and rock under these waters, and there’s something new below. Something big.”

       “A dead whale?” Jones asked curiously. He had followed the captain inside.

       “No, much larger than that, sir. Sonar says irregular shapes, mounds of it. Could be a wrecked ship.”

       “Damn. Have there been any storms in the vicinity, or known pirate attacks?” Taylor asked. “If a commercial vessel sank in these shallow waters, there could be survivors about. What about it, Ears?”

       “Possibly a civilian wreck, Captain,” the sonar operator replied. Eyes tightly closed, he held the earphones in place with both hands. “But it would have to have been a small ship, maybe a fishing boat or pleasure craft. I’m not hearing any metal below, just lots of wood and plastic.”

       “Sounds like a speedboat to me,” James stated, crossing his arms. No metal meant there was no threat to the convoy. “Ears, what’s the depth?”

       “Five hundred meters, and rising,” the sonar operator called out briskly, hunched before the glowing computer screen.

       “Lieutenant, send out a couple of hovercraft… No, belay that,” Taylor said with a grimace. “Uncork a Lynx helicopter and do a sweep for any survivors. Hundred meters, three hundred and five. Move quick now.”

       “Debris spotted in the starboard water, sir!” an ensign interrupted, touching his headphones. “Multiple lifejackets, broken wood and general flotsam!”

       “Get that Lynx flying, Lieutenant,” Taylor snapped, sitting in the command chair. All around her banks of video monitors strobed into life, showing every СКАЧАТЬ