Aftershock Page 9

  ‘And there’s no definite cause?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What’s the team status?’ Steph asked.

  ‘Pete and Mai are in the Big Mac, left about two minutes ago. Mark’s just boarding Ringo now. He’ll be there before them, of course. His ETA is 21.57 local time.’

  Josh paced over to the crew who were refuelling and checking out Paul. Steph went to get suited up.

  ‘We’ll be ready in under five minutes,’ one of the techs told Josh.

  ‘Make that four,’ he retorted.

  Steph appeared a minute later and they stood beside the craft watching the techs finish off. An engineer in a black boilersuit approached. ‘So whose turn to pilot?’

  ‘Mine,’ Josh and Steph said in unison. The tech looked from one to the other, not sure whether to say anything.

  ‘I think if you look at the log, Dr Jacobs, you’ll see that you commanded the last mission.’

  ‘Okay, Professor Thompson,’ Steph responded. ‘I refuse to play silly games. The keys are yours.’ And she gave Josh a sweet smile. He turned and climbed the steps up the side of the Silverback and lowered himself into the pilot seat. Steph followed him up and jumped into the copilot’s seat directly behind him.

  A few moments later, the chief engineer shouted to the others and they all headed for the control shelter at the far end of the hangar. As he went, he gave Josh the thumbs up. Josh glanced at his watch. The engineers had prepped the plane in three minutes 55.

  Paul ascended on the hydraulic platform, the floor of the hangar dropping away beneath it. A slit appeared in the ceiling. It grew larger as the two hemispheres of the landing pad separated. Above the plane stretched clear blue sky. The lift took the Silverback through the opening and stopped at ground level. Josh and Steph looked around them at the frozen wasteland. Close to the pad lay a few wiry, sorry-looking scrubs, but apart from these the view consisted of granite escarpments, and beyond that a scarred and rutted strip of tarmac. This was all that remained of the airstrip the Russian military had slapped down almost 60 years earlier. Beside the strip, they could see the ugly squat shape of the radar station. Rust lines ran down its concrete sides and not a single pane of glass had survived the years.

  ‘Polar Base. We’re making a final preflight check,’ Steph announced into her comms, and she ran her fingers quickly over a control panel.

  In the front seat, Josh adjusted his holovisor and made a tiny adjustment to his earpieces. He could see a 3D representation of the island of Semja Alexandry. ‘Lay in a course for Fiji,’ he told the computer. A panel of lights flashed on his control panel. ‘You got that, Steph?’ he asked.

  ‘Perfect,’ she replied. ‘Flight time, one hour 37 minutes.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  ‘Polar Base ... ready for takeoff.’

  ‘Copy.’

  Josh tapped at the plastic panel in front of him, and he and Steph heard the engines fire up. He surveyed the parameters moving across his field of vision in his visor and ran his fingers over the panel again. The plane began to lift into the cold, crisp air at 300 metres per second, then gradually accelerated until it had reached the optimum cruising altitude of 20,000 metres above the Tundra.

  ‘Okay, what’s your tune?’ he asked Steph as he simultaneously ran the flight schedule through a final check and prepped the engines for horizontal flight.

  ‘My tune?’

  ‘Yeah. What do you play on takeoff?’

  ‘I...’

  ‘Oh never mind,’ Josh shot back. ‘You’ll have to put up with mine.’ And he snapped the plane into horizontal flight mode, the engines began to change tone and the Silverback shot forward, accelerating to Mach 10 in a matter of seconds. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’, Josh’s favourite, burst through their headphones.

  At an altitude of 20,000 metres, very little detail of the land below could be distinguished by the naked eye, but Paul was packed with the most sophisticated detection and analysis equipment coming out of the CARPA labs. Passing over the north-east coast of Siberia, Josh and Steph could have picked out individual hairs on a yak’s rear end if they had wished to. Instead, Steph was refining the flight-path to get to Fiji in the fastest possible time, but avoiding hostile airspace.

  E-Force had a special arrangement with the former Soviet states and had automatic clearance to fly over Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and the others. China, though, was a different matter. Beijing had not been involved in the creation of E-Force and they had refused to cooperate fully with the UN, only allowing E-Force to enter Chinese airspace in dire emergency. Since the recent heightened tension between Beijing and Washington even this small concession had been withdrawn.

  Steph had felt the Silverback turn sharply without warning. ‘What‘re you doing, Josh? ... Josh?’

  ‘I’m taking us directly south.’

  ‘But that’s...’

  ‘Yep, it’s over our friend’s precious airspace.’

  ‘Josh, you can’t do that.’

  ‘What? You think they have anything that can out run us?’

  ‘No,’ Steph snapped. ‘But they could fire at us.’

  ‘What? And risk an international incident?’

  ‘Too damn right they would.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Steph, but I’m the one piloting this aircraft. It’s my decision. We have to get to Fiji. Lives are at stake. You know that.’

  Steph said nothing. She was trying to steady her breathing, trying to keep her mental balance. ‘I don’t think you’ve thought this through, Josh.’

  ‘Oh, I have.’

  ‘If the Chinese kick up a stink, the UN are not going to be happy with us. You could be forced out of the team.’

  ‘I’ll take the chance.’

  ‘At least let Base One know.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Mark will have a coronary. We can be in and out of Chinese airspace before anyone even notices.’

  ‘I’m against this, Josh.’

  ‘Course plotted. It’ll get us to Fiji 20 minutes faster.’

  ‘No!’ Steph cried. ‘Please, Josh. Don’t do this.’

  ‘Too late. I’m sorry, Steph.’

  Steph watched the display in front of her. Light patterns shifted across the highly polished plastic. The new flight-path was programmed in and would take them straight over the Gobi Desert, then out over the East China Sea. Josh had locked in the command.

  There was an ominous silence between them. Steph was boiling with rage but she knew ways to force herself to remain calm. Years of yoga and practising meditation techniques had their uses. ‘On your head be it,’ she said, unable to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘You can unlock the controls, Josh.’

  The plane ascended another 3000 metres, rolled and swerved randomly to confuse any radar tracking that might break through its camouflage. The Camoflin coating made it almost completely radar-invisible, but a Chinese satellite might pick it up.

  On the holodisplays in their helmets, Steph and Josh could see the terrain 23,000 metres below. It began to change, turning from rocky high ground to the orange wash of desert. The guidance system flashing across their visors told them they had encroached into the northern region of the Gobi Desert, a vast wasteland that stretched into the heart of northern China.

  They flew on in silence. Steph was still too angry to accept fully what Josh was doing. She knew his heart was in the right place and that, in some respects, he was a better E-Force member than she was. He always put the mission first. But she also knew that she was the more disciplined person, respectful of the rules and regulations, someone more bound to protocol – and she believed in her approach. She could not admit it right then, but she knew Josh’s individualism and self-belief got things done. She just didn’t like the way he went about it.

  A voice broke over their comms. ‘Unidentified object approaching at high speed.’ It was the onboard computer.

  ‘What!’ Josh exclaimed. ‘On screen.’

  ‘What is that?�
�� Steph said.

  ‘Unidentifiable,’ the onboard computer responded. ‘Object now 4.9 kilometres due south-south-east. It’s falling away from us.’

  ‘Good,’ Josh said.

  ‘There’s a second object,’ Steph announced.

  Josh was silent, dumbstruck.

  ‘That’s falling behind too. Some sort of missile by the look of it. It came into range briefly.’

  ‘Warning. Warning.’ It was the metallic rasp of the onboard computer again. Three rows of lights on the control panel began to flash. The sound of the engines changed pitch, descending rapidly. The plane began to rock on its axis.

  ‘Switching to manual,’ Josh said. ‘Steph. Anything more on what those things are?’

  ‘Hang on. Picking up a low frequency emission from the second object. It’s not a conventional missile. It’s ... damn!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just got a momentary sensor reading from the limit of the range. It’s not an explosive device. It’s some sort of probe. The first object must be a jet. The probe is emitting low frequency electromagnetic waves.’

  ‘You put the shields up?’

  ‘Yep. It’s cutting straight though.’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Chinese ... clever people.’ She resisted the urge to say I told you so. ‘I’m modulating the shield randomly.’

  ‘Just what I was about to suggest.’

  ‘Oh good!’

  The plane rocked violently. Josh and Steph were pushed forward, their bodies straining against the safety restraints. The lights flicked on, then off. They stayed off for three torturous seconds before coming on again at half power.

  ‘Steph? You okay?’

  ‘I’ve been better.’

  ‘The modulation isn’t working.’

  ‘No, and the whole shield system is now offline. Engine two is working at 40 per cent efficiency, and...’

  The lights went off, and stayed off. The tone of the engines changed again, shooting up through several octaves. The plane shuddered.

  ‘Ninety per cent of the electrics are out, Josh,’ Steph shouted above the screeching of the engines.

  ‘Copy that. I’m going to try to land.’

  Josh ran his fingers over the controls. Almost nothing worked. He grabbed at the emergency joystick, a design feature added in case all other control systems failed. With the engines working at low efficiency, it took all Josh’s flying skills to bring the plane down to a lower altitude. He was also worried that without the servos and antigrav systems on board, the plane would be unable to handle the ridiculously high speed they were still travelling at. He glanced at the control panel to check their speed and altitude, but nothing was working.

  ‘We’ve got to bail,’ Steph screamed into her headset. But comms were down. She glanced out the window. The plane was banking hard. She could see the orange sand thousands of metres below. Then the Silverback rolled again. They were falling at an incredible speed, the sand rearing up towards them. She felt sick and fought it down.

  The plane was shaking so violently it felt like it was about to shatter into a million pieces. Steph jolted in her seat as a crack appeared in the carboglass above her head. The crack slithered along the smooth parabola of the canopy and she could hear the air rush from the cabin as it decompressed. Her cybersuit was still functioning normally. She could breathe and she could withstand the cataclysmic drop in cabin temperature.

  ‘Steph,’ Josh called, his voice desperate. ‘Don’t think you can hear me, Steph, but I’m going to try to land in the desert. Hold tight.’

  Josh leaned on the joy stick and the plane surged into an even steeper descent. Then, with expert timing, he pulled it back, praying the servo mechanism of the manual override could handle it. It was like the power steering in a heavy car. He needed it if he was to have any hope of landing Paul in one piece. The landing gear was offline. Through the window, the sandy terrain, featureless except for the shadow cast by the Silverback, seemed to rise up at him. It was almost impossible to get his bearings, to gain any sense of distance or scale.

  Seconds before he had expected it, the plane touched the ground. Josh reacted with lightning speed, bringing up the nose of the jet, letting it skim along the sand. He knew they would survive just so long as the infrastructure held. It was an incredibly strong plane. But something like this had never been tested before.

  Josh focused all his attention on steadying the Silverback, letting the underside of the plane take the strain. He had to hope the Maxinium would survive the landing. Josh was thrown around in the seat, the safety restraints screaming. The sides of his helmet smashed against the head rests and ear guards. He felt his guts churning.

  The plane hit something and shuddered. There was an explosion to port. Josh could not turn to see, but he knew what it was. The engine had gone. Debris slammed into the canopy. Then the canopy itself shattered. Pieces of carboglass flew outward, propelled by the internal pressure in Josh’s cabin. He heard a second explosion. This time from under the plane. Something seemed to be coming up through the floor. He couldn’t quite believe it. Couldn’t understand what it was. Then he realised it was a section of undercarriage sheared clean away from its support bracket. It emerged from the crumpled steel under him and then flew up, missing his face by a few millimetres before shooting out into the freezing air.

  22

  Hang Cheng, Gobi Desert, summer 1988

  Chief Scientist Mengde Sun pulled down the bottom of his tunic and ran a hand over his bald head. There was a brief rap on the door and a voice said, ‘Sir, it is time.’

  Mengde opened the door and saw the guard standing to attention. He nodded and let the man lead the way. They were in the east wing of the base. It was hot and tiny particles of sand had somehow found their way through to the interior of the base. Funny, Mengde thought to himself, it was so easy for such a simple thing as sand dust to get into this place, a place otherwise impregnable.

  They turned a corner. The guard opened the door for the scientist and he stepped into a narrow room. One of the long walls was a single sheet of glass. It was dark behind the glass. The room was filled with computer equipment. A row of desks ran along its centre. Each had a computer placed on the middle of the desk. An operator sat at each of the terminals. The operators were wearing headsets and mouth mics. To each side of the computers lay clipboards, papers and piles of floppy disks. The room was overlit, almost dazzling, and there was dust here too, suspended in the air, flecks lit up by hundreds of watts of power.

  Mengde was led to the back of the room where there was a large leather chair. Beside the chair stood a low table with a glass and a decanter of water. He sat down.

  It had been such a long journey, he thought to himself. A long temporal journey, but it had covered almost no distance. For he had been born within half a kilometre of this room. The date had been 2 October 1949, within hours of the birth of the People’s Republic of China, the day Mao Zedong had ascended to the highest office in the land.

  Mengde Sun had grown up with the Republic, his childhood had been spent in the tiny village of Hang Cheng in the southeast corner of the vast Gobi Desert, a frontier settlement in the middle of nowhere. His father, Mengde Zhui, had been the village leader, but he had been a weak man. When Sun was seven, his father was blackmailed by a business rival who had photographs of the village leader in flagrante with the baker’s wife. When Mengde’s father decided not to pay the blackmailer, his infidelity was exposed. The baker tried to knife Zhui, and Zhui’s wife, Sun’s mother, was disgraced along with her perfidious husband.

  The incident could have ruined Mengde’s life, but instead it changed it incalculably for the better. He was shamed and had become an outcast along with his parents, but he learned a great lesson from the experience. It taught him the power of blackmail, the power of coercion, the attractiveness of corruption. And besides, he had already been something of an outcast in the village. He was a mathematical prodigy, mas
tering calculus by the age of four, working through elegant solutions to problems of binomial expansion before his fifth birthday. Aged eight, he was packed off to Beijing, Technical College 18. He never saw his parents again.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, there has been a very slight delay,’ a voice said at Mengde’s side. He was so lost in memories that for a second he barely heard the man. He turned and looked up at a very nervous technician in a white lab coat. He had an ID pinned to the collar: Yung Sing. Mengde stared at him for long moments, then waved the man away.

  He had not seen his parents again, but he had returned to the village. Just once. In June 1986, two years ago. He had watched as troops stormed the town meeting hall where a few stubborn citizens had remained protesting against the destruction of their village and the planned relocation to tenements in Fung Ching Wa, the nearest town.

  By that time, Mengde had become a high-ranking official of the Communist Party and the government’s Chief Scientist. He had reached this pinnacle by virtue of a peerless scientific brilliance, but had consolidated his position by whatever means necessary. He was ruthless, amoral and totally corrupt.

  He had been given complete control of the project to build Scientific Base 44 and allowed free rein to choose where it was to be located. He had picked a 1000 square kilometre scrap of land on the edge of the Gobi Desert. No one in Beijing cared about the village of Hang Cheng or its handful of citizens.

  From a sun-parched hill at a safe distance from the village, Mengde had witnessed the explosives being laid around the buildings. He had watched with growing contentment as the old stone homes, the town meeting hall, the shop and the school collapsed in a most orderly fashion. Then, as a group of a dozen red bulldozers rumbled over the desert, heading for the ruins left by the TNT, he had stood up, rubbed the sand from his hands and turned his back on the place.

  ‘Sir, we’re ready.’ It was the same technician as before, Yung Sing. The man was standing close to the arm of the Chief Scientist’s sumptuous leather chair. Mengde did not move a muscle, but stared straight ahead. The lights in the room dimmed as others brightened behind the wall of glass.