Candleburn

by Jack Hayes

  One of the agents took a painting from the wall above Nate. The doctor put a saline drip in Asp’s arm and hoisted it on a coat hanger. They clipped it to the empty picture hook.

  “So,” Mac said, “what about the bomb?”

  “What about the Prince and Duchess of Cambridge?”

  “Already whisked out of here,” Mac replied. “They’re probably boarding the plane to England as we speak.”

  “Is the area under evacuation?”

  “Be serious, Blake,” Mac said. “How would you get a warning out to the populations of all these buildings in a little over ninety minutes? The panic would be ridiculous. There has to be a way to stop the bomb.”

  Silence, save for the doctor’s murmur back and forth with the nurse.

  “Rasoul said there was no-one in the country with the expertise to disarm it,” Blake said. “That true?”

  “Almost certainly,” Mac replied. “I have men looking into it as we speak. But it seems unlikely. Come on! A better plan, please!”

  Blake felt a wave of anger.

  “What the hell is this?” Blake said. “Why is this down to me? And hold on a second, why am I having this conversation with you? Surely there is a head of security or a local MI6 boss I should be talking to rather than a Judge, even one as elevated and humble as yourself?”

  Mac stared at Blake. Unblinking eyes, fierce and full of fire.

  Blake slapped his palm to his face.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered.

  “Good,” Mac said. “Now, you’re thinking. What did I tell you today? We’re not morons. Of course I knew all along who you are and what you were. I know all about Ron, just as Ron knows all about me. Do you really think it was mere coincidence that you happened to be regularly taken to our house for drinks? Why you? Why not the other journalists in your office?”

  Blake felt incredibly stupid.

  “With my credentials out of the way,” Mac continued, “back to the issue at hand. We have 1:41:56 until a bomb takes out almost a circular kilometre of one of the friendliest nations in the Gulf. If we can’t disarm it, can we do a controlled detonation?”

  “The bomb’s too big for that – and on a rooftop,” Blake said. “I doubt it could be done in the time frame, given the way it works.”

  “Could we helicopter it out? Take it to sea and dump it?”

  Blake considered it briefly.

  “Even with a standard thermobaric that would be a tough call,” he said. “A normal one is 10 tons. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was larger. That’s too heavy for a helicopter. Plus, it’s in a sealed box that’s bolted to the building. Probably, the casing blows open when the thing goes off with its first charge.”

  The doctor was working furiously with a scalpel at Asp’s chest. The nurse had clipped a bright LED light to the back of a chair and was assisting with an anaesthetic mask over Nate’s face.

  Blake chewed another biscuit and washed it down with cool refreshing water.

  He needed a cigarette.

  He doubted that either Mac or the Doctor would approve.

  He watched the nurse’s hand work a small ball next to the Nate’s mask as she manually pumped gas into his lungs.

  Helicopters. Thermobarics. Rooftops. Oxygen.

  “I have an idea,” he said slowly. “But the timing is going to be tighter than tight.”

  58

  Blake held his phone loosely so that both he and Mac could see the clock ticking down.

  00:07:14

  “And you think they’ll get here in time?” Mac asked, straightening his tie in his collar.

  “Each time you enquire doesn’t make them faster,” Blake said. “All I can do is run you through the numbers. Al Bateen Air Force base is 80 miles as the crow flies. Their top speed is 200 mph, unladen. If they didn’t have a cargo, we’d be laughing. With one, though... it’ll be close.”

  Mac tapped his finger nervously on the stainless steel banister that ran the length of the mezzanine.

  “It already is close,” he said.

  They were alone on the viewing deck, ten storeys up in the Burj Khalifa. It was a clear view from this atrium out to Kaskhar’s building. It was amazing, given that the bomb had been put in place in plain sight of so many people, that Kaskhar’s plan had nearly been successful. The tarpaulin had been removed by engineers from the Dubai ruler’s elite army team as they checked to see if there had been a mistake and the bomb could be disarmed in time.

  After thirty minutes of examination, they’d agreed that Blake’s plan – the wheels of which had been put in motion within a minute of him explaining the idea – was the most likely way to prevent excessive damage.

  Mac punched some buttons on his phone.

  “Sir?” a disjointed voice called through the speaker.

  “Cassie – as soon as you can, I’d like an audio of what’s going on plugged through to this phone.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  Beneath Mac and Blake, the area around the fountains, normally brimming with tourists and shoppers from the Dubai Mall, was deserted. In ninety minutes, the police had, despite Mac’s concerns, done an excellent job of clearing the streets.

  The official line was a chemical spill.

  00:06:32

  Very soon, the official line was likely to be explosively correct.

  “I thought the mobile signals were being blocked in this area at the moment to prevent remote detonation of the bomb?” Blake asked.

  Mac lifted his handset and waved it lightly.

  “Let’s just say not all of them operate on the same frequencies,” he replied.

  Blake bit his lip. There was a question burning inside him but given the circumstances, he didn’t want to provoke an argument.

  “Spit it out, Blake,” Mac said, his Scottish demeanour lending a commanding gravitas to the sentence.

  Blake hesitated before responding.

  “Why didn’t you listen to my warnings sooner?”

  “Aside from the fact that you had no evidence and were rambling like a madman?” Mac replied.

  “Aside from that,” Blake shrugged.

  “Well,” Mac answered, “who stood to benefit most from a scare story about Iran?”

  Blake considered the answer. Normally he enjoyed the form his conversations with Mac took – never a straight answer, always a question to a question, letting Blake reach conclusions for himself. Now that he considered it, it should have been painfully obvious that Mac was the head of British Intelligence for the whole of the Arabian Peninsula.

  “After all, if not Dubai, where else would you use as a base for the region?” he thought.

  Blake looked back at the clock.

  00:05:59

  “The Israelis,” he said. “Or the Americans.”

  “Good boy,” Mac agreed. “And which of those is your past tied to?”

  “You thought I was part of the US plan to scare the UK into supporting a war with Iran,” Blake quietly said.

  “Right,” Mac moved away from the window and poured two cups of tea from the pot resting on the deserted bar. “No milk, it will have to be black.”

  “Tea for the end of the world?” Blake said. “Not something stronger?”

  “Really, Blake. Sometimes I think that even though you were born British you got heavily corrupted while in the United States.”

  “Still,” Blake continued, “given the risk a bomb posed...”

  “Ron’s been bleating to us for months about the threat we faced,” Mac replied. “We just didn’t think he was under so much pressure from Connors that he’d engineer this situation.”

  “Engineer?” Blake exclaimed. “Ron was behind all this? Seriously?”

  “Oh, do pay attention,” Mac chastised, “you really are intentionally dense on occasion: why do you think relations between us and them have been so strained lately? They didn’t actually want the Prince dead, or for a large section of Dubai to be destroyed, but once they’d
come across the intel that these terrorists were planning something, normally they’d have passed it straight to us. Instead, they diverted everyone, looking this way and that – chasing ghosts. That way they never pull the trigger and hoped to take credit once the situation was sufficiently serious that war with Iran was inevitable.”

  “So how is this Ron’s fault? Surely this is your agency’s problem for not paying attention when given a tap on the shoulder by their side?”

  “A boy only gets to cry wolf so many times, especially when that boy is actually a salesman peddling wolf bait. After four or five false alarms, they provided the impetus that introduced the appropriate elements together. The Al Calandria family had a bastard son, the self-styled Aarez – real name Mustapha Bin Daska Al Calandria – half Emirati, half Bulgarian.”

  00:05:12

  “The family had disowned him. Yes, they knew he had ties to the Russian mob in Dubai, it was the only way the mob could get the credentials they needed to do business here and while it mildly tarnished the family name, they recognised that even their bastard child had to have an income of sorts. But, as one of the state’s most important families had they known, they’d never have permitted him to blow up a part of their own Emirate. So if Ron hadn’t applied pressure to the Russian mob, swung a few favours here and there to connect the insanely paranoid Kaskhar and Aarez together, would anything have happened? Neither side had the resources or plan without the other.”

  00:04:49

  “So Ron didn’t pull the trigger,” Blake said, “he just loaded the gun.”

  “Correct,” Mac replied. “Two separate conspiracies got intertwined. Aarez needed money for his plan and Kaskhar need Russian connections and manpower.”

  They drank their tea as they continued their vigil.

  “I suppose that also explains my involvement, too,” Blake observed. “Ron knew I was friends with you and hoped I’d get the message through once things started stretching beyond his control. It’s silly really... I should have realised he was far too on top of the situation.”

  04:10

  “And it had irritated me all along,” he continued, “that I couldn’t figure out why a prostitute who would have stolen the original puzzle box would send that to my house and the key to my office.”

  “Yes, that part was rather clever,” Mac agreed. “The prostitute stole the box from the courier Ron indicated. He knew where the box was coming into the country and when. And, as for your involvement, there isn’t a person in Dubai that didn’t know how your moronic boss Alice was behaving – she practically bragged about it at parties throughout the city. By sending the key to your office, Ron guaranteed that the plot was going to leak out somehow.”

  03:32

  “He couldn’t have foreseen just how aggressively Aarez and his partners would work to get their plans back on track, though,” Blake said, “or how I would respond to a little undue pressure.”

  “Oh, that I think he was almost certain about,” Mac replied. “Of more interest to me, though, was the way that using you to get the message through allowed him to keep his distance – he, of course, wasn’t aware that we were on to him. We’ve had that bloody bar bugged for months.”

  A crackle from Mac’s mobile.

  A set of broken voices issued from the speaker with the acoustic properties of a penny rattling in a biscuit tin.

  “This is tough going, strong winds are buffeting the sling, over.”

  “Any update on an ETA?”

  “We’re a few miles out, still. But we can see the Burj, over.”

  There was a strong throbbing in the distance. Both men looked around through the window. At first, they couldn’t see its source.

  02:59

  “There!” Mac said.

  He pointed to the horizon. A black dot slowly getting larger.

  02:40

  “Oh God,” he huffed. “It is going to be close.”

  The Chinook helicopter, the biggest fire-fighting beast in the entire Middle East, was edging gradually closer. Beneath her belly was 14 tons of thermal suppression foam, which would expand 200 times in volume within a minute.

  02:25

  If it had a full minute to expand.

  And if the plan worked.

  “We should step away from the windows,” Blake said. “There’s a settee over there we can use as a shield in case the glass shatters.”

  “You think that’s a risk?”

  “Honestly?” Blake replied. “I don’t know if this will work. It should – themrobarics can’t operate in the absence of oxygen. That much fire suppression foam will be scattered by the first blast from the bomb and should keep the fuel from vaporising fully. Certainly, it should stop a cloud forming. When the second blast happens, we’ll get a big bang... but it should be orders of magnitude smaller than it would normally.”

  “How much smaller is orders of magnitude smaller?”

  “Let’s just say it’ll be safest if we watch from behind the settee.”

  “This isn’t Doctor Who, you know.”

  00:01:52

  The mobile crackled to life again:

  “We’re nearing the drop zone. The buffeting is getting worse, over”

  The Chinook, great twin-rotor behemoth, arced between the buildings. It was a dinosaur of the air in both size and age of its design. In the wake of its mighty downdraft, the palms that decorated the streets bowed as they would in the fiercest of storms.

  00:01:44

  “Come on, come on,” Blake muttered.

  He was amazed at the skill of the pilot, sweeping through the artificial canyons created by a roll-call of the world’s greatest architects. Next to the Burj Khalifa, each other skyscraper looked like a normal high-rise office tower. Blake knew that transferred to London, more than a dozen of these structures would make Canary Wharf and the Shard look like pygmies against the horizon.

  00:01:35

  “At the drop site,” the voice of the pilot continued. “Bad updrafts. Hard to hold steady, over.”

  “Come on...” Blake whispered.

  The helicopter wobbled as it circled the titanium box, shining brilliant in the midday Dubai sun. The red and orange striped hammock, larger than a house and slung beneath its belly, shifted like a pendulum in the gusting wind.

  00:01:21

  “Get on with it...” Blake muttered.

  “The hammock’s shaking too much, over.”

  00:01:17

  “If he doesn’t do it soon, the foam won’t have time to expand,” Mac said, alarmed, “and he won’t have time to get away before the helicopter’s taken out by any blast wave.”

  “But if he drops the foam and the hammock’s swinging,” Blake said, “he’ll slop it everywhere except on the bomb.”

  00:01:12

  They watched the pendulum, mesmerised as it steadily oscillated to and fro.

  The helicopter shifted closer to the building.

  “What’s he doing?” Mac said.

  00:01:10

  The helicopter descended until the hammock rested on the bomb.

  00:01:02

  “It’s not ideal,” the pilot said. “But we’re running out of time and out of options, over.”

  00:00:55

  The Chinook, twisting as the pilot sought to remain directly over the bomb, began to rise once more. The rested hammock was moving less.

  A dawdling trickle, like milk in a cereal advertisement, poured in slow motion from the sling.

  00:00:42

  As it hit the bomb, at first it began to splash off. The trickle grew to a torrent when the hammock opened fully. The landing liquid frothed. The torrent became a deluge. The expanding foam stuck to the bomb and the roof, gaining ever more size as it beefed up, exposed to the air.

  00:00:36

  “This may just work,” Blake said, hope flickering in his voice.

  The building took on the appearance of an expensive coffee as the froth piled higher and continued to voraciously expa
nd.

  00:00:30

  The helicopter began to turn and tilt forward. The hammock was released to reduce drag as the Chinook flew away. They had little time to get out of the blast radius and land – even a minimal explosion could generate enough turbulence to rip the blades from the rotors.

  00:00:15

  The foam continued to build in size.

  “I hope this is going to work,” Blake thought.

  He grabbed two large cushions and handed one to Mac.

  “What’s...?”

  00:00:10

  “To cover your head,” Blake said. “If those windows do go...”

  “Eleanor isn’t going to like that I stayed to watch this...”

  00:00:05

  “Please, God... work,” Blake thought.

  00:00:00

  The first explosion rocked the floor. The windows bowed visibly in. The top blew off the mountain of froth, sending foam scattering into the air.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Blake said.

  “Now is not the time...”

  Mac’s sentence was cut short. The second blast was stupendous. The foam vanished – obliterated from existence – the ground shook, earthquake strong, and chunks of concrete, hurled from some mighty catapult rocketed in all directions.

  Mac and Blake ducked.

  Giant, streaming, knife-edged shards of glass streaked in all directions.

  “Shit, shit, shit...”

  Even as his lips moved and he heard his voice, Blake was so viscerally part of the all-seeming oneness of the exploding shockwave – he could feel it forcibly shaking through his internal organs – that he couldn’t be sure if it was him saying the words.

  And then, it was over.

  Blake’s body was trembling.

  He couldn’t lift from his knees. For the first time in his life, he truly understood the words ‘shell shocked’. His fingers wouldn’t release the pillow clasped firmly to his head. He looked at Mac. The Scot’s eyes, bush-baby wide stared back at him.

  Lips parted, eyebrows raised in dumb surprise, Blake couldn’t be sure which of them started it but they began laughing.

  Long and hard and deep.

  They laughed until their ribs ached.

  Mac raised a finger and pointed to Blake’s head. Blake’s fingers finally responded to his commands, the power of laughter lifting the spell of fear. He looked at the top of the thick cushion.