Aftershock Read online

  Sam Fisher is the pseudonym of thriller writer Michael White, author of the acclaimed international bestsellers Equinox, The Medici Secret and The Borgia Ring. He lives in Sydney.

  Aftershock is the second novel in the high-octane E-Force series following State of Emergency, the team’s first mission.

  Visit his website at www.michaelwhite.com.au

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  After Shock

  ePub ISBN 9781864715620

  Kindle ISBN 9781864716375

  A Bantam book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Bantam in 2010

  Copyright © Michael White 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Fisher, Sam.

  Aftershock.

  ISBN 978 1 86325 693 3 (pbk).

  A823.4

  Cover photograph by SuperStock

  Cover illustration and design by www.blacksheep-uk.com

  Internal illustration by Ice Cold Publishing

  Internal design and typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Table of Contents

  The story so far...

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Epilogue

  STATE OF EMERGENCY

  The story so far...

  ‘The world needs an organisation that can go into disaster zones and save lives, superfast,’ declared Colonel Mark Harrison. And he was a man who made things happen.

  It took him a year to get anyone to listen to his plan and then a further three years before his dream became reality. But when it did, he found himself leader of a team that could go into any emergency situation anywhere in the world and save lives. He called his team E-Force.

  E-Force is fronted by the six key members: Mark Harrison, Peter Sherringham, Stephanie Jacobs, Maiko Buchanan, Josh Thompson, and Tom Erickson, but they are backed up by 1300 others – techs, engineers, maintenance, medical and comms people. Their main base (Base One) is the tiny Pacific island of Tintara, a little under 2000 kilometres south-south-west of San Diego, but there are several other bases dotted around the globe at secret locations.

  Although Mark, Steph, Josh, Pete and Mai are at the sharp end of any mission, they could not operate without Tom, the team’s cyberguru. Wheelchair-bound after a childhood road accident, he is a world-class hacker and has an intimate relationship with the ‘seventh member’ of E-Force, Sybil, the world’s only quantum computer. Sybil operates all the E-Force systems from Tintara and is the computer nerve centre of the operation.

  During the team’s first mission, they were called in to rescue Senator Kyle Foreman who was trapped in a

  bombed-out building in Los Angeles. The team had not yet completed their training, but were catapulted into action regardless. Since that first operation, E-Force have conducted more than a dozen separate missions and become globally famous. The world now knows the faces of the team members, but the locations of Base One and the other E-Force hubs remain a closely guarded secret.


  It is now almost six months since E-Force’s first mission. The team have gained a great deal of experience since that excursion to rescue Senator Foreman. They are as ready as ever, and waiting for action.

  1

  The St Maria Nuclear Power Station, Paraguay, 15 May, 5.02am

  ‘Sure as hell hope this ain’t no wild goose chase,’ Robbie Valentine said, swinging a length of electrical cable in his right hand.

  ‘I wouldn’t be too surprised, my friend,’ Mario Alves replied. ‘We’ve had two false alarms this week.’

  Valentine, an American night-shift tech, led the way along a low-ceilinged tunnel lined with heavy duty electrical cabling. After 20 metres the two men came to a hatch. It swung open onto a broader, higher tunnel. They could just about walk upright. At the end, they reached the main power conduit. Valentine dropped the cable to the floor and tapped in an alphanumeric to unlock the inspection cover. The metal door levered outwards and the tech shone a torch into the opening.

  At first, everything seemed fine, then Valentine noticed the copper contact on one of the main cables had slipped from its socket. He flicked off the power to the circuit and leaned forward to grasp the cable. As he stretched into the box of electronics, his right elbow nudged the main power switch he had just flicked off. For a second the switch hovered between ‘on’ and ‘off’, then slipped a centimetre downwards. Two hundred amps of electricity with a potential difference of 50,000 volts shot through the American’s body. It travelled the length of his spine in under a microsecond, frying his nervous system, killing him faster than a bullet through the brain. Valentine’s body flew out of the junction cupboard, through the air and landed in a smoking heap 5 metres along the tunnel. En route, the dead man knocked his partner off balance. Alves stumbled backwards over the electrical cabling Valentine had been carrying, and landed badly, his right arm fracturing under the weight of his body.

  One hundred and 27 metres away from the charred remains of Robbie Valentine, the main operations room of the St Maria Nuclear Power Station was quiet. Of the three nightshift engineers on duty in Main Control, two had gone off for a coffee, leaving behind the new boy on the job, Fernando Guitica, who had only qualified from the University of Asunción a month earlier. The master controls were entirely automated and had a German-designed self-diagnosis back up system in case any faults occurred in the complex network of computers and electronics that monitored the power station. The job of the engineers was really just to babysit the machines, unless, that is, something went very badly wrong.

  At the precise moment technician Robbie Valentine was barbecued in the maintenance tunnels, Fernando Guitica was engrossed in a thrilling game of Mario Kart on his new DS. He failed to see the red warning light flashing on the electrical systems monitor. By unfortunate coincidence, the cable that Valentine and Alves were supposed to repair was a multifunction conduit. Its main purpose was to send electricity to a digital thermocouple that regulated the temperature of the main pumps keeping the reactor cores cooled with water. A subsidiary cable in the conduit powered the audio alarm systems for Main Control. So, as Guitica entered the final lap of a nail-biting race on the DS and moved up from third to second place, he was blissfully unaware the internal temperature of Pump Number 4 on the east side of the power station had already gone critical. As a consequence, the first warning he had that something very bad was happening was when the sound of a massive explosion reverberated through Main Control.

  The shock of the blast threw Guitica from his swivel chair. He went sprawling across the highly polished floor and only stopped when his head made contact with a leg of one of the computer cabinets. Dazed, he shook away the pain surging through his head and scrambled to his feet, searching for the nearest computer screen. What he saw sent a wave of panic through him. The monitor displayed a schematic of the power station, and he could see immediately a flashing red symbol. One of the four enormous pumps cooling the radioactive core had been obliterated.

  His body froze, his mind racing. There was an acid taste in his mouth and his right hand was clenched so hard his nails cut into the flesh of his palm. He span around as the other two engineers, Dominic Xanando and Kurt Fritzer, dashed into the room from the corridor, their faces ashen.

  ‘What the fuck’s happened?’ Fritzer screamed as he rushed over to the console. Guitica stepped aside as his boss surveyed the monitors, looking on dumbly as the man stabbed at a series of buttons. ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Fritzer exclaimed.

  A second loud explosion shook the room and instinctively the three men dived for the floor. Xanando got up, shoved Guitica aside and found Fritzer scanning the controls, his breath coming in loud gasps. ‘It’s going critical. Fuck! How can this happen? How come we had no warning?’

  ‘That’s what the techs were sent in for,’ Guitica managed to reply. ‘A fault in the cabling, they thought.’

  ‘This is in a different league, Guitica,’ Fritzer yelled, his face lathered in sweat. ‘We thought everything was okay, but the whole fucking warning system must’ve been down for hours. Christ ... the station could go critical. It’d make Chernobyl look like a fart in a jacuzzi.’ He ran his hands through his hair and stared, slack-jawed, at the computer screen.

  Smoke began to rise from the console. ‘What the...?’ Xanando began. Then came a fizzing sound followed by a brief flash of light from inside one of the monitors. All three men sprang back from the desk and a second later the computer screen died. They turned in unison as a grating sound came from the other side of the room and the main door slid shut. A red light above the door started to flash.

  ‘Containment,’ Fritzer announced. And they heard a heavy, lead-lined radiation door slam into place a few metres along the corridor. Without waiting a second, Fritzer ran over to a second computer console, stabbing at a red button – the emergency alarm. Before he had lifted his finger from the control they heard the alarms kick in outside Main Control. Their own audio systems were still down, but alarms on a different circuit were blasting out around the station. In all main corridors, containment doors were slamming down, secondary coolant surged through pipes around the massive pumps and through backup tubing around the gigantic coils of the pumps. But the damage to the reactor had already been done. There was nothing they could do ... except pray.

  2

  6.52am

  ‘Pete? What’s your ETA?’

  Tom Erickson’s voice resonated in the tiny speakers positioned close to Peter Sherringham’s ears. He flicked his gaze to one corner of the holographic image in his headset. ‘Three minutes, 10 seconds, Tom.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  Pete ran his fingers over the plastic control panel in the cockpit of the Silverback jet, George, and the plane ascended 400 metres on a sharp incline. At Mach 10, it covered the distance in a fraction of a second. Glancing back at the holoscreen, Pete could see two traces – two planes behind him – another Silverback piloted by Mai Buchanan, and the larger bulk of the Big Mac, the E-Force workhorse, with Stephanie Jacobs and Josh Thompson aboard.

  ‘Okay, guys.’ It was Mark Harrison, the team leader, speaking from where he stood next to Tom in Cyber Control at the E-Force base on Tintara Island. His voice could be heard by all four E-Force members in the three planes. ‘As we have a few minutes before you reach the target, I’d like to bring you up to speed. The BigEyes tell us the situation at St Maria is deteriorating fast.’ A schematic of the plant appeared on the team’s holoscreens. ‘As you know, Pump Number 4 blew. We’re not sure how or why. The engineers on site are unable to increase the flow of coolant to the core. Coolant is getting through from secondary backup systems, but it’s way too little, too late. The core housing has ruptured and the outer casing of the reactor itself is exposed. There’s been a very small radiation leak from this, but it also means we have a way of cooling the thing externally.’

  Tom broke in. ‘The quencher tanks are on “max”, Steph. That
means you have 50,000 litres of Quenchex to smother the flames. You then have a further 20,000 litres of liquid nitrogen to dump on the core itself. As you can imagine, you only have a small margin of error. Miss the flames and the liquid nitrogen will be ineffectual. Putting the fire out is only half the job, so both drops have to be within a metre of the target.’

  ‘So, no pressure then,’ Steph, in the Big Mac, laughed. ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘Tom reckons we have nine minutes until the reactor blows.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ Josh said. ‘Our ETA is six minutes 35, so we’ll have no more than two and a half minutes to get the core temperature down.’

  ‘I know,’ Mark responded. ‘Mai and Pete, you should be there a few minutes ahead of the Big Mac. You have to get a clear picture of the critical drop areas. Use the full spectrum analysers that’ve just been installed. Here’s a schematic of the plant.’

  A 3D image of the St Maria Nuclear Power Plant appeared on the Silverback holoscreens. Tom described the layout. As he spoke, the image shifted perspective and different parts of it became enlarged to show more detail.

  ‘There’re four pumps,’ he explained. ‘In most reactors, failure in one or even two of the pumps would be manageable, but this place is old. In fact, it was due to be decommissioned

  a year ago, but the Paraguayans managed to push it back. All four pumps need to be working at a constant 80 per cent plus efficiency rate to maintain stability for the core. Pump 4 has vaporised and the core temperature has risen rapidly. I can’t understand how it was left to get so bad. The warning systems must’ve also been offline. Anyway, the explosion has done us one favour. It just fell short of ripping open the reactor core itself, but it’s exposed the housing. This is the primary drop area. There’s a serious fire raging all around the Pump 4 module, but there’s also a very hot fire all over the core housing.’

  ‘How hot?’ Josh asked.

  ‘It’s a chemical fire, outdated insulation and piping material. We’re looking at 6000 degrees in places.’

  Josh whistled.

  ‘And that, my friend, is why we only have...’ Tom paused for a second, ‘seven minutes 50 to put out the fire.’