Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  Richard arrived in the central square in front of the James way where a wildly dressed handful of beards was milling around. Nothing against beards per se. It was just that the competent beards were probably up at the sharp end helping.

  ‘Colonel Jaeger?’ bellowed Richard, towering over the confusion. ‘Where’s the colonel?’

  ‘Over there,’ yelled someone obligingly, pointing to the brightest burning, over by the John Deere section.

  Richard pressed forward, his mind shifting gear. A glance over his shoulder showed that Colin was solidly behind him like a prop forward running guard for his fly half on a rugby field.

  ‘Colin!’

  The steady Scot came closer.

  ‘How d’you fight fires like this with water at such a premium?’

  ‘The camp security people double as firefighters. They will likely have set up a pump to get a good head of sea water up from the shoreline. Otherwise, buckets.’

  ‘But against petrol they’ll have to use foam.’ Richard was a tanker man, his response was automatic and immediate. ‘Water will just spread burning petrol all over the place. They’ll have to use foam,’ he repeated, holding up the canister from the Westland.

  ‘If they’ve got any and if they can get it defrosted in time. Still, most of the four-by-fours and all of the John Deeres have foam canisters, and from the feel if things they’ll be defrosted soon enough.’

  ‘Other than that, isolation? Pull everything back and hope it burns out before it sets anything else alight.’

  ‘That’s about it. At least it looks as if transport rather than shelter has been hit.’

  ‘So far.’

  They burst through into the vehicle dispersal area and there was Colonel Jaeger at the head of a motley crew of firefighters, parka gaping, shirt open. It was hot enough for June. A swift glance around showed that Billy Hoyle was there, pulling himself up in Richard’s estimation by wielding a canister from one of the John Deeres. Sergeant Killigan had swapped his role as security guard for that of fire chief. As the foam choked off the pools of blazing petrol, carefully targeted jets of brine fell hissing onto the red-hot skeletons of the bumed-out vehicles, quenching tyres, seats, interiors. But half a dozen vehicles were still wildly burning, and as the group from Erebus arrived, another went up as though it had just been hit by a mortar round.

  ‘Get in the John Deeres and the four-by-fours,’ Jaeger was bellowing. ‘Move them out of harm’s way. Killigan, we need more foam. Come on, the rest of you, move these vehicles.’

  But even the most intrepid of his little command were hesitating to do anything so obviously suicidal. Colin and Richard both knew that it could be done in relative safety, with a little intrepidity and self-control. ‘Leave that to us,’ they bellowed as one and the team broke up. Kate and the doc went off to look for wounded; the drivers followed Richard and Colin.

  ‘Is this wise?’ gasped Colin.

  ‘It’s a distraction,’ answered Richard with more certainty than he felt. ‘One charge, exploded now. Maximum disruption. It’s working so far.’

  ‘Distraction from what?’

  Richard opened his mouth to answer when behind them the first of the tractors went up amidst a babel of shouting and screams.

  *

  Jolene DaCosta walked quietly but purposefully through the huts at the far side of camp. Her fists were thrust deep in her parka pockets, gathering the loose bulk of the garment round her slight frame. None of the fire’s heat penetrated this far, but shafts of yellow brightness cut through the midnight glimmer and she wished the warm garment was not so brightly coloured. She also wished she still had her gun. She had no doubt that she was putting herself into very great danger here but her first priority had to be to her investigation. That meant that while everyone else was trying to protect the living, she had to look out for the dead. She knew the Englishman held at least part of a clue wedged in his shattered skull. The FBI would have to help her with that and so she had to be sure he was there for them to examine when they arrived, if she could. She was certain that Major Schwartz, too, held some further hints about the facts in his own death, the identity of those responsible for it, and their motives. Her duty here was clear. She just wished it was not also so blindingly obvious.

  Jolene opened the door of the hut and froze. Subconsciously she had adjusted to twenty-four hours a day daylight very well. It came as a genuine shock to find the interior of the hut absolutely dark. Unlike the well-fitted labs and the social Jamesway, there was no need for windows in mere storage huts. The light of the midnight sun was cloud-obscured, far too dull to penetrate. The doorway was well shadowed from the blaze in the parking area. Wishing now she had a torch as well as a gun, she stepped in.

  Automatically, she felt around on the inner doorframe for a light switch, and found one. A cord dangled. She closed the door carefully, making sure it was tight. Then she pulled the dangling cord and the hut was filled with dull white light from a low-wattage bulb in the roof. A sudden wind thumped against the outside of the hut, making the canvas walls flap thunderously. She jumped, but even this strong hint from Mother Nature failed to alert her to how flimsy the glorified tent really was. Enough light escaped through the weatherproofed walls to make the whole thing glow like a danger signal to anybody watching in the murky daylight outside.

  Jolene had not yet had the opportunity to examine the late Major Schwartz and it seemed to her a good opportunity to combine the duties of guard and inspector. She had gained her first degree, in criminology, at the University of Texas, but her doctorate in forensic science had been earned on the West Coast. She could perform a pretty fair autopsy on Major Schwartz herself, if the need arose. Certainly his stiff, icy corpse held no terrors for her. She unzipped the plastic bag it was in and went deftly but carefully to work.

  Which is what she was still doing a minute or two later when the light went out.

  On the instant the darkness came, Jolene dropped to the floor so that the first bullet went over her head, through the space she had occupied an instant ago. She knew the quiet spit of the gun as well as she knew her own heartbeat and rolled onto her back looking for the red dot of the laser sight. She lay still, face up like a corpse herself, mouth wide and nostrils flared, swallowing air without the slightest susurration of breath. So quiet that the only giveaway was the echoing beat of her heart. She counted seven — a lucky number with her. Nothing. Not even the red glimmer of the dock’s sight. Tension screwed at her like an emotional rack. ‘He’s waiting for me to move: do not move,’ she thought. ‘He knows exactly where I am. If I don’t move he will creep up and kill me anyway.’ She moved her head infinitesimally. She heard the slither of the hood beneath her cranium and stopped, eyes as wide as her gasping mouth, striving to soak up enough dull light to discriminate shadows and silhouettes. Instead she saw the faintest of red lines cut through the rising column of her frosted breath.

  Panic. Did he see it? God, what a giveaway. How could he miss it?

  Faintest of footfalls. Whisper of nylon. He was on the move. Was there a rhythm? Could she move at the same time using his movement to cover her own?

  Whisper of nylon against nylon. She rolled. Bang! The shot smashed into one of the bodies above her.

  ‘That was a little big edgy,’ some calculating part of her psyche said coldly, ‘shooting a dead man.’

  Whisper of nylon on wood … She rolled again, tensing herself for the shot. There was none. She lay face down now under Major Schwartz’s table. Arms folded and tensed, ready to push as she leaped upward. Had he come against her at that moment, she might have done just that, hurling her stiff, frozen evidence into her would-be murderer’s face, no matter what the cost. But he did not come. And her reason whispered, ‘You cannot harm the evidence. You are the inspector …’

  And so, even without another whisper, she rolled sideways away from temptation. She saw the floor where her face had been the instant before she rolled; rough wooden boards illuminat
ed by a bright red spot. She understood that but for her movement that deadly mark would have rested unsuspected on the back of her head. She kept moving by a sheer exercise of will, tearing her muscles through the incapacitating shivers of revulsion. The red-marked floor exploded upwards and she closed her eyes, rolling again, calculating with the most intimate of knowledge how swiftly the next round would pump up into the chamber. Rolled again, remembering with photographic precision that the table behind Schwartz was piled with boxes two metres high and more. Hurled herself erect, the shoulder of her parka whispering past the table edge.

  A black wall of boxes stood between her and her would-be killer. Let him not think to shoot under the tables, she thought. Her legs flinched, slowing her as she danced away. A tunnel between the piled boxes gleamed red. The laser sight shone on the inner surfaces. Something spat through, making the table lurch; spat through to whine past her ear and thump out through the wall behind. Three shots gone, she counted. She had to calculate on a full load. She was still in terrible trouble, from an attacker she had neither seen nor heard. And her own gun! She had time to curse that pompous, inefficient bastard Colonel Jaeger. Then she gave the loudest and most blood-curdling scream she could manage and threw herself sideways. She landed on her right shoulder, rolled, and powered up onto her feet again. The layout of the hut was like a map in the laptop of her visual memory. She was exactly at the junction of the space between the tables. If she stopped going sideways now and started rolling forwards she had a good chance of reaching the door.

  With no further hesitation she threw herself forward. Precisely into the cold grip of Tony Thompson. Together, like Romeo and Juliet awakening, in a kind of sickening slow motion, slightly louder than the arrival of an Amtrak locomotive, they rolled onto the floor. Still Jolene did not stop fighting. She took the corpse by his shoulders and lifted. Her feet skidded on floorboards slickened by some nameless dead-person slime. She pushed him away. A red brightness defined his shoulder. His right; her left. He slammed ardently down on top of her, dead flesh as bullet-proof as Teflon-coated Kevlar. ‘Fuck you!’ she screamed. He knew where she was. There was nothing to lose by making a noise until he lost sight of her again. ‘I know who you are,’ she shrieked, hoping for nothing more than to give him pause. ‘I’ll see you fry, you bastard …’

  And the distant door opened.

  ‘That’s not very ladylike,’ said Richard Mariner, peering into the darkness.

  ‘Gun!’ she bellowed, tearing her throat.

  Tony Thompson’s heavy corpse slammed to her left, the weight of the next bullet pressing it down again. She threw it left and rolled to the right. Her hair caught in the splintered floorboards and she all but scalped herself coming up but still she did not hesitate. ‘Get help,’ she bellowed at the gaping door.

  Outside, there was a flash of movement. Richard’s shoulder, she guessed. Inside, there was a blur diving sideways across the dull square of doorway. She saw nothing more than a figure in cold-weather gear, apparently flying. Her foot hit more of the slippery liquid from whichever of the corpses and she went down hard. By the time she picked herself up, everything was quiet and Richard was running back in through the gaping portal.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ she asked, her voice ragged.

  ‘Nothing. No one.’

  ‘He went this way.’ She led Richard to the last place she had seen the figure. In the canvas wall of the storeroom there was a long, clean cut.

  ‘So,’ said Richard thoughtfully, ‘he had a knife as well as a gun.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jolene. ‘But what else did he have?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean did he have a bomb?’

  He hesitated. ‘That’s why he was here I’d say. What do you want to save from in here?’

  ‘Can’t we —’

  ‘Search for it, find it, disarm it in time? I think not. We’re already living dangerously.’

  ‘Then it’s the bodies. Schwartz first, with everything of his we can carry.’

  They worked in a frenzy. Everything around the spaced-suited corpse was piled willy-nilly on his firm flat belly. Then they simply caught up the square corners of the table he was resting on and ran him out through the door. Richard was first, running backwards, slipping and almost falling down the steps onto the icy ground. ‘Keep going,’ he yelled at her.

  Two huts away, on the edge of the flame-bright central area, they left him and turned to go back for Tony Thompson.

  ‘What are you doing?’ came Colin’s distant bellow. ‘Can we help? We’re all done here.’

  ‘Stay back,’ bellowed Richard in the loudest voice Jolene had ever heard. Then he was gone past her, heading back in for Tony Thompson. Still game, though deeply convinced now that she must be mad, she turned to follow her intrepid helper.

  Then suddenly his great black form was silhouetted against white. She saw him spread against the ballooning detonation like a chiaroscuro in an animation. The exploding atoms of force tore past him and then she was flying and possessed the deep knowledge that she had seen him take wing as well.

  Richard flew backwards into the wall of the next Jamesway whereas Jolene, further back behind him, missed it and flew out into the parade ground, sliding almost to Colonel Jaeger’s feet before she stopped. The soft wall of the rigid-frame tent broke Richard’s fall, and he was not too much the worse for wear. Unlike the Jamesway. The weight of his body wrecked the wall on which he landed, and the searing heat set the frame and wooden floor alight. He rolled sideways over the fire-retardant material of his safety net and contrived to be well away before the whole lot went up in flames. Still running — and a good deal more shocked than he realised — he hurled into Colin Ross who was returning with the other firefighters from their successful efforts in the vehicle dispersal area. ‘Here we go again, Colin,’ he said, very loudly, half deafened by the explosion.

  Colin could see that. So could the others, particularly as the wounded, with two doctors and Kate Ross, were pouring out of the burning building that had broken Richard’s fall: the base’s medical facility. Running forward, well practised now, the firefighters set up their teams again. This time they did not need to worry so much about foam. The fire-retardant walls of the huts contained the flames until they reached ignition point. Then the huts exploded, spreading flame like a virulent contagion. The fire teams soaked the walls with sea water as best they could, but after the medical facility, two of the laboratory huts went up too, the chemicals within them making the explosions larger and more deadly. It was these explosions, the last before the flames began to come under some kind of control, that claimed Killigan and his right-hand man Corporal Washington. Singed, seared, almost as badly wounded as Hugo Knowles, they were dragged aside and replaced, until the sullen flames began to die back at last.

  After that it was just a case of quenching wooden floors, contents and packing cases. Half an hour’s work which, unfortunately, robbed Armstrong of almost all its medical supplies.

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Jolene the moment she came round.

  ‘Richard?’ said Kate Ross, dabbing her last anaesthetic disinfectant wipe on a combination of blast sear and gravel graze on Jolene’s forehead. ‘He’s back fighting the fire.’

  ‘Not Richard. Major Schwartz.’

  ‘Over there, taking his ease where you left him. I warn you, though, that since the infirmary went up he’s beginning to drip a little.’

  ‘I’ve got to get him somewhere secure.’

  ‘That’s up to you, dear. But dead people are low on my list. I’ve got wounded and dying to take care of. And not much left to do it with.’

  This statement was a little over-dramatic in fact. Kate had no one that near death’s door, but she did have several who were pretty badly burned and blast-damaged, Killigan and Washington among them. A couple of scientists, Fagan and Mendel, were a cause for concern; Mendel particularly, the last to leave an exploding hut, had been badly seared by the bla
st.

  As the last fires came back under control and the exhausted men and women of Armstrong base began to look around themselves it became time to take stock. The gathering light of a new day at the beginning of the last working week of the millennium revealed that they had lost one store hut, two labs and the medical facility, as well as half their transport pool. On the plus side, they had shelter and supplies to continue their work. They even had enough medical equipment to tend all but the worst cases, for the labs all had well-equipped first aid boxes, just as the vehicles had all had foam-filled firefighting canisters.

  Looking around his battered command like Colonel Travis at the Alamo, Jaeger said hoarsely, ‘We are due for relief at the end of the next month. We can certainly expect a full re-fit before we close down for the winter in March. We still have a lot of work to do and everything we need in order to get on with it.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to hold any of you here against your will, particularly in the face of the FBI’s imminent arrival. But anyone who wants to stand with me and get on with the work we were sent here to do is welcome.’

  ‘Not me,’ came Jolene’s clear voice. Heads swivelled to look at her standing thin and straight beside the silvered corpse of Bernie Schwartz. ‘I’m asking Andrew Pitcairn to take me and my evidence out of here until I can guarantee security. I’m not sure what is going on here but I am certain that almost all the violence over the last few days has been aimed at a dead man — this dead man. And everyone else who has been hurt or killed has simply gotten in the way. We’re outta here, so maybe you folks can sleep a little easier. If the Feds don’t like it, you just tell them to come talk it over with me.’