Rollerball (Commander Shaw Book 17)

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Rollerball (Commander Shaw Book 17) Page 9

by Philip McCutchan


  I reported to the police officer in charge of rescue operations, telling them about Kyoto Electronics — for what it was worth now. But I said nothing about the road convoy heading for the A93. I didn’t want any clumsy interceptions that would put Felicity at immediate risk. That had to be handled with kid gloves. As for finding Seiko and taking him in, I doubted if that would help. I remembered the wartime kamikaze pilots, the Jap aviators who had flung their machines and themselves bodily against the aircraft-carriers and battleships operating in the Pacific, and I knew in my bones that we had another like them in Dr Seiko. There is seldom much that can be done to shake dedicated men.

  My 6D2 pass got me a mobile into Perth. Rollerball was no fast mover. We drove alongside its path of destruction in places and we overtook the thing not far south of Pitlochry, where it was crunching along the tarmac of the A9, following its straight track, its direct route south, leaving the roadway on a bend to plough across country before once again impacting into the hard surface and deeply furrowing the edge. The police driver had slowed to a crawl to watch it, and he looked awestruck as well he might.

  “Is there nothing that can be done?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Which isn’t to say we won’t try. Now let’s press on. I have to get to London.”

  We went on past. Rollerball, now moving the wrong way down the northbound carriageway, loomed huge and black on our right. In the police car’s headlights I’d seen something I hadn’t seen in the darkness earlier: Rollerball’s spherical surface was ridged with flange-like protuberances, such that would give it a good grip in mud but did little for the road surface — it was almost a sort of non-belted caterpillar track. It was the early hours and the traffic was scarce, but already the thing was causing some aggro and a dozen or so car and lorry drivers were showing signs of panic.

  I was flown down from Perth after reporting briefly to Max on the security line. Met by helicopter at an RAF airfield near London, I was taken to Focal House. Max had just had another report from the police in Scotland and he was grey with worry.

  “Bloody monster’s been through Dunkeld,” he said. “Sliced straight through the Atholl Arms Hotel. I’ve stayed there — nice place. This is diabolical. It even crossed the Tay, after smashing into the northern end of the bridge. Buggered up the bank … seemed to claw its way out like an alligator, from eye-witness accounts. Spinning and churning and then getting a grip. There’ll be uncontrollable panic before long.”

  “Where is it now?” I asked.

  “Somewhere in open country. They estimate its speed as no more than three or four miles an hour, dropping on its average when it meets things like the Tay. Let’s hope the Forth will sink it!”

  I shook my head. “It won’t. Seiko knew from the start that he’d have the Forth to cope with.”

  “Let’s have it in full,” Max said. I gave it to him. While I was doing so his security line burred and he took another report from Scotland. Rollerball’s track was expected to take it into the northern outskirts of Perth and the sphere was likely to plough a swathe through the factory where they made Caithness glass. Caithness glass would be a shattered shambles. The ball was targeted towards the Dewar bottling plant, and there was going to be an awful stench of wasted whisky and nothing would be bottled in the foreseeable future.

  I asked, “Has anyone tried to stop it?”

  “They tried gunfire, after Dunkeld. Tanks, moved in by Scottish Command. The shells burst on impact and that was all. They didn’t even dislodge any of the projections, the caterpillar track or whatever you like to call it.” Max blew out a long breath. “Could be just as well, don’t you think?”

  I took his point. “The diseases — yes. I’d advise not trying to destroy it till it can be cornered in very open country.”

  “That means south of Edinburgh.”

  I nodded, wondering how it would cope with the Pentland range, or come to that the Ochil hills north of the Forth (I was to hear later that it coped very well indeed, seeming as if by instinct to choose the easiest routes, deviating as necessary).

  I said, as I’d said to the police in Pitlochry, “I don’t believe anything’ll have any effect in any case. Seiko convinced me right along the line.”

  Max smashed a fist into his palm. “We have to get that bugger, Shaw.”

  I reminded him about Felicity and gave him my theories about Seiko’s dedication, what I believed to be his readiness to sacrifice himself. Then I told him the rest of the story, the extra demands that Seiko had passed to me just before we’d all left Kyoto Electronics. “The dedication’s not just financial,” I said. “There’s something much more than that.”

  “Go on, then.”

  I said, “This links in with the past. It’s a route I’ve travelled before — up to a point. When I was with Naval Intelligence. D’you remember the Kola Peninsula business — north Russia?”

  Max’s eyes narrowed and he gripped a biro rather hard, so hard that his knuckles whitened. “I do remember,” he said. “That geological fault … from the Kola Peninsula to — where was it?”

  I said, “Winchester was the end of the actual fissure, but a thin-ceilinged earth-crust cavity connected and extended on north — beyond Glasgow.” It had been a very close thing. Two thousand million tons TNT equivalent of nuclear material had been scheduled for detonation by the Russians behind heavily reinforced steel and concrete tamping doors at the Kola end, an explosion that would take the line of least resistance and travel along the fissure to the backbone of Britain, a shorter distance in fact than appeared at first sight, taking into account the earth’s curvature. Well, it hadn’t come off in the end, thanks to one thing and another inhibiting the plans. Now something like it, but in reverse, was back on stage.

  Max asked, “Are you saying this Seiko’s going to make history repeat itself?”

  “Not quite. It’s a very dirty con trick to some extent, but mishandled it could lead to war.”

  “Be more precise,” Max snapped.

  “I will. Seiko’s idea is to exploit that thin ceiling and the fissure at the end of it. He knows that the shut-off doors at the Russian end were never replaced after they’d been destroyed.” That had been forced on the Soviets by the NATO powers with UNO backing; for all sorts of reasons Moscow hadn’t been in anything of a position to make trouble over it, and the Kremlin had known very well that the West would have its agents on the Kola Peninsula to keep a check through the years. And Max, of course, knew the rest of it as well: in the interval between then and now there had been large-scale changes in the Soviet war-base set-up in those far northern parts. To start with a five-year pumping operation had been mounted to rid the fissure of the seawater that had entered when the control base had been inhibited and smashed up. In those days the fissure entry had been at the foot of a deep shaft surmounted by a sea-girt control tower off the port of Moltsk; after Moltsk had been emasculated Murmansk had become more and more important; and a linking fissure that emerged into Murmansk at a point a little above sea level had been developed for use as a vast nuclear fall-out shelter in the event of war — and it now contained the naval base, the operational and administrative HQ for all Russian warships and fleet auxiliaries in the far northern waters around Novaya Zemlya, Murmansk, Archangel and so on. “It’s pretty important to the USSR,” I said to Max.

  “An understatement. Militarily — strategically, tactically — it’s bloody well vital in the Kremlin’s view.”

  I went on with my spiel. “Seiko’s idea is to distribute his bacteria and so on along the fissure and via the forced-draught system right into the base. Are you with me?”

  I had seen that he wasn’t, quite. He said in some perplexity, “You mean the threat’s not against this country?”

  I said I didn’t mean that at all. True enough, Seiko was going to send his filth into Russia, tetradoxin, Fusarium Sporotrichoides, the man-made bacteria, the lot. But he would drop the word in the right quarter that it was
Britain that was spreading disease along the fissure, disease that would emerge slap into the naval base and all its environs, disease that would spread and last long enough to make the whole area, all the Kola Peninsula, all the northern ports, unusable and uninhabitable for years to come.

  “You can see the result of that,” I said.

  “Russian reaction.”

  “Exactly. We get the blame — ”

  “And Moscow goes into a strike-back,” Max said. He pushed himself at arms’ length from his desk and stared at me, his face grim. “I suppose ten thousand million sterling says it doesn’t go that far?”

  “It’s going to take more than that,” I said. “Seiko’s no communist but he doesn’t love the West either. Apparently his family came from Hiroshima and a lot of them were there when the bomb was dropped back in ’45. His grandparents, and a football team of uncles and aunts and cousins. Not his parents — they weren’t there at the time. Some years after the war, they came to Britain — they’re dead now, apparently. While they were in Britain they fell foul of Soviet agents … something that dated back to the war days, I didn’t get the whole story — ”

  “Were the parents communists?”

  I said, “I gathered they were, or had been rather. Anyway, Seiko believes Moscow was responsible for their deaths. He’s very bitter all round and he’s hitting back. He sees his plot as a kind of hoisting of a lot of people with their own petards — ”

  “Be more precise,” Max interrupted, repeating himself.

  “Right,” I said, “I will.” I sat forward, knowing that what I was going to say would shake Britain to its foundations, knowing that I needed to convince Max beyond all doubt. “Seiko wants Russia to be flattened and he believes it can be — if the NATO powers send off the nuclear missiles first. The fact that Britain’s liable to be equally flattened in return if things don’t work out as planned — that doesn’t worry him at all. So what Seiko wants is for the British Government to lose no time in pushing NATO over the brink into a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Since it’s coming from Russia anyway once the diseases get through, he believes we’ll see we have no alternative — that if necessary we’ll send off the missiles from the nuclear submarine fleet, acting on our own and at once committing NATO.”

  “The answer, surely, is to spike his guns?”

  “How?”

  Max said, “By informing Russia in advance, of course.”

  I shook my head. “They’ll never believe us. They’ll make the immediate assumption we’re lying as advance cover-up for our nefarious activities. Then they’ll hit back. What Seiko’s offering us is the chance to get in first.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Max growled. “Originally, you said these people would rely on pressure from the public to force our hand. The public’s not going to want all-out war!”

  “They won’t know — not from Seiko, who’s all set to broadcast his terms, his financial terms. Sure, we can tell the public, but they’re not going to believe us any more than Russia is. Or we can’t assume they will anyway. No-one trusts official announcements any more, do they? That’s the point behind the money demand — don’t you see? The cash is just a sort of … cover is the word I suppose. They don’t need it. There’ll still be public pressure on us to concede, to stop Rollerball in its tracks, because it looks like nothing more than a demand for payment.”

  “And if — when — we refuse to concede?”

  I said, “Rollerball goes on rolling. There’s no way we can win. It’s all going to happen. Never mind conceding. Seiko holds all the aces.”

  “Could be sheer bluff. There may be no disease at all.” “Don’t bank on it. Two deaths already, remember? It exists all right — we knew that already, from Railton’s notes and that biochemist from Canberra.”

  Max put his head in his hands. “Rollerball. How does it blow the disease through? Does it contain explosives as well as bacteria and fungus?”

  “Not according to Seiko,” I said. “It just goes on rolling, right along the fissure once it’s in. When it’s in position at the Russian end, it goes into a self destruct, initiated by remote control. Nature does the rest. That’s if the whole northern hemisphere hasn’t already gone up in a nuclear holocaust. Whichever way this goes, it’s war.”

  9.

  Max said Seiko and his bunch of maniacs would go up with the rest of us. They wouldn’t welcome him back in Japan, he said; the Japanese Government would be far from happy when their world trade was disrupted by a nuclear war which could bring them no benefit at all. I pointed out that Seiko had a readymade organisation in Australia and might easily beat it for a prepared funk-hole somewhere in, say, the desert heart of the continent until the whole thing was over. It occurred to me that he could be on his way out already. With Felicity. Now Rollerball was on the move there would be no need for him to linger; his remote control set-up for the final destruct could presumably be operated from out of the country.

  “Depends on how portable it is. I’m going to assume he’s still inside the UK. And you’re going to get him.”

  “What about Miss Mandrake?”

  “You mean she’ll suffer if anyone gets close. I’m sorry, but you know the score.”

  I did; it was a risk all field persons had to accept. It couldn’t be allowed to weigh with Max. I said, “Seiko will go into action as soon as — ”

  “He can’t. Rollerball has to get — wherever it’s programmed to plunge into the earth. Into the fissure. We don’t know where that is, we have to take a chance, but it gives us a little leeway. Get Seiko. When we’ve got him, he’ll lose his control.” Max raised his voice as I began an interruption. “All right, so Rollerball’s moving away and can only be stopped on Seiko’s say-so. We’ll have to see to it that he does say so — and there comes a point, my dear fellow, when even total dedication runs out.”

  So those were the orders. I didn’t agree with them because I was dead certain Seiko would have plenty up his sleeve if anyone closed in on him. I believed we should concentrate on trying to inhibit Rollerball itself, the only concrete thing we had to fight. There had to be something that would stop it dead, even if we had to dig a sort of Hadrian’s Trench right across England. Max said he would be in immediate touch with Defence Ministry experts and anyone else who might have some ideas; and as I left his room he was already on the line to Downing Street.

  *

  The first broadcast came before I’d left Focal House. Alerted by our monitors I listened and recognised Seiko’s voice; I don’t know how he hooked himself into the BBC network, but he did. He over-rode a talk on rural rights of way. This had faded out after a couple of minutes or so and Seiko came across loud and clear. No mention, of course, of the overall scheme in regard to Russia. All he wanted was for the drafts and credits to be made available and all would be well. If they were not forthcoming, there would be widespread disease. Rollerball was on the move and thousands of people north of the Scottish border could testify personally to this. And millions more had heard the early BBC news broadcasts giving eye-witness accounts. Seiko didn’t stay long on the air; not long enough for ours or the BBC monitors to get a fix on him. After he’d signed off they went mad around Downing Street, as I heard later. Mobs surged along Whitehall and a number of injuries resulted from the crush. The police were out in strength but were overwhelmed. Troops were called out in London and all the garrison areas: Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, Colchester, Catterick. Those from Glencorse Barracks in Edinburgh had been involved already and the tanks had later been joined by rocket launchers of the Royal Artillery. Rollerball had ground on, taking not a blind bit of notice and casting off all assaults like water running from the proverbial duck’s back. Late that night it crunched down towards the Firth of Forth via a point a little east of Dunfermline; a little east of the road and rail bridges it entered the stretch of water leading across to the Leith shore and Edinburgh. The searchlights were on it and a mass of people watched from the road bridg
e; in Leith and Edinburgh there was total panic and many more casualties as in the early hours of next day the monstrous sphere bulldozed its way through the buildings, crunching as the night wore on through the New Town, across George Street into Princes Street, down the embankment to the railway line, clawing its way up the other side into the Old Town where it did immense damage to the time-worn buildings. From there it headed on towards the Moorfoot Hills, spreading more and more panic. All this was on television: trust the TV boys, I thought, to make the most of everything and never mind the increased alarm amongst those who looked like being in its track. They even showed some of the deaths, horrifying ones as people, mainly the elderly ones, failed to get out of its path in time. It had been found impossible to evacuate all the areas fast enough, and there were plenty of people, again mainly the elderly, who had stubbornly resisted all attempts to move them until it was too late.

  Behind the scenes government was in a ferment too, not to say panic, but I didn’t know this because government likes to appear calm and confident and this time, because it wasn’t, it shielded itself from the TV eye, not even putting a minister on show to tell everyone it was all right — they probably hadn’t the face. The newspapers were filled with horror stories of Rollerball’s progress and with imaginative speculation. Following upon Seiko’s broadcast, the general consensus of the press was that the Government should stand firm against the demand. Parliament agreed with that by a hefty majority; even the House had not yet been given the full facts, and when they were, there might well be a shift of views. That forthcoming election was weighing heavily and the Government wouldn’t want to go to the country having allowed it to come close to the brink — if they got the time, that was, to hold the election at all. Delaying tactics seemed to be the thing now, as I learned when I reached Edinburgh on the Seiko hunt. The cabinet, who naturally had all the known facts fed through from Max, were going to rely for a while on the efforts of the diplomats and it was believed the Kremlin had already been contacted. It remained to be seen what the Russian leadership made of it all; for a start, I reckoned they might evacuate their naval base on the Kola Peninsula as a simple precaution in case Whitehall was telling the truth. And they would rebuild those tamping doors too. Seiko would have anticipated that, presumably, but the damage would have been done vis-a-vis our relations with the Soviet Union if, as I still believed, they rejected the British Government’s story about the Jap involvement, seeing it simply as the western capitalists preparing their ground. To my mind it followed from all of that that Seiko meant to go into action in the very near future.

 

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