Aftershock (9 page)

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, mastering 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.

‘Experiment 1,' Yung said.

Behind the glass was a small stage 2 metres square. On the stage stood a chair. A man was strapped to it by restraints at the wrists and ankles. It looked very similar to the apparatus used for execution by electric chair except there were no wires connected to the contraption. The man looked petrified, but resigned. Only his fingers twitched.

‘Healthy man, aged 22,' the technician said. ‘Prisoner AMV45.'

Mengde looked at the prisoner. He knew what should happen. He had conducted earlier trials. He knew the math. But even so, he felt a certain thrill of anticipation. Long ago he had read about the early Chinese alchemists – innovators and leaders of course, like so many other Chinese thinkers and warriors. The alchemists of the Qin Dynasty had conducted experiments on prisoners. He was part of a fine tradition.

The technician nodded to a man at one of the computers and he depressed a succession of keys. ‘We are using a pulse at 2 hertz, with a wide dispersal, low intensity beam. Please observe.'

There was a momentary squeal from the other side of the glass. The man began to shake, his eyes widened in horror. He strained against the restraints, the metal edges cutting into him. Then his eyes exploded. The spray hit the glass and the techs the other side recoiled instinctively. The man's head slumped forward and he started to scream.

Nobody moved, no one said a word. The screeching metallic sound of the beam stopped abruptly, but the dreadful screams remained, cutting the hot, dusty air.

‘Very good,' Mengde said after several moments. He was looking at the blinded man on the other side of the glass. The man was convulsing, covered in blood and vomit. ‘Let's try the other setting – 7.5 hertz, and narrow the beam to 13 RDF.'

Yung Sing took a few steps across the room and whispered in the ear of one of the men at the terminals. The man tapped the keys and the technician walked back to stand beside Mengde's chair.

‘Whenever you are ready, sir.'

‘Yes, yes,' the Chief Scientist said slowly. ‘There is no need to hurry, is there?' And he looked round at the technician for the first time. ‘I'm rather enjoying myself.'

They all waited another 30 seconds. None of Mengde's subordinates dared move a muscle. The man behind the glass kept screaming. Then the scientist lifted a couple of fingers and the technician shouted to the computer operator, ‘Align the beam.'

The sound started again, but this time it was a higher pitched shriek that sent shocks along the spine and resonated far into the inner ear.

Yung raised a hand. ‘Now.'

The computer operator hit ‘return' on his keyboard, and the man behind the glass turned to powder.

Mark's Silverback,
Ringo,
slowed to Mach 2 and dropped 10,000 metres. Eighty-two kilometres, and two minutes later, he pulled his speed right back and descended to an approach altitude of 3000 metres. Beneath the jet, the calm waters of the Pacific lay like a mottled black carpet.

Details of the E-Force mission had been sent ahead to the Fijian authorities and to a Royal Navy frigate currently 40 kilometres north-west of the island. The ship, the
Essex
, had immediately set course for the disaster zone at full speed. Mark could see it now on his sensor display as it steamed south.

Ringo
came in low over the patch of ocean directly above the Neptune and Mark made a preliminary sensor sweep of the area. He was just about to read the results off the screen when his comms sounded. A man's voice came over the system. He spoke English with a mellow Pacific Islands accent. ‘This is the Fijian Naval Authority, Suva calling E-Force jet designation E991.'

‘Hi, Suva. This is Mark Harrison aboard E991.'

‘Sir,' the voice said. ‘I have the supreme commander of Fijian national armed forces, Admiral Sir Joni Madraiwiwi here.'

‘Admiral,' Mark said.

‘Good evening, Mr Harrison,' Madraiwiwi replied. His voice was deep, almost a growl, but refined. Mark surmised the Admiral was an Oxbridge man. ‘The speed at which you chaps travel never ceases to amaze me.'

‘We try our best, sir.'

‘I just wanted to let you know that you have our full cooperation. My government will provide you with any materials or personnel to assist you.'

‘We are very grateful,' Mark responded. ‘I think at this stage we will be fine. We have to do a preliminary analysis. But I will certainly keep you and your government fully informed.'

‘Very well, Mr Harrison. We have two ships en route to the disaster site and I understand a Royal Navy vessel is on its way.'

‘That's correct. We are always grateful for any local assistance, Admiral. But if I may, I would like you to ensure your ships adopt a holding pattern no closer than 10 kilometres from the hotel site. It's a safety matter for you and for us. The commander of
HMS Essex
has agreed to this.'

‘I see no problem with that. Keep in touch.'

Mark broke his connection and heard the familiar rumble of the Big Mac as it descended to hover over the water a short distance from his Silverback. It was staying just high enough to prevent its massive engines churning the water too much.

From the main control panel of the Big Mac, high up in the top bubble of the aircraft, Pete and Mai could see the surface of the water dotted with shapes. Cutting the engines to minimum power and dropping to 50 metres above the surface of the ocean, Pete flicked on the powerful front beams and a hectare of black water lit up. The surface was strewn with debris – sheets of plastic, metal cylinders, food and other organic material.

Mai stepped down from the guidance module on the flight deck and strode into the adjoining room to check the computers that operated the outboard equipment, leaving Pete at the main panel. He looked around the now empty deck and took a deep breath. He could hardly believe he was back on operational duties again. He felt a thrill of excitement. The old adage was spot on, he told himself: to get over any traumatic experience, you had to get right back in the saddle.

Mai came back just as a buzzer sounded and Mark's face appeared on a screen above the console. He was seated at the controls of
Ringo
, a short distance away, hovering 30 metres above the waves.

‘I've run a scan,' Mark said, and touched a couple of keys on the panel in front of him. Multicoloured images appeared on the Big Mac screen. ‘As you can see, the shock was pretty serious. According to the design plans, the three domes are called Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Alpha is the most westerly, there on the left of the screen. As we saw at Base One, the top of Alpha has shattered, but the rest of the dome seems amazingly intact. It looks like there are some pretty heavy-duty bulkheads that seal off any section of any dome if there's a major breach. Ironically, apart from the top floor, Alpha is the least badly hit, whereas the whole of Gamma has been shaken pretty bad. The top of the dome is holding so far, but it's under a lot of stress. I want you to launch a Hunter to get close to the wreckage.

‘Right.'

‘Tom called in a few moments ago,' Mark added. ‘He's managed to explain why there are so many people at the hotel, a day before it's due to open.' He sent Pete an image that Tom had found on the web. It was from
Entertainment Today
– an article about the Gala Night at the Neptune Hotel.

Mai stared at it and sighed. ‘If I believed in such things, I would say that was very bad luck.'

‘Yeah, Mai, but I think you believe in luck about as much as I do.'

She turned away for a moment. Something on another screen had caught her eye. When she looked back to Mark, she was grimacing. ‘Mark, take a look at the surface. Coordinates, 619.3 by 342.1.'

‘What is it?' Mark said as a fuzzy image appeared on one of his monitors. The high-sensitivity camera on the underside of the Silverback automatically honed in and refocused, showing a dark shape – a badly charred body floating face down. ‘Okay, Mai. Bring it in,' he said heavily.