Chimera Code (Jake Dillon Adventure Thriller Series) by Andrew Towning

across the glass display panel. The Commander
smiled warmly, and dismissed the man.
    For the past six months the Americans had been working
alongside the British Government and Ferran & Cardini’s research
department in an attempt to erase a glitch in the new Kirill-Chimera
seek - retrieve - and destroy programme. The Sea Predator’s computer
system had been loaded with the prototype and while undertaking
trials ona number of Russian mafia targets - had momentarily become
visible to them. Kirill had written the programme in such a way for it
to constantly alter its script, once it had infiltrated the target’s hardrive
and operating system - allowing all data to be extracted remotely
and sent back to the Sea Predator - Kirill had then created a deletion
protocol that was activated after releasing a death virus onto the
target’s hardrive.
    A young rating by the name of Zak Ryan had immediately spotted
the glitch. Had informed Taylor, who barked the order to get off-line
and shut down the programme. He was now hoping that their invasive
snooping had not been noticed by any eagle-eyed nerds working for
the Russian Mafia... The border of Kazakhstan with Russia had, in
recent times, seen a hundred fold increase in drug smuggling activities
by the Mafia cartels, who were using the inhospitable terrain of the
Ural Mountains to transport raw opium all the way up to the coast
of the Kara Sea. The opium would then be processed in laboratories
and distributed throughout Europe by a sophisticated network of
transport routes. From the same labs came the latest designer drug
- peddled to the higher end of the market and only available to the
wealthiest of addicts with the promise of a never before experience.
What they found was narcotic hell. This drug, Red Horse as it had
been nicknamed, had made the Mafia-led cartels billions of dollars
and even more powerful, but was costing the government financially,
politically and, of course, socially. Ferran & Cardini had asked the
American Navy if they could have the assistance of the Sea Predator in
an attempt to locate the labs that were producing and distributing the
Red Horse drug and erase them with her lethal payload of missiles.
    A day earlier, the Sea Predator had been tracking an unnamed
vessel that was under suspicion of drug trafficking; the vessel was the
size of a container ship, of unknown origin, and had been making
slow progress from the north-east, close to Russia’s Artic coast. Its
heading had been on a direct course towards the island of Ostrov
Kolguev.
    Now however, the vessel had disappeared.
Taylor used every resource that the Sea Predator had to find it, to
no avail. As a last resort he dispatched two tracking torpedoes, these
did not have warheads, instead they were equipped with the latest
satellite navigation and tracking systems housed in the nose cone.
The torpedoes had a two hundred mile range and had never let the
commander of the stealth ship down before. If the mysterious ship
that had so far evaded their state-of-the-art searches was there, then
they would find it.
For now, though. They were playing the waiting game.
Taylor shook his head and sighed, running a hand through his
fair coloured hair. He stood up, and paced around the bridge, if for
no other reason, than to stretch his legs and relieve the tension he was
feeling in his neck and shoulders. He went and took his seat again.
“Anything back from the torpedoes?”
“Negative, Commander.”
“What about the satellite video stream?”
“The same Commander, negative. We currently have three
satellites passing over this sector, and according to the data they’re
sending back down to us. There are no vessels visible to them.”
Taylor cursed.
“What is the position of the torpedoes?”
“They’ve separated, Commander. The first is ninety-five miles
due north of us, the other due east approximately seventy miles. If
there’s anything out there, they