Nano Read online

  Pete had landed his Silverback next to the three others now standing on the helipad of the Cloud Tower. He could see the control room of the Big Mac on his wrist screen as he climbed down the steps recessed in the side of the Silverback. Reaching the roof of the building, he took a deep breath, the smoke filtered by his cybersuit.

  ‘What now?’ he asked. He caught sight of Mai over by the glistening grey fuselage of Paul parked about 20 metres away. She strode over and the two embraced.

  Dimitri walked onto the flight deck of the Big Mac and surveyed the split screen – the Cloud Tower in the left half and an image of Pete on the right. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like that, Pete,’ Dimitri Godska commented with a smile.

  ‘It’s not something I would like to repeat. Has Tom got new stats? I hope my insane risk-taking was bloody worth it!’

  ‘Just coming through,’ Tom’s voice tumbled from the wrist speakers in Pete’s and Mai’s suits and over the powerful PA in the control room of the Big Mac. There was a brief pause then Tom said, ‘Looks like we bought some time, guys.’

  Pete and Mai let out loud sighs of relief. ‘Thank God! How long?’

  ‘Impossible to judge to the second. But put it this way, I wouldn’t like to be in that tower more than 90 minutes from now.’

  ‘How’re Chloe and Steph doing?’ Mai asked.

  ‘Called in a minute ago. They’ve just got through to Floor 202,’ Mark responded.

  Pete started to ask a question when Tom’s voice cut through. ‘Oh no!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hang on.’ They could all hear Tom speaking to a tech but they couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then Tom came back on the line. ‘Guys, we’ve got another crisis. There’s been an incident in the Channel Tunnel.’

  ‘What sort of incident?’

  ‘Sending everything through.’ The data collected by Sybil appeared on the Big Mac screen and on the wrist monitors. ‘BigEye 2 detected an explosion,’ Tom reported. ‘Location: 16.1 kilometres into the French end of the tunnel. The satellite sensors tell us a train travelling northwest from Paris to London has been stopped in the south tunnel, 72 metres beneath the English Channel. No data on the nature of the explosion, number of casualties or the condition of the train. Wait . . . something coming through . . . Unreal!’

  ‘What is it, Tom?’

  ‘Spectroscopic analysis on BigEye 2 has detected very high concentrations of hydrogen fluoride vapour along with an organophosphate compound.’

  ‘A bio-weapon!’ Pete exclaimed. ‘It’s Sarin.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Dimitri asked.

  ‘The hydrogen fluoride – it’s a signature of that particular weapon of mass destruction.’

  Mark felt a shudder of horror pass through him. He was no expert on bio-weapons but you didn’t have to be Einstein to know that Sarin deployed in a confined space like the Eurotunnel could only spell disaster.

  ‘Right,’ he said, his voice calm. ‘Mai, Pete, I want you over there as soon as possible. Take-off without delay. I’ll contact you en route with an operational plan and notify the local authorities we’re on our way.’ He turned to Tom’s image on the wall screen. ‘Tom, we need to focus on this for the next 20 minutes. Our ETA at the Cloud Tower is now 19 minutes 50 seconds. There’s nothing more we can do there for the moment. I’ve asked Steph and Chloe to call in every 10 minutes with progress reports. At the moment, they’ve just got through to Floor 202. The fires are out in the Chasm so we need to get a handle on this latest disaster. I’m going to call up two more Silverbacks from Polar Base.’ Then he turned to Pete and Mai climbing into their Silverbacks. ‘Guys, I’m going to get on to the nearest E-Force supply station. I think there’s one in Northern France, actually. They’ll deliver any heavy gear you need. I’m thinking you’ll need a Pram and a Cage. You’ve got Sonic Drills and med-kits of course.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘With luck, the equipment will be there before you.’

  ‘Flight time: 25 minutes 16 seconds,’ Mai said.

  The Silverbacks began to rise slowly from the roof of the Cloud Tower. Once clear of the helipad, they engaged forwards thrusters and shot away directly west at Mach 10.

  39

  72 metres beneath the English Channel

  ‘Is everyone okay?’ Josh asked, staring around at the four men. They all looked terrified.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ said Adam Franklin, the tall Englishman.

  Josh looked at him steadily for a moment. ‘An airborne toxin. Looked to me like a superfast-acting nerve agent.’

  ‘You mean Sarin?’ Louis asked.

  ‘Or Soman or VX. It doesn’t matter, really – they’re all deadly.’

  ‘Those poor people,’ the steward exclaimed. ‘Are they all dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Gabir,’ Josh replied. ‘Anyone exposed to an agent like that has less than a minute to live.’ He shoved his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out his mobile. It read, ‘No Signal’. ‘Yeah, well, ridiculous even thinking of it,’ he said half to himself. He turned back to the others. ‘We’re what . . . 50 metres down?’

  ‘I’d guess we’re 15 or 16 kilometres into the tunnel,’ Gabir responded. ‘So we’re more like 70, 75 metres under the Channel.’

  ‘Great!’ Josh looked around at the other three men and saw that Angus Faulks’s face had lost all colour.

  ‘You okay?’ Josh asked.

  The man nodded and took a few deep breaths. ‘Can the gas get through to here?’

  ‘I hope not! Look, I don’t think so. This door is sealed.’ Josh nodded towards the hatchway. Then they all heard a sound. Josh flicked his torch in its direction. ‘Hello,’ he called.

  ‘Hello.’ A face came out of the gloom. A young guy about 20 with a scruffy attempt at a beard, longish hair tucked behind his ears, a yin-and-yang piercing in his left nostril. ‘Thank God!’ the kid said and took a step towards them.

  A second face appeared immediately behind him, a young woman around the same age. She had large, very green eyes and ash blonde shoulder-length hair braided at the sides like a medieval princess. She had on a backpack. Both of the kids looked terrified, their faces ashen. The young man had a gash across his forehead. The pair suddenly recognised Josh as the famous ex-E-Force member and gave him a confused look.

  ‘Yeah, ironic, isn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s only just struck me what a funny joke the gods have played.’

  The young man screwed up his face. ‘My name’s Fred. Fred Hardy. This is my sister, Tracy.’ She nodded at Josh.

  ‘How did you . . .?’ Gabir began.

  ‘We were in the corridor between carriages – squeezed in at Gare du Nord,’ the young man replied.

  ‘When the train lurched after the explosion, Fred was thrown across the corridor and smashed his head on a suitcase,’ Tracy explained. ‘Luckily, he wasn’t knocked out. Some instinct told me to get out of the carriage. We found a doorway leading from the tunnel into this.’ She glanced around at the narrow passageway.

  ‘We saw people collapsing. What’s going on?’ Fred’s eyes looked huge in the light of the torch. Blood trickled down his left temple.

  Josh stepped forwards. ‘Let’s take a look at that wound.’ He held the torch in his left hand and gently probed the cut with his right. Fred winced and pulled back. ‘You’ll live.’ Josh turned to the others. ‘Fred, Tracy, this is Louis, Gabir, Adam and Angus.’

  ‘So what now?’ Fred asked.

  ‘Well, we’re safe for the moment. Clearly the gas isn’t getting through into this area.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Adam asked.

  ‘I would guess this is a maintenance hub running parallel to the main train tunnel,’ Gabir replied.

  Angus, who had been leaning against the wall panting, suddenly produced a strange gurgling sound from deep down in his throat and began sliding down. He had reached only halfway when he convulsed and a thick stream of puke exploded from his mouth. He slum
ped onto his back, his huge body shaking.

  Josh ran over to the stricken barman and turned him over onto his side. Angus’s face was bleached white, blood streamed from his nose and his mouth. He was gurgling, trying to say something but it was just a confusion of sound. A trickle of blood slipped out of his left eye. He began to convulse, sending blood and ooze flying through the air.

  The others standing close by jumped back instinctively but Josh grabbed the poor man and tried to get him into the recovery position. Angus stopped shaking and his head slumped forwards. Josh felt for a pulse. Nothing. He closed the man’s eyelids and rested him back on the floor.

  40

  Floor 202, Cloud Tower, Dubai

  Stephanie surveyed the scene. Although Floor 202 was almost a dozen storeys above the impact site, it was totally devastated and a powerful air stream blew across the entire floor.

  ‘Why is there so much damage this far up?’ Chloe asked.

  Steph didn’t answer for a few moments. Instead, she tapped at her wrist screen and studied what the sensors in her cybersuit were telling her. Chloe turned away and stepped into the nearest shop, fighting against the wind blowing straight at her. Three dead bodies lay in the wreckage. They were covered with dust and pieces of glass. Hearing Steph calling her, she ran back out onto the main walkway.

  ‘There was a large gas tank over there, in the roof,’ Steph said and pointed to the far side of the mall. ‘See how all the debris has been blown in this direction?’

  ‘Yeah, the windows in the shop there have smashed outwards.’

  ‘That would account for the wind gusting through the place,’ Steph replied and nodded back towards where the tank had exploded. ‘Must have been sparked by the heat from below or maybe a pipe was wrenched from the tank.’

  ‘Whatever it was, it’s caused a huge amount of damage.’

  Steph switched modes on the screen and scanned the floor for any traces of life. Using the computer system in the cybersuit, she was able to pinpoint thermal signatures. They both knew that a dead body cooled by an average of one and a half degrees Fahrenheit per hour. Chloe glanced at her screen.

  ‘It’s exceptionally cold up here with the windows blown out.’

  ‘Almost zero in fact,’ Steph replied. ‘So the corpses will probably cool more rapidly than normal. I’m picking up at least 30 heat signatures all around 90, 91 degrees. Definitely dead, I would say.’

  Chloe checked her own wrist monitor. ‘Copy that . . . but hang on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over there. Three o’clock.’

  Steph span on her heel and studied her screen. ‘Got it.’

  Chloe led the way. ‘It’s a couple of degrees hotter than the others, and . . .’ She glanced at her monitor again. ‘It’s moving.’

  They scrambled over piles of broken counters, furniture, lumps of dislodged concrete. A doorway opened onto a shop directly ahead, the door was hanging half off its hinges. And there, curled up in a ball and whimpering, was a tiny chocolate labrador.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Chloe exclaimed.

  ‘What is it?’ Steph responded and came around the last mound of debris and through the doorway. Chloe had bent down and was cradling the puppy in her arms.

  Steph gave a brief smile then shook her head slowly. ‘Amazing!’ She scratched the little dog under its chin. ‘Is it a boy or a . . .?’

  A stream of urine jetted out from under the puppy’s fat belly, drawing a neat line down Steph’s cybersuit. She instinctively jumped back and then realised how silly she was being.

  ‘Agh! Well, that answers that question,’ she laughed.

  41

  It was clear from the scanners in Steph and Chloe’s cybersuits that the emergency exit in the southeast corner of the floor was inaccessible. The explosion of the gas tank had completely devastated that section of Floor 202. In fact, one entire corner of the Tower on Floors 201 and 202 had been destroyed.

  They began to pick their way over to the southwest emergency stairs but it was hard going, the floor was strewn with rubble and the overhead water extinguishers had come on automatically, drenching everything. Loose electrical cables were thrashing around and sparking in the water. This did not present any real danger to Steph or Chloe – their suits would protect them from any random electrical currents – but the puppy, whom they had immediately christened ‘Lucky’, could have been fried by just one stray wire.

  By the time they reached the end of the row of shops on the south side of the Tower they found the water had drained away. A few metres on and they were walking along a raised concrete area. Mud from shattered plant pots was splattered everywhere, great streaks of it lay across the concrete. Mixed with the mud were shreds of paper, slithers of glass and torn clothing. It was slippery and treacherous. They took it slowly, reaching the staircase a couple of minutes later.

  Chloe tried the door. It was locked. Steph stepped for- wards, extended the vector laser and pointed it at the lock. A quick burst of blue light shot out from the device and the lock melted. She gave the door a swift kick and it flew inwards.

  A huge burst of flame shot out from the doorway. Steph stumbled back and managed to break her fall on a shattered leather chair that had found its way into the mall from one of the shops. Chloe was less than a metre behind her and sidestepped the flame with ease.

  Steph pulled herself up and glanced at her wrist screen. ‘Bugger!’ she exclaimed. ‘The fire goes way back into the stairwell and it’s very hot – over 1000 degrees centigrade. No way we can get through there.’

  ‘Okay. So what now?’

  A voice broke through their comms. ‘Steph? Chloe?’

  ‘It’s Mark,’ Chloe said. ‘Big Mac?’

  ‘We’re hovering above the roof,’ the leader of E-Force said.

  ‘Status?’

  The two women filled him in.

  ‘All right. We’ve just done a scan of the entire upper floors of the building. There’re no life signs on 200 or 201. People have gathered on Floor 199.’

  ‘I could use the Hopjet to get down there,’ Steph said.

  ‘But how would you get any survivors back up to the roof?’

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Chloe said, ‘I’ll get back up to the helipad, pick up the Cage and come down here. I should be able to break a way through to 199 and get everyone up to 202.’

  Mark didn’t respond for a moment. Steph and Chloe could hear him tapping at his control panel. Dimitri said something to him but the two women in the tower could not quite make it out.

  ‘All right,’ Mark said eventually. ‘It’s a plan. We can’t land on the roof . . . too unstable for the weight of the Big Mac but, Chloe, we can lower the Cage down to you. Steph? You have everything you need?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right then, ladies. Good luck.’

  ‘Oh, one more thing, Mark. We have our first survivor.’

  ‘Who?’

  Chloe explained and Mark laughed down the line. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll prep a carrier for the little fella.’

  42

  72 metres beneath the English Channel

  ‘Holy shit!’ Adam Franklin croaked. Josh looked at him, the banker’s face was pale and lined with anguish. ‘What . . .?’

  ‘He must have breathed in a lethal dose. He was a long way behind us,’ Josh replied quietly. ‘Anyone feeling ill?’

  No one spoke. Josh looked into each of their faces. ‘Gabir,’ he said. ‘What’s the layout of the tunnels?’

  Gabir’s face had drained of blood. ‘Er . . .’ He took a deep breath. ‘Er . . . it’s quite simple. Um . . . Two tunnels. One from Paris to London travelling northwest, the other, London to Paris, heads southeast. There are connections between the tunnels, cross-passages, every 350 metres.’

  ‘Is this a cross-passage?’ Josh asked urgently.

  ‘Unfortunately, I think not,’ Gabir went on, gradually regaining his composure. ‘The major connectors are wide corridors and they, er . .
. run straight.’

  ‘So where are we?’

  Gabir ran a hand through his thick curly hair and took another deep breath. ‘As I said before. We must be in one of the maintenance hubs.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Every couple of kilometres there’s a network of interlinking passages and rooms but they don’t cross over to the other tunnel. They contain equipment and spare parts for workmen, emergency tools and materials, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well, I guess we can’t complain,’ Fred Hardy commented. ‘We’re lucky we got out.’

  ‘You’re right, Fred,’ Josh responded. ‘It’s just that our best chance would have been to get to the London–Paris tunnel. All right, come on. We have to get as far away from the main tunnel as possible. See what we can find in this maintenance hub that can help us.’

  Josh and Gabir took the lead. Louis Chabon gave the body of the dead barman a wide berth, crossing himself as he went. The others slipped past the corpse without looking down.

  The corridor narrowed and wove northeast in the direction of the Paris-bound tunnel. It was a well-lit, featureless passageway with a metal floor and curved concrete walls. About 100 metres from the hatch they had earlier escaped through, they came to a door. Josh turned the handle and it opened inwards. Gabir switched on the light.

  It was a large, low-ceilinged room. A single fluorescent strip juddered into life overhead. Deep metal shelves took up two entire walls. Most of the shelf space was filled with boxes, metal containers and lumpy pieces of machinery. At the far end stood another door and next to that a phone hung on a wall bracket.

  Josh ran over to the phone and put the receiver to his ear. There was a dial tone. He studied a laminated sheet pinned to the wall to the left of the phone. There was a list of names, official titles in English and French and next to each, four-digit numbers. ‘Well, maybe there really is a God,’ he said and grinned at the others.

  Gabir approached. ‘Best call Central Control,’ he said. ‘They’re based at Sangatte, just where the Paris–London entrance goes underground. They have emergency services based there. Here, let me.’ The steward ran a finger down the laminated card, took the receiver and keyed in the number 5447.