INCARNATION

by Daniel Easterman

  ‘What you did not destroy were the prototypes for a new generation of these wonderful devices. There are seventeen of them in all, and they were removed from Chaofe Ling several weeks ago. These weapons will detonate at ground level, and they will not require delivery by plane or missile. To be precise, they have been designed as terrorist weapons, although they would, of course, be completely outside the reach of any ordinary terrorist organization. Unless, of course, it turned out to be a state-sponsored organization.

  ‘Several of these weapons have been taken to the United States, where they have been distributed to a number of major cities. One is in Paris, one in Moscow, one in Rome, one in Berlin, one in Sydney, one in Tokyo. The rest are being held in reserve, except for one currently in London.’

  David felt his breath grow cold. The warm night turned to ice around him.

  ‘Anthony, this is insane. You can’t possibly…’

  ‘I just have done.’

  He clicked the little gadget he had used to control the anti-tamper device on the buoy. Several lights flickered then went off again, leaving one to show the device was live. Farrar tossed the remote control over his shoulder into the lake.

  ‘When the bomb wipes out half of London, Saddam Hussein will become the world’s most powerful man. I don’t much like him, if the truth be told, but things being as they are, I reckon he’s the man to go with. And this is where you come in. You

  ‘How long? How long before it detonates?’

  ‘I’m not really sure. Not very long. Half an hour, fifteen minutes. If you had a radio, you could try tuning in to a London station, let it play until it blanks out. Maybe it’s gone already, though.’

  Suddenly, Maddie let out a cry that would have torn the moon from its moorings had that been possible. David snapped his head up to catch sight of her leaping forward. She grabbed Farrar round the neck, then toppled sideways over the gunnel, her weight dragging him with her.

  David rowed up quickly, but there was no sign of either of them near the boat. He threw down his oars and leaped into the water, taking in a deep breath before plunging downwards.

  The water on the surface had been lukewarm after a long day’s exposure to sunlight. But within a few feet it grew frighteningly cold, and colder still every foot he went down, and he knew he was at the top of a very deep lake, and if he drowned in it he would never rise to the light again.

  It was pitch dark in the water, and he lost his bearings at once, and could scarcely tell up from down.

  He sank further, and he thought he was dying. His lungs were growing desperate for air. He went further down and felt a skin of ice had covered him, and then there were thick weeds reaching out for him, tough and slimy. He kicked free, pushing up for the surface again.

  He rose to the top, spluttering, gasping for air, and the moment he could open his eyes he looked all round in desperation, but there was nothing and no one. He dived again, and suddenly he saw her, not far from the surface, floating, her whiteness marking her out.

  He caught her by the armpits and brought her fast to the surface, then kicked out till they were next to the dinghy. He hauled her on board, flattened her on her belly as best he could, and pumped the water from her lungs. She did not move or breathe. He bent down and put his mouth to hers, frantically trying to fill her dying lungs with his own breath.

  He collapsed across her at last, unable to get any response. And for the first time, he began to cry without control or help, in pure agony for all he had lost, but above all for Nabila and Maddie.

  ‘Dad?’

  Her voice was very weak, but it was her voice. His name was followed by a string of coughs and splutters. He straightened her and helped her throw up more water, and when that was done and her eyes were open, he held her so tightly that she might have died from that alone.

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  He did not hold her long; dared not. Every moment counted, a second’s delay could be fatal.

  ‘Maddie, I have to try to stop the bomb exploding. Did he say anything at all about it to you?’

  She shook her head, still coughing.

  ‘All right. I’ll have to get the computer up first. I want you to rest in the dinghy and wait till I come back.’

  ‘I don’t have much …’ She started coughing again.

  ‘Try not to exert yourself, love.’ He squeezed her gently.

  ‘… choice,’ she said. She drew him to her, shivering. ‘He said he’d … booby-trapped the buoy.’

  ‘I’m going to have to take care of that.’

  ‘Can’t you … just go down for the briefcase … and leave the buoy alone?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that, but it’s too much of a risk. The moment I touch the case, the buoy will be triggered, and for all I know the box is wired to blow or send out an electric charge.’

  He leaned back hard on the oars, pulling away from the other boat and the buoy behind it. When he reckoned they’d gone far enough, he shipped the oars and fetched the rifle from behind. He glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed since Farrar had pushed the button.

  He lay down against the curved side of the dinghy and brought the rifle back against his cheek. It took him moments to track and find the buoy. What would constitute "interference"? he wondered. And then he had the anti-temper mechanism in his sights. What the hell? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

  A deafening explosion ripped the night from end to end. What had been endless silence was for a moment the very embodiment of noise. Pieces of debris swept over their bowed heads and fell into the water in a sequence of splashes. The surface of the lake shook, and ripples appeared everywhere, rings of silver in the moonlight.

  Quickly, David rowed the dinghy back to where the other boat still bobbed miraculously up and down. It was taking in water slowly through the bullet-hole he had made earlier and one or two gaps left by the explosion. The buoy was nowhere to be seen.

  The dinghy carried an old killick anchor. David threw it in and told Maddie to do her best to keep both dinghy and boat steady.

  He jumped in with a tremendous splash. He’d taken the night-sight from the rifle. He’d always heard this model was waterproof, and he hoped that extended to a little more than getting a few raindrops on the lens.

  Taking a deep breath, he plunged down, sucked in at once by the darkness. Kicking hard, he felt himself drop through the smoothness of ancient water and draw nearer and nearer the awful bottom of the lake. His lungs were crushed by the depth and by the knowledge that he could not breathe. Every second brought an increase in the pain in his chest, and in the panic that mounted remorselessly in the back of his skull.

  He knew he could lose the race by as little as a fraction of a second. But whether a second or ten minutes, the result would be the same. Perhaps one man in a car driving out of the city would be spared; and perhaps a family, driving in, would be caught up in the holocaust. He judged himself to be near the bottom. Bringing the sight to his eye, he struggled to make sense of the green world he saw through it. Fish startled him, scurrying away from his flailing left arm as he swept through their normally undisturbed habitat. Then he saw weeds flapping, and steadied himself to avoid becoming entangled in them. They were everywhere, rank, rotting, thick as mummy cloth, swaying like decaying silk, green and green and green. He could see nothing of the box among all this luxuriance, and he wondered how far from it he’d wandered in his descent.

  He wanted to kick his way back up again, to burst out of the water and drag in all the air and sweetness between here and the mountains. Instead, he swam in a diminishing circle, all the while doing mental arithmetic to estimate how much longer he could risk staying down.

  He saw it suddenly, almost hidden in a vast clump of weeds that reminded him of overgrown jungle plants. Dipping down, he fumbled for the handle to which the rope had been attached. He grabbed it and pulled up hard, tearing it from the weeds, and kicking for the surface. As he did so, the night-sight showed him Farrar’s
body, waving like a dark trophy captured by the water plants and the fish in the dark, open-eyed and circling. He shuddered and kicked again.

  His lungs close to bursting, he pushed desperately for the surface. Moonlight and false hope, he thought, as his head broke through the water. He thought of Nabila fighting death in the hospital and wondered if her lone struggle had been eaten up along with everybody else’s.

  He came up closest to the rowboat, which had drifted a little from the dinghy. Maddie was leaning over the edge, nervously awaiting his reappearance. When he finally did so, she sank back on the front thwart and breathed deeply to calm the thick patter of her heart.

  He managed to get the box on board the rowboat, then climbed over the gunnel himself. He had never felt wetter or colder in his life. The bottom of the little boat was awash in water, and he began to worry that it might start taking on more with his extra weight.

  The computer turned on without a blink. It was a Macintosh PowerBook G3, and David felt a surge of relief when he realized it was a machine he knew how to operate.

  He found and opened the application that ran the entire arming, countdown and triggering procedure. Someone - probably not Farrar - had given it a nickname: "Last Laugh". It sounded like a regular computer game, and when he opened it - Farrar had not bothered locking it or using a password - it looked like a game. He was tempted to breathe a sigh of relief and discard it then, but for one thing: the programme contained two files, one in Chinese, one in Arabic, setting out the technical specifications for the weapon. A quick glance at the Chinese file showed David that, if this was a game, it could have massively fatal consequences.

  Pulling down menus, he quickly located the programme’s main control panels, and within those a clock showing the countdown. He had eleven minutes left.

  The control panels also gave him access to the command sequence that would allow him to abort the entire procedure. Carefully, as water washed round his ankles and his teeth banged together from cold, he tracked his way through it, each step taking him nearer to the last. Then, just when he thought he’d done it, the screen flickered and there was an image of a hand. On the palm sat a flashing message that requested him to place his own palm on the screen. He stared at it for a moment, then corrected himself. Not his palm. Anthony Farrar’s palm.

  He thought it through in seconds, then started rowing back to the dinghy, positioning the rowboat roughly where it had been before.

  ‘Maddie, are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. What’s taking you so long?’

  ‘I’m nearly through. Look, I think I’d better come across to the dinghy.’

  He rowed across the gap separating them and handed the lap-top to Maddie before stepping into the rowboat. The bag was in the rear of the dinghy, where he’d left it. Rummaging inside, he located the Ek knife, the same one he’d had in the Taklamakan, the same sharp blade. He clutched it tightly in one hand and removed the sheath.

  ‘Dad, take care.’

  Maddie kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, dropping over the side into the lake.

  He went down like a stone, the night-sight in his left hand, the knife in the right, its cord tight round his wrist. For a few moments, it seemed easier to him just to let go, to flood his lungs with water and join Farrar at the bottom of the lake. The vegetation might hold them both down there for years, perhaps they’d just decay until their bones fell to the lake floor, never to be found. It was only the thought of Maddie in the dinghy, drifting without purpose as the sun came up and the day ahead lengthened into unimaginable grief that kept him to his purpose. That and the faintest flicker of belief that Nabila was alive and might go on living if he was fast enough.

  He thought he’d been down eleven minutes and more, but that was impossible, so he went on searching, even though his lungs were screaming for air. He knew Farrar had to be there, but whichever way he turned, however hard he strained, he saw only fish and weeds. His lungs were burning as though on fire, and at the last possible moment he gave in, kicking away from the bottom. He shot towards the surface, but even as he rose he started to lose consciousness.

  Then the water broke all around him, and he was in the air, gasping and spitting, gulping the air in greedily, the way he remembered drinking down water in the desert. Again and again he sucked down lungfuls of the stuff, until his head was spinning and his chest ached. When he glanced at his watch, there were barely seven minutes left.

  He swam to the dinghy and saw Maddie looking down at him.

  'I’ve got to go down again,’ he said. ‘What’s it say on the computer screen?’

  ‘There’s a message in the middle of the hand. It says “Abort before final countdown. Six minutes remaining.”’

  He closed his eyes, sucked in all the air his lungs would take, and headed back under. This time, something curious happened. It was as if he could hear Nabila’s voice inside his head, urging him on, telling him not to kick so much, but to let the panic subside and the water take him into itself. He heard her whispering, as though her lips were brushing his ear, words of caution and rebuke.

  Next moment he was there again, swimming above that rotten prehistoric heart while the fish stared at him in open horror or fascination. He put the night-sight to his eye and started to scan in a slow circle. His eye felt tired, and at times the picture blurred, but he went on. ‘Slowly,’ whispered Nabila. ‘Don’t force it. Let it come to you.’

  He saw him suddenly, as a priest might see a crucifix in the near distance, after a long road, in a place where nothing might have been expected. In a matter of seconds, he was staring into the cold blank eyes.

  As he reached out for the nearest hand, the chill thought came - What if I take the wrong hand to the surface? But he thought back to the lap-top and decided that Farrar had used his right hand.

  Cutting without a hard surface underneath proved harder than he’d expected. The blade cut as well as ever, but it lacked purchase. He ended up with Farrar’s arm between his legs, while one foot pushed down on his neck, clutching his hand while sawing hard through the wrist. He cut and sawed and splintered and snapped his way through a forest of thick and fine bones and tendons. Then there was a last sensation of tearing, and he realized he was losing consciousness from lack of oxygen.

  He kicked and kicked again, pushing up in a last-ditch venture against death, Farrar’s hand gripped tightly in his like a rabbit in an eagle’s talon. He came crashing to the surface, and would have gone down again, drinking half the lake, had not Maddie caught sight of him at once and pushed for him, reaching him in time to grab his arms and haul him on board.

  He retched and retched and retched, then pointed to the computer.

  ‘Maddie, take it … take the … hand and … put it on … the screen.’

  She backed away from him, all her terrors reviving, her barely dormant nightmares coming back to life.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I won’t touch it. It’s horrible.’

  ‘You have … seconds, that’s all. Millions of people ... will die. I can’t live … with that, can … you?’

  He struggled to get to a kneeling position, but he was still too disoriented to remain upright.

  ‘You have to … do it, Maddie. Please.’

  ‘Is she there?’

  ‘She?’

  ‘I don’t know. The woman you wrote about. The one in your letter. That you love.’

  He hesitated, then nodded just once.

  ‘All right, then, I’ll do it for her.’ And she stretched out for Farrar’s hand and lifted it to the screen.

  ‘How long?’ asked David. ‘How long to abort?’

  ‘Twenty seconds. It’s accepted the palm print.’ She threw the hand away in disgust. ‘Now it wants a password.’

  David looked up in pure horror. There was no way he could ever outguess Farrar, not with seconds to spare, but suddenly, it was as if every conversation he’d ever had with Farrar flashed through h
is brain, and the answer was in the last.

  ‘Maddie,’ he said. ‘It’s a name. A Chinese woman’s name. Type it in carefully, you won’t get a second chance. M-E-I-H-U-A.’

  She did as he told her. The moment the ‘A’ was keyed in, a large message appeared: ‘OPERATION ABORTED’.

  Above their heads, the stars and the moon went on shining, unimaginable pleasures eternally denied. David wondered how beautiful Meihua had been, and how she had died. And he thought of Nabila, and how beautiful she was, and wondered if she was still alive. And Lizzie dead. And Maddie on the edge of insanity, the only part of his world he knew for certain. He drew up the anchor and started the slow pull back to the lights that waited on the shore.

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  He went to the hospital alone. Maddie was still too ill to go with him, even if he’d wanted her to. She was having enough trouble coming to terms with her mother’s death. Rose insisted she stay with him for the foreseeable future.

  He looked for Blennerhassett as soon as he set foot in the unit, but the doctor was nowhere to be seen. The room where Nabila had been was just off the corridor. Already knowing what he would find, he headed there on his own.

  The door opened on to an empty room. His heart skipped a beat, knowing now for certain what it meant. He stared at the bed, at the stands and trolleys and monitors and drips that still surrounded it.

  He went back to the corridor. There was no one in authority to whom he could speak.

  He’d go home now, and enquire later about what had been done with her, about the arrangements for her burial. He’d have to see to that. And a headstone with her name carved on it. He remembered that he didn’t know her date of birth. And anyone who might have known was buried in the ruins of Kashgar.

  He’d almost left the hospital when he heard a voice behind him.