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  He glanced at his watch. It was one minute to nine. Turning back to the screen, he tapped two more keys then lifted his binoculars to view the horizon and the distant towers of Dubai. From this distance they looked like a clutch of stalagmites projecting upwards from the floor of a cave. A haze of pollution hung over the city and just above the desert floor, super-heated sand shimmering.

  Azrael checked his watch again and moved his index finger a few centimetres upward, letting it hover over a red button slightly to the left of the centre of the console.

  He felt the plastic against his skin and relished the extra- ordinary sensation of possessing power over life and death. He wanted the moment to last forever. But then if it did, he thought, no one would die and that would never do. He pushed down, hearing a click as the device engaged.

  14

  ‘ALERT. ALERT,’ the PTP in the Land Cruiser screamed at him but the exhilaration of the moment made him momentarily deaf. He ran around the front of the car and saw the army truck approaching. It was kicking up sand, driving fast along the narrow sandy track he had himself taken.

  Azrael reached the driver’s seat and stabbed at a control on the dash. He heard a couple of bolts snap on the roof followed by the sound of the aerodynamically designed plastic pod sliding from the roof-rack and thumping to the sand behind the car. Jumping out, he glanced to his left and saw the truck was now only a few hundred metres away.

  Close to the back of the Land Cruiser, Azrael yanked on the lid of the box and a metal framework span away from the case. He pulled on a cord to one side of the frame and the arrangement untangled itself. The muddle of spindly poles and cross-beams, metal cylinders and specially designed sand-tyres snapped into place. It was a mini-motorbike, powered by a xenon difluoride battery that worked in conjunction with a powerful solar cell. Azrael pulled a plastic tag from a pouch in his commando pants, leaned into the machine, inserted the tag in a slot just under the handlebars and pushed the ignition button. The bike burst into life.

  He jumped on and tore away. Fifty metres from the Land Cruiser, he glanced back to see the truck approaching the missile launchers. He left the track and hit the desert, hearing the rumble of the engine as its powerful four-wheel drive cut through the sand. Gunshots rang out through the desert air. A bullet flew past his right ear. He slipped the bike into a lower gear and squeezed on the gas.

  A second bullet whizzed past him, closer this time. He pushed on the accelerator some more, shoved his right hand into his commando pants again and withdrew a slither of black plastic. He turned quickly. The army truck pulled up alongside the Land Cruiser. He touched a pad on the plastic controller and a microsecond later, the vehicle exploded in a ball of flame taking the rocket launcher, the army truck and eight human beings with it.

  ‘Eight down, 7 billion to go,’ Azrael said aloud into the stifling desert air.

  15

  Floor 191, Cloud Tower, Dubai, 12 December, 9.01 am

  On the observation deck, Franz Heinegger was admiring the view – the staggering panorama of endless desert and perfect blue sky. And beyond the desert, in the centre of his view, lay the Arabian Sea twinkling in the morning sun. From where he stood, Franz could see for over 1000 kilometres and was looking across eight different countries. To his far left lay Iran, then, as he turned clockwise, he took in Afghanistan, Pakistan, a slither of northern India, Oman, the UAE of course, then Yemen and in the far right of his vision, Saudi Arabia. It was a truly spectacular sight.

  Franz sipped his coffee, taking in the rich aroma and staring at the vista in humbled silence. It was at moments such as these, he thought, that it was so good to be alive. A weird thought occurred to him. Right now he was proud to be human, proud of his fellow men and women, no matter what nationality or colour they might be. Human beings had shaped this amazing tower, forged it from metal and plastic and wood and concrete. It was up there with the Gutenberg Bible and the moon landings.

  He saw the flames first, a flicker of crisp yellow, then pink. That was a moment before he noticed the two black lines. For that is what they appeared to be – two simple black lines, each little more than an elongated dot in the distance. With incredible speed, they grew larger. But still for many seconds Franz could not really understand what it was he was actually seeing. The brightly coloured flames came and went. For several moments, he thought the preternatural colour was merely the sun glinting on something in the air . . . a distant jet? Then one of the black lines broke away, swung south in a ragged arc and vanished.

  The other Scourge missile was a little over a kilometre from the tower when the clues all came together in Franz Heinegger’s mind.

  Screaming, Franz turned and ran for the exit 20 metres across the marble floor of the platform circumventing the tower. He had just reached the door to the emergency stairwell when the Scourge slammed into the glass wall of the observation platform and exploded, vaporising every living thing from Floors 189 through 193. And as Franz Heinegger’s body was turned into atoms, the force of the explosion sent steel, concrete, glass and metal outwards in an eruption that shattered support pillars, crumbled walls, floors and windows, and sent a huge roar of sound bellowing across the desert, a sound that echoed around the towers and vainglorious monoliths of Dubai.

  16

  Floor 199, Cloud Tower, 9.01 am

  Abu Al-Rashid had just walked through the doors of the Apple Store in the Cloud Tower when he felt the vibration and heard the low-pitched rumble from beneath his feet. Up to that moment, he had still been seething with fury at what his father had done. He had caught a bus to the CBD and then walked 4 kilometres to the Tower. The Apple Store on 199 was one of his favourite haunts after school. The staff there knew him and if the place wasn’t too busy, they let him play around on the computers.

  Abu had crossed the threshold of the store and had just spotted his favourite assistant, Tariq Naqvi, an unusually tall and waif-thin 18-year-old who had taken a real shine to Abu. They both froze where they stood as the vibrations rippled through the store and a great roar of sound ricocheted around the walls lined with the white rectangles of Apple Macs.

  The next thing Abu knew, he was flying through the air propelled by an invisible force. He landed heavily, sideways, on the carpeted floor. His head made contact with the leg of a counter. A horrible stinging sensation shot up his nose, the pain slamming through his head. From his position on the floor, he saw his friend Tariq fly towards him.

  The youth landed badly, his back smashing against the edge of a table a few metres away. Abu heard the young guy’s spine snap, a crisp, high-pitched crack cutting through the low rumble of sound coming from below. Tariq vomited blood as he fell forwards, his face smashing into the floor. His dead eyes stared straight at Abu.

  The boy screamed but the sound was engulfed within the rising clamour from somewhere below. He felt a terrible panic well up into his throat and his stomach began to heave. He pushed his head down into the carpet and crawled further under the counter. He could hear all manner of things flying past and smashing around the store windows a few metres away.

  A piercing scream cut through the air close by. Then came a horrific squelching sound. Turning his head away from where Tariq lay, Abu came face-to-face with a pink and red smudge of humanity, a face disfigured by some heavy flying object. A gasp of breath came from the distorted hole of a mouth and the person went limp.

  The shaking and the roaring seemed to go on and on. Something heavy landed on the counter above Abu. It hit the surface with a crunch and glass cascaded over the edge and onto the floor. The boy tried to make himself as small as possible, curling up into a foetal ball.

  Then as suddenly as they had started, the vibrations and the roaring stopped. And for a moment at least, the place seemed absurdly quiet. Abu waited for several minutes before he edged his way out from under the counter. Emerging from beneath its lip, he pulled himself to his feet.

  The scene that met his eyes reminded him of the horror movi
e he had seen at a friend’s house when his parents were out. The huge glass window at the front of the shop had shattered into hundreds of thousands of cuboid pellets and formed a semicircle halfway across the store. Every shelf had collapsed, chairs and desks were upended and, across the floor, lay at least a dozen mangled computers, their white plastic cases riven, screens obliterated. And the bodies . . .

  Abu could see one man was clearly dead. He had been ripped in two at the waist. Tariq lay still under the counter. Two more mangled forms were sprawled out in a huge patch of blood soaking into the carpet. A fine white powder hung in the air. Abu glanced up and saw that half the roof had been pulverised, the ceiling tiles shredded.

  He could not move a muscle. He felt so completely paralysed with fear and shock, he imagined he would never be able to do anything ever again. His heart pounded and he felt a cold sweat break out that made his forehead numb. Then a terrible sound came up from his throat – a cry, a moan, a sigh all rolled into one. It was a sound he had never heard before and for a second he wondered at the fact that such a noise had come from him. Then he started to shake. He fell to his knees, his head lolling forwards to the floor. Tears streamed down his cheeks, his sobs muffled by the carpet.

  He stayed in this position for at least a minute before a biting fear shot through him as he realised just how vulnerable he was, how much he wanted to survive, how much he did not want to end up like any of these people around him.

  17

  Base One, Tintara Island, 8.03 am local time

  The whole team was gathered in the conference room. A large flat screen dominated one wall. It was lit up now with sparkling metal, flashes of silver and orange. The sound from the speakers was almost deafening. Mark Harrison, the leader of E-Force, was standing in front of the screen. To his left sat Maiko Buchanan, Stephanie Jacobs and Peter Sherringham, and to his right the two newest members of the team, Chloe Gavoine and Dimitri Godska.

  Chloe had been a pilot with the French Air Force and a member of a very rare breed: a female French Foreign Legionnaire. She was tall, a fraction under 1.8 metres, big-boned and super-fit, with very short brown hair, a long, shapely nose, high cheekbones and large brown eyes. When one of the original members of E-Force, Josh Thompson, had resigned six months ago, Chloe had been recruited to replace him.

  Dimitri Godska, a Ukrainian pilot, had been with E-Force from the beginning as part of one of the backup teams. In his civilian life he had been an experienced surgeon. Only 168 centimetres, he was slender but very muscular. He had long black hair in a ponytail, jet-black eyes and a strong jaw. He always seemed to have a five o’clock shadow, whatever the time of day. To his left, in the aisle, seated in his electric wheelchair, was Tom Erickson, E-Force’s resident computer genius.

  ‘Well, this is the situation at 8.01 PST, 47 minutes into the operation to save Thor 1,’ Mark said. He clicked a remote in his right hand and the image on the wall froze. It showed the Aon Tower in Downtown LA and a cluster of aircraft close to the building, climbing vertically. It was the E-Force team struggling to rescue the three survivors aboard Thor 1. The images had been taken by BigEye 4 over California, one of the team’s 32 satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

  ‘You can see the nanonet is going into a cascade rip here.’ Mark moved the remote to produce a coloured circle on the frozen image, directly over the web of nanothreads. ‘Tom, you’ve done an analysis, yeah?’

  Tom’s wheelchair whirred as he came to the front of the conference room, stopping the opposite side of the huge screen from Mark. ‘At this point, just as the major rip begins, the nanonet is under a strain equivalent to 1.4 3 105 newtons per square metre,’ Tom said.

  Pete Sherringham whistled.

  ‘Yeah, some serious shit,’ Tom went on.

  ‘Can we improve the net’s strength for future operations?’ Mark asked. ‘We almost failed –’

  A loud screech of a siren filled the room. They knew immediately what it meant. Mark turned and they all filed out.

  Cyber Control was only 20 metres away along a wide corridor. ‘What’s happening?’ Mark said as he strode into the room ahead of the others.

  Cyber Control was a vast, circular space. Around the edges stood computer modules. Technicians in boiler suits sat at consoles, some staring at holographic displays floating above the controls, while others tapped at virtual keyboards – simply light projections on flat surfaces. The rear wall was taken up with a screen 15 metres long by 10 high.

  ‘Projecting on screen now, sir,’ one of the techs said. ‘This is just in from BigEye 17 over the Persian Gulf.’

  The screen was filled completely with orange. But then some movement could be made out: an image from a camera high over the desert sweeping across the sand. The angle changed and in the centre of the screen they could all see a distant skyline – towers glistening in the morning sun, a backdrop of unblemished blue.

  ‘That’s Dubai,’ Chloe said. She was standing a few metres to Mark’s left.

  The image changed rapidly as the camera closed in. A live feed from Downtown Dubai filled the screen.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mai exclaimed, taking a step forwards. There was no human sound in the room.

  The wall monitor showed a tall tower, so tall it seemed to be completely out of proportion with all but a couple of other spires. The Cloud Tower was famous around the globe. It was a marvel of modern engineering. But a dozen or so floors down from the top, a huge hole had been punched through the tower. Whatever it was that had smashed into the building had taken at least 15 floors with it. Above and below these, the structure had been ravaged, pillars caved in, windows obliterated. A massive black stain some 50 metres long stretched from the bottom of the chasm, running down the side of the building. Red, orange, blue and green flames licked outwards from the hole. A great billowing black cloud of smoke streamed out of the western side of the tower blown by the winds coming in from the desert.

  ‘I have a horrible sense of déjà vu,’ Stephanie said, her words falling like rocks in a still lake.

  ‘Any info?’ Mark asked the nearest tech.

  ‘Just coming in, sir.’

  The wall screen split in two. The left half showed the view of the tower, the right-hand panel carried a stream of data.

  ‘Sybil,’ Tom said to the air. ‘Give us a rundown, please.’

  The E-Force computer network, known by everyone at Base One as Sybil, was the world’s only quantum computer. It, or she, as most of the E-Force team viewed the system, was millions of times more powerful and therefore faster than any other computer on earth. And in the year since E-Force had been operational, Tom had used all his considerable skills to help the techs at Base One enhance Sybil still further.

  ‘The target is the Cloud Tower, Dubai,’ Sybil began. The view in the left panel of the screen changed. ‘This was filmed 2 minutes 6 seconds ago by BigEye 17.’

  The screen showed a black missile screaming towards the tower, a jet of pinkish flame emerging from its rear. One-and-a-half seconds into the film, the missile slammed into the tower.

  ‘Missile make and model unknown.’

  ‘Any stats at all, Syb?’ asked Pete, the explosives expert of the team.

  ‘Missile is 3.36 metres in length. Speed at impact, 1005 kilometres per hour. Impact site on south-facing side of tower, epicentre Floor 191. Four floors above and six below have suffered Level 1 damage – complete destruction. A further six floors above 195 and four more below 185 have graduated Level 2 to Level 3 damage.’

  ‘Any chemical data?’

  ‘Spectroscopic analysis from BigEye 17 suggests the presence of high levels of carbon dioxide and water.’

  ‘What about nitrogen compounds?’ Pete asked, puzzled.

  ‘Levels consistent with base parameters. No non-linear variation within pre- and post-impact time limits.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Chloe Gavoine asked, turning to Pete.

  ‘It means the explosive is not conventional. No nitrog
en compound remnants means we can rule out TNT and HMX.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mark said. ‘We’ve gotta get over there.’ He turned to Erickson. ‘Tom, you keep working on this with Sybil. I want every scrap of information you can get on the missile. We can pass that on to the authorities en route. I need you to get structural diagrams, design plans, internal layouts for all floors and a constant info stream from BigEye 17.’ He turned to the others. ‘Let’s go.’

  18

  An elevator took the six operational team members down 14 floors from Cyber Control to Basement 7. Emerging from the lifts, they ran along a tunnel lit by massive halogens sunk into the ceiling. At the end of the tunnel, 3-metre-high steel doors opened automatically, leading into Prep Area 1. Here they were helped into their cybersuits. One of the mainstays of E-Force’s array of hi-tech equipment, the cybersuits were the team’s armour. Made from a blend of state-of-the-art polymers and carbonthreads, they enabled the wearer to withstand extremes of temperature, poisonous atmospheres and noxious environments, and the suits themselves were self-repairing. At the same time, they provided nutrients and, if the wearer was injured, a network woven into their fabric provided painkillers as well as a stream of computer-controlled nanobots to heal injuries super-fast. Finally, the suits were hot-wired to the comms web of the entire operation with direct links to Sybil via ultra high-speed internet and wireless connections.