Sensitive New Age Spy (23 page)

But even if Sheehan was knocking together a Meccano-set cruise missile or two, it wasn’t the end of the world. One more cruise missile, more or less, wasn’t going to make much difference to the planet. What would make a difference was a couple of nuclear warheads, just the right size to fit on a cruise missile. By the time my entrée turned up, I’d lost my appetite.

Between sips of her soup, Artemesia told me a lot more about the evils of whaling than I really wanted to know. When the waiter took away her empty bowl and my barely touched one I switched the conversation to Sheehan and the launching pad out on the slipway.

‘I gave Mr Sheehan an open cheque, as well as a promised bonus for on-schedule delivery,’ she said, ‘but he seems to take pride in bringing the project in on budget.’

‘The project being a cruise missile, made with loving hands at home?’ I said.

Artemesia gave me a pleasant smile as she calmly buttered a piece of bread. ‘For years now I have argued and protested and made appeals to governments and politicians and the
UN. All to no avail. We blockade their ships and try to drive away their quarry, and still they persist. And now it has become clear that the Japanese government intends to buy its way into dominance of the World Whaling Commission as a way of again legalising whaling. They must be stopped. When reasoned arguments fail, Mr Murdoch, stronger measures are call for.’

‘And you think nuclear blackmail’s the answer?’

‘Blackmail and threats are only delaying tactics, Mr Murdoch. They give an adversary time to plan a response. Every day that we prevaricate, another dozen whales are slaughtered. It’s my intention, therefore, to give the Japanese government other things besides scientific research and school lunches to occupy its mind.’

‘It’s a pretty long haul for a homemade cruise missile from here to Japan,’ I pointed out.

‘Mr Sheehan’s missile is designed to make use of the surface effect to extend its range, and coincidentally, to reduce its radar signature to nil.’

At the right speed, and with the right wing design, surface-effect craft travel over water or land on a slim cushion of air that reduces drag and extends their range dramatically. The Russians had built a number of seagoing vehicles, including large cargo freighters, to examine the concept, and the Japanese were looking at using it for a new version of frictionless bullet trains. It seemed feasible that it would work for a cruise missile. Shit!

‘As to range,’ she continued, ‘the missile doesn’t need to reach the Japanese mainland for me to achieve my purpose. Are you aware of the island of Iwo Jima, Mr Murdoch?’

‘The place the Yanks captured from the Japanese in 1945? Where they took the photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi?’

‘Very good, Mr Murdoch. How fortunate we were to go to school at a time when so much emphasis was placed on history and geography. Iwo Jima is part of Japan’s Volcano Islands,’ Artemesia continued, ‘and has two sister islands, Kita Iwo Jima and Minami Iwo Jima. The area has considerable surface and subsurface volcanic activity. Iwo Jima is a rather flat little island, apart from Mount Suribachi, but Minami Iwo Jima rises straight out of the sea, with almost sheer sides reaching to a height of close to one thousand metres. When I sold off my father’s companies I retained Gaarg Satellite Imaging, with the intention of studying global warming and conducting a census of the world’s whale population. In early 2005, one of our people noticed a major geological fault cutting across the north face of Minami Iwo Jima, the side facing the Japanese mainland.’

History and geography were actually two of my best subjects at school. Mathematics was totally beyond me, but right now I was starting to put two and two together and I was coming up with a terrifying four. ‘Oh,’ I said.

Artemesia smiled. ‘Oh indeed, Mr Murdoch.’

‘So, you’re intending to use your homemade cruise
missile to drop a nuclear warhead into a fault in the side of a volcano, causing the major part of the island to collapse into the sea, creating…’

‘A massive tidal wave. Precisely, Mr Murdoch.’

Her voice was calm and steady, but the look of demented righteousness in her eyes chilled me to the bone.

‘When I approached Mr Sheehan with my plan he agreed that his cruise missile could reach the target, so I put him to work. We were well advanced on the project before I learned that the missile’s load capacity was half a ton of conventional explosives, which was nowhere near enough to achieve the result I wanted. I was stymied for a week or two, and then Mr Pergo approached me regarding financing a business plan he was working on with Reverend Priday. When he revealed the details of their scheme I realised he had the solution to my problem.’

‘So you made him a better offer?’

‘Exactly, Mr Murdoch. Mr Pergo’s past in Iraq was catching up with him and it was only a matter of time before he was going to be invited to appear before the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. It was all but game over for him, and he needed to make a large amount of money in a short amount of time. With his connections to one of the crew on the American warship, and access to my resources, Mr Pergo was able to put all the elements together very quickly. We saw it as a mutually beneficial opportunity.’

‘Not so beneficial to the millions of Japanese likely to
be killed when your tidal wave hits the Japanese coast?’

‘Detonation of the warhead and the subsequent landslip will register instantly on seismographs in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities, triggering the automatic tsunami alarms. It will happen at exactly noon on a weekday, so the alarms will set in motion the well-rehearsed emergency evacuation plans the Japanese are famous for, ensuring that all coastal cities in the path of the tidal wave suffer minimal loss of life. Infrastructure and economic damage will be severe, however, and as a consequence I’m sure the people of Japan will lose their taste for whale meat.’

The calmness in her voice as she said ‘minimal loss of life’ made my blood run cold. Minimal loss of life, like collateral damage, is one of those elastic concepts that mean different things to different people – words that turn human lives into statistical equations in a cost-benefit analysis. Exactly how many people was this woman willing to kill in order to save the whales? At what point did commitment and dedication to a cause, even the noblest of causes, flip over into obsession and then total insanity?

‘And you’re not expecting a lot of very angry people to come looking for you?’ I said.

‘That doesn’t really matter to me, Mr Murdoch. My job will be done. Besides, I think the world will have more than enough on its plate coping with the collapse of the Japanese economy.’

She was right about that.

We are totally self-sustaining on this island and we can ride out any storm until calmer and more rational views prevail. After all, isn’t today’s terrorist simply tomorrow’s visionary? And remember, I’ll still have one remaining warhead, which I’m sure will be useful as an insurance policy against unwelcome callers.’

No argument there. A nuke in the cupboard was as handy a deterrent as a pitbull to a postie.

‘I’m guessing that old Aldo Ray movie gave you the idea for using the tanker as a distraction,’ I said.

‘I was always a fan, Mr Murdoch. I watched
The Siege of Pinchgut
many times as a child. Worked rather well, don’t you think?’

I had to admit it had worked like a charm. But it wasn’t a good feeling knowing that I, along with the Australian and US governments, had been duped by the plot of a 1950s B-grade movie.

One of the guards came over to our table and whispered in Artemesia’s ear. She nodded and stood up.

‘There’s something I need to attend to, Mr Murdoch. You will, of course, be our guest on Adamek Island tonight.’ It wasn’t a question.

When she’d left, the guard motioned to me to get up and go with him. He did this with a wave of his pistol, which was pretty persuasive. I’d been hoping to check out the dessert menu, but a nine-millimetre Browning trumps a carob-chip brownie every time.

The island’s guest quarters were nowhere near as schmick as a suite at the Hyatt, but mine did have an ensuite bathroom, fluffy white robes, a minibar, tea-making facilities, a very solid door and 24-hour security. The security, of course, was to stop me going out rather than anyone coming in. My guard was standing in the doorway explaining the house rules when I glanced down beside the bed.

‘Jesus, how’d that snake get in here?’ I said, and as he stepped forward, eyes to the floor and pistol raised warily, I swung the heavy door round as hard as I could. He saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and turned just in time for the edge to catch him on the temple. There was a nasty thud of wood on bone, another thud as his Browning hit the carpet, and then he was on his knees with a glassy look in his eyes.

I walked out of the guest quarters ten minutes later
wearing the guard’s camouflage fatigues and carrying the Browning in his holster. I’d left him under the doona on the bed, gagged and trussed up with his belt and the cotton tie from a bathrobe. I kept my own belt, since the homing device under the buckle was the only way I had of making contact with Ed and getting off the island.

And getting off the island was something I had to do fast because we’d have to call in the big boys to sort out this little viper’s nest. I needed to get to the lighthouse, where the radar dish was, and the high vantage point would give me the range for the homing device.

The few people I bumped into ignored me, so I decided to risk a peek in the big workshop before taking the path up to the lighthouse. A side door opened onto a large workspace crammed with machinery, including lathes, drill presses and computer-controlled cutting devices. The workers inside ignored me as well.

Artemesia’s little cruise missile was sitting under a bank of lights in the middle of the workshop. It was about nine metres in length and its cylindrical fuselage had stubby, delta-shaped wings attached, which made it look a bit like a scale model of the old Concorde. There was a raised air intake for the turbofan engine at the rear of the craft, and the delta wings were turned up at the tips. The black paint covering the fuselage and wings was probably radar-absorbing, and while the missile appeared rather crudely engineered and put together, the damned thing did look like it could fly.
Worse than that, it looked like it was ready to fly.

Towards the front of the fuselage, a hinged panel lay open and a couple of white-coated bods were fiddling around in a space that looked big enough to hold a beer keg, or something the size of a beer keg. If the warheads were on the island, which now seemed likely, and my pal Lieutenant Kingston was also in the vicinity, then things were coming to a head.

On the far wall of the workshop there was a large mirror, and next to it a door marked PROJECT MANAGER. The mirror was no doubt one-way glass so the manager could keep an eye on his minions. Under PROJECT MANAGER it said NO ADMITTANCE, so I went right in. Sheehan had his feet up on a desk and was busily folding a sheet of A4 paper into the shape of a plane.

‘Aerodynamic research?’ I said.

He launched the paper plane, which did two quick spiral loops of the office before dropping neatly into a wastepaper basket under the window.

‘Forget I asked,’ I said. If Sheehan could get performance like that out of a paper plane, then his homemade missile would probably be able to go the distance.

Through the one-way mirror, I could see that a third person had joined the two boffins at the business end of the missile. It was Chapman Pergo.

‘So
how’s it all going, Mr Sheehan?’ I said, turning back in his direction. ‘Launch on schedule?’

Sheehan took his feet off the desk and indicated the whiteboard behind him with a tilt of his head. A chart on the board showed target dates and stages of construction and testing, with ‘completed’ marked next to most of them. Tomorrow’s date had ‘RTL 7.30 a.m.’ next to it, with a question mark. I figured RTL stood for ready to launch.

‘You one of the new security team?’ he asked.

I nodded and he smiled. He looked at me more carefully and I could see he was putting two and two together. ‘No, I don’t think you are. You don’t sound like a Yank.’

He reached for the phone on his desk and I pointed the guard’s Browning right between his eyes.

‘You got me. I’m just an Aussie with a big fucking gun, so don’t even think about touching that phone. You and I need to talk.’

Sheehan settled back in his chair. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what your problem is, but this place is sealed up tight as a fish’s arsehole, so why don’t you hand over the gun and let me call security?’

‘Think your homemade missile can make Japan?’

He shrugged. ‘Buggered if I know, but if Miss Gaarg reckons her looney-tunes fantasy of a tidal wave flattening Yokohama will help her cause, and she thinks my little bottle rocket out there can do it, then I’m willing to play along. She’s a very generous woman, our Miss Gaarg.’

‘So you think the tidal wave idea’s a fantasy?’ I said.

‘Look, mate, once we fuel her up with enough gas to
get to Iwo Jima, she can only carry half a tonne of explosives. Even if she detonates right on target we’ll only get a bang big enough to scare the shit out of the seagulls.’

‘See the bloke talking to your techies out there?’ I said. ‘You know who that is?’

‘That’s Chapman Pergo. Nasty bastard, that one. Not someone you’d want to cross, that’s for sure.’

Well, Mr Pergo has recently pinched a couple of nuclear warheads from the US Navy, and when your missile takes off it’s going to have one of them installed in the nose, primed and ready to blow. Think we’ll just have a fantasy tidal wave if a nuke detonates in that fault?’

Sheehan sat bolt upright. ‘Holy Mother of God, are you having me on?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

There was a clock on the wall above Sheehan’s head. If the launch was scheduled for breakfast time tomorrow morning, that gave me less than eighteen hours to stop it. I’d spotted at least twenty camouflage-clad goons and they were all armed, so I was outnumbered and outgunned. What I needed was some serious back-up.