Atlantis

had led a number of diehard cold warriors to suggest she had secretly supplied the insurgents with weapons. Now York had confirmation of what many had suspected, that the shells were part of an illegal traffic from the old Soviet arsenals that reached terrorists by way of the criminal underworld. Aslan was probably not the only warlord to retain some of the prized hardware for his personal use.

As York zipped up his survival suit, Howe came bounding up the ladder. He was already half into a white flash-resistant overall and passed another to York. The two men quickly kitted up and each took a helmet from a bin under the console, the Kevlar domes incorporating bulbous ear-protectors and shatterproof retractable visors.

“This is it, then,” Howe said.

“God be with us.”

The two men slid down the ladder to the deck. Behind the superstructure the helipad lay empty, the Lynx having flown off to Trabzon as soon as the storm brewed up.

“The automated firing system will be useless without electronics,” Howe said. “But I put the pod on manual when I last checked it so we should be able to crank it up by hand.”

Their only hope was surprise. Vultura would not know they carried fixed armament; the weapons pod was retracted during Seaquest’s normal operations. Aslan’s intent was undoubtedly to board and plunder and then dispose of the ship at his leisure. They had little power to affect the fate of Seaquest but they might exact a small price in return. With Vultura’s gun trained on them, they knew their first shot would unleash hell, a furious onslaught the vessel was not built to withstand.

Together the two men crouched in the middle of the foredeck and heaved up a circular hatch. Below them lay the dull grey of the turret armour, the Breda twin 40 millimetre barrels elevated from the compact mounting in the centre.

Howe dropped down to the gunner’s platform behind the breech mechanism and looked up at York. “We need to be ready to fire as soon as we raise the turret and acquire the target. We’re going to have to do this the old- fashioned way. I’m gun layer and you’re forward observer.”

The weapon would normally have been operational from Seaquest’s bridge, the range-finding provided by a Bofors 9LV 200 Mark 2 tracking radar and 9LV 228 fire-control system. As it was, York did not even have use of the hand-held laser rangefinder and had to rely entirely on his navigational skills. Fortunately he remembered the distance from the rendezvous co-ordinates to the eastern tip of the island, where Vultura was now exposed broadside on.

“Range three thousand three hundred metres.” York raised his arms as a crude sighting aid, his right arm held out at forty-five degrees from Seaquest’s bow and his left arm at Vultura’s stern. “Azimuth two hundred and forty degrees on our axis.”

Howe repeated the instructions and spun the wheel beside the gunner’s seat until the barrels were aligned on Vultura. He swiftly calculated the angle of elevation, moving a ratchet on the semicircular metal compass so the barrels would fall on the trajectory as they raised the turret.

“Barometric pressure and humidity normal, wind speed negligible. No need for compensation at this range.”

York lowered himself to the floor beside Howe to help with the ammunition. The belt feeds from the hold magazine were empty since the ship had not been prepared for battle before the attack, and in any case did not operate without electronics. Instead they began extracting shells from reserve lockers on either side of the turret interior.

“We’ll have to use the manual feed,” Howe said. “High explosive for the left barrel, armour-piercing for the right, five rounds each. I doubt whether we’ll have the opportunity for more. We’ll use the HE for rangefinding because the impact is more visible and then switch to solid shot.”

York began stacking the five-kilo shells in the racks above the receivers, red-tipped to the left and blue-tipped to the right. When he had finished, Howe sat in the gunner’s seat and pulled back the bolt on each barrel to chamber a round.

“Bloody frustrating having only ten shells for a gun that fires four hundred and fifty rounds per minute,” Howe observed nonchalantly. “Maybe the gods of Atlantis will smile on us.”

The two men pulled down their safety visors. York eased his body into the narrow space in front of the wheel controlling barrel elevation while Howe grasped the manual override that raised and lowered the turret. After giving the wheel an experimental turn he looked at York.

“Ready to elevate?”

York gave a thumbs-up.

“Now!”

As the turret rose and the barrels depressed, York felt a surge of adrenaline course through him. He had faced hostile action many times, but always from the detached position of a bridge or control room. Now he was about to engage an enemy in mortal combat behind the cold metal of a gun. For the first time he knew what it felt like for the men crouched behind the cannons of Nelson’s Victory or inside the mighty turrets of dreadnoughts at Jutland or the North Cape. Their survival was in the balance, the odds stacked heavily against them faced with Vultura’s 130 millimetre gun with its state-of-the-art GPS-linked ranging system.

The pod rose above the deck and the silhouette of Vultura came into view. As York watched the barrels drop to the pre-set mark and lock into place, he slammed shut the handle on the elevation wheel and raised his right arm.

“On my mark!”

Howe flipped up the safety and curled his finger round the trigger.

“Fire!”

There was an ear-splitting crack and the left-hand barrel recoiled violently on its springs. York snatched up his binoculars and followed the trajectory of the shell as it screamed through the air. A few moments later a fountain of spray erupted just to the right of Vultura.

“Twenty degrees left,” York yelled.

Howe spun the azimuth wheel and locked the carriage in place.

“Fire!”

There was another jarring report and jet of flame from the left-hand barrel. The gas blowback instantaneously ejected the spent casing and chambered a new round.

“Hit!” York shouted. “Armour-piercing, five rounds rapid!”

He had seen the red flash where the explosive had detonated against metal and sent a spray of splinters over Vultura’s stern. Their hope now was that solid shot would disable the ship’s propulsion system, wreaking damage on the turbofan boosters that gave Vultura more speed than almost any other surface vessel.

“Fire!”

Howe pulled the right-hand trigger and held it down. With a noise like a giant jackhammer the gun blasted off the five-round burst at full cyclic rate, the magazine emptying in under a second and the spent cases flying from the breech with each recoil.

Even before the reverberation had ceased there was a sickening crash towards the stern of Seaquest and a massive vibration through the deck. The two men watched in horror as the ship took half a dozen direct hits just above the waterline. At this range the powerful Nitrex propellant meant Vultura could fire at a virtually level trajectory, the depleted uranium AP rounds raking Seaquest from stern to midships. It was as if she had been skewered by a giant pitchfork, each shell punching effortlessly through the bulkheads and emerging from the other side in a jet of fire and debris.

“They’ll go for the bridge next,” York yelled. “Then it’ll be us.”

While Seaquest heaved and groaned, York trained his binoculars on Vultura’s stern. Puffs of smoke were showing where she had been hit. A movement caught his attention and he shifted the binoculars down. A rigid-hulled inflatable was planing towards them, its twin outboards churning a wide V-shaped wake. Inside it he could see a group of crouching figures. It was already past the halfway point and closing fast.