The Secret of Excalibur (37 page)

Nina’s leg was being bandaged, but she was offered no painkillers. Her body fought her mind, wanting to shut down to find relief from the burning in her thigh, but she refused to cave in to it, doggedly resisting unconsciousness.

‘Is she ready?’ Mitchell asked impatiently.

‘Almost,’ replied the man securing the last of the bandages.

‘Bring the reactors up to stage one power. We’ve wasted enough time.’

‘Reactors?’ Nina asked. ‘This thing’s nuclear?’

‘From decommissioned Los Angeles-class subs. The generator needs a lot of power at start-up, just like Vaskovich’s.’ Mitchell turned to one of the technicians. ‘Once we’re steady at stage one, deploy the antenna array. Then charge up the magnets—’

‘Sir!’ called another man from across the room. ‘Radar contact changing course, coming straight for us.’

‘On screen,’ Mitchell snapped, facing the large display on the wall. The map zoomed in on a smaller area around the
Aurora
’s position. A yellow square was slowly moving towards it from the south. ‘What is it?’

‘Propeller aircraft, course track suggests it came from Scotland.’

‘Identify it!’

‘Got the transponder code, checking the tail number . . . It’s a United Nations plane, sir. Attached to the Oceanic Survey—’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Mitchell hissed under his breath. ‘It’s Chase, it has to be.’ Nina’s heart jumped at the name. ‘Someone at the Pentagon’s been talking to Amoros. God
damn
it!’

Even through her discomfort, Nina managed a smile. ‘Oh, you’re in trouble now.’

Mitchell glared at her. ‘Get her into position,’ he ordered. ‘And take down that plane!’

Chase finished fastening his parachute straps and used the binoculars to take another look at the ship. It was now close enough to show that the flag was indeed that of Panama, and after a moment the name painted on the bow finally came into focus.

Aurora
.

‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘Okay, fly over it, I want a closer look.’ He glanced at the altimeter and saw that the Seminole was at slightly over seven thousand feet. When he was ready to jump, he would get Amoros to descend by a couple of thousand; he had no way to judge the wind, and wanted to minimise the chances of being blown away from the freighter.

He looked back through the binoculars. The
Aurora
took on greater clarity as they approached. There was a helicopter on a pad behind the superstructure, which was unusual - most ships of the type would use the space for additional cargo - but the rest of the vessel seemed normal, high stacks of multicoloured containers filling its huge main deck.

Movement caught his eye: someone emerging from the superstructure and crossing to the edge of the open wing bridge . . .

He wasn’t going for a smoke.

‘Shit!’ Chase gasped. ‘
Incoming!
’ Amoros stared at him in disbelief. ‘They’ve got a Stinger!’ The man was hefting the tubular anti-aircraft missile launcher over his shoulder, lining up the heat-seeking head on their plane . . .

‘Jump!’ Amoros shouted. ‘Eddie, go!’

‘But—’

‘
Go!
’

With a last look at Amoros, Chase pushed open the door and flung himself out. The freezing wind was like a blow to the chest; he tumbled through the air before throwing his arms and legs wide to stabilise himself. The ship rolled into view, a splash of floodlit colour amongst the darkness.

Orange light flared from the wing bridge. A Stinger missile leapt from the launcher, a spot of fire at the head of a column of smoke.

The Seminole had already banked away, Amoros turning hard in an attempt to break the Stinger’s lock. Chase knew his chances weren’t good. The Stinger could take down fighter jets - a civilian twin-prop would be an easy target.

The missile spiralled upwards as Chase fell, its sonic boom pounding him as it passed. He turned his head to track it—

The Stinger hit the Seminole’s port engine and exploded, the wing blowing apart in a swelling fireball of burning fuel. The cabin windows flared white as an inferno swept through the fuselage, then the remains of the aircraft rolled in flames towards the hungry sea below.

Chase had no time to think about Amoros. He was dropping fast, and the
Aurora
was still some distance ahead. He had no choice but to deploy his parachute - but if he was seen he would be an easy target, and he might still fall short of the ship . . .

He pulled the ripcord. Nylon hissed out of the pack, blossoming above him into a dark rectangle. The harness snapped tight round his chest and shoulders.

Had it slowed him enough? Or was he already too low?

He guessed he was at about four thousand feet, but in the darkness it was difficult to be sure. He pulled the control cords, trying to give himself as much forward momentum as possible.

All he could do now was hope.

‘Got it!’ the technician said. ‘Target is going down. It’s on fire.’

‘Monitor for distress calls,’ Mitchell ordered. ‘If there are any, jam them.’

Nina’s brief elation turned to horror, part of her mind now wanting to follow the desire of her body and simply switch off to escape a new pain: loss. But again she refused to surrender.

If Chase was gone . . . then
she
had to stop Mitchell.

Somehow.

‘It just hit the water,’ said the technician a few seconds later. ‘No radio messages.’

‘Keep monitoring just in case. And deploy the antenna array.’ Mitchell pulled Nina roughly to her feet. She gasped in pain. ‘You wanted Excalibur?’ he said. ‘It’s yours - for the rest of your life.’

Chase willed the parachute to stay aloft. He was almost in range of the slowly moving
Aurora
, just a few hundred feet away, but was still losing height too rapidly. He strained to hold his position, trying to eke out every last foot as he aimed for the containers . . .

They
moved
.

For a moment he was stunned, unable to take in what was happening. The container roofs were opening, each swinging up and round in a mechanical ballet like some monstrous transformer toy. More mechanisms came to life within, gleaming metal spears rising up and extending as their upper sections sprouted into giant alien sunflowers.

The entire top layer of containers was nothing more than a disguise for an antenna array, smaller than the one surrounding Vaskovich’s facility but more dense, more complex, hundreds of glittering collectors ready to draw in the earth’s own energy . . . then unleash it.

And Chase was falling right into them.

He pulled the cords, trying to swing away from the antenna field towards the stern. It meant travelling further and running the risk of falling below the level of the deck, but it was better than being impaled as he landed. ‘Come on, come on,
shiiiiit
—’ Too low, moving too slowly . . .

He thrust his feet out as he swept into one of the still-deploying antennas with a rattling clash of metal. The parachute swooshed over him, already collapsing as he was brought to a near-stop - the antenna was stronger than it looked, bending but not breaking.

He fell, grabbing for one of the extended ‘petals’ to stop himself dropping into the pitch darkness inside the container. It twisted under his weight, creaking and screeching at its hinge, but didn’t give way. Half tangled in the parachute cords, Chase crashed against the antenna’s column. He flung his arms round it, sliding down as if on a fireman’s pole before hitting the metal floor.

The parachute was caught in the antennas, flapping in the wind. He pulled the release and shrugged off the harness, then drew one of his guns with one hand, a small torch with the other.

What looked on the outside like a collection of individual containers was revealed as nothing more than a framework supporting a façade. The whole array was now fully raised, extending high above the open roofs. Chase directed the torch at the floor, which turned out to be a solid deck. That meant the containers below were fake too, a shell with something hidden inside. The antenna array gave him a pretty good idea what. The whole ship was a floating version of Vaskovich’s earth energy facility.

Only Mitchell had designed this one for destruction, not production. And if the antennas were now in position . . .

He ran through the metal forest towards the aft superstructure, hunting for a way in before anyone aboard realised they had a visitor.

Mitchell and his two guards half carried, half dragged the struggling Nina along the length of the hold, the generator’s magnetic rings hanging threateningly overhead. Excalibur waited for them at the far end on what Nina now saw was a platform mounted on a crane arm that would lift it up to the centre of the ring. ‘You’ll be staying with us for a while,’ Mitchell told her. ‘At least until we can find someone else who can energise the sword.’

‘Gee, I feel so special,’ Nina snapped. ‘Didn’t you think about testing your own people before moving into kidnapping? You know, keep it in the psychotic, traitorous family.’

‘I did. Nobody worked. I would have gone wider, but trooping hundreds of people through the ultra-secret weapons platform and asking them to hold King Arthur’s sword to see if it glowed might have raised a few questions.’

They reached the platform. Excalibur had been diligently polished, not a speck of dust on it. It rested point down in a black frame of carbon fibre, held in place by a clamp round the cross-guard. And there was another clamp, larger and more box-like, open and waiting round the hilt. Nina felt a chill. Inside the clamp was an indentation . . . just large enough for her hands to fit inside.

Mitchell saw her growing look of horror. ‘Yeah, I thought you wouldn’t hold it voluntarily.’ He nodded, and the two men pushed her closer.

Nina struggled to wrest her arms from their grip, keeping her fists clenched. ‘If you think I’m gonna stick my hand in that thing—’

Another nod. The man to her right punched her injured thigh. The resurgent pain hit Nina so hard that she almost blacked out.

By the time she started to recover, it was too late - her hands had been prised open and placed round Excalibur’s hilt, and the clamp closed with a decisive
snick
.

‘No!’ she cried, trying to pull free. ‘Lemme go!’ But the box was tight round her wrists, hard edges cutting into her skin. Both hands were pressed against the cold metal of the sword, and the blade was shining brightly. Charged with earth energy, the molecules along its edges aligned into a single line of sharpness, it could cut through almost anything.

But that didn’t help her. The clamps round the guard and hilt held it in place in the frame, locked solid.

Nina wanted to kick Mitchell, but the pain in her wounded leg was too intense for her to move it. All she could throw at him was spit and invective. ‘Fuck you.’

Mitchell irritably wiped away the glob of her saliva from his left eye, and was about to operate the platform’s controls when an urgent voice crackled over the walkie-talkie of one of the guards. He took it from the man and listened, eyes slowly widening first in surprise, then sudden anger. ‘Find him and kill him!’ he snarled. ‘Now!’

Nina’s eyes widened too, with something she hadn’t expected to feel again - delight. ‘Eddie, huh? You’re screwed now!’ she crowed.

‘There are forty people on this ship—’

‘Tough luck on them.’ Stung, Mitchell hit the controls to elevate the platform. Trapped, alone, Nina was lifted to the centre of the vast generator.

34

A
hatch at the rear of the fake containers led into the superstructure. Chase went through it, gun covering the passage beyond. No sign of anyone. So far, so good—

An urgent, honking alarm sounded, a voice booming over the PA system: ‘All hands, intruder alert! Repeat, intruder alert!’

Not so good. The parachute must have been spotted.

Chase drew his second gun, a Heckler and Koch USP Expert now in each hand. It wasn’t his preferred choice of weapon, but the .45-calibre bullets would be more than adequate at close quarters.

Not knowing Nina’s location, he decided to start with the most logical place. If Mitchell planned to fire the weapon, he needed both Nina and Excalibur to make it work, and the hold was the only place large enough to house the earth energy generator. He prowled the corridors until he found narrow stairs leading down, and started to descend—

Someone was running towards him.

Caught halfway down the steep flight, Chase hooked his arms over both banisters and slid down the stairs with his guns held out in front of him. An armed man was below; Chase fired twice, knocking him back in a spray of blood. He reached the end of the banisters and clanked on the deck, seeing another man and taking him down with a single shot to the head before spinning at a sound behind him and blowing away a third.

He hurried forward. Though an open hatchway at the end of the corridor he saw more stairs leading down—

A man leaned out from behind the hatchway and fired at him. The bullet zipped past Chase’s head as he threw himself sideways, shooting back. Both shots clanged uselessly against metal.

Shadows darted across the wall beyond the hatch, more men on the stairs—

He fired another shot to encourage them to stay back as he looked for cover. There was a hatch in the wall - he pulled it open, using it as a shield as more gunfire spat from the end of the corridor. The hatch jolted as bullets slammed into it, coin-sized dents erupting across the metal.

Shouts from behind. More people were coming after him.

He was about to be pinned down . . .

With no other choice, he jumped through the door and slammed it behind him.

The room beyond was a storage area. Some of the stacked equipment resembled the magnets of Vaskovich’s generator, and he also saw a pack containing a glidewing like the one Mitchell had used to reach Grozevny. But he didn’t care about the room’s contents - only that there were no other exits.

Unless—

A large duct emerged from the ceiling, feeding fresh air into the enclosed hull - with another vent in the wall below it. Chase raised both guns and blasted the vent cover to pieces. He jumped on a pile of boxes and bashed the broken louvres away, then clambered inside.

The duct was wider than he’d expected, and he felt a warm breeze against his face as he scrambled along it. It wasn’t so much for ventilation as for cooling, to let hot air out. He heard the hatch being thrown open behind him. More shouting as men burst into the room and found nothing but hardware - but it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where he’d gone.

He aimed one gun back at the vent entrance, moving as quickly as he could towards the light coming through grilles in the duct floor ahead. Another shout - someone had seen the open vent. He glanced backwards. A head appeared in silhouette within the rectangular opening. A shot from the USP, and the head disappeared in several different directions at once.

A fusillade of bullets would come along the vent at any moment—

He reached the first grille, getting a brief sense of a cavernous space beneath before smashing at it with his pistols. The thin metal immediately buckled. He kept striking it until one end broke away from the frame and it swung loose.

There was a girder several feet below. Not much, but it was all he had. He dropped through the hole as shots ripped into the duct walls just above him.

He hit the beam and slithered down it, the metal tilted at a steep angle. One of his guns spun away to the floor far below as he grabbed the support, both legs hanging over a long vertical drop.

Pulse pounding, he saw he was hanging from the framework supporting a horizontal copy of Vaskovich’s system. One of the huge rings of electromagnets was suspended from the other side of the beam by massive insulators. More rings stretched away along the length of the hold to—

Nina!
She was slightly below him at the far end of the generator, trapped on an elevated platform with Excalibur. He wanted to call out to her, but couldn’t, unwilling to give away his position.

Though it wouldn’t be long before he was found.

He pulled himself up, finding a foothold. The generator didn’t seem to be active yet - but with the antenna array deployed, it wouldn’t be long. Could he sabotage it?

The gear attached to his webbing clinked against the support. An idea formed . . .

‘What the
fuck
?’ Mitchell ran to the control-room window, staring in disbelief at the figure climbing down a support beam. ‘He’s in here!’ He snatched a headset off one of the technicians and yelled into its microphone. ‘Security! He’s in the hold, on the generator! Get your asses down here,
now
!’ Grabbing the XM-201, he raced down the steps to the deck.

Chase saw him coming as he jumped from the frame and stood beneath the magnetic ring. He had his remaining pistol in one hand . . . and a grenade in the other, fingers lightly gripping the safety handle. He held his arms wide to make sure Mitchell could see what he was holding. There was still a chance he might just shoot him anyway, but as he’d hoped the American was being cautious, not wanting to risk any damage to the generator.

‘Hey, Jack!’ he called as Mitchell drew closer, rifle raised. ‘Nice boat!’

‘Put the pin back in, Eddie,’ said Mitchell angrily.

‘I dunno, I’m curious. You said bad things’d happen if the magnets got damaged - sounds like it might be worth seeing. Or you could let Nina go and we’ll just leave.’ He looked up at the platform. Nina had seen him by now, watching the distant scene play out.

‘That’s not really an option.’ Mitchell clicked the ammo selector to a new position and took more precise aim. ‘I can blow your whole arm off at the shoulder, Eddie - and who knows, your hand might even keep hold of the spoon. Even if it doesn’t, the magnets will survive, they’re tough.’

‘So tough that you need a room full of spares?’ Chase countered. ‘Let Nina go, or I blow this place to buggery.’

‘And you with it?’

‘If that’s what it takes.’

Mitchell shook his head. ‘No. I know you by now, Eddie. You’re all about the mission, just like me - and your mission’s getting Nina out of here alive. If you blew yourself up, your mission’d fail, and I know how much you hate that.’

‘We’ll see.’

Mitchell just smirked. Other men ran up behind him. Some were armed with XM-201s, others with more conventional side-arms. Mitchell glanced at them, then erupted in anger. ‘What the hell are you doing? Non-magnetics
only
in here! Get out!’ Realisation crossed his face, and he turned back to Chase. ‘You were reported as carrying two guns, Eddie. Where’s the other one?’

‘No idea,’ Chase answered truthfully. ‘I dropped it, could be anywhere. No telling how much damage it might do if it gets pulled into the magnets, eh?’

‘Spread out,’ Mitchell ordered his men, keeping his gun aimed at Chase. ‘Foreign object sweep. There’s a gun around here somewhere - find it.’

Chase adopted a casual, not-a-chance expression, but it wasn’t long before one of the men called out and recovered the fallen USP from behind a skein of cables. ‘Bollocks,’ he muttered.

‘Nice bit of improvisation, Eddie,’ Mitchell said, ‘but it didn’t work. You’ve got nothing. Now put the pin back in.’

With a resigned shrug, Chase flipped the grenade round in his hand to reveal that the pin had been in place all along, hidden by his thumb. ‘Worth a try.’

‘Search him.’ Two men went to Chase and frisked him, taking his few remaining belongings. ‘Okay, get those out of the field limit. Move it, Eddie.’ He jerked the XM-201 towards the control room.

‘Not going to kill me?’

Mitchell smiled. ‘Oh, hell yes. I just don’t want any bullets flying around in here. Go on.’

Chase looked helplessly up at Nina, then started for the control room, Mitchell tracking him with his gun. All but one of the other men exited the hold ahead of them, the last also aiming a rifle at Chase as he followed him to the stairs. ‘So what’re you going to blow up? Iran? Russia? Venezuela?’

‘Close with the second one,’ said Mitchell as they entered the control room. ‘Are we at stage one power?’

‘Yes, sir,’ a technician answered. ‘We’re at the convergence point of five flux lines, and already drawing zero point three seven from them. Everything is green.’

‘Then fire it all up. Full power.’

The technicians worked their consoles in unison, the deck trembling as a thrumming electrical rumble began to rise. Mitchell moved to watch one display in particular, a digital readout of the system’s power, just like the one in Russia. It climbed smoothly past 0.50 as power was fed in and the magnetic field increased in strength, channelling more earth energy through the system.

Through the superconductor. Through Excalibur.

Chase could still see Nina at the far end of the hold, pinned in the bull’s-eye of the last ring. The sword glowed ever brighter in front of her. Unable to shield her eyes with her hands, she turned her head away from the glare.

A bolt of electricity sizzled across one of the nearer rings, dancing between the magnets. Other flashes built up around the generator, the sharp smell of ozone hitting Chase’s nostrils. ‘Will she be okay up there?’

‘I wouldn’t have put her there if it was going to kill her. I need her alive.’ The gauge ticked rapidly past 0.80. ‘Confirm antenna alignment.’

‘Confirmed, sir,’ a man replied. ‘Ionic reflection is calculated and set, and we have target lock.’

Mitchell nodded. 0.90 flicked past, 0.95 . . . ‘We’ve reached threshold!’ he exclaimed, banging a fist on the console as 1.00 came and went without pause, the numbers climbing at an increasing pace.

‘Confirmed!’ said a technician with equal excitement. ‘The process is now self-sustaining, and rising along the predicted curve.’

‘Magnetic field status?’

‘Firm, and also rising.’

‘Keep it going,’ Mitchell demanded. ‘Ready firing sequence.’

Chase watched Nina as electrical flares crackled around her, and then his gaze moved across to the support beam on which he had landed after dropping from the duct. Staring intently at one particular spot, he whispered, ‘Come on, come
on
. . .’

Mitchell looked sharply at him. ‘What was that?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ Chase said. ‘Just that, you know I had a hand grenade when you found me?’

‘Yeah?’

‘When I came into the hold, I had
two
.’

Mitchell whirled to stare up at the beam, opening his mouth to issue a frantic command—

Too late.

Chase’s other grenade had been hanging by its pin from a hook supporting part of the generator’s miles of wiring. As the magnetic field rose in intensity, the grenade’s steel casing was pulled towards the nearby ring of electromagnets, dangling perpendicular to the floor below. At first the pin held, but as the invisible force grew stronger and stronger, it began to bend . . . before breaking.

The grenade shot across the gap and smacked against a magnet, its safety handle springing loose and clanging beside it. The fuse counted down the seconds, three, two, one—

The explosion blew the electromagnet to pieces. Shattered fragments were snatched up by the intense magnetic field and whirled around the generator to slam into other components, tearing them from their supports. Massive electrical arcs seared across the hold, sparks and flames gouting into the air where they struck.

Another magnet overloaded and exploded, debris smashing the control-room window. Mitchell dived behind a console - and Chase spun and drove his fist into the face of the stunned man guarding him, mashing his nose up into his brain with a hideous crunch.

He grabbed the dead man’s XM-201 as he fell. It was useless to him as a rifle, the biometric lock in place. Instead he stabbed at the button of the grenade launcher.

The grenade shot across the control room, hitting a console in the opposite corner. Technicians were sent flying by the blast, one man backflipping through the broken window like a rag doll. Chase ran for the door, firing another grenade to take out a second set of controls. He saw Mitchell scrambling across the floor and was about to send the final shot at him, but a nearer console blocked his aim - if he fired, he would be caught in the blast himself. Instead he jumped through the door and unleashed the last grenade at the big screen on the wall, the computer map vanishing in a storm of pulverised liquid crystal.

He raced down the stairs into the hold. The man who had been blown out of the window was draped brokenly over the first ring above him. Chase ignored the gruesome sight and sprinted along one side of the generator, tossing the rifle away.

Shielding his eyes from the arc-welder brilliance of the electrical bolts, he ran towards the platform holding Nina.

‘Shut it down!’ Mitchell screamed at one of the surviving technicians. ‘It’s overloading, shut the goddamn thing
down
!’

‘I can’t!’ the man protested. ‘It’s self-sustaining! The system’s locked into its last command - it’s just going to keep on building up power until it blows. The only way to stop it is to take out the superconductor!’

‘Or the person holding it,’ Mitchell growled, looking through the swirling smoke towards the far end of the chamber. The glow of Excalibur was clearly visible - as was Nina, still locked to it.

He hunted for his gun. It lay under a burning console, flames blistering its casing. ‘Maybe you were right about it being too easy to break, Eddie,’ he said, before darting to the window. A glance down into the hold told him that Chase had abandoned his stolen XM-201, his handprint not in the gun’s memory.