Smilovitz had said the virus was manufactured. Made. Created. By a human designer. In a lab. Manhattan? She doubted it. A terrorist attack, then? It made little sense, but more so than an attack by a nation state. Who would use this kind of virus as a weapon?
Still searching in the bag, her fingers curled around the small metal tin. Though labelled liquorice pellets, inside was a USB. On it was a copy of the recording taken by the two Americans who’d travelled from Broken Hill to Canberra. The originals were in a bag in her hotel suite, and though no one else in Canberra had seen them, she didn’t know who had watched the footage before it had reached her.
Though she’d not had time to review the entire week-long recording, she’d seen enough to make a copy to give to Tess. Rather, she’d heard enough to want the police officer’s professional opinion. This morning hadn’t seemed the appropriate time.
There were two sets of recordings. The first having been made in Nanaimo, the airfield on Vancouver Island where Liu Higson had landed, and at Pine Dock, a remote fishing village on the wrong end of Lake Winnipeg. Those recordings were interviews with Canadians, about where they’d escaped, what they’d seen, how they’d survived the immediate aftermath of the outbreak. Interesting, sure. Except for the climate, it was very similar to the stories from Thailand or Japan.
She’d watched that footage multiple times, particularly the interview with Dr Smilovitz. Not for what he said, but to reassure herself that he had never met the Guinn siblings before. And she’d done that because of what was on the second set of recordings.
In Pine Dock, the siblings had been given military-grade body cameras with a seven-day battery life. Though they had occasionally turned off the cameras, they’d never muted the microphone. The images of their journey through Michigan and Indiana were difficult to decipher, but the sound quality was excellent.
Aside from learning anarchy had gripped South Bend and the surrounding countryside, she’d found two conversations the siblings had not intended to be recorded. Both were discussions of the cartel’s attack on Broken Hill, but in both, it was the link to the outbreak that had caught Anna’s ears.
Lisa Kempton had been preparing for some kind of apocalypse. To prevent it, years ago, she’d hired Corrie Guinn to develop software with which satellite communications could be subverted. Anna was unclear whether Corrie Guinn had developed the operating system for the satellites or merely a hack. They mentioned air traffic control systems, too, but that conversation was partially muffled by Pete Guinn’s methodical chomping of a ration pack.
Nevertheless, Lisa Kempton, the billionaire, had something to do with global satellite communications going down. Kempton had been trying to stop an apocalypse. Smilovitz had said the virus was manufactured. The cartel had attacked Kempton’s plane in Broken Hill. It was all linked. But precisely how was as unclear as how she should proceed.
Contact had been lost with the Guinns. While this didn’t guarantee they were dead, if President Trowbridge and his CIA escort had disappeared in the Canadian wilderness it was unlikely the Guinns were alive. Certainly, they would be as impossible to locate as Lisa Kempton.
While she certainly wouldn’t seek advice from Oswald Owen, nor Bronwyn Wilson, if Anna told Erin Vaughn, she would tell Lignatiev. The military would be deployed in both hemispheres, but was it worth the effort? How many lives would then not be saved?
An old rule of her father’s had stayed her hand. A lesson he’d given her when dealing with school-yard bullies who’d continued their torment after the bell: revenge never brings the rain. It had taken her a few bruises, and a few grazes to her knuckles, before she’d truly learned that lesson. Justice, of one sort or the other, required patience. She put the case back in her bag. She’d speak to Tess, and to her father, as soon as they returned to Canberra.
Darkness descended, though she didn’t close the curtains. Outside, in the distance, a sudden flurry of noise marked the nightshift heading to work. Thirty minutes later, a louder bustle denoted the dayshift returning to their billets. She returned to her papers and had just finished when a breathless sentry stumbled to a halt outside her door.
“Ma’am! Ma’am!” he gasped. “Ms Dodson.”
“Yes, that’s me. What is it?”
“You’re needed, ma’am. In the Bunker.”
“The Bunker? Why?”
“A bomb, ma’am. Someone dropped a nuclear bomb.”
12th March
Chapter 19 - The First Wave
The Bunker, Parliament House
The Bunker wasn’t supposed to be called that. Technically, it was the Communications and Operations Monitoring Station, so named because they’d chosen the acronym first. With predictable contrariness, the official name had been ditched in favour of the more accurately descriptive nickname. The Bunker was a secure room for the dissemination of reports from spies and foreign agents, from allies and eavesdropped from their enemies. None of which applied in the current crisis. Built as an underground refuge, with an airlock and air filtration system efficient enough to protect from a biological or radiological attack, the designers had been more concerned about a dirty bomb than Armageddon.
In a secure corridor, behind an unguarded sentry post, stairs descended below ground to another long corridor, which led to the Bunker. Beyond a small waiting area, with remotely lockable doors either end, was the first airlock. In normal times, the double-set of transparent, but bullet and bomb-proof, doors were the only ones closed. Now, a second set of far thicker blast doors had been lowered.
Beyond those, a corridor led to the bunkrooms, mess hall, and washrooms for the soldier-operators, as well as to the armoury, storerooms, water reserve, air-filtration, electrical conduit, servers, and generators. In the other direction, the same volume of space was given to the far more spacious private rooms of the politicians. But immediately in front of the blast doors, behind a floor-to-ceiling transparent wall, was the communications centre itself. Rows of monitors and keyboards had been used to access the data processed elsewhere, then displayed on the wall-sized screens dominating the room. In the far corner, a transparent-walled meeting room offered space for politicians and military leaders to debate in semi-privacy. Like the C.O.M.S. wasn’t supposed to be called the Bunker, the Secure Executive-Control Restricted Emergency Transmission Silo wasn’t supposed to be called the War Room, but the nickname had, inevitably, stuck.
When the true nature of the outbreak had become apparent, the contents of the armoury had been distributed among the conscripts sent to aid in outback security. The soldiers who operated the communications equipment had gone with them.
With the satellites down, with their allies’ data centres offline, little information had been coming into Canberra. As priorities shifted towards production, the Australian data centres had been taken offline in order to preserve electricity and the data stored therein. Fixed-line phones and radio, and a thread-thin web of fibre optics, provided some input, but the most useful information came from hand-delivered eyewitness accounts. In short, the state of the art C.O.M.S. was useless, and so the Bunker had been mothballed. Besides, with only one entrance, if the undead reached Parliament House, who’d want to be trapped in a hole below ground?
That was the situation as Anna had understood it, but when she was confronted by the reality, she came to a shocked halt in the doorway to the communications centre.
Oswald Owen was an island of indifference amid a chaotic maelstrom. The prime minister stared, unblinking, at the wall-sized, but blank, screen. Erin Vaughn tore through maps in the War Room. Lignatiev was tearing strips off a uniformed sergeant, while it appeared the team on duty had been tearing holes in the wall before news of the new disaster came in.
“What happened here?” Anna asked. She’d been in the Bunker once, two weeks ago. Then, it had thrummed with frantic professionals collating what little information had been arriving by radio and hard-line. Now it was more like a building site. Large portions of the floor had
been ripped up and the cables ripped out. Monitors had been removed from desks, stacked near the wall, where, again, the panelling had been removed to provide access to the wires behind.
“They’ve been stripping the command centre for parts to build the new data centre upstairs,” O.O. said.
“Who authorised that?” Anna asked.
“You did,” O.O. said. “And so did I. We voted on it a week ago.”
“We did?”
Along with the politicians, half a dozen camouflaged soldiers, and a couple more wearing black tactical gear of the Special Forces, were trying to not get in the way. Ten dusty civilians, the team dismantling the place before news of the latest calamity arrived, stood at a cowed attention as Lignatiev barked orders. But the Minister of Defence’s swearing wasn’t restoring calm.
Anna turned back to O.O. “What happened?” she asked. “One of Ian’s new recruits dragged me down here. He said someone dropped a nuclear bomb.”
“A mushroom cloud was sighted in the Pacific,” O.O. said. “Technically, it was three separate sightings, by three different planes, all flying scout ahead of the Hawaiian invasion fleet.”
“Was it three mushroom clouds, or one mushroom cloud seen by three different planes?” Anna asked.
“Probably,” O.O. said. “Don’t ask me which.”
“Don’t we have any functioning communications systems?” she asked.
“Less than before,” he said. “There’s a radio link to the airport, and a phone line to the broadcast studio.”
“And?”
“No, that’s all we’ve got down here,” O.O. said. “We can’t even call the barracks. I told you it was a mistake voting for Bronwyn Wilson.”
“Have we heard from Guam? Perth? Hobart?” she asked.
“Cup a hand to your ear, and you might hear them yell,” O.O. said. “I didn’t think they’d do this. And who are they, I hear you think. Conscripts. More bloody conscripts because we decided a highly trained specialist was the same as an infantryman, gave them a rifle, and sent them hunting zombies in the bush.”
“We should send someone to the university,” Anna said. “At least they’d know which wires are liable to electrocute you. They haven’t even cut the power.”
“There are, quite literally, a million more where those blokes came from,” O.O. said.
“Tell me about the cloud,” she said.
“I did,” O.O. said. “A mushroom cloud was seen at sea. Three reports from three different planes.”
“At sea, somewhere near Hawaii, but not over land? Where is the fleet? It can’t have reached Samoa yet. Were there casualties?”
“The planes were flying in convoy, ten per wing. One military plane in the lead, the others were civilian. The civilian aircraft were lost. The assumption is the EMP knocked out their avionics.”
“There were soldiers aboard?” she asked.
“Conscripts and equipment, yes.”
“We lost twenty-seven planes?”
“Twenty-eight,” O.O. said. “The pilots in a plane which radioed in were blinded. Both of them. Managed to keep the aircraft airborne long enough to send a radio broadcast. That was their last transmission. No mayday was picked up.”
“Twenty-eight planes? That’s… thousands of soldiers.”
“I hadn’t finished,” O.O. said. “The plane’s broadcasts were picked up by ships. We’ve lost contact with them, too. But the message was relayed back until it reached a fighter patrol over the coast.”
“We lost contact after they relayed the message? We need to mount a rescue.”
“How? What with?” O.O. said, gesturing at the blank screens. “Those should be displaying all the intelligence we’ve gathered. I suppose they are, in a way.”
“Thousands are dead, perhaps thousands more need rescue,” Anna said. “But one or three mushroom clouds spotted in the middle of the Pacific? We don’t know where?”
“I’m sure someone does,” O.O. said, gesturing at the room. “But they’ve not told me yet.”
Anna looked around the hapless engineers, searching for someone who might be able to give her more information, but her gaze settled on the prime minister. Bronwyn Wilson walked to the War Room. Inside, after the door closed, Anna saw Erin Vaughn turn to her. She saw the younger woman’s arms move as she spoke, but the room truly was soundproof. The prime minister sat. Vaughn slapped the wall in frustration and stormed out, heading over to Ian Lignatiev. Anna did the same. Oswald Owen, at a more sedate pace, sauntered after her.
Vaughn reached the uniformed politician first, laying her hand on Lignatiev’s arm, whispering something in his ear. Briefly, he took her hand before he saw Anna approaching, and hurriedly let go.
“Owen’s briefed you?” Lignatiev asked. A man famous for his self-control, his muscles were tensed with the effort of keeping himself in check.
“There were three sightings of a mushroom cloud,” Anna said. “Or maybe three separate mushroom clouds, in the Pacific. The number of casualties, and the number of ships which need rescue, is unknown.”
“I don’t see how we can mount a rescue operation,” Vaughn said.
“I am less concerned with the planes and scout-ships than I am with the troopships heading for Samoa and then Hawaii,” Lignatiev said. “There are a million soldiers aboard.”
“Conscripts,” O.O. said. “Unarmed, too, because you trusted the Yanks to fly weapons there when they can’t even fly their new president out of Canada. At least they won’t have rifles weighing them down if they have to swim.”
“Pull your head in, Oswald,” Anna said. “Ian, should we order the ships to return?”
“I can’t determine what order to give until we’ve determined where the ships are,” Lignatiev said, “but the cloud was sighted north of Tarawa.”
“Tarawa Island, in Kiribati? So it was south of Hawaii?” Anna asked. “But how far south?”
“Tarawa Island is four thousand kilometres northeast of Big Island, Hawaii,” Vaughn said.
“All we can conclude is that the bomb detonated somewhere between Australia and Hawaii,” Lignatiev said.
“Are we sure it was a bomb?” Anna asked. “Not some kind of accident aboard a sub?”
“Hmm. Maybe,” Lignatiev said, automatically looking up at the large, blank screen. “Maybe, but it is more prudent to assume the worst.”
A clatter and smash came from her left. One of the conscript-technicians had tripped on an exposed bundle of wires. Trying to carry three screens at once, she’d dropped two.
“This is a nightmare,” Anna said. “Who’s our expert?”
“No one here,” Vaughn said. “The operators and advisors accompanied the Federation Guard to the new military training camps near Wagga Wagga.”
“No, they went to bolster the defences at Ermington,” Lignatiev said. “I was concerned Sydney would go the way of Melbourne.”
“Could have sent them to count polar bears at the South Pole for all the use they are to us now,” O.O. said.
“Then I’ll…” Anna began. Her first thought was to find Hoa Nguyen. Though the veteran public servant was no expert in disaster management, she would know the names of those who were. “No. I’ll get Dr Smilovitz and Dr Avalon. They dealt with biological threats to the species, but I bet they know more about radiation than we do. They could tell us whether this was an accident aboard a sub, or something much worse.”
“Are you sure you want to go outside?” Vaughn asked.
“Canberra is as safe as it was an hour ago,” Anna said. “The lights are still on, Erin. We’re not under attack. Although perhaps we should make contacting Hobart a priority, just in case.”
“Agreed,” O.O. said. “I’ve got a famously loud voice. I’ll go up to the roof and shout. Or we could send a plane. Ian?”
“There should be a few jets at the airport,” Lignatiev said. “I’ll send a runner.”
“There’s engineers at the university,” O.O. said. “Professors and ac
ademics, but one of those blokes must know more than theory. Let’s get some of them here to sort out this chaos.”
“I’ve a team in my department who can handle this,” Vaughn said. “Though I suppose I should inform the prime minister first.”
They all looked to the War Room where Bronwyn Wilson sat, silent, motionless, staring at the wall.
“Then I’m getting something to eat,” O.O. said.
“You’re hungry? Now?” Vaughn asked.
“Rome’s burning, and I don’t have a violin,” O.O. said. “So I’ll eat, drink, and be as merry as a bloke can be.”
He walked away, leaving behind only furious irritation on Lignatiev’s face.
“I told you,” Vaughn said. “That’s why he can’t ever be prime minister.”
Lignatiev nodded. “Anna, you’ll fetch those two scientists? Let me give you an escort.”
“No,” Anna said. “If they’re people you trust, then you can trust them to go to the airport. I’ve got my car, and it’s only a short drive. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Then let me get you a sidearm,” he said.
“If I had one, I’d shoot at shadows,” Anna said. “That would set off an alarm, and even more trouble. No, the last thing we want to do is create a new crisis.”
“But do be careful,” Vaughn said. “We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”
Chapter 20 - Off the Scale
Geoscience Australia, Canberra
Outside, the comparative normality of the night-shrouded city was reassuring. Even the lone and distant gunshot offered the reassuring comfort of familiarity. Her car worked, as did the streetlights, and the spotlight on the roof of the sentry’s patrol car. The EMP hadn’t reached Canberra. But her knowledge of nuclear weapons was limited to the long-term effects of the tests in Emu Fields and Malinga. She knew about the dangers of radioactive seepage into groundwater, about the eternally lingering effects in the soil, and the life-shortening internal destruction wrought on unsuspecting bystanders. How far did the effects of an EMP extend? How far could radiation spread in the ocean? How fast?
Life Goes On | Book 3 | While The Lights Are On [Surviving The Evacuation] Page 18