The Covenant of Genesis

feeling only relief as she reached the starboard side of the deck.

It didn’t last. From there, she had an elevated view of the dock. The floatplane at its far end had lost most of one wing; the Pianosa’s other boat had capsized, debris floating around it. Two bodies lay on the dock - one was a member of the ship’s crew, but the other was unfamiliar; one of the pirates, a spear protruding from a bloody hole in his chest.

Eddie, she thought. He was the only member of the expedition who could have fired such a shot. Was he still alive - and if so, where was he?

The other pirates provided an answer. Some of the men on the dock started shooting into the water, quickly joined by more in a speedboat. Dozens of little waterspouts shot upwards where the bullets hit. The leader shouted again, sounding annoyed. The pirates stopped shooting - but there was no sign of anyone below the waves.

The pirate leader climbed into the larger of the two moored powerboats, the others splitting up to board the vessels. Engines started. They were leaving.

From her vantage point, Nina already knew they weren’t simply going to sail away. The RIB had rocket launchers aboard, the bulbous dark green warheads already loaded.

They hadn’t come just to rob the ship. They were going to sink it, remove all trace of the expedition.

One of the men in the smaller powerboat, almost directly below, looked up - and saw her. He shouted something, raising his gun—

Nina jerked back. The hoist controls were just a few feet away. Above, the bullet-pocked boat was hanging out over the ship’s side, still swaying . . .

She waited for the swinging boat to reach the furthest point of its arc - and kicked the hoist’s emergency release lever.

The boat plunged downwards with a rattle of chains. The pirates barely had time to scream before over half a ton of steel and wood and fibreglass hit, crushing them flat inside their own boat. Blood spurted over the dock.

The men in the two remaining boats gaped at the sight. Only their leader, at the RIB’s controls, was immediately able to overcome his shock, gunning the engine to curve his boat sharply away from the Pianosa.

Chase surfaced under the longer leg of the dock, seeing the RIB moving off. The other moored pirate craft, he saw with surprise, had become the bottom slice of a boat sandwich, its occupants reduced to a glutinous red jam.

‘Nice work,’ he muttered, looking up to see who had been responsible - and filling with relieved delight at the sight of a very familiar face peering over the deck.

His smile vanished as the RIB came about - and two men inside it raised Russian RPG-7 rocket launchers, aiming them at the Pianosa.

The first shot streaked across the water and hit one of the fuel barrels under the gangway. The explosion instantly consumed the others beside it, a huge ball of fire and filthy black smoke seething upwards. The heavy gangway broke loose, crashing aflame on to the burning dock and destroying several pontoon sections.

But the pirates weren’t finished.

The second RPG hit the ship at its waterline, blasting a foot-wide hole through the steel. The sea instantly rushed in, greedily filling every space it found within. A third detonation, from the other side of the Pianosa - the cruiser had also fired a rocket.

Holed in two places, no crew left alive to contain the flooding, the survey ship was doomed.

And Nina was still aboard.

The pirate leader pointed away from the stricken ship, to the northwest. The surviving speedboat turned and surged off in that direction, the RIB following. The deeper rumble of the cruiser’s engine rose as it joined the smaller boats in their escape.

Chase climbed on to what was left of the dock. It was now severed from the ship, slowly drifting away. ‘Nina!’ he shouted up at the Pianosa. ‘Nina, are you okay?’

She crawled to the edge of the deck, dishevelled hair fluttering in the wind, and looked down at him. ‘Eddie, God! Are you all right?’

‘More or less. Is anyone else alive up there?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nina called back grimly. Toxic black smoke was belching from all the entrances to the superstructure.

Chase glanced at the waterline. The hole made by the RPG was now completely submerged, and dropping lower with increasing speed as the bow took on water. ‘The ship’s sinking - you’ve got to get off.’

‘How? The gangplank’s gone!’

‘Find a life jacket, then jump.’

She looked dismayed. ‘Jump?’

‘Might as well!’ He turned his attention to the overturned boat. ‘Bejo!’

Bejo surfaced beside the wreck. ‘Mr Eddie! You okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Chase told him, pointing at Nina. ‘Get ready to help her when she jumps in. Then bring her over here.’

‘I don’t want to jump in!’ Nina protested, donning a life jacket. ‘It’s too high!’

‘Well, if you wait a couple of minutes it’ll be at water level and you’ll just be able to step off, but I don’t think waiting’s a good idea!’ He indicated the flickers of flame escaping from the ship’s interior.

Nina reluctantly climbed over the railing. ‘Oh . . . craaaap!’ she shrieked as she closed her eyes and dropped into the sea. Bejo quickly reached her and raised her by the shoulders as she gasped and shook her head. He helped her to the dock.

Chase lifted his bedraggled fiancee from the water, then pulled Bejo out before starting for the other end of the dock. ‘Where are you going?’ Nina asked.

‘If the plane’s radio’s still working, we can send a distress call.’ He jogged to the battered Otter. There was an unpleasant moment when he had to push Ranauld’s shrapnel-torn corpse aside to reach the instrument panel, but he saw from the lights on its fascia that the radio was still active.

He reached for the hand-held microphone under the panel and switched the radio to VHF channel 16 - the international distress frequency. ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the research vessel Pianosa . . .’

The pirate leader looked down sharply as the speeding RIB’s radio crackled. It had been set to receive on channel 16, listening for any distress calls from the survey ship. None had come - destroying the vessel’s bridge and radio masts with the very first shot had seen to that.

But now a survivor was making a call - and worse, it was being answered. Someone aboard an Indonesian Coast Guard vessel was replying in halting English, asking for the ship’s location.

The plane, he realised - it had only been damaged, not destroyed. Its radio was still intact.

No witnesses of the attack could be left alive. His employer had been very clear about that.

The speedboat was the fastest of their three remaining craft. He handed the RIB’s controls to one of his men and beckoned the speedboat closer. ‘There are still people alive!’ he shouted across to its three occupants. ‘Go back and kill them!’

The man at the speedboat’s outboard tugged the red bandanna from his face and gave him an eager, malevolent smile, then swung the vessel about.

‘Oh, bollocks,’ Chase muttered as he concluded the distress call - and saw one of the retreating boats making a hard turn.

They had heard the message.

Stranded on what was left of the pontoon dock, he, Nina and Bejo had nowhere to run. Even if they dived underwater, the pirates could just wait them out, taking shots when they surfaced for air. And they had no weapons.

Except . . .

‘What are you doing?’ Nina called as Chase clambered into the cockpit.