Rollerball (Commander Shaw Book 17)

by Philip McCutchan

  Touch and go …

  My throat was as dry as dust and I felt a shake in my hands. The long wait went on. Another hour and then the thing was upon us. As I had seen in the north near Hawick, Rollerball loomed, a darker mass in the night’s dark, a mass that broke through into the rim of light. There was a gasp from the troops, a frozen look of horror in Max’s eyes as he came across to where I was standing. His first sight … first physical encounter, anyway. The TV cameras hadn’t had quite the same impact.

  The sappers moved back, clearing away from the bridge. One of them began laughing hysterically, a horrible sound as the sphere crunched nearer. A sergeant ran across and the laughter stopped suddenly.

  Max swore. His eyes looked hollow as he stared at the bridge. He said, “When you think of the weight of those bagatelle-sized balls … ”

  I was thinking all right, and wondering, not for the first time, how Rollerball had managed on soft ground which it must have encountered en route. Something like a swamp would sink it for sure, but it might plough on and emerge again. Or perhaps its brain was able to tell it to avoid ground that was too soft. Like it had avoided the trench …

  On it came, immense, lethal. It began its approach to the bridge — it was dead on course, that was something.

  My nails were digging into my palms as I watched the awful progress.

  Max said, “It’s taking the ramp.”

  Rollerball moved onto the ramp; its flanges gripped and dragged it forward. There was an indrawn breath from the sapper major: the supports were going down under the enormous weight of that unknown metal, the whole thing was starting to subside but as yet the girders were holding.

  The thing swivelled slightly, as though it was unsure of itself and its course, and it seemed to slow. Then it was on the main part of the bridge and the supports sank lower. The girders bent and there was a sound of tortured metal, metal under stress, but Rollerball moved on again and the strain was transferred to the supports at the other end. As the sphere moved past the halfway point, the supports sank farther and the girders gave more sounds of protest. By now the roadway of the bridge was impacted squarely on the earth and was beginning to be pushed downwards; but Rollerball moved on, crunching, biting with its flanges.

  It came clear of the bridge and continued south. For a while all present simply stood and stared, seeming unable to take in what looked like victory. Then a loud cheer went up, ringing after Rollerball as it vanished massively beyond the rim of light. The relief, the sense of triumph, of something achieved at last, was immense and heady.

  But it had come too soon.

  12.

  After the congratulations and the joy Jackson mustered his sappers for taking down what was left of his bridge and I walked back with Max to the parked cars. A radio message had been sent to the police in Brough for immediate onward transmission to Downing Street that Rollerball was still on the surface.

  Max said, “Let’s hope it does satisfy the Kremlin. We’ll no doubt have their reaction soon.”

  I said, “I’m not so sure.”

  Max looked at me. “What does that mean, for God’s sake?”

  “It means I’m far from certain that it’s all over — ”

  “As to that, it isn’t. Rollerball’s still there and has to be dealt with.”

  I said, “I didn’t quite mean that. I mean … well, both those intersections, here and up by Hawick, are the weakest points ceiling-wise — that’s agreed. That’s where I was expecting it to dig in. But don’t forget, the geological fault goes right on to the Kola Peninsula. There’s still a possible chance Rollerball will make its descent somewhere else along the fault line.”

  “Yes, but damn it! The weakest point — ”

  “Is most likely Seiko’s choice. That’s true. Maybe I’m just being cautious, but we’ll just have to hope not only that we’ve stopped the big threat but that Moscow sees it that way too.

  They’ll know all about that geological fault. They were going to make use of it themselves the last time I was involved.”

  Max waved his arms in the air. He was showing the strain badly; he had a lot on his shoulders and soon he would have to face the PM and the assembled cabinet. He swore. He said savagely, “Why does bloody geology have to have faults, for heaven’s sake!”

  There was no answer to that one.

  *

  Max went back to London right away, driving himself to RAF Leeming where a plane was standing by. For a while after he had gone I sat in my car, thinking hard and getting nowhere at all. Seiko had had his original demand met — the massive credits for encashment overseas — and to that extent he would be satisfied. Presumably he could now beat it for safety, or anyway greater safety in a coming nuclear situation, in the vast spaces of the Australian outback. Or could he? There was still the control of Rollerball and he might need to be around for that as I’d discussed with Max a day or two before. Even in that regard there had to be some doubt. Something was nagging away at the back of my mind about Rollerball’s control system; Seiko had never said in so many words that apart from the final destruct he had any kind of outside control of the thing’s movements — that, looking back, had been my own assumption. I could have been dead wrong. Certainly he couldn’t have been regulating every twist and turn of his metal baby by remote control. I cursed myself; I’d been on the move too much, was half shagged out, should have ticked over earlier. Rollerball had to be directed entirely by that programmed brain and Seiko wasn’t really essential any more. If the missiles started flying around his objective would be achieved and he wouldn’t need even the final act of destruction of Rollerball and the bacteria spread.

  To me, that spelt an early shift to Australia. And what about Felicity?

  I beat at my forehead with clenched fists. I was becoming desperate. There was no daylight anywhere and I felt time closing in fast. It was the highest and thickest brick wall I’d ever been faced with. And here I was, wasting time in a car on the fringe of Kirkby Stephen. Not knowing where to head next; and thinking of Max’s reiterated order: get Seiko. I knew, now, that he was right. Seiko would be the only man alive who could stop war in its tracks — if he could be made to. The mere fact of his arrest might hold the Russians off until a full confession could be produced.

  And I had no idea in the world where to start looking for Seiko. It could be Australia for me again, and that was a big place. Australia couldn’t be reached that night and for want of any other ideas I decided I might as well drive on into Kirkby Stephen and look for a hotel that wouldn’t mind being knocked up in the early hours so I could snatch some sleep. My RAC handbook showed the King’s Arms in Market Street. I started up and headed that way. I didn’t get there; I’d moved only a couple of hundred metres when I saw headlights coming up towards me, blindingly. I stopped and a police car pulled up alongside and the driver looked out.

  “Commander Shaw?”

  “That’s me. What is it now?”

  “Message relayed by Scotland Yard, sir.” The copper handed through a folded piece of paper. I read it, flicking on the courtesy light. The message had been originated by Norfolk Police of all people. Why Norfolk? I soon found out why. What had at first been thought to be a dead body had been found on the sandy shore of the North Sea not far from Mundesley. That had been at 10 p.m. People in the area had been disturbed by a low-flying chopper making a funny noise and doing what seemed like an inordinate amount of to-ing and fro-ing. The police had heard this too and had investigated. Result, they had picked up an unconscious woman but no helicopter. The woman carried no identification but she had come round in hospital, enough to answer some elementary questions. The name was Felicity Mandrake and she’d asked for Focal House to be informed. Focal House had passed the message to Kirkby Stephen.

  I looked at the policeman. He asked, “Anything we can do, sir?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but no. I’m on my way.” I had the car turning for the south almost before the PC had had time t
o get clear.

  *

  Felicity had been taken to hospital in Norwich. I went down from Kirkby Stephen the faster way, along the road across Mallerstang Common to the Moorcock Inn on the A684 through Wensleydale and on through Leyburn and Bedale. When I hit the A1 long before the wintry dawn I disregarded all speed limits. I came off the A1 at Stamford and cut across country from there, after which it was largely frustration in increasing traffic. I picked up the BBC news broadcasts: they were being cagey and there was still no mention of the threat of nuclear war, nor did they mention the furore that I guessed would be hitting Pravda and the Soviet TV and radio, the vilification of NATO, the self-righteous, bellicose noises that would be emanating from the Kremlin. Not that they could really be blamed; Seiko was the villain, not Russia. But the BBC was making much of the concession by the Government to Seiko’s demands — the handing over of the credits. There had been a wave of euphoria throughout the country; even the TUC had uttered kind words about the cabinet. But the BBC was forced to admit what so many thousands of people were seeing for themselves: Rollerball was still on the move, still creating havoc as it moved down into Yorkshire.

  When I reached the hospital Felicity was reasonably perky but she had three broken ribs and a sprained ankle in addition to the exposure element. She’d been lucky to get away with it and wasn’t complaining. The chopper, she said, had developed an engine fault and after a lot of hassle had ditched in the North Sea, not far from the beach.

  “What was the idea?” I asked. “A get-out?”

  She said, “They were taking me to the Continent. They didn’t say where, but I believe it was the first leg to Australia — ”

  “Seiko?”

  “He wasn’t with us. The two that were … they were hurt when the chopper ditched and I think they drowned. I didn’t see — ”

  “Let’s concentrate on Seiko. Where is he?”

  She was getting very tired now but I had to press. She made an effort, but it wasn’t too helpful. She said, “I don’t know. And I don’t know for sure where I was brought from. It was a big car and I was made to lie on the floor in the back with a rug over me, plus Jap feet. I don’t know where we picked up the chopper either. But I managed to shift the rug a little and once or twice I saw road signs.”

  “Well?” I was desperately impatient.

  She said, “The first was Bishop Auckland.”

  “I know about that.”

  “Then after I was moved again, I saw a sign for York. Soon after that we stopped and went into a house, not for long, and I can’t be sure it was York we went into.”

  “Any others?”

  “Stamford,” she said. That would have been where, like me, the car had turned off for the east coast and, presumably, the chopper. It wasn’t much to go on, but Bishop Auckland at any rate fitted in with what Broadley had told me. Felicity said Seiko had been at the last safe house, the one that could have been in York, but she’d gathered he wouldn’t be there much longer. He too, with his band of warmakers, was about to leave the country. After that, another blank: she hadn’t heard where for. I believed it could be Switzerland or Beirut but most likely Australia. It didn’t have to be by air for the first hop and it probably wouldn’t be — it’s easier to be put ashore clandestinely from a ship than from an aircraft trackable by radar, an aircraft that had to cross coasts and frontiers and would be shown up fast on the screens if it went where it wasn’t scheduled to go. All the same, the air watch would be stepped up and the city of York would be toothcombed as soon as I could get word through, which would be as soon as I left the hospital. Before I left Felicity had something else to tell me and it set me thinking. She had picked up something about the way Rollerball had been programmed, how its apparent intelligence had been instilled. It had to do with those small, heavy balls. It didn’t quite add up but it was interesting. It was this: Seiko had personally driven a number of those balls down the A9 to Perth, M90 to Edinburgh and on down the A1 to London. They had been slung in some contraption underneath his car all the way, and they had been in contact with the road surface. Some had escaped by intent — the ones that had turned up earlier, the one in Belford included, presumably.

  “Does it help?” she asked.

  I said I didn’t know; so far, it didn’t, but in time it might. “Get well soon,” I said, looking down at her. “You’re precious, remember?”

  A sister chased me away after that. Knowing Felicity was in good hands, I left her with a fairly easy mind. As I moved away from the bed the police guard moved back to take my place. Nothing was being left to chance. I drove out of the hospital car park, no time to catch up on a missed breakfast and there wouldn’t be any lunch either. I got the police to alert Max and then I drove to York. Nothing further came through on my radio. I puzzled around Felicity’s report of the bagatelle balls and their weird journey from Pitlochry. I had a vague theory that followed somewhat along the lines of my own reflections back in Nateby. That lack of actual remote control, and the fact that Rollerball seemed to be working out its own destiny, relying on what was inside it, what was programmed into it. I remembered a report I’d read once in Focal House’s weekly dollop of Required Reading: robots that could be programmed to keep on repeating actions that they had once done — once only. Seiko was an expert in that line of country. Could he have programmed those travelling balls, familiarised them with the route south, then positioned them in Rollerball to monitor electronic impulses?

  Was that the brain?

  But if so, why the set-piece routes of the A9 and the Al? Maybe that had been a test run, something that would have subsequently to be obliterated, or more balls could have been programmed especially for Rollerball’s present route direct across country. But Seiko or one of his dogsbodies would have had one hell of a trek, dragging those balls on a lead like a lapdog all the way south, and in any case he couldn’t have ploughed slap bang through all those buildings, to say nothing of swimming the Forth in winter. That wasn’t on. On the other hand a direct, straight route was a direct, straight route. The programming could be simple if Rollerball wasn’t to have any regard for what it did on the way. Perhaps all Seiko had needed to do was to roll the balls in a straight line for the equivalent of a few hundred miles and they would then respond. It could be done on rollers, the same sort of principle as the roller method used by garages for carrying out in situ road tests for MOTs and so on. It was quite a thought but it didn’t allow for the sort of deviation Rollerball had made when it met my trench. For that, it had to have something extra, a sort of radar eye that could peer through its metal. And after the deviation, the ball-brain would put it back on course.

  I gave it up. It didn’t seem especially useful just then. Seiko had to be found and produced to the USSR. We were still on the brink. And if Seiko hadn’t got out in time — and if he had ever been in York at all — he would find it too late now. The road blocks would be at saturation level. I’d been called on my radio telephone with word that York was in fact surrounded. The police had been reinforced by troops from Catterick.

  *

  Seiko was in York right enough. I got the word of his arrest when I was stopped by the road block on the A64. It turned out that Seiko had panicked when the city was gone through with that toothcomb I’d asked for, which tended to prove that Max had been right when he’d said that dedication could be fractured. Seiko had evidently become totally concerned, now that he had succeeded in putting the NATO powers on a collision course with the USSR, with his own personal future — all that cash availability and his funk-hole in Australia once he had got out of UK in time to collect the wherewithal before the British Government negatived the deal.

  As the net closed, he’d decided to risk getting out by train. He almost got away with it. He had turned up at the railway station accompanied by a Pakistani who turned out later to have been the one aboard my flight from Sydney, the one who’d taken part in the attack on the way in from Heathrow. No-one was looking for Pak
istanis at this stage, though perhaps they should have been, and Seiko’s companion had bought tickets through to Ramsgate via King’s Cross and Charing Cross — Ramsgate made it look like a sea escape having been planned — without query. Seiko himself went through in a wheelchair, carrying crutches and swathed almost from head to foot in bandages. His face was just two eyes and a nose and a gap for the mouth. He was being trundled into the guard’s van of the London train with his attendant when an alert policeman decided to investigate more closely and the unwinding of the bandages had produced gold and Seiko had been hurried to the nick.

  I drove on for a chat with him. Panic was not now evident; he was calm and collected. In a sense he held the upper hand still and he knew it. I asked him what Rollerball was going to do now it had failed to enter the fissure.

  “Say nothing,” he said. “Too late now for United Kingdom.”

  “Nothing’s happened yet.”

  “Will soon.”

  “When?”

  There was a shrug. “Up to British and Soviet Governments.”

  “Not so,” I said. “It’s up to you. You’re going to stop it happening and we won’t lose any time.”

  He grinned up at me from his seat. He was as smug as hell. “Say nothing, do nothing.”

  “Think of all that cash potential. Any moment now, it’s going to be stopped.”

  “Not so at all, since I can stop war. You have just said this.” “So you’re going to?”

  “No. But if credits withdrawn and self held in custody then no smallest possibility that I stop.”

  He was so cocksure and there was a strong element of the cleft stick. In his view we had that one nebulous hope and he didn’t think we would throw it away. And time was passing; we might not have much longer. Seething with frustration I reached down and took hold of his shoulders, and lifted him, and shook the meagre body like a rat. The grin rattled away into a thin line of hate. I put him down again. He still wouldn’t co-operate and we were running it very close now. I left him under guard to stew for a while and I got a line through to Focal House, where Max had already been informed of the arrest.