by James Phelan
A glance back at the jetty revealed the charred mess of the twin catamaran hulls, oily flames licking out in every direction. Other boats nearby had been devastated by the blast, and the torn-apart stern of the little tin dinghy floated lifelessly in the churning sea.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Gammaldi. “Those bastards could have killed us!”
Fox was silent. Gammaldi looked at his friend knowingly, and a moment later the four-wheel drive’s big diesel engine revved up. The tyres chewed up the gravel road and the Land Rover took off in a cloud of dust.
They soon found their quarry cruising towards the airport—the fastest way off the island.
There were two vehicles: a small four-cylinder sedan and a van whose back axle was riding low due to the weight of the pod. Fox’s Land Rover easily won the contest in weight, but was under-classed in acceleration compared to the two newer, better-geared hire cars. The van’s load was limiting their speed though, so the convoy was only travelling at around ninety kilometres per hour.
“We’ve got about ten minutes before we get to the airport. You’d better buckle up.”
Gammaldi didn’t need any further prompting and pulled his seatbelt tighter.
“Have you got any weapons in this rig?” Al was anxiously measuring out the closing five hundred metres or so between the vehicles.
“Nothing but a toolbox under your seat.”
Gammaldi reached underneath and produced the toolbox in all its glory. Aside from a hammer and a few wrenches, nothing else looked like it would do any damage.
“Great. If you can get us close enough to take their cars apart undetected, I think we may just stand a chance,” he said with deadpan seriousness.
“Did you have to speak so soon?”
The distance between the vehicles was a hundred metres and closing rapidly when two burly torsos leaned out of the back of the sedan and started firing at the Land Rover. Thankfully, due to the winding road and Fox’s quick evasive manoeuvres, few of the nine-millimetre pistol slugs met the thick aluminium skin of the four-wheel drive. Not so lucky was Gammaldi’s side of the partitioned windscreen, which disintegrated from a direct hit.
“Should I ask if you have a plan, or shouldn’t I speak any more?” Gammaldi said as he spat out some blood streaming into his mouth from a gash on his eyebrow.
“Since when do I plan ahead?” Fox said.
Slipping the Land Rover’s big rebuilt engine down a gear produced a surge in speed and the next volley of fire went sailing behind them. The cars were pulling parallel and Fox yelled at Gammaldi over his redlining engine: “Take out the driver!”
Gammaldi, hammer in hand, readied himself.
Fox used the superior weight of his vehicle to nudge the rear of the sedan and send it careening off the road. In the same movement one of the gun-toting thugs, leaning out the window, was crushed between the vehicles. The driver of the car over-corrected and set himself on a collision course with the Land Rover, only this time Gammaldi rose up and threw the hammer through the open window.
The result was spectacular. The driver suddenly slumped unconscious over the wheel and the out-of-control car rammed into a Moreton Bay fig tree and disintegrated.
Gammaldi let out a hoot. Fox couldn’t help but share the moment: they’d just taken out three armed assailants in a high-speed car chase with a grimy old hammer. But the split second he looked over his shoulder to admire their triumph spelled disaster.
The rear door of the van ahead opened to reveal a man sitting on the tied-down pod. It was the device he was aiming at them that made Fox gasp, slam on the accelerator and spin the steering wheel.
A Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the bitumen below and to the left of the two-tonne Land Rover and exploded into a devastating ball of flaming shrapnel. The vehicle and its occupants were sent cartwheeling end over end until they finally came to rest upside down in the thickly treed national park that bordered the road.
Gammaldi looked across at his mate. Fox hung unconscious in his seat, his legs cut up from shrapnel that had torn through the floor, his face a bloody mess from the shattered windscreen. Gammaldi reached over and put two fingers to Fox’s neck—he was still alive.
Gammaldi checked himself over. Apart from a few minor abrasions and bruises, and a pounding in his head, he felt remarkably fine. Thank god, he thought, they were going to be okay.
Then he saw the van pull up beside him and heard footsteps marching in his direction. His door was yanked open, and he closed his eyes as a pistol pressed against his forehead.
7
FIVE DAYS TO GO …
Usually Bill McCorkell began the 0800 briefing. The first official part of the day for the President of the United States of America was a half-hour rundown on the world’s hot spots and specific risks to the nation’s security by his National Security Advisor. Lately, the meetings had been running overtime and included most of the executive members of the Security Council. Today Peter Larter, the Secretary of Defence, began.
“Gentlemen, I believe we’ve found our mystery weapon,” he told the men seated around the room as they scanned the photos of strange-looking equipment laid out on the low coffee table between them.
“Oh, boy, Pushkin was right …” the CIA’s Robert Boxcell murmured with an incredulous look on his face.
“Who the hell is Pushkin and what is this … ‘coilgun’?” demanded the President, reading the name from a sketch on the table.
“A coilgun, Mr President, is basically an electronic gun,” McCorkell said. “Think of a cannon that uses rails and an electric current instead of a barrel and gunpowder.”
“Mr President, the sketch you’re looking at was made by a Soviet scientist who defected to us in the eighties.” The Secretary of Defence swallowed hard, McCorkell noted. “It was part of the Soviet counter-effort to create a Star Wars system of their own, in response to Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative—the precursor of our current National Missile Defence system.
“Rather than imitating our research into particle beams, railguns and missile-killing missiles etc to shoot down incoming ICBMs, the Soviets concentrated their efforts into a very small area of space-based weapons. Like us, they saw the benefit of having NMD systems in space which would be hard to detect and destroy. But they took it one step further.”
“Peter, are you telling me that they put weapons of mass destruction—this coilgun—into space?” asked a shocked Fullop. The Chief of Staff was the administration’s most vocal proponent of space-based weapons. “Greatest defence we could have—” McCorkell had heard Fullop’s favourite phrase a hundred times.
“It’s the only explanation we have, Tom. My team has gone over this all night,” Larter said.
“Robert?” McCorkell prompted, bringing the CIA chief out of his mindful reverie.
Boxcell looked up from the diagrams of the coilgun, glanced around the room and settled on the President.
“Mr President, there may be cause to take this assumption seriously. In 1985 Vladimir Pushkin defected across at our West German Embassy. We knew him as a senior physicist working for the Soviets in their Bureau for Strategic Research and Development. We ended up gaining little useful information, as most of our systems then were well ahead of the Soviets’.” A pause. “He did claim, however, to have worked on a counter-version of our own Star Wars program. Apparently, due to limited funding, they concentrated on one design only—railgun technology.
“Pushkin claimed the years of testing proved the railgun was unable to destroy one ballistic missile, let alone hundreds or even thousands in an all-out nuclear war. But what grew out of that failure was a coilgun, a variation on the railgun theme and potentially much more powerful—an electric current would surround the projectile and shoot it out at phenomenal speeds, much faster than conventional ballistics.”
At Larter’s signal a military aide switched on a digital projector.
McCo
rkell leaned forward, taking in the first image: more detailed hand-drawn diagrams of the coilgun.
“Bandar-e Anzali after impact,” Larter said, nodding to the aide who switched images.
The next shot showed the devastated area they had seen the previous day in greater size and detail.
“Our computers have been able to place a contour map over the blast area to within centimetre accuracy.” Onscreen, a green spider-web-like grid mapped out the gradient of the blast area.
“The gradient measurement is in centimetres?” McCorkell asked.
“That’s right,” Larter confirmed. “What you see on the screen here is in fifty-metre intervals. From the epicentre of the blast there is a slope of around one centimetre for every six metres. This equates to the centre being only 1.2 metres below the edge of the blast. No explosive we know of could create this damage and not leave a deep impact crater at detonation point. Moreover, notice the shape of the contours?” All the men strained their eyes to notice something they apparently should have. “It is close to a perfect circle. Not from something fired at an angle, but from directly above.”
“My God,” muttered the President. “The Russians—no, the Chechens have this capability and this is how we find out about it? Do we have anything this advanced?”
“Sir,” began Larter. The other men in the room were silent. “We are not saying that this attack is definitely the result of so-called Star Wars technology. We have yet to implement this sort of offensive technology into space ourselves—but our own research has led to the development of railguns for our military. It is the next stage of ballistic weaponry. But I think this vindicates the good life we set up for Pushkin.”
“I think you’re forgetting a couple of things,” Boxcell said to the Secretary of Defence. “Firstly, Pushkin died in an “accident” within weeks of defecting—using a knife to get bread out of a toaster. This was in a temporary safe house in Virginia, and it just so happened his security detail was found by the next shift commander watching MTV in an outbuilding. Forensics found high-voltage burn marks under Pushkin’s arms and tyre tracks in the driveway that weren’t from an Agency vehicle.”
McCorkell watched everyone in the room straighten a little.
“Are you this well briefed on all Agency files?” Larter asked with a mocking grin.
“I was that next shift leader,” Boxcell retorted. McCorkell cringed at the exchange—although all men present were friends, their professional rivalry was the same as in any high-powered boardroom.
Boxcell went on. “The last thing Pushkin managed to document of the coilgun project—the Dragon, as the Soviets termed it—was that the projectiles were made from an extremely rare element … theterion I think it was called.”
“Theterium,” Larter corrected. “A new element discovered in Tunguska, Siberia, early last century.”
“A new element?” asked the President.
“Mr President, there are apparently quite a few combined or totally different elements to be found in meteorites and so on,” McCorkell said, getting nods from Larter and Boxcell to affirm his explanation. “It stands to reason that such elements could be potentially much stronger than those on Earth if they were, say, from a binary or tri-star system, due to the extra gravity.”
Larter had another image brought up on the projector: grainy black and white shots of rural destruction.
“So … a relatively small amount of this theterium could be made into a projectile for a coilgun small enough to be launched into space,” McCorkell added, cottoning on to the idea that was becoming a much more realistic hypothesis.
“Exactly,” Larter said. “What you are seeing here are images taken in 1908 of what has become known as the Tunguska Event. These fallen trees spiral outward from the centre point for up to half a kilometre. Devastation was wreaked close to a thousand-mile radius from the blast point—equivalent to a three-hundred-megaton nuclear blast,” Larter brought up an aerial photograph. “And as you can see using the same contour grid, there was absolutely no blast crater whatsoever.”
There was thoughtful silence in the room as each man took in the information.
“How many of these weapons did Pushkin say he developed?” the President asked.
“Pushkin claimed they had built one Dragon prototype and had enough of the element to manufacture three projectiles, which could be reloaded one at a time in space,” Larter said.
“And the weapon takes time to recharge in between firing?” McCorkell asked.
“Yes, but the time frame was never specified by Pushkin,” Boxcell answered. “Could be the Chechens’ seven-day timetable though.”
“And we’re down to five days now,” McCorkell said. The comment hung in the air for a moment.
“So it is possible there are at least two more weapons in space,” the President stated with raised eyebrows. “Able to be fired on anywhere on the globe …”
“There was one major hole in this coilgun theory,” Larter interjected. “The size of the Dragon, as documented in sketches by Pushkin, made it too bulky to be put into space intact. Pushkin himself said it would have taken at least two, probably three flights, and then tens of hours of labour in space to assemble the pieces. There was no way the Soviets could have launched this under our noses, and their Salyut space stations couldn’t have accommodated the hours of space-walking to put the sections together. Our predecessors considered Pushkin was unreliable in these fantastic claims, which is why they did not pursue his information—”
McCorkell interrupted the Secretary of Defence mid-sentence. “Tell me, did our predecessors disregard Pushkin’s claims before or after the Soviets launched and assembled the Mir Space Station?”
8
MARCH 2005
Through the thin sheet of corrugated iron Fox could hear the life being beaten out of Birmingham. He’d been through such an ordeal himself the day before and was certain his left leg was fractured below the knee. Now, two days after being taken captive, he sat behind one of the bamboo-framed huts near the cage he’d been kept in. The militia guards had fallen asleep after smoking dope all day and he’d managed to pop the lock on his cell. Armed with an ancient AK-47, Fox surveyed the area for threats. The main force of militia and Indonesian Army had moved off the night before, and for the first time that week the rain was easing.
He was faced with two tasks. Around fifty East Timorese sat captive in the centre of the camp, surrounded by rings of razor wire and half a dozen stoned guards sitting under a tin roof. And there was Birmingham, on the other side of the wall behind him, on the receiving end of hell. If it were like his torture session, there’d be two Indonesian soldiers and the local militia leader inside.
It was a difficult choice. He had a duty to his soldier, his countryman, his friend. He also had a duty to save the people he and his friend had come here to protect.
He knew he could take out the prison guards with about half a mag of ammo to spare. The prisoners could flee while he took on Birmingham’s captors. Either or both Australians would probably die, but it was what the navy soldiers were paid to do.
He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. He was far past exhausted. He’d been stripped to his underwear, hadn’t eaten since they’d been dropped off some fifty hours prior, and he could no longer tell where his blood stopped and the mud began.
Inside, the gasping screams of his friend were now accompanied by a whipping sound. He knew they were lashing Birmingham with wire, as he himself had been lashed. Fox made up his mind.
Crawling around the corner of the hut, he peered through a gap in the door. Three targets. He shouldered the door open quietly and took a couple of quick steps in, crashing the militia chief in the back of the head with the rifle and quickly bringing the barrel up eye-level with the Indonesian commanding officer.
“Merdeka dia! Merdeka dia!” Fox said. Free him!
The Indonesian soldier looked down the
AK-47 barrel and slowly took out his pistol and put it on the floor.
“You too!” Fox said to the officer who was still holding the whip. The pair locked eyes, and Fox could read the man’s defiance. He dropped the whip reluctantly and joined his comrade on his knees.
“John?” Fox said, taking a step forward and unlooping his leading seaman’s hands from the bar he was bent over.
“Thanks,” Birmingham said through a mouthful of blood.
“Hands on head!” Fox said in Indonesian. The young soldier obeyed, but the officer just stared at him. Fox glanced at Birmingham as he struggled to stand up. His face was a pulp, his eyes puffy slits.
“Shit—can you see?” Fox asked.
“No.”
“Shit.” He held the gun trained on the Indonesians and had a quick look around the room for a rag or something. He heard Birmingham grunt behind him.
“Menanamkan itu bedil turun!” the Indonesian officer said.
Fox turned and saw the officer was pointing a small revolver against Birmingham’s head. He took a moment to translate. Put the gun down.
For a few seconds there was silence. No one dared make the next move.
“Fuckin’ pop him, Lachlan,” Birmingham said, swaying on his feet.
The officer and Fox held each other’s gaze.
“You go now—leave,” the officer said.
“You have to let my friend go—and the other people,” Fox said, starting to shake from the effort of holding the AK-47 steady.
“They are my people,” the officer said, digging the revolver into Birmingham’s cheek.
“Pop the fucker!” Birmingham repeated.
Silence.
Before Fox could do or say anything else, Birmingham lunged to his left, taking the officer crashing down as a shot rang out and the gun clattered across the floor.