White Gold

by David Barker

  urbanepublications.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2019

  by Urbane Publications Ltd

  Suite 3, Brown Europe House, 33/34 Gleaming Wood Drive,

  Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ

  Copyright © David Barker, 2019

  The moral right of David Barker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-912666-29-4

  MOBI 978-1-912666-30-0

  Design and Typeset by Michelle Morgan

  Cover by Author Design Studio

  Printed and bound by 4edge UK

  urbanepublications.com

  For Fiona, who deserves platinum

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Three

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  NORSAR’s Finnmark station, Norway, June 2034

  The Earth shook and somebody was listening. Six times already this century, NORSAR’s team had detected nuclear tests carried out by the North Korean military and reported it to the United Nations. By coincidence, that very morning, the Finnmark station was being visited by the newly appointed minister for science, keen to show herself associated with one of Norway’s success stories.

  “So that mad dictator has broken his promise again?” asked the minister.

  The man, whose screens had flashed and pinged an alert, turned to face the visiting dignitary. He looked puzzled. “Actually Minister, I’m not sure. It’s a strange signal. I don’t believe it was a nuclear bomb.”

  The minister breathed a sigh. Her husband was in Japan on a business trip. Not a great place to be if the North Koreans were rattling their swords again. “You use seismology to detect these bombs, is that correct? Could it be a regular earthquake?”

  “Hmm, it’s the wrong profile for that. I think it’s a shift in the magma chamber of a volcano getting ready to blow.”

  “Big deal.”

  The man scratched his head. “Have you ever heard of the Volcanic Explosivity Index?”

  The minster shook her head.

  “It’s like the Richter scale they use for earthquakes. Every point higher on the VEI represents a ten-fold increase in the volcano’s eruption.”

  “And?”

  “Paektu is on the border between North Korea and China. When it blew its top over a thousand years ago, it scored a seven. A thousand times bigger than Eyjafjallajskull. Ten times bigger even than Krakatoa. If it’s getting ready to go again, forget about monitoring for some squitty underground nuclear test. The whole world is going to notice this explosion.”

  PART ONE

  ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

  CHAPTER 1

  Freda Brightwell awoke in a strange bed, wondering if she had done something foolish the night before. For a moment, she was twenty-one again. But there was no hangover and no fellow student lying next to her. As the disorientation faded, she remembered where she was and groaned. The guard had banged on the cell door, just after 6am, as usual. The routine of the maximum-security Russian prison was starting to imprint itself onto Freda’s brain, if not her body clock yet.

  She had been awake for most of the night, fearing that Overseas Division had abandoned Gopal, Rabten and herself. Agents left to rot in a Russian dungeon? Surely not. At the very least, her boss Wardle ought to be worried about ‘enhanced interrogation.’ How long could the three of them be expected to resist torture once it began? She thought it odd that they had been in this prison already for a week and nobody had bothered yet to question them. Though perhaps she should be grateful for small mercies.

  Freda hoped that the Russian and British Intelligence services might be negotiating some sort of trade. But during the darkest hours, with nothing but insects for company and deranged screams for a listening track, Freda’s optimism scuttled off to hide in the corner. She worried that perhaps everybody was too busy with more important matters to concern themselves about three OFWAT agents. She knew from years of experience how meticulous the department was at preparing false identities. Her attempt to extract Gopal and Rabten must have been leaked to the Russian border police somehow. There was no way their IDs would have been spotted as fakes.

  Freda had finally fallen asleep just as the summer dawn had started to chase away the shadows from her tiny cell. And then the guard with his stupid bloody baton. She could visualise his grinning face, set into his thick neck and massive frame. A walking walrus, with a moustache to match. An image popped into Freda’s head: she was sitting up in bed as a child while her dad read an Asterix book to her. She realised that the guard outside her door bore an uncanny resemblance to Unhygienix, the fishmonger. The little smile did not last long.

  Will I ever see my father again?

  It was Freda’s first pang of homesickness since she had joined OFWAT nearly twenty years ago. An eight-foot by eight-foot cell with a bucket of piss for company can do that to a person. She swallowed her weakness and got up, jogging on the spot to get the blood pumping. The door to the cell pushed open and she stood to attention, waiting to be called to the breakfast hall. She ducked through the under-sized door and started walking along the metal grating that formed the corridor towards the canteen. Another prisoner, on the floor above hers, shouted something in Russia and spat through the grating of his walkway. A glob of mucus landed next to Freda’s foot. She hunched her neck in case more phlegm was flying her way but refused to look up.

  The breakfast offering was not dissimilar to the mucus. She wouldn’t be giving this hotel five stars on Trip Advisor. Freda shuffled along in the queue, barely looking at the food as she tried to keep her attention on fellow inmates next to her. The knife-attack a few days earlier had been a close thing. Waiting for the next strike was almost worse.

  Freda sat down next to Gopal and Rabten. Able to relax a little with extra pairs of eyes on alert, spending a little time with her fellow agents at least helped to chase away the night-time gloom. An ex-Gurkha with a dry wit and a Buddhist monk whose glass was always half full. Hardly the usual recruits to Overseas Division, but then, the Himalayas mission si
x years earlier had hardly been a typical assignment. Freda wondered how her other partner on that mission, Sim Atkins, was getting on. He had been sent undercover to work at the moon base a few weeks ago. There had been no updates on his progress before her capture. Another source of anxiety.

  God, what is this food? Dumplings laced with downers?

  Back in her cell at the end of a monotonous day, Freda lay on her wafer-thin mattress trying to recite to herself The Jabberwocky. The nonsense poem she had memorised for a school talent show a very long time ago. The mental distraction, and the lack of sleep from the previous night, were helping her to drift off when a loud insect buzzed into her cell. Freda tutted, wondering if the Russian pests around here were biters. And then she realised that this was the first bug she had heard all week. She sat up and tried to locate the insect. No chance in this darkness.

  The buzzing stopped and a message appeared on the wall opposite Freda’s bed. Her heart lifted as if it had been pumped full of helium and a broad smile spread across her face. Her vision went blurry as she tried to read the words, tears starting to form. The insect must be a nano-drone sent from Wardle, shining a beam across the room. Not forgotten after all!

  Three Hydras on their way tomorrow.

  Rendezvous exercise courtyard 11am local.

  Freda slept well for the first time in a week and for once was grateful for the guard’s wake-up call. She hurried to breakfast and sat down with Gopal and Rabten, whispering the news when nobody else was near. Freda’s legs jigged up and down beneath the table. The questions flowed.

  “What if we can’t get out to the courtyard?” said Gopal.

  “How do you mean?” said Freda, her optimism taking a step backwards.

  “Say there’s a fight breaks out. It’s the only thing that passes the time for some of these knuckleheads. Exercise privileges are normally cancelled for the rest of the day when that happens.”

  “We pray,” said Freda, clasping her hands together.

  Rabten’s face lit up and he mirrored Freda’s gesture. “Namaste.”

  The discussion continued. Hydras – hypersonic drones – were too small and light to carry a human more than a very short distance. So even once out of the prison, how were they going to get out of Russia? And if they were dangling below the drones as they escaped, surely the marksmen in the guard towers would be able to pick them off with ease? Wardle must have thought of all this, he must have this figured out. That was Freda’s mantra all morning as the minutes ticked down, with all the pace of a classroom clock, to showtime.

  The buzzers on the door out to the exercise yard sounded on schedule and the prisoners filed through for a daily dose of vitamin D and the freedom of an open sky above their heads. Freda muttered a thank you to the heavens as she, Gopal and Rabten gathered near the middle of the yard, keeping an eye on the guards’ towers and the other prisoners around them. Three sides around the courtyard were exterior walls, about fifteen feet tall, with the fourth side made up of the main prison building. An armed guard was at each corner of the yard, perched high in a tower. Freda couldn’t help thinking of an old classic film, The Shawshank Redemption. She just hoped they were heading for the same happy ending.

  But eleven o’clock came and went. Nothing happened. After the euphoria of thinking that a rescue operation was underway, Freda sank into an even deeper slough than before. The prison walls seemed to lean in towards her, the barbed wire reaching out to snag her clothes.

  At lunchtime, the three agents assessed their options.

  “Something must have gone wrong,” Freda said. “Maybe the hydras were intercepted.”

  “Maybe tomorrow meant tomorrow,” said Gopal.

  Freda played with her stew. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Gopal shrugged. “If the nano-bot came after midnight, then strictly speaking, when it said hydras arriving tomorrow, it did not mean in a few hours’ time, but the day after.”

  “Well I wish they’d write some clearer instruction.” She put her spoon down and a faint smile appeared. “You could be right.”

  The waiting was even worse second time around. All those fears about an interruption to the routine seemed more real now. They had been lucky yesterday. Surely their luck would run out today. But the buzzer sounded for morning exercise on schedule. The three agents stepped into the courtyard hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

  A high-pitched whine alerted Freda to the approach of the drones. She grabbed Gopal’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Three missile-like aircraft, with grey stubby wings, flashed past three of the guard towers and released a vapour. A trio of guards slumped to the floor. But the fourth tower was alert. A claxon sounded out and the guard managed to loose a hasty shot at one of the hydras before he too was overcome by gas. The three hydras descended to the middle of the courtyard and handle grips unfolded from the belly of the small drones. But only from two of them. The third hydra had been damaged by the guard’s lucky shot. An acrid smell and dark smoke drifted out of the back of the wounded drone and the grip would not descend.

  “Grab hold of those two,” Freda shouted to her colleagues.

  “We’re not leaving you behind,” said Gopal.

  One of the hydras fired a burst of shots over the heads of other prisoners who were approaching.

  Freda shook her head. “No time to argue.”

  “Grab hold of us. Three bodies, two hydras,” the Gurkha suggested.

  Freda thought for a moment, then shook her head again. “They’re on their limit as it is.”

  Gopal folded his arms. “Then we wait for another rescue attempt.”

  “There won’t be one.” Freda looked at the smoking hydra and then bent down to the ground. “Help me find a stone, quick.”

  Gopal’s top lip curled and then he started scrabbling through the thin layer of dirt, searching for something larger than gravel. A small prisoner at the back of the courtyard was directing his entourage towards the hovering drones. But it’s not that easy to get past a White Crane martial arts expert. Despite being much smaller, Rabten was too fast and accurate for the lumbering muscle men headed his way. After a head-kick, a jab to the solar plexus and a leg sweep, three giants lay dazed on their backs.

  “Here,” said Gopal tossing a plum-sized stone to Freda. She caught it and rammed it into the tailpipe of the damaged hydra. Gopal looked bemused as the drone sputtered and then dropped to the ground.

  “Fourth protocol,” said Freda. “An immobilised hydra will self-destruct in thirty seconds to avoid being captured. Quick, help me place it against the outside wall.”

  Between them, Gopal and Freda dragged the heavy drone across the courtyard to the foot of an exterior wall. The small prisoner gesticulated towards the hydra and some of his entourage started running towards the machine.

  “Get back!” she yelled, running to the furthest corner of the yard with Gopal and Rabten, waving her arms in gesture to the other prisoners. Some understood and followed suit. Others, maybe distrustful of orders or unable to understand, approached the damaged hydra just as the explosion ripped a hole in the wall. Bodies and debris went flying across the courtyard.

  Freda was knocked to the ground by the shockwave. As she staggered to her feet, a blanket of silence seemed to have descended on the yard. Smoke billowed across the quad as armed guards in riot gear burst out of the main prison building. She could see people were shouting but nothing was registering in her ears. A trickle of blood found its way into her left eye and blurred her vision.

  The guards began to attack the prisoners with riot sticks, who fought back with bare hands, their only hope in weight of numbers. One prisoner had his front teeth knocked out and his nose broken by a flailing baton. But his two friends exacted terrible revenge on the baton-wielding prison guard, pinning him to the ground and pressing the weapon into his windpipe.

  Freda looked up to see more guards, armed with rifles and respirators, appearing in the lookout towers. Two of the men in the to
wers fired cannisters into the centre of the courtyard. Tear gas began to mingle with the smoke of the detonation. A gust of wind pushed through the hole in the outside wall and the cloud began to dissipate. The path to freedom became visible to those who had not been overcome by the gas. The three agents bolted for the hole along with numerous other prisoners. Bullets bit into the ground near the breached wall and then stopped. The still-functioning hydras had opened fire at the guards in the towers.

  Once outside the prison the fugitives began to fan out. They faced another obstacle: a wire fence, at least three meters tall, topped with razor wire. Some prisoners risked lacerations and started scaling the fence, their dark blue prison robes showing flashes of bloodied skin beneath as the blades cut through their clothes. The three OFWAT agents crouched down as one of the hydras emerged through the hole in the stone wall and fired a missile at the chain-linked barrier. A section of the fence disintegrated into a twisted heap of wire. Prisoners surged through the second breach, pushing and shoving each other to be the first out. They staggered onto a road. A passing car broke sharply and skidded, trying to avoid the human obstacles. One of the prisoners was clipped by the front wheel arch of the vehicle and went spinning to the ground in a howl of pain. None of his fellow prisoners stopped for him, but instead sprinted towards the trees on the far side of the road.

  Freda and Gopal did the same. Rabten wanted to stop to help the man who had been knocked down, but the other two dragged him away, into the forest. The pair of remaining hydras followed the agents until they were safely in the woods, and then the drones disappeared into the azure summer sky with a scream of their engines. Freda looked around at the dozens of prisoners in distinctive blue uniforms as they scattered in all directions.

  At least these lot should keep the authorities busy for a while.

  But still, the three of them were also in prison uniforms, stuck somewhere in Russia with no weapons, no equipment or money and no IDs. Part two of Wardle’s escape plan had better be more fool proof than the first part.