by Greg Barron
‘Jesus, someone fucking do something.’
Marika looks helplessly out when her senses are assaulted by the hammer of gunfire. She looks up to see the corporal with the FN MAG-58, holding the weapon two-handed, a stream of empty brass cartridges hitting the deck, pinging off and dropping down towards the ground, now so close she can see naval personnel on and around the grey ships moored at Garden Island. Cranes. Cars on the roads. Even what appears to be a man training a dog.
The projectiles strike home, into the arc of the Evektor’s propeller, fragments and debris flying off until the rest of the three-bladed prop disintegrates into four or five big chunks. The remainder of what must have been a full magazine he directs into the engine block, and now, finally, the Evektor stops its crazy gyrations and hangs limp.
Marika turns and looks into the grinning face of the machine gunner. Her ears are numbed by the gunfire. ‘You’re a legend,’ she calls.
The pilot’s voice is booming through the comms. ‘Where the hell are we going with this? It’s fucking heavier than you think … and the windage …’
Before Marika can answer there is the sound of tortured metal. The winch, mounted on the ceiling is tearing from its mounts. The loadmaster jumps up. ‘The SAR gear isn’t designed to take that kind of weight — I told you.’
Marika looks below and ahead, they are just above tiny Clark Island off Double Bay. The open sea is no more than four or five kilometres ahead. Taking the Evektor offshore will be by far the best option.
The metal tears again. The loadmaster looks at her with desperate eyes. ‘We’re not going to make it far — we have to put this damn thing down.’
TWENTY
ENGLISH CHANNEL
LOCAL TIME: 2245
Captain Walid grunts with satisfaction as he flicks the switch that sends the anchor chain rattling out through the hawse. One and a half miles outside UK territorial waters, away from the main shipping lanes and coastal surveillance, he switches on the deck floodlights and calls all hands.
The first mate turns to him. ‘I don’t understand. What are we doing here?’
‘If you understood things good like me you would be a captain too. But now I can tell you — we are going to make sure that my ship does not look the same when we go back. We need paint, and steel sheets from the stores. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir. Right now.’
The most important change is the name, and the steadiest hand among the crew, balanced in a bosun’s chair, repaints the name on the side from ‘Isra’ to ‘Lucky Swan’, repeated in Cantonese characters supplied by an online translator. The Lucky Swan was a genuine ship that Walid had seen rusting away near Karachi Harbour.
The island and olive leaves of the Cypriot flag are exchanged for Taiwan’s bold red and blue, and the rail cut away from the forecastle. The whole jagged mess is then thrown overboard. A false funnel is made of tin plate and hastily painted, then placed in position. The gantry crane is brought into use, bringing pallets of general ship’s stores up on deck. These are covered with canvas shrouds to give the impression of a fully laden ship, changing the silhouette substantially.
‘No English turd and his forms will stop me from getting paid,’ Walid mutters under his breath. He plays solitaire on his iPad on the bridge while he watches the activity on the deck. He feels like a general. A very clever general indeed.
TWENTY-ONE
SYDNEY
LOCAL TIME: 0845
Waking in his inner-city unit, Jan Sloven’s thumping headache reminds him that the night before he went too hard for too long. Wild Turkey 101 Proof is not his usual choice of beverage, but when the woman you are with chooses what he regards as a man’s drink, it is churlish not to follow. Unable to stomach breakfast, he punches out a quick Nespresso, then takes a long, hot shower, finishing off with a burst of cold water that leaves him breathless and fully awake, his skin tingling. Dressing quickly, he makes another coffee, drinking it standing up, staring out the fifteenth floor window, over the tops of five city blocks, then the Botanic Gardens to Woolloomooloo Bay.
Dressed and ready, he takes the elevator down to the car park, clicking the unlocker as he approaches the deep-blue Prius. In a few moments he is on the Cahill Expressway, heading up towards the bridge. His thoughts are concentrated on Diana, the subject of his late night, a data analyst from the front office.
The night had ended, disappointingly, with a kiss in a taxi, a lot of promise, then a dismissal and the sweep of a black skirt as she walked up towards the lobby of her apartment block.
Maybe a phone call … no, a text, a bit later. Dinner, Friday night? Somewhere expensive. Jan is thirty-three years old, in that nether world between young enough to date a decade-wide spread of girls, and too old for the twenty-somethings who so often catch his eye.
He is just about to take the bridge exit when his Samsung blares and he lifts it to his ear. Listens. Strange how ten, twenty seconds can change a life. Something has happened that yesterday would have seemed pure fantasy. Something that he had himself dismissed as unlikely has become real and very possible indeed.
The Evektor swings dangerously as they drop towards the harbour. The chopper shudders with the strain, and the winch, Marika sees, is just seconds from failure.
‘There’s only about two welds still holding,’ screams the loadmaster. ‘The drum is starting to force its way out. We have to get this thing down.’
‘We’re not going to make the open sea,’ Marika says to the pilot, ‘we need somewhere closer.’
She squints down and across the water. The float plane dock at Rose Bay catches her eye. The area is ideal — sheltered from the wind, plenty of space. She opens comms with the ground on the GU. ‘We’re going to try for Rose Bay. Recommend initiate Hazard Level Alpha.’
Marika’s mind registers but hardly sees the boat ramp with a gang of rowers loading a surf-lifesaving boat onto its trailer, beings from another — far safer — world.
Up in the distance, across a narrow throat of land, past the mansions of Vaucluse and Double Bay, she can see the coastal strip from Dover Heights down to North Bondi, the place where she was born and raised, where she’d sat just a few hours earlier, and beyond it the blue Tasman Sea.
If only we could have got that far …
She drags her eyes back to the wide, sheltered expanse of Rose Bay, with the seaplane terminal, Lyne Park, and the Royal Sydney Golf Course in the background.
A police command launch, thirty odd metres of gunmetal grey, charges towards them from the dock at Double Bay, creamy white wake curling up against the flare of her hull. Even from here Marika can make out the white lettered name, Nemesis, stencilled on the bow, and a tall, white-haired crewman standing forward of the tactical bridge.
‘Get the toolbox,’ shouts the loadmaster, standing upright, using both hands to try to support the winch body in place. Veins stand out on his neck like pipes. ‘This is NOT going to hold.’
Marika takes a turn at trying to hold the winch in place as someone brings up a toolbox and the loadmaster selects a pair of small bolt cutters and a hank of heavy-gauge tie wire. He runs a double loop around the drum of the winch and the frame. He uses the handle of the bolt cutters to twist the wire multiple times until it pulls it closer into place.
‘Genius!’ Marika shouts.
‘Farm boy,’ he grins back. ‘Grew up on a sheep farm near Wagga. Anything you can’t fix with fencing wire isn’t worth fixing.’ From the toolbox he cuts another length from the hank and fashions it into a support from a hole in the winch body to a steel strut. ‘The problem isn’t just the weight of that little plane — as the skipper said, it’s the windage, and all the swinging around.’
‘The strap’s fraying,’ someone calls out, ‘we have to get this freaking thing down.’
Marika looks down and sees the loose threads in the nylon webbing flying free in the slipstream. Something is pounding in her head now. She looks up. The Rose Bay ramp is just two hundred metres away.<
br />
‘That’ll do,’ she calls, ‘take it down now.’
TWENTY-TWO
SYDNEY
LOCAL TIME: 0900
Jan ends the call, and changes lanes abruptly, just in time to take the Macquarie Street exit. The headache, having receded somewhat, begins a sharp little throb deep in his temple.
Passing St Mary’s Cathedral, turning east, Jan bullies his way through the traffic. Stretching the Prius to the limit as he surges onto Bayswater Road, Rose Bay seems like an age away. It is, in reality, only minutes before he slows at the entrance to Lyne Park, the bay waters glittering in the sunlight.
Jan guns the engine past a team of FRNSW firemen erecting barriers at the park entrance, and is directed away from the water, back to the rear of the car park where he steps out of the car. Turning to look out across Rose Bay, he sees two men, both wearing grey Remploy SR3 first responder suits with Avon ST53SD masks, cross the car park to meet him. He knows that these Hazardous Materials Response Units are based in several locations around the city, including nearby Alexandria, hence the rapid deployment.
‘Mr Jan Sloven?’ The voice sounds metallic, emanating from panels in the mask.
‘Yes?’
‘Come with us.’
Jan stands and locks the car, then follows, running an appreciative eye around the Lyne Park environs. Australia has one of the most highly developed CBRN — Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear — response systems in the world, keyed to the population centres of the major cities. The site is already beginning to develop the classic Hazmat plan, with, in this case, the waters of the bay making up the Hot Zone, the car park the Warm Zone with its entry control, decon corridors and forward triage station. Behind it all, on the grass of Lyne Park, is the Cold Zone, with the rehab area, a multi-agency incident management team and a site control station. The site commander is in first responders’ gear with a mobile phone at his ear and another in the palm of his hand. A yellow decon tent is being inflated on the grass beside a cluster of bemused boat owners, standing in a group firing questions at an FRNSW officer.
Other groups are arriving, including a team exiting a BK117 chopper in the Cold Zone, and a van of HART specialists — the Hazmat Advisory Response Team.
Questions build up in Jan’s mind, like flotsam behind a dam wall, but there are no answers yet. Most of them will require his specific skills to figure out. For the moment, however, as he moves towards the HART van for suiting up, he tries to assess the chances that the little plane out there is truly carrying a cargo of something dangerous.
If this is related to the worldwide dispersal of anthrax spores from al-Hajjuf in Iraq, then this is big, something so potentially catastrophic that it makes him forget the headache and the girl. He was briefed on the possibility of an attack by the Federal Police a few days earlier, but an attempt on this scale had seemed unlikely.
Japanese scientists were the first to discover a peculiarity of anthrax: the passage through a human host increases its virility and strength. They also had, in the 1930s, access to unlimited Chinese victims on which to test their theories. Unit 431 operated scientific death camps, killing thousands, in Manchuria. The US obtained the resultant anthrax strains and technical data, by giving immunity from prosecution to the war criminals involved.
The United States experimented with these, and other strains at Fort Detrick in the 1950s. They, along with the British, exported them to various ‘allies’ across the world. Istikaan, the Hourglass, with the complicity of Saddam Hussein and the Special Programs unit of the Mukhabarat, was able to refine the British Vollum strain pathogen over a period of years using live human subjects.
Al-Hajjuf, the laboratory involved, was built underground in Iraq’s western desert, on the site of a meteorological station, hidden away from weapons inspectors. It seemed that the entire anthrax program, originally established at the well-known al-Muthanna State Establishment, was moved there in the mid 1990s.
Photographs in a British Intelligence report on the site had showed a well-equipped lab, coupled with barred holding rooms. The bunker complex was surrounded by mass graves of burned bodies.
In general, between one and five subjects were taken from the holding cells, then placed into the inhalation chamber. The spores were introduced via a valve and dispersal mechanism in the room itself. The subjects would then be observed through the window; the first lung infections, the bleeding, the eventual collapse.
Detailed records were kept of the times taken to infection, to extreme trauma, and to death itself. Records of at least eight hundred strains were kept. Some were abandoned, but those that showed increased pathogenicity were further refined. The LSS-253 strain is believed to have come through at least fifty of what Istikaan referred to as ‘leaps’. Others he referred to as ‘steps’, or ‘strides’.
Since anthrax is not spread by person-to-person contact, after the people were dead, the inhalation chamber was cleaned of stray spores by the introduction of chlorine dioxide gas at a high but not measured concentration for twelve hours. After this was cleared by powerful vacuum fans, Istikaan and his technicians could enter, extract infected fluids from the bodies, then take the cadavers to pits where they were burned in gasoline-fuelled fires.
One room off the main laboratory was resourced as a DNA-sequencing and genetic-engineering laboratory. Access to the room was restricted, apparently, to Istikaan, and two assistants. Equipment included a scanning electron microscope and sophisticated computer genome mapping equipment.
A voice beside Jan breaks into his thoughts. ‘We’re ready to suit you up, sir.’
Jan nods, and follows the man into the blue LED-lit brightness of the van interior.
The surface of the harbour turns to a crater of blown surface spray, and the reflected wind starts the Evektor penduluming dangerously. The light plane finally touches the water, nose first.
‘We have to get it to sit flat,’ the loadmaster calls, ‘or it’ll sink pretty damn fast.’
The pilot lowers the plane at just the right speed to let the flotation of the wings take effect, letting the tiny craft sit flat on the water.
‘It’ll only float for a few seconds,’ the pilot calls, ‘someone needs to go down and move the sling to the middle so we can lift it evenly.’
‘I’ll go down,’ Marika says. ‘You got any Hazmat gear on board?’
Someone passes her a mask and a pair of gloves — though she doubts that either will give her any more than cursory protection — she then heads for the cable, holding it low and behind her butt with a gloved right hand and a firm grip in front of her chest with her left, easing herself down the cable in an abseiling crouch. The distance is about ten metres, still more than a three-storey building, and it’s enough to give her a dash of vertigo as she drops at controlled speed towards the Evektor — so streamlined and beautiful in the air, now broken and forlorn.
Through the cowling, with its matching jagged holes, she can see the pilot’s grisly remains. Ignoring the corpse, for the moment, she moves to the extreme rear of the craft, loosens the sling and uses both hands to shimmy it over the other tail wing and along the fuselage to the middle.
‘How’s that?’ she shouts up into the roar of the machine. Marika watches the cable tighten, and feels the plane lift a fraction. The loadmaster gives her the thumbs-up.
Now she walks along the fuselage, closer to where the splintered stubs of the propeller lie still. She tries to lift the cowling, finding it stuck fast. She can’t reach the interior fasteners. She draws her Glock and fires, first on one side, then the other.
Finally the cowling budges enough for one arm, then her head, to enter, the rim bruising along her abdomen as she slips in under the canopy and head-first into the spare seat, pushing the dead male across the tight confines so the bloody remnants of his head loll the other way.
A loose black electrical switch sits on the co-pilot’s seat. She follows the wire where it snakes under the carpet, lifts it up and re
veals the full installation, ingenious in its simplicity. It consists, basically, of three sections. A containment vessel, a solenoid-activated seal, then a tube running down to the spreader unit extending through the skin at the bottom of the fuselage.
Before exiting the cockpit she takes one more glance at the dead man. Her face twists in annoyance and she shakes her head. ‘You bastard.’ She finds herself shaking at the extent of what might have happened and as an after effect of extreme danger. ‘You would have killed them all.’
On the way in on the yellow work boat Marika passes a mixed team of FRNSW and Federal Police heading out to add flotation collars to the plane, surround it with a containment boom and take the dead pilot away. Dressed in bulky CBRN gear, protocol demands that they take multiple photographs, including a series on a hi-res rotating crime-scene camera. Finally, however, the plane is floating free without the help of the choppers, and the body of the Evektor’s pilot is slipped into a black body bag and stretchered away into one of the work boats.
Marika endures the decon process in the yellow inflatable tent, with the integrated Kärcher system, followed by the application of reactive skin decontamination lotion on her exposed skin. After a quick debrief, she spends a few minutes attending to comms with London.
She watches as the supervising scientist from the government’s REDPATH facility, Jan Sloven, comes back onshore from the plane, after having removed the spore tank. He walks up from the boat into the Warm Zone to sustained applause from all personnel. He dips his masked head to acknowledge it. Sloven is well known in CBRN circles, one of the new wonder breed of Australian scientists. A member of Mensa, recipient of all kinds of awards.
His decon process takes some time, but when he’s out she finds herself standing next to him, watching a specialised CBRN Fuchs vehicle roll into the Warm Zone, its lugged wheels turning. It will be used to transport the tank to a laboratory.