by David Hewson
Levine's eyes hooded over. 'What's it say?'
Fogerty looked at the screen and smiled. 'It says the markets have just gone. Right down into the gutter. Best avoid those falling bodies on your way down to Vegas, gentlemen. Hard cash is the currency of the day from now on.'
CHAPTER 33
Departure
Puig Roig, 1312 UTC
'Quite a set-up.' The pilot nodded at the control centre, so white under the scorching afternoon sun that it made Lieberman's eyes hurt.
'Oh yes.' Lieberman was fresh from the video conference and finding it hard to focus on all the things running through his head. And wishing he could push one abiding image out of his mind. That of Challenger, rising into the sky on a hot day in 1986, punching into the blue heavens on a column of smoke and flame, then exploding like some giant firework that burned a big black hole in the stomach of all the millions who saw it.
Bob Davis tossed his dying cigarette over the edge of the precipice, then immediately reached into his shirt pocket to pull out another one. 'And not a bit of it works. We are in a mess, aren't we?'
Lieberman bristled. This quick, easy cynicism was something he knew all too well himself, but it just wasn't appropriate. He'd been all over the site, spent the best part of an hour poring over the scale model of the satellite. Leaving the motives to one side, what Sundog had achieved on the mountain was astonishing. They had created an entire operational nerve centre and placed it in a remote, secure location, away from prying eyes, yet linked through enough state-of-the-art communications gear back to La Finca, straight out into the big wide world.
And Bevan was right. La Finca was, to some extent, peripheral. The low, modern command base was the key. It was set a few hundred feet beneath the dome itself, on a long, protruding rock finger that was broad enough and flat enough to take both the building and the vital helipad. The dome sat remotely above everything, glowing in the sun like some huge golden golf ball perched on a giant rock tee stabbing upward at the sky.
Lieberman had taken the tiny funicular that linked the control centre to the dome, sat in the flimsy metal cage as it climbed the hill, feeling the sweat cling coldly to his shirt, looking out across the mountains, across the island, inland toward the Bay of Palma beyond. When it came to a halt, he stumbled out onto the summit, keeping his eyes away from the unguarded edge. There wasn't a single thing inside the dome that he understood, but it was impossible to be anything but impressed.
'Don't knock it,' he said. 'This is a work of art. It's not their fault someone stole it from them.'
The man coughed and spat over the edge. 'I'll take your word on that. It's just the bloody awful security that bugs me.'
Lieberman watched him draw heavily on the cigarette. 'I guess they thought the whole thing was pretty much in mothballs. You think it's that bad?'
The pilot looked at his watch. 'Oh yes. We'd best be going. If your earlier feelings about the time to leave still hold.'
Lieberman felt like kicking himself. The sheer sophistication of Puig Roig had entrapped him. The video conference meant he'd missed the last cycle update. It was a miracle Bevan wasn't screaming at him already. Worse, he really had no idea whether the cycle had worsened. There had been so much to see. 'Damn. Five minutes. I need to check something.'
And drag Annie and Mo away from this too, he added quietly to himself. There was such a buzz, such frantic energy being poured into the complex, that you could get swept up in it all and let the hours drift away into nothing.
'I'll see you at the machine,' Davis said, then launched a cigarette over the cliff edge and walked off toward the helipad.
Lieberman strode into the control room, took a snatched look at the incoming data on a free monitor, then found them still head deep in the system. 'You've got to cut that. It's time to go.'
'Not now,' Mo said, not even taking her eyes off the screen. The big American was over in the corner, talking to a couple of the staff people who'd shown Lieberman around. He was glancing at them.
'Exactly right now. GI Joe is about to come over here and call off our departure slot if we don't move this minute.'
She pulled herself away. 'Does that matter, Michael? We're here. Nothing's happened. And it's past the peak. Surely it's obvious. We're safe here.'
'You're right. It's just that I hate flying so much I want to get it out of the way as fast as I can. And whatever that thing is you're doing… I'm damn sure you could both accomplish it all down below.'
She thought about that. 'That's true. Now, anyway. I'm glad Irwin did send me up here. This network was on the point of collapse.'
'Good. Now can we go, please?'
'Done,' she said, and started to log off.
Capstick walked over and said, 'Are you folks on your way? If you're not out of here in five minutes I'm closing that window. And God knows when it's going to be open again.'
Lieberman felt something inside his stomach jump and asked, 'What happened?'
'Nothing like Kyoto, thank goodness. But we've got all hell let loose out there. Something's infected the stock markets. They're through the floor everywhere. The President has suspended all trading until further notice, most everyone else is following. Some big worries about currency effects too.
Everything trying to rush into gold, not that it's easy to buy anything.'
'Have they claimed responsibility?'
'You bet. Right there on the Web site. As pleased as punch about it. The news wires say this could push the entire world into a recession, and those loons are sitting up and applauding themselves.'
'I guess they have a different agenda.'
'They don't care,' Mo said. 'They just don't give a damn.'
'Right,' Capstick yelled, heading for the door, motioning for them to follow. 'But the bottom line is I need you out of here right now. Along with the crash, we've got a major telecom failure throughout the northern latitudes right now. The closest it's got to us is Toulouse, but I'm not taking any risks. If this comes any farther south we lock the doors and shut ourselves in for the night. I'm happy we can keep the link with La Finca now we've backed up the microwave dishes with a landline. But I'm sure as hell not having people flying in and out with some electromagnetic storm going on. Get one of those helicopters down on us and it could put this entire centre out.'
'Thoughtful of you.' Lieberman nodded, shielding his eyes as they came out into the ferocious heat and light. 'No problem. We're gone.' Mo and Annie followed in his wake, moving as quickly as they could. Capstick nodded as soon as he saw they were on their way, then was gone.
'You think anyone got hurt?' he asked no one in particular. 'All that guy could think about was money and hunks of equipment. Jesus. Maybe Charley's right, in some way. We do deserve all this.'
The engine was winding up. 'You don't mean that, Michael,' Mo yelled over the noise, and touched his arm.
'No?' So hot. So complex. So much in this place he didn't understand. 'Let's go before GI Joe changes his mind.' They climbed into the helicopter, Annie smiling at the pilot, who winked back at her.
'If you want to go the quick way, Bob, it's no problem with me,' Lieberman said over the noise of the engine. 'So long as you don't mind me throwing up along the way. Seems there's some major telecom breakdown out there. Capstick wants us out before it reaches here.'
'I heard,' the pilot yelled. 'He's an idiot. This thing is spreading west, not south. It's taken out the main lines in New York, for God's sake.'
'All the same.'
'All the same, you relax. We have one little thing to do, and then we're home.' The helicopter lifted off the ground, sending up a skirt of dust that briefly obscured everything, then cleared. They were hovering, stationary, ten feet off the surface.
'What little thing?' Lieberman yelled.
The pilot threw a headset at him, motioned him to put it on, did the same himself with a pair tucked into the pocket by the seat, then shouted backward over his shoulder, 'Sorry, my loves, only one e
xtra pair in this beast. You just talk among yourselves.'
Lieberman put the cans on and was amazed by the difference. The sound dulled to a mute swell, and Davis's voice came through as clear as a bell. 'What little thing?'
The helicopter moved slowly sideways, thirty feet or so until it was hovering stationary again, this time over the stomach-wrenching drop down to the foot of the valley. 'Bob. What the hell are you doing?'
Davis shifted the stick gently, the engine note changed, and he replied, 'Satisfying my curiosity.' The pilot looked over his shoulder. 'Don't worry,' he said loudly to Mo and Annie. 'We just have to make one pass and then we're gone.'
Lieberman felt his guts start to wind around and around themselves as the machine slipped slowly beneath the level of the ridge and down the rock face some fifteen feet in front of them, another thousand feet of nothingness below.
'Meaning?' he asked.
'Meaning I spent the last three hours watching those boneheads play security men around this place, and I have to tell you the only suspicious device they'd ever manage to find is one that consists of a big black ball with a fuse coming out the top and the letters B-O-M-B painted on the side. It's pathetic.'
The helicopter was completely beneath the line of the ridge now. Lieberman could see that the centre was built on a huge overhang of rock that had somehow been left behind in the natural erosion of the original mountain. 'Bob, they checked those places you mentioned. I saw them doing it. They put a team down with ropes and stuff, and looked inside.'
The thin face glared at him. 'The obvious ones. Don't you think these people expect that? It's in the bomber's psychology. You pick the places you know people will look. And put the real nasty somewhere else altogether. Somewhere you'd never think of looking.'
Lieberman watched the cliff face move past them at a snail's pace, felt the vast gap between him and the ground below turn into something physical, something he could touch. 'Make this quick, for God's sake.'
'One pass, that's all. Around the ridge. And I'm probably wrong, let me say that straightaway. This is doubtless me just being downright awkward.'
'You said it,' Lieberman replied, and tried to stifle a burp.
The machine moved another few feet along the cliff face. They were now beneath the massive spur of rock, in the shadow of the overhang that supported the command centre. And there was nothing to see. Nothing at all. He felt Mo's hand on his shoulder.
'What's going on, Michael?' He shook his head. The pilot was trying to work the radio, cursing all the time.
'Problems?'
The pilot grimaced. 'It's blocked by the mountain. I can't even talk to them if we do see something. I'll just have to break off.'
'Bob…' Lieberman wanted to yell at this man, wanted to seize the stick on this thing and guide them gently, swiftly down to solid earth. Hanging like this in the thin and burning afternoon air was insane. 'There is nothing here. It's straight underneath the outcrop. You couldn't get at it even if you tried. That's why they didn't look.'
'No?'
The helicopter swung around a corner of the rock face, and the pilot said, 'Then what the hell is that?'
Lieberman looked at it in silence. As they shifted around the mountain, it was coming into full view, with the machine now edging toward ten feet from the mouth. And there was no mistaking this. Below, through the glass panels beneath their feet, you could see the winding, narrow track, invisible from a distance, that led to the place. This was some kind of disused, ancient mine entrance, an opening that spanned a good thirty feet in diameter, with nothing but blackness beyond.
'Bloody idiots,' Davis said. 'I knew they should have looked here. There could be any number of these things hidden in the lee of the peak.'
'What are you going to do?' Lieberman asked.
'What can I do? We'll fall back to the other side of the valley, I'll be able to radio them from there, and then we're going home. I'm damned if I'm hanging around here doing their dirty work for them.'
'Sounds good to me. You think that — '
And he stopped, pulled the headset off, knew that this was more important than anything else right then. Mo was screaming, over and over, frantic, hysterical, and for a moment he couldn't see why. 'Look!' she yelled.
In the mouth of the opening, emerging from the blackness, was a solitary figure: a woman dressed in khaki overalls, moving slowly forward into the light. Lieberman blinked. She had bright red hair, so bright it seemed unnatural.
'Oh Jesus,' the pilot said quietly to himself, then hit the throttle. The helicopter pitched up and started to move backward, turning slowly on its axis. Lieberman stared at the woman, trying to work out what this strange, shapeless thought was that kept running around the shadows in his head.
'She's not armed,' he said. Then he put the headset back on, repeated, 'Bob, she's not armed.' The helicopter was moving so wildly now, thrusting them from side to side, he thought he might lose all contact with what was up, what was down.
'She doesn't need to be,' the pilot said quietly, and then the sun was on them, pouring through the glass canopy of the machine. 'Base One.'
He yelled into the mike. No one returned the call. 'Base One!'
Climbing, turning. Lieberman didn't want to try to work out which way they were even facing now, so he focused back on the fast-disappearing mouth of the mine in the rock face instead. The figure was no longer there. The machine popped up above the flat level line of the helipad, fifty feet away, still ascending, still shifting back toward the sea.
'Base One!'
'Base One, we read you,' said a bored voice. 'You're supposed to be long gone from here, friend.' The engine screamed higher; it felt as if they were being pulled into the sun.
'You have intruders in a tunnel underneath the facility,' the pilot yelled. The radio was quiet for a couple of long seconds.
'Location?' It was Capstick's voice.
'A disused mine about three hundred feet below your level, just around the corner of the overhang, going back into the mountain. If you have people at ground level, they can get in through a path that leads up from the valley. You may need ropes.'
'Can you get there?' Capstick asked.
'We've been there, mate, and we're not going back. We can't land and we can't do a damn thing except sit there waiting for them to start firing.'
The line went dead. Lieberman looked at the pilot. The engine had lost some of its frenzy. The machine was edging back over the valley, rising steadily, on its way home.
'Hold position,' Capstick said.
'Negative, we have civilians on board.'
'Well, put them down somewhere, man. We need you to point these bastards out.'
Lieberman looked at Mo in the back. She was terrified, plain terrified, with Annie clinging to her. And Davis was wavering. Military men, he thought. It was hard to shake it from your blood.
'I can't just leave them,' the pilot said. 'If I find somewhere close by I can…'
You can what? Lieberman almost asked the question. It seemed a reasonable one under the circumstances. But there was something in the way, and it was half-noise, half-light too. It sat, ominous and golden between all of them, like a fiery beast taking in breath. And then it roared, exhaling, screaming, loud and blinding, blotting out everything else there with its vast, shimmering presence.
The machine bucked and wheeled. The pilot was wrestling the stick, forcing the throttle ever higher, trying to climb away from this thing. And beneath them, everywhere, was dust, a huge, swirling ocean of brown, alive and billowing, racing out from the ledge beneath the command centre, out toward them, with powdery fingers and fiery breath.
Lieberman looked at the base and thought: This is a sight that lives with you forever, stays imprinted on the cells of your neural fibres until they cease to function.
A bright, searing line of fire ran from the foot of the outcrop, close to where they found the mouth of the shaft, diagonally upward and inward, toward the massi
ve heel where the projecting spur met the mountain, eating the rock like a fissure in a volcano, rising, destroying, weakening as it ran. There was a second explosion, a ball of fire roaring out of the rock. The pilot looked nervously at them. 'Brace yourselves, the shock comes after.'
Lieberman watched, clinging to the door handle in the helicopter to try to minimize the discomfort of the buffeting. The spur of rock on which the centre stood was failing, its integrity destroyed by the blasts. Tiny, distant figures, like racing ants, ran around the crumbling buildings, tried to cling to the structure, unable to second-guess which way it would twist and turn as it crumbled into dust. He watched and thought: Charley? Maybe the CIA woman is right. People do change that much. And then the view was obscured by a vast, billowing cloud of dust that raced toward them, the engine was screaming, the helicopter fighting to gain some height.
When it hit, it felt as if they were lifted by some giant, omnipotent hand that picked them up, gently at first, then with an awesome strength, and shot them up toward the sky. Just as suddenly, they were free, the machine was released from this violent, swirling force. The cloud was falling away beneath them. To their right, he could see the distant line of the sea, still and blue and placid. In this rush upward, the flimsy, forced engine of the helicopter and the sudden blast of air that came out of the valley had taken them over the peak, and they were now limping erratically out toward safety.
Lieberman watched the pilot fighting the machine, with his hands, with his feet. There were strange noises coming from above them. The helicopter seemed incapable of taking a straight line down toward the scrub in front, down toward land. He pushed his arm behind his seat, felt their hands grip him.
'We'll be okay,' Lieberman said. 'Don't worry. We'll be okay.'
The pilot looked at him and Lieberman felt cold. He was scared too. 'This thing's buggered, mate,' Davis said. 'If I don't put her down straightaway, it's going to come apart on us in the air.'
The engine coughed. Something metallic flew down in front of the glass. 'Shit,' Davis said, and pushed the stick forward, falling, hunting, turning the craft around, looking for somewhere flat enough to land. Lieberman watched the earth rise up to meet them. They were descending at something close to forty-five degrees now, he reckoned, and still there was nothing but sheer rock on either side. Annie started crying in the back. Or it may have been Mo. He didn't want to find out.