Hunter Killer - Alex King Series 12 (2021), A BATEMAN [urban books to read TXT] 📗

what they would have spent scrapping them, and the irony that Aurora used these funds to further their clean energy ethos was not lost on the company’s investors.

King turned around and Newman was no longer behind him. Madeleine had pretended not to notice the curt exchange between the two men. King also thought it strange that she had not queried Daniel’s absence more. The ship had a manifest of passengers, but King suspected it would operate like a buddy system. They were grown adults and it wouldn’t be like a teacher holding a role call on the steps of the bus on a school outing. Daniel had only been in the company of Madeleine on Spitsbergen, so it would be likely only she would draw attention to his whereabouts.

The ship had moored alongside a large floating pontoon that jutted out some fifty metres and was tethered in place at the base of the platform. The pontoon looked to be constructed from a series of thick, hollow plastic containers chained together. Each section was around the size of the rear section of a small van, and the top surface had non-slip sheeting adhered in place.

“All constructed out of recycled plastic bottles with added natural colouring. The small sections make it more buoyant, but are also a safety feature, if one is damaged, the others remain afloat.” Madeleine said as they got in the orderly queue. She smiled up at him and added, “I did some reading up on it while I was on the plane. Speaking of which, where is Daniel? I still haven’t seen him.”

King pointed to the cage lift that was making its way up to the former drilling platform, the first passengers on their way to the top level, where the offices, accommodation and admin were located. He studied the lift and the queue and estimated that there would be another four or five trips before they got their turn. “I saw him get on board,” he lied. “I expect he’ll be putting first dibs on the best room.”

“Dibs?” She looked at him quizzically.

“Yeah, like calling shotgun.” He paused. “It’s a British thing.”

“Oh…” She watched the lift come back down and said, “I was told everybody gets off here then boats ferry them to the other platforms.”

“That’s right,” King agreed. The formalities were a fog, the operation so rushed that it was all he could do to concentrate on what needed to be done next. He still needed to meet his contact. “So, Daniel may well be remaining on this platform. We’ll have to see how it works out, it could be us who get ferried away.”

“Oh well.” Madeleine bumped her hip against King’s and said quietly, “Three’s a crowd…”

King smiled down at her. His old mentor Peter Stewart, the man who had recruited and trained him what seemed like a lifetime ago, would always say, “You’re always in the shit, Son. It’s only the depth that varies…” King had begun to realise what the man had meant. There was no good outcome from allowing the flirtation and acknowledgement of the attraction between them. The shit level was about up to his bottom lip at this stage. He would have to be careful.

Chapter Twenty-Three

 

Lake Como, Italy

Located in a large basin within mountains giving way to numerous steep valleys through which funnelled wind met the water, Lake Como was renowned for its complex weather system. Often the lake could be seen dotted with masts and spray from sailing boats crashing through troughs, sails full and tacking dramatically tight courses, only for those same boats to be stranded in the middle of calm water, held hostage to still air and a mirrored surface from which there was often no escape for hours on end. There were few places on earth with such complex and fickle sailing conditions, and the locals even had names for the winds. There was the Breva - the prevailing wind, with its anticyclonic rotation it blew frequently. In the Alto Lago di Como, compared to the rest of the lake, the Breva wind was strengthened by an intensity that easily exceeded twenty-knots, accompanied often by significant wave motion. The Tivano was the morning thermal wind, with lower intensity. And the Ventone or Vento was the northerly wind that blows in strong gusts during the afternoons, often reaching forty knots. The Fohn was a wind that was accompanied by a rise in temperature, and the Garzeno or Garzenasco wind descended from the valleys of Garzeno and was usually associated with thunderstorms concentrated on the high ground above the town of Dongo.

Giuseppe Fortez did not tire of watching the lake and its turbulent waters. Since arriving here, he had noticed how the wind whipped up the lake, but how the conditions never lasted long, and as the days had warmed to spring, he could now set his watch by the change in wind and the daily temperature. There was little else for him to do here. Of course, he had been lucky to live through the takeover. What his grandfather had built up, the empire born from unions and workers’ rights had swelled to organised crime, wartime profiteering, switching of wartime allegiances and heavy-handed domination of the backstreets of towns and cities, and then entire regions of his beloved Italy. His father before him had commanded the regions of Tuscany and Umbria with the same ruthlessness as the Dons of Sicily but had remained out of the witch-hunts that had followed, paying off the right people and the wrong people with a little bit more. After he had succeeded his father Giuseppe Fortez had ruled with an iron fist, and had built a fortune, but in handing over the reins to his two sons, that fortune had been slowly eroded. Poor investments, battles with rival gangs and families, encroaching foreign organised crime and the reliance upon drugs and weapons as their stock-in-trade