Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  The pathway led up into the light, over the shoulder of the mountain and onto a plateau just large enough to contain a collection of huts and a stack of communications equipment. Unlike Armstrong, the huts were real huts, not Jamesways; they had wooden sides and real glass windows. After the high-tech twenty-first century set-up of the NASA camp, this all looked a little old-fashioned, out of date, shabby.

  The radio mast towered over all — but in the earliest moments of the twenty-first century, it could not simply be a radio mast. Up its skeletal length, secured and well-protected against the fiercest excesses of Antarctic weather, there were satellite dishes, bowls and aerials of all sorts. It was obvious which was the main communications hut, for it crouched at the base of the mast, almost between its feet. At a decent, secure, distance away stood the camp’s power source, a solid-looking generator hut, identifiable by the pile of fuel cans outside it. Other than that there were labs and dormitory huts, similar to the basic layout of Armstrong. Except that there was no transport dispersal area. If you wanted to get anywhere on Deception, you walked down to the beach and you took a boat. But the Argentinean scientific team who normally lived here in the summer must have taken their boats away with them, for they had seen no boats below.

  ‘Hoyle,’ shouted Killigan. ‘Can you get the generator started?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  ‘OK. Do it. I’ll take both the women with me.’ As he spoke, Killigan let the red dot rest on Vivien Agran. It followed her as she came over to join Jolene. Then, inevitably, Killigan said, ‘Move.’

  As Hoyle went over to the generator, the three of them went towards the communications hut. The women walked side by side, with Killigan a little behind them switching the red dot from one to the other, letting the ruby line of light bounce over their shoulders as they walked so that they would not forget he had a bead on them. The penguins screamed in the distance. That was all. Apart from the crunching of their footsteps on the cindery gravel, and the whisper of their breath, there was no sound. The wind was dead calm. There was no surf on the inner lagoon. In the far distance of the vast skyscape revealed by their elevation here, clouds gathered and toothpicks of lightning glittered, but there was no whisper of sound from them.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ said Jolene, her voice only slightly louder than the rhythmic crunching of her footsteps. ‘You going to get the disk off him and send it your own people instead? Is there really ten million dollars up for grabs or was that just a con to buy some time?’

  Vivien did not respond.

  ‘You think Varnek’s going to get up here in time to give you an edge? You well tooled up?’

  If the entertainment officer had any reply, she could not make it. The door of the communications hut was suddenly in front of them.

  ‘It’s open,’ said Killigan. ‘Agran, lead the way.’

  As Vivien opened the door, a distant coughing roar alerted them to the fact that they had power. She reached for the light switch and the communications hut lit up. Everything was covered, closed down, carefully secured. Killigan pushed past them, confident about what equipment he wanted to use and how to get at it. The only thing that slowed him was the necessity of holding the red dot on the women. Then Hoyle ran in and took over, working with the speed of a well-trained expert.

  The computer looked old-fashioned but functional. When they checked that it was connected to the power and switched it on, it lit up quickly enough. Its flickering seemed to fill the room. Jolene looked around, surprised. The strange light seemed to be catching the corner of her eyes, flickering at the window as though the sky itself was fluttering like a butterfly wing. She stepped back to look out of the window at her shoulder. Nothing. Perhaps it was the tension, she thought. For it was coming up to the microsecond when she would have to make her move. The e-mail address would be up any instant — either Killigan’s or Mrs Agran’s. It would all depend on which way Killigan would jump, now, at the last possible moment. She tensed for action. The flickering of the screen died and the icons came up. With a bark of delight, Hoyle sat down and grabbed the mouse. He rolled the cursor over the plain green screen to the symbol for Internet communications and clicked on it.

  From outside there came a high scream. Something thumped on the roof. They all jumped so badly that Killigan nearly shot someone. The outer edges of Jolene’s sight began to flicker again. Shock, she told herself. Get a grip, girl. Her mind was racing, trying to work out how to get her hand down the front of her jeans without anyone noticing. But in fact that was the easiest bit.

  ‘Can’t get the Internet server up,’ said Hoyle. He clicked again. The scream and the thump on the roof came again. ‘It’s the dish,’ said Hoyle. ‘Trying to connect us with our service provider via the phone satellite!’

  No sooner had he said this than the screen cleared. ‘We’re in,’ he said. ‘That’s our provider’s logo. We’re on the Internet. Now I know exactly what number I gotta dial. Here we go …’

  Jolene focused all of her concentration on the screen, beginning to worm her fingers down the waistband of her jeans.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Vivien. ‘I’ve got one more offer to make.’

  Hoyle’s hands wavered. He looked up at Killigan.

  ‘I’m sure I can get my people to go up over ten million dollars.’

  ‘That’s not much of an improvement, lady,’ said Killigan.

  ‘And the ride out. That I can guarantee. Remember that. You come in with me, you get a ride on Kalinin, safe and secret. You know I can deliver that. You can drop off at Ushuaia in three days with a down payment. You can walk away and never look back, with the balance wired anywhere in the world you want. All of you. No loose ends.’

  ‘Except one,’ said Killigan, and the red dot flashed blindingly into Jolene’s eyes as he spoke.

  The door burst open. Varnek and Washington erupted into the hut, Mendel a little way behind them.

  Stasis. Except for Jolene pulling her fingers back out into the light. Silence. Stillness. Except for the weirdest crackling; a strange, faint odour. And a distant rumble, as though the second part of the storm was coming much more quickly than anticipated.

  Jolene, her body tense as a spring, looked at the two groups she was caught between. The flickering through the window behind her came again, more powerful now. And as it did, Killigan jerked his gun round in one swift, fluid motion and shot Washington through the head.

  Jolene didn’t stop to think. The game had suddenly jumped beyond anything she had calculated or could deal with now so she threw herself backwards with all her might. The back of her head hit the glass of the window and shattered it with stunning force. Her shoulders took the glass and cleared it out of the frame so that she could pivot on her hips and roll free through the small frame which was just big enough to allow her body to exit.

  She hit the cindery ground in a foetal position, rolling sideways, able at last to push her hands down the front of her jeans unobserved.

  As she came up, there was Hoyle with Washington’s rifle, coming round the corner of the hut, bringing the big Remington to bear. Jolene rested on one knee, ripping the pistol up into two-handed firing position, arms straight, flicking the safety off as it came up. As soon as the barrel was in line with his thorax she squeezed off a pattern of three and rolled away. Whether she hit him or not she did not know, but when she came up again, he was gone. She broke for the nearest cover, the labs by the cliff edge. Only when she hit the ground behind their reassuring bulk did she begin to try and take stock.

  She should have been trying to work out what was going on and how she was going to retrieve the situation now. Instead, as she let the shells fall out of her gun and slammed in another complete load, she was wondering what in hell’s name was happening to the sky. She had heard of the aurora australis, the southern lights. She knew about most sorts of atmospheric interference from the petty to the memorably epic. She knew that the spectacular light shows that the solar wind, for exampl
e, could trigger at high latitudes were becoming more vivid because the ionosphere was rippling down nearer the earth. But apart from the Fourth of July, she had never seen anything like this.

  The entire sky above her head was full of flashing lights. Up at the zenith, they were like sheet lightning, flickering across the whole dome of heaven in a range of colours from rose-pink to blood-red. Beneath this were individual lines and streamers, light and dark, like the trails of great exploding rocket displays. They had no form. There were no dandelion clocks of fire. No ruby fountains, golden waterfalls or silver showers like there had been on the last night of the state fairs of her youth. But the upper sky was all ablaze in a most amazing feast of ill-organised pyrotechnics, all the more impressive because, like the aurora, it was all but silent.

  ‘Hey, Inspector,’ came Killigan’s voice. ‘What’ve you done to the Internet?’

  Jolene rolled onto her stomach in the gritty ash and peeped round the corner of the hut she was hiding behind. She made no sound.

  ‘Dish looks all right,’ he shouted gruffly. ‘So you must have screwed with something else, huh?’

  Could he not see? she asked herself silently, wild with pettish frustration. Could he not comprehend? Whatever was happening above their heads was screwing with more than wavelengths in the light spectrum. It was screwing with everything.

  Mir! It was Mir coming down! Right over their heads. Two hundred tons of it and a nuclear generator. Jesus! The most expensive light show in the history of the world. She raised the Smith and Wesson, looking for a target.

  ‘Don’t blame me, you sorry fucker,’ she yelled. ‘Blame the Russians. It’s their space station.’

  Black grit kicked up in front of her face. She had seen no red dot, nothing. She rolled back into cover. Silence. Except, right in the furthest range of her hearing, a strange, gathering thunder. Then, by a fluke of timbre, by a chance of auditory wavelength, she heard a tiny tinkle. She was distracted by the breathtaking sky. It was such a tiny sound after all, like a dime thrown onto the ground. Only at the last instant did she jerk into action, tearing the muscles of her belly as she moved with galvanic force. And not a moment too soon. The hut she had been hiding behind erupted into flames which rose as though challenging the majestic light show in the sky and rained down on her crouching back in splinters — splinters and nothing larger, thank God. She was up and sprinting for the next hut at once. Black grit kicked up from beside her foot. She noticed this and thought it was probably a bullet from the rifle with its heavier load. Bad shooting from Hoyle, unless they were trying to wound her and hold her as a hostage still. At this stage that didn’t seem very likely. They’d kill her with the next shot, then.

  Jolene dived to her right, hoping to God there was a building there. There was: an outhouse used as a chemical john, like the one Billy boy had tried to watch her using. But it was much, much smaller; this was Argentina after all. It was about a metre square, two metres tall. Unless she was going to stand behind it like a sentry in a sentry box it was going to be no use at all. She pulled herself to her knees, looking around. About three metres beyond the outhouse the ground sloped away steeply towards the edge of the cliff. Then a sheer drop of more than six hundred metres to a shallow beach and a deep lagoon. If the water they had experienced so far was anything to go by, the lagoon would turn her into something fit for Captain Birdseye in about three minutes flat.

  Jolene fought to her feet and turned, using the chemical toilet as a shield, reaching out with her right arm round the end, balancing the weight of the Smith and Wesson against her burning need to draw a bead on a target — preferably Killigan — and blow the sucker away.

  Instead, she saw Killigan’s shoulder as he pitched another detonator at her. He should have been a pitcher for a major league team. The shot was accurate, perfectly timed and unstoppable. The last thing she thought with any clarity was, ‘Strike one.’

  Then behind her the Sikorsky reared up over the edge of the cliff and swept into the upper air, the power of its passage sucking her backwards onto the dangerous, cliff-edge slope. As her feet slipped down onto the cinder path, the whole outhouse blew up. A massive gout of red and yellow flame instantly occupied the space where she had been. She took one more giddy step backward, and then the blast caught her. It caught her, held her, lifted her, pitched her over the edge of the cliff and then it dropped her.

  *

  ‘There they are,’ shouted Robin as she brought the Sikorsky up towards the cliff edge. She could see figures against the spectacular pyrotechnics in the sky.

  ‘Can you see Jolene?’ T-Shirt yelled.

  ‘No,’ bellowed Robin.

  ‘She’s a top-flight professional,’ said Richard. ‘She can take care of herself.’

  ‘Glad I gave her back the Smith and Wesson though,’ commented T-Shirt.

  ‘We need to get over the lip of the cliff,’ called Richard. ‘See if we can put down anywhere.’

  ‘All right, darling,’ shouted Robin.

  Robin’s words drowned out Colin’s more sensible, ‘Is that wise? We aren’t armed …’

  And so they came up over the edge of the cliff, straight into the heart of the fire-fight. No sooner had the black edge of the vertical drop heaved in under the Sikorsky’s nose than Robin was yelling, ‘There she …’

  And the outhouse went up. Jolene’s body jerked backwards as though a line had been tied to it and she had been pulled over the cliff edge by a falling weight. All of them were in the cockpit. The men were crowding their heads into the cockpit through the door from the cabin. They all saw the lone figure, pale, intrepid. They all saw the explosion. They all saw her flying out and down beneath the rearing nose of the helicopter.

  Then the blast which had chucked Jolene so casually over the edge of the cliff caught the Sikorsky and flung it upwards. Debris rattled against the nose, and Robin, for one thanked God that it had not been a brick outhouse. Flames licked at the undercarriage. The Sikorsky was riding the top of the blast bubble, seemingly pressed hard against the glittering sky.

  ‘She’s gone over the edge,’ yelled Richard.

  Automatically, without thinking, Robin reached for the radio. Opened a channel to Kalinin, sucked in breath to warn the ship. At the very least they should drop a lifeboat and look for Jolene’s corpse. Shattered or frozen, it made little difference, as long as the death was quick. The instant Robin opened the channel to Kalinin, the whole of Killigan’s armoury went up, triggered by the helicopter’s radio signal. The communications shack erupted in a massive mushroom of fire large enough to topple the radio mast and ignite the generator hut. The Sikorsky, already surfing up on the wave of explosive power, swung upwards and backwards again, hurling back across Port Foster towards the southernmost curve of cliffs. Only Robin’s natural genius as a pilot held them safely in the air. They were back across the harbour, skimming over Telefon Bay on the far side before Robin brought the Sikorsky under control. And it was only then, really, that they noticed T-Shirt had gone, vanished out of the helicopter altogether, leaving behind him on the cabin floor a duvet like the cloak of an ancient king.

  *

  The human body falls, give or take, thirty metres a second. So when she went over the edge of the cliff, Jolene had a little over twenty seconds to live. If she had sat in solemn silence, counting each second off on her watch, they could hardly have been longer than the seconds she experienced. At first she fell backwards, speed gathering, looking lazily upwards at the rocket show in the wild sky above her. She had the feeling of her arms and legs waving, swimming and kicking in the air. A roaring of air past her ears gathered, intensified. She saw the belly of the Sikorsky, outlined against the glory among the stars, soaring away from her — and that was all, really, that gave her a sensation of falling. But then an extra twist of movement flipped her over. At once the wind bit at her eyes at near hurricane force, for she was falling at more than one hundred kilometres an hour by now. And now that she was face down, t
he wind blasted past her ears with deafening force, so that she did not hear the destruction of Deception Base when Killigan’s detonators all went off. She knew nothing else of the Sikorsky, blown like thistledown more than two kilometres across the bay, riding the blast wave backwards. All she knew was that her heavy head was pulling her down into her last high dive. The edge of the bay came into focus even to her streaming eyes, and it was chopping up towards her faster than a guillotine blade. Now, and only now, did she realise that she was going to die here, any second, and her heart felt as though it was going to break before her head exploded on the shore or her body froze in the bay.

  But at the very moment when she gave up hope, T-Shirt slammed into her back. ‘Hang on,’ he screamed into her ear. Arms and legs flapped wildly, and even before she could realise how useless his sacrifice was, he had thrown away his hand-chute and was wrapped around her, holding her tight as tight could be while his big, wingshaped parachute brought them safely and gently down into the instant death of the freezing ocean immediately below.

  *

  ‘There they are,’ yelled Richard. ‘I can see the parachute. How soon can we get to them?’

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ called Robin and, in spite of all she had said about safety, she cut through the outer edge of the blast to drive the battered helicopter down across the bay. By the time they were over the parachute, two minutes had passed, however, and short of going swimming in the icy water themselves there was nothing they could do other than head flat out for the Zodiacs.

  There was no room on the beach, so Robin hovered as low as she possibly could while Richard and Colin dropped out of the cabin and onto the black cinder shore. Here they found Borisov still sitting in his Zodiac, unsure of what to do. They focused his mind in no uncertain fashion. Piling into the big black inflatable they yelled a range of orders at him which it is unlikely he understood in any detail. The basic objective was clear enough, however. The Russian officer gave the Zodiac full throttle and it sped in a wide curve across the mirror-smooth perfection of the bay. The last of Mir fell away to the north of them, its flashing brightness beginning to intermingle with the gathering front behind the great storm’s eye.