Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9) Read online

  HELL GATE

  Peter Tonkin

  © Peter Tonkin 1998

  Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by Headline Book Publishing.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Cham, Guy and Mark.

  And in memory of:

  Charles Hodgson

  1910-1997

  Adventurer, explorer, treasure seeker, hunter, broadcaster, adviser, inspiration, friend.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER I

  The night was balmy, the moon full and high, the tide sweeping up towards the flood. A warm wind followed the tall seas in from a spangled horizon then continued up over the massive cliffs to whisper among the twisted trees and the soft heather, adding a salt tang to the heady richness of the heather flowers. The wind brought with it a ceaseless, muted thunder to drown the sleepy screaming of the nesting gulls below. High cloudlets meandered eastwards like black holes edged with silver among the stars. Away westward, on the low horizon, the clouds served to distinguish between blotted constellations and the occasional jewel-bright ship’s navigation light, but none of them moved across the white face of the moon. All the wild country from Malin Head to Mullaghmore lay still and silver like the throne of ancient kings. It was high summer in Donegal and there had been no rain since St Swithin.

  Eamonn O’Hanlon led Mary-Ann Hennessy over the springy heather, too wise to whisper sweet nothings as yet, content to let the Foreland and the Atlantic beyond work their wild magic. He wore his shirt open almost to the waist and its tails outside his jeans. She wore the lightest of summer frocks, a thing of half-transparent cotton with a tight bodice, a swirling skirt and a timeless gingham print. The desolate wilderness of sea-swept land hunched back like the flank of a wolfhound waiting to spring. Under the steady whisper of the wind which flirted with the hem of her skirt and wandered where his fingers wished to follow, the land seemed to be breathing.

  The ruins of a castle stood stark atop their pinnacle of rock away to the right, separated from the coast by a cleft, seventy metres sheer and seven or more wide, at whose jagged foot the Atlantic itself served in the office of a moat. Basalt walls, as black as the cliffs themselves, sat lowering over the ocean, full of breathtaking, brooding menace in the soft silver light. Dundark Castle was shut off to the world on this side, its windows blank and empty, its great doors fallen closed, its rotted drawbridge long ago tumbled into the void, but open to the Atlantic on the other, gaping, like a skull that has lost its face. Eerie, exciting.

  Eamonn was from Ballymore, the village five miles back along the tiny track at whose near extremity his old Ford Sierra lay parked. Mary-Ann was from New York, a tourist come to sample the romance and to test the tales of her emigrant grandfather. During the last weeks she had travelled by bus and train up from Shannon, exploring the dreams of her childhood. But it was only now, and here, that some of the romance was coming to irresistible life.

  In O’Reilley’s, the Ballymore local, Eamonn had stood out in Mary-Ann’s eyes because of his wild dark hair, green eyes and flashing teeth. She had stood out in his eyes from the half-dozen strangers there that night because of her soft red hair, her Brooklyn drawl and her air of available innocence. It hadn’t really needed any blarney to tempt her out with him at all. She had handled the Irish and Italian Lotharios of the mean streets of her home city since childhood. She could take care of herself-even against a man who passed himself off as a junior officer in the Provisional IRA.

  Silently under the awesome beauty of the place, Eamonn led Mary-Ann down to the Lovers’ Chair, a fold of rock mattressed by a springy covering of heather, protected from prying eyes by a stunted but full-blossoming fuchsia bush. Here, when they sat, the whisper of the wind became less invasive, the rumble of the surf a little more muted but the vista of sea, cliff and castle more beautiful than ever. The ground beneath them seemed to throb to the steady rhythm of the surging tide, as though the wild, magical ocean had insinuated fingers into the black rock bones of the place. And, indeed, it had. As the lovers took their ease in each other’s arms and paused to look across the slope they had just negotiated, the first plume of spray soared upward out of the heart of the rock, as though the west coast of Ireland had been transformed into a spouting whale. All around them, there stood chimneys in the rock tumbling to tunnel mouths at the tide line, anything up to two hundred metres in from the edge of the cliff. As the tide reached its flood, these blow holes all began to send up their cloudy, lacy fountains into the air in a timeless water show more wonderful than anything even Coney Island could offer, which he had arranged, especially for her.

  With practised calculation, Eamonn had laid her so that she could see the full glory of the scene and he could roll over on top of her with ease. This allowed him to keep an eye on the cliffs and the castle, but put his back to the ocean. And this meant that he remained unaware of the boat which was currently detaching itself from the shadows away out to sea, silently untangling its jewelled running lights from the galaxies above. Eamonn was here as a lover, not a lookout, no matter what he had said in O’Reilley’s bar. And, indeed, after the first warm embraces, he moved to action. His fingers slithered beneath the lacy cup of Mary-Ann’s underwear and his left hand lay snugly across a warm swell of thigh no longer protected by a summer frock. And Mary-Ann’s fingers, by no means passive themselves, were busy at the buckle of his belt.

  The last thing she said before he rolled on top of her was, “I hope you brought protection, buster…”

  He had. But it was not protection enough.

  The bullet took Eamonn under the left shoulder blade and exited through the middle of his chest, entering Mary-Ann’s chest immediately between the breasts and exiting through her spine. Neither ever knew what hit them. They didn’t feel a thing. They danced, as though in ecstasy, and lay still. The ground beneath them darkened and the darkness began to spread.

  The wind whispered. The ocean surge thundered. The heather seemed to heave. The waves roared again and a cloud passed over the face of the moon. As it did so, a wall of spray exploded over the cliff top, making a pale curtain just substantial enough to outline a couple of figures wearing combat gear and camouflage paint as they detached themselves from the cover of a ridge. Both wore bulky belts and light bergens which could have contained arms, but neither was carrying an obvious weapon.

  “Who did that?” one asked the other in flat, accentless English, yelling to be heard above the wind and the waves.

  “I’ll bet it was Pitman.”

  “Jesus…”

  “Look, Captain Dall, the kid said he was PIRA in the pub,” the second figure countered defensively.

  “That was to get off with the Yankee tart, Paul. There’s no way he’s a dicker. This is supposed to be an old cache. They wouldn’t be guarding it now. And anyway — ”

  “I know. B
ut you know the way they are over here. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is up to, for all their fucking blarney.”

  Two more figures appeared, also in combat gear and dark berets. Neither carried obvious weaponry. One was tall and square, the other slighter. The first figures both rounded on their slight companion. “For God’s sake, Pitman. You’ve really made this messy!” snarled the captain.

  “We have to be at the pick-up point ninety minutes after the top of the tide. Unobserved.” Pitman’s voice was light, husky, unfazed by the hostility; the accent flat, nasal. Dutch or South African. “And there’s a lot to do in the meantime, Captain Dall.” Automatically all four of them looked away beyond the castle to where the silent vessel was just distinguishable pitching in towards the land. As if on their signal, all her running lights went out.

  “Right!” snapped Captain Dall. “Let’s go.”

  The four figures ran down to the edge of the cliff where the ruins of the drawbridge entrance still stood as bulges beneath the overhanging vegetation. Here the captain and Pitman secured two lines and watched silently as their companions rappelled down the sheer cliff face, bouncing out cautiously as though they might strike their heads on the opposite wall of the deep cleft, and landing with care on the vertical wall as well, hoping not to disturb the razor-billed herring gulls which nested there.

  About halfway down, on this side, was a ledge. Normally it was impossible to see and only someone after the gulls’ eggs would ever have found it. Behind the full nests, the black basalt opened into a cavern. And here the local command of the Provisional IRA had secreted a large cache of arms and explosives. The two men pushed in past the stirring birds and, crouching in the black-walled confines, using infra-red torches and night-vision glasses, they swiftly made their selection. The chosen boxes were secured together and hauled up to the cliff edge. Pile after pile of boxes was swiftly pulled up and stacked beside the anchor points. After an hour, the cavern was all but empty and the two men made their way back up the cliff. Their passage was complicated by the stabbing beaks and battering wings of the stirring birds. Then the four figures came and went between the ruined drawbridge and the cliff top a hundred yards distant, which overlooked a deep bay where the boat currently picking its way in through the narrows was due to, anchor in thirty minutes. At last all four were able to collapse onto the heather beside their ill-gotten gains, gasping for breath, unmolested.

  The instant the slight figure hit the ground beside him, the captain said, “Not you, Pitman. You have a mess to clear up. I don’t want any trace of them left near here and I don’t want them causing trouble if they’re found.”

  “Sling them down one of these blow holes,” suggested one of the others.

  “Not good enough. Even if you put them in the car and torched it…What did you use?”

  Pitman held up a customised Smith and Weston nine millimetre automatic, a slim, skeletal weapon, its side open so that the contents of its magazine could be seen. It had been customised by Armament Systems and Procedures of Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. It was loaded with equally customised bullets designed to open into barbs in flight. “Used the ASP,” she said flatly. “It’s loaded with Talons.”

  “You used Black Talons on them?”

  “One shot. One Talon.”

  “No wonder it was so messy. All right. I want you to get them well away from here and I don’t want any authorities asking questions about Special Forces weaponry. Talons are special kit, Pitman. Cover it all up. Here.” Dall reached down into a pile of the arms and pulled out a sawn-off shotgun. “This should cover a multitude of sins. But well away from here. I don’t want the Garda stirred up too soon.”

  Pitman took the shotgun. “Is this really necessary, Captain? I mean we’re only trying to fool a hick Mick pathologist.”

  The captain’s silence said enough.

  “Mind if I help?” asked Pitman’s partner.

  “You have an hour,” said Captain Dall. “Then we’re out of here and you’re on your own.”

  As the two figures picked their way across the heather, Dall turned to Aves. “Look at this,” he said quietly. He bent and opened one of the wooden boxes, one whose identification codes had been incompletely scrubbed off its wooden side.

  Inside the box there were heavy-duty, moulded composite containers, deep green in colour, a metre and a half long, maybe half a metre wide. Dall hefted one out onto the heather. “Know what these are?” he asked apparently casually.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Aves.

  Expertly, Dall turned the toggles round the sides until he could lift the whole lid free. “You’d better believe it,” he said quietly.

  Nestling in its protective padding there lay a Stinger anti-aircraft guided missile.

  “This changes the whole game,” said Aves, looking nervously around. “Maybe the kid was a dicker after all. I can’t imagine the PIRA leaving kit like this lying around unprotected.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But I was thinking further ahead than that. This changes things for us. We signed up to this for a price. If there are Stingers involved then I say the price doubles.”

  “Is that wise, Captain? If you start screwing around now, the Boys are going to be pissed.”

  “What do we care? We got the hardware. We got Calcutta. We can get New England to Great Egg as agreed and sit there armed to the teeth with Stingers until they stump up the extra. What can they do?”

  “Buggered if I know, Captain, but they’ll think of something. You know who we’re dealing with here.”

  “Screw them. They’ll be helpless.”

  “I don’t think so, Captain. And I don’t think Pitman and the others’ll be too keen either.”

  “Screw them all,” spat Captain Dall. “What I say goes. We double the price and we don’t tell the men. We keep this “need to know” until the payoff. What can they do? We hold all the aces, and every one of them’s got a Stinger on it.”

  *

  Separating the bodies was difficult and messy. The single Black Talon round had opened in flight and the barbs that had sprung out from the body of the bullet had compounded the destruction to both thoraxes, especially the girl’s. They heaved the flaccid corpses away to one side, then Pitman used the night glasses to look at the mess on the ground. The head of the bullet, squashed against the basalt, showed clearly. Pitman picked it up and pocketed it.

  They carried the bodies to the boy’s old Ford. The keys were still in the ignition so it was easy enough to open the boot and pile the pair of them in there. As they stood beside the vehicle, Pitman said, “You don’t have to do this, Sam.”

  “Forget it. You driving?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll take the shotgun then. Think we should change?”

  “Not worth it. No time anyway.”

  “Tell you what, though…” He pulled his balaclava down over his painted face. Pitman did the same. If the boy really was a player, two figures looking like this in his car would hardly raise an eyebrow among the locals.

  They bounced down the pitted track until they gained a metalled road and sped eastwards through Inishowen. They followed the dull headlight beams up twisting mountain roadways with the widening ocean at their backs; then they hopped unhandily between the peaks of the watershed and down deserted byways in the still of the small hours until they had gained another cliff top, this one facing away from the Atlantic coast, and well away from Ballymore.

  Here they pulled the corpses from the back of the old Ford and arranged them at the cliff top.

  “Hands and feet?” asked Sam quietly.

  “Take them off,” said Pitman.

  A few minutes later the same flat tones added, “Put them back in the Ford. But leave the heads. No dental work will survive this…” Over each bullet wound Pitman added a blast of shot which hurled the shredded bodies back over the cliff edge. For several hundred feet the battered bodies flailed and fell like a couple of broken dolls down int
o the wild white water.

  “So far so good,” said Pitman as the pair of them climbed back into the old Ford.

  Well within the allotted time they were back at the cliffs above Dundark. Sam joined Captain Dall and his right-hand man Paul Aves as they lowered the last of the boxes into the waiting boat below, while Pitman worked on the Ford, rolling it forward, lining it up, putting explosive and a timer into it, priming and preparing it.

  Then the four figures gathered briefly at the cliff top, talked urgently and prepared to descend. They rappelled down onto the deck below and pulled their lines free. Then the four of them stood on the afterdeck and looked up at the cliff while the boat, crewed by personnel in camouflage kit and freighted with a cargo of illegal arms, motored out of the bay.

  After twenty minutes, when the boat was well clear of the coast, Pitman said, “Now!”

  On the flat monosyllable, a distant spark of fire sprang into life and, trailing flame, it began to roll unerringly down the slope. Four pairs of eyes watched its progress with critical concentration. Just at the point where its carefully calculated progress led it down into the blood-soaked hollow of the Lovers’ Chair, the Ford exploded into vivid flame, then it hurled itself on down and over the edge of the cliff.

  The brightness of its demise spread like the glow of a shooting star across the wild water and illuminated the face of Angela van der Piet, known to the others as Pitman, as she pulled her mask off and ran her long strong fingers through her short golden hair.

  Away on the other side of Inishowen, the combination of tidal inflow and outwash of the river swept the bodies of Pitman’s victims across the funnel of Lough Foyle, out of the jurisdiction of the Garda, whom she so despised, and into the remit of the RUC whose pathologists are among the most experienced in the world at dealing with gunshot wounds.

  CHAPTER II

  Richard Mariner’s thoughts could hardly have been further from death and destruction — except that he could cheerfully have strangled the twins. Wild with excitement, they had been up since four. They were nearly ten now, but showing only variable signs of maturing. Richard loved them without limit or reserve, but this did not blind him to the social shortcomings which they seemed to reserve especially for Robin and himself. In his heart of hearts he suspected William and Mary were subconsciously getting their own back for the times in the last years when they had been dumped with long-suffering grandparents or friends, or shuffled off to boarding school while their errant parents got themselves into adventure and danger all over the world. Robin, for her part, was certain that this was the case.