Dark Heart by Peter Tonkin Page B

behind them, Caleb ordered, ‘Full ahead both, please, Mister Sanda. You know the heading.’ The lieutenant, back at the helmsman’s shoulder, nodded and repeated the order, which the helmsman echoed in turn. And the corvette
Otobo
surged towards thirty knots. Richard was bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement and Robin grudgingly felt his contagious enthusiasm beginning to infect her too.
    â€˜Just say when you want the war-games to begin,’ said Max, at Richard’s shoulder, his eyes fixed on the warship’s battle displays – in which the Zubr featured sizeably and centrally, as it wallowed apparently powerlessly beside the Sevmash freighter which had brought it here. ‘You just need to say the word,’ he emphasized, pressing his cellphone to his ear. ‘I can call Captain Zhukov any time you want . . .’
    â€˜Very well.’ Caleb turned. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced formally in English to the bridge. ‘We are at war.’
    What Max said to Captain Zhukov was lost in the clamour of the emergency stations alarm that Sanda set off on his captain’s word, but the effect on the huge Zubr hovercraft was electrifying. It simply vanished from the displays.
    Richard looked up, hardly able to believe his eyes. Away ahead, the Sevmash freighter sat solidly, as though painted against the hard blue sky. But the Zubr was no longer anywhere near her. Clearly Captain Zhukov had not merely readied his toothless weapon systems, he had inflated the hovercraft’s skirt and put the massive fans on idle. And on Max’s word he had gone to full astern. Without any water resistance to drag at a keel that hardly broke the surface, he had gone from dead stop to fifty knots in a heartbeat. Fifty knots in the opposite direction to the one he was expected to be heading in. It was simply astonishing.
    â€˜Incoming!’ called one of the men stationed in front.
    â€˜Hard left,’ ordered Caleb and
Otobo
heeled into a screaming turn towards the distant delta. Running across the incoming swell, she started to pitch and roll as the one motor pushed her hard forward while the other pulled her hard back. She had an impressively tight turning circle, but inevitably she was fighting the physics of being half submerged in a way the hovercraft would never have to do. ‘Deploy countermeasures,’ Captain Caleb concluded his order. ‘Gun. Do you have him?’
    â€˜The tracking is too slow, Captain,’ answered the gunnery officer. ‘We latch on to him but he slips away before we can engage . . .’
    â€˜Press the fire mechanism as soon as you engage,’ ordered the captain. ‘The system will register a hit without actually firing the gun.’
    â€˜Really?’ answered Asov. ‘You put my mind at rest of course. But where’s the fun?’
    The last comment seemed to bypass Captain Caleb, who was already issuing his next command. ‘The 30 millimetre Gatling may fire as it engages. Its system is nimbler than the big gun’s, you see, Mr Asov. And I must observe that we are not running for cover.’
    As he spoke, a lone missile exploded harmlessly in the air high above them, its powder-filled warhead sending a puff of blue smoke drifting down the wind.
    â€˜Countermeasures effective, Captain . . .’
    â€˜But it wasn’t a real missile,’ teased Max. ‘It was just a little rocket. A toy. Like on May Day in Moscow, you know?’
    â€˜Thank you. Now, please engage the Gatling.’
    â€˜Engaged,’ sang out the assistant gunnery officer. ‘No . . .’
    Richard crossed behind the engine monitoring station and looked out of the starboard bridge-wing window. The huge hovercraft was speeding full ahead now, skipping across the water like a skimmed stone. It was on a parallel course to the corvette, but running at least twice as fast.
    â€˜But then,’ needled Max’s voice from behind