by Scott Baker
David had freaked out. How had this man known they would be there? Craig’s explanation just didn’t satisfy David’s well-developed sense of paranoia.
‘I got a call from my editor saying that it’s essential to get you two across the border. Didn’t tell me why. I was hoping you’d be able to answer that.’
Schwartz did not mention that he had readily agreed, sniffing a story, though he did not understand why he was instructed not to use the company vehicle.
And so began the five-hour ride of dancing around the truth. It had become apparent that Craig knew nothing about the diary, nor The Facility, and Shaun was not about to broadcast the information to CNN. But Schwartz was a journalist, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was getting information.
After two hours of subtle and not-so-subtle interrogation, the foreign correspondent quieted, realising that the two were not going to tell him what they were up to. Still, he was determined to figure it out.
The landscape grew sparser of vegetation as they travelled, the earth seeming to force its way through the covering of greenery to expose its grey, jagged rock.
Neither Shaun nor David really had a plan, but Shaun had a feeling that if they just got here, somehow he would be able to work something out. David did not care – his whole life was mixed up in this venture now and the only way he could ever feel safe again was to face it head on. Besides, he wanted to meet the guy who developed that codec. He had reverse-engineered it and had been astounded by its sophistication every step of the way. It was the mind that had actually conceived of it that David wanted to experience – there was a big difference between understanding something that had been created, and conceiving the idea in the first place.
Eventually signs of life appeared again and Shaun studied the map. He reasoned that they were entering the town of Peshawar, in the far west of Pakistan. According to his guidebook, the city’s origins were lost into antiquity, but many of its buildings were erected over two thousand years ago.
Shaun had decided, even before they arrived in the town, that this was where they would stop, get their bearings, and formulate some kind of plan.
David had not said much. With the hangover wearing off, he was beginning to process what he had read before he had drunk himself into oblivion. He did not feel like speaking to this reporter any more than Shaun did, and his mere presence led to David’s growing sense of conspiracy.
‘You heard of the Pathans?’ Craig asked, trying a new approach on the bigger man.
‘No. Should I have?’ David replied sombrely.
‘Not really. Just that they sort of rule the roost in this area. Government law only really extends as far as the city suburbs, then it mostly becomes tribal.’
‘Well, we knew this would be a shit of a place,’ David said uncharacteristically.
‘You okay?’ Shaun mouthed to his friend.
‘Sure,’ David replied, meaning not at all.
‘Well, you seem a little upset.’
‘Ah, I’m not. I just keep thinking about that …’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know. What we read.’
Shaun had not spoken a word about the diary since they had landed.
David turned and looked Shaun square in the eye. ‘You read it. Man, you read it. We’re in Pakistan! How the hell did we get here?’ His voice began to rise just a little. ‘I mean, look around you. We’re really doing this, and I believed it totally, I really did, but that last stuff? I mean, that’s a lot to swallow. It just makes me question the whole thing. Miracles?’
Shaun gave his friend a look that told him to keep his voice down, but David only grew louder. Craig stayed silent and strained to listen above the noisy vehicle. David gave up trying to be quiet.
‘I mean come on … time travel? Really? Is that really possible? You’re the expert, and you said no. I mean, do you really think that someone has found a way to do it? Or is this whole thing some elaborate hoax?’
Craig’s reflexes sprang into action. ‘Hoax? You guys in some kind of mess? Time travel? Been watching some good sci-fi on the plane, have you?’
Shaun glared at David, then shook his head slowly and pursed his lips. If this reporter wanted information, Shaun would flood him with it. At least it might throw him off their scent.
‘You see, time’s a funny thing,’ he started, launching into his teacher voice. Craig listened, thinking this was the start of what he had been waiting for.
‘I guess the most important change is the realisation that time is not what we thought it was.’
David turned and looked out the window, aware of Shaun’s tactic.
‘It’s natural for us to think of time as a separate, constant thing, completely outside our physical world. It turns out, that’s not quite true.’
‘It’s not?’ Craig prompted, finally getting something out of these two.
‘It is wrapped up in our world very physically – it even has shape and is affected by things such as gravity, which is really just a curve in what we call space–time.’
‘Time is affected by gravity? But it doesn’t have any weight, how can gravity have an effect on it?’
‘Tell me, do you think light has weight?’ Shaun asked, warming to the challenge.
‘Ah, I don’t really know. I don’t think so,’ Craig stammered.
‘But gravity affects it.’
‘It does?’
‘Sure, what do you think a black hole is?’
‘It’s what my mother told me I had instead of a stomach,’ David put in, hinting that he was coming out of his grump. He had read Shaun’s papers online, so many of these concepts were familiar to him.
He could not help but smile as he listened to Shaun explain time, gravity, black holes and the rest. And it worked: Craig seemed content to improve his scientific knowledge without realising he was being fobbed off.
Before Shaun could finish his explanation of the twins paradox, his concentration was shattered by an exploding window next to him. The shock sent a cold jolt of adrenaline through his body, and only a second passed before he saw Craig in front of him slumped forward, his head making a dull thud on the steering wheel. Immediately the car sped up and began to drift off the road.
David grabbed the wheel frantically, trying to keep the car straight, but the wheel was slick and slippery with blood.
‘He’s been shot!’ David cried as Shaun grabbed the journalist by the shoulders and pulled him off the wheel. David fought for control, but Craig’s foot had become stuck on the pedal and the car continued to accelerate. In desperation, Shaun released Craig, revealing a large, dark hole near his temple, bubbling thick red blood. He grabbed the handbrake sitting in between the driver’s and passenger’s seats and pulled it hard. The effect was immediate.
David slammed forward, inadvertently pulling on the wheel. Shaun was also thrown forward, and with no seatbelt to hold him in place, he flew through the centre of the seats and smashed into the front windscreen. The car spun with David’s hand fixed to the wheel. The sudden jolt freed the car’s accelerator, and it sat for an eternity up on its two driver’s-side wheels, before bouncing to sit still in a cloud of dust, sideways across the road.
Traffic had stopped and the pair sat for a moment, ripped from the depths of intellectual theory into the harsh, practical light of day. With a dead body in the car.
Gradually the cars started to part and move about their business, beeping their horns at the unwelcome roadblock. Within seconds the source of the shot revealed itself as a jeep sped up behind them and screamed to a halt. David glanced in the rear-view mirror, then turned. There stood eight men, all with their faces covered in long black material, like some hideous impersonation of wild west stagecoach robbers.
Without pause for thought, Shaun grabbed the inert driver by his loose-fitting clothing. David scrambled to help, and within moments the dead reporter was in the back seat and Shaun was in the front, spinning the wheel and gunning the engine hard. The blue smoke of burned
rubber spewed from the tyres. The car fishtailed away as the black-clad men jumped back into their vehicle and took off in pursuit.
There was no need for words. Both men knew that when someone shot at you and hit the guy next to you in the head, it was either a very bad shot, or a very good one. Either way, it was not something you wanted to stick around to find out.
CHAPTER 55
Shaun floored the pedal, glancing back through the rear-vision mirror while trying to navigate a way out of the city. Even with its load of eight men, the jeep seemed to gain on them as it swerved through the sparse traffic. Then there was gunfire – it was all the inspiration Shaun needed to spin the wheel and get off the main road.
The back windscreen exploded with a BOOM! David and Shaun both ducked instinctively, and with the front, side and now back windows blown out, the rush of wind brought the smells of the city streaming through the cabin. Peshawar was a frontier town, and a maze.
As they dodged a horse-drawn cart and came over a rise, the full majesty of the mountains in front of them dwarfed the outline of the city.
Again, gunfire ripped through the air and Shaun spun the wheel once more, turning down a side street into the old city. If it were a different day, the Americans would have marvelled at the beauty and rugged strength of the place. Two- and three-storey houses made of unbaked bricks and set against wooden frames lined the streets. Cobblestones replaced bitumen as the car hurtled through twenty-five centuries of history. They spun and weaved and braked and skidded through winding streets too narrow and too old for motor vehicles. Ten minutes of inner-city close calls passed before David finally urinated in his pants, his body reacting on its own to the constant production of terror-induced adrenaline.
Bullets tore into the ancient walls of a gate of the old city as the pair sped under the bridge spanning the road. And all of a sudden, they were out of the city’s winding bends, out of the strange narrow streets. Just as quickly as they had entered the old city, they shot out now onto a road that seemed to fly clear of it.
Shaun looked up, and in front of him the massive mountains loomed with impossible drama. Their grey, jagged crags and snow-lined peaks gave foreboding a whole new definition, but as the howling of the wind was punctured again by cracks of gunfire from behind them, neither Shaun nor David had time to marvel at the awesome beauty of the Khyber Pass.
‘What the hell do they want? Why are they trying to kill us?’ Shaun yelled at David. Sometimes David wondered if he existed purely as a focus for Shaun’s rhetorical questions.
‘I pissed in my pants,’ was all David could think to say by way of reply. Shaun did not notice. His side mirror had just been shot off and he knew that without the refuge of sandstone buildings and narrow streets to shield their way, it would be only a minute or so before the jeep would run them down and be within an accurate firing range.
And then, a strange thing happened. In the rear-vision mirror Shaun saw the jeep slow and turn off the main road.
‘What are they doing?’ David asked as he followed Shaun’s gaze.
‘They’re giving up!’ Shaun said, more hopefully than triumphantly.
‘Who were they?’ David asked.
‘I don’t know. Taliban? Apparently it’s just one giant male-only tribe up here.’
‘Did you see those people?’ David persisted. ‘The people on the street? They were walking round with full belts of ammo slung across their chests as if it were Halloween. I mean, shiny bullets are really in this season,’ David joked, insane with fear.
‘I know. It’s frontier country here, but I really didn’t expect …’ he looked out at the enormous mountains in front of them, ‘… that,’ he finished.
The peaks rose up like something from a Tolkien fantasy novel. For a country which boasted the Himalayas, not a lot was mentioned about the enormity of the sister ranges to the north.
The landscape was unearthly, and gunmen could chase them through city streets and go all but unnoticed. The idea of normal was not one they were accustomed to in this very foreign land.
‘You okay?’ Shaun asked. David was white. His response, a weak smile. He shook his head slightly, looking at the body in the back seat.
Shaun looked down to crunch the gears, then his eyes returned to the road only to see the jeep reappear from a hidden driveway fifty feet ahead. David could do nothing but scream, and Shaun looked forward in terror.
This time there would be no chase, no evasion, no city-street manoeuvres. This time, the jeep was parked right in front of Shaun and David, and its occupants had their weapons trained at their windscreen. They were too close to miss. Shaun slammed on the brakes.
The men yelled orders and fired into the air. Three men jumped from the vehicle and one pointed at Shaun, shouting demands he did not understand. He took it to mean that he was to get out of the car. He turned to David as his hands came up off the wheel.
‘Just stay calm. I think they want us to get out. Just stay cool.’
‘The player,’ was all David had to say. The silver briefcase housing the portable disc player sat on the back seat next to the dead newsman.
‘Leave it. If you reach back there, they’ll kill you. Just leave it and get out slowly.’
Hating every second of it, David did as Shaun suggested, and no sooner was he out of the passenger door than he met a rifle butt across his temple. The blow knocked him to the ground and left him bleeding. David struggled to stay conscious as he pressed his face into the dirt and felt a boot sink repeatedly into his soft middle. The Pakistani men continued to shout, giving orders or making demands – David could not tell, nor did he care; all he wanted was to stop being kicked.
Shaun did not fare any better. An almost-identical action had knocked him to the ground, the rifle butt slicing into his forehead and releasing a torrent of blood. Although able to protect himself from some of the attacks, he dared not fight back. The men grabbed and blindfolded him, driving the butts of their weapons into his sternum, face and groin. His forehead still bled, quickly staining the blindfold.
He let himself be dragged towards the back of a truck, trying to decipher the stream of commands. His hands were tied, as were his legs, and he was shoved roughly onto the hard metal tray. Soon after, he felt David thud down next to him, a whimper coming through his rattled breathing. Shaun could tell that David was hurt, worse than he was. What the hell was going on?
The militants did not seem interested in trying to communicate beyond what could be prescribed with the contact of a rifle butt, but Shaun knew that the attack could not be totally random. Shortly, the truck moved off.
CHAPTER 56
Lieutenant Dan McCabe stared at the hand-held monitor. The image it showed was that of a mountainside rushing past, as the reconnaissance bug flew bare centimetres from the rock face. He took off his backpack and undid the clasps. It was so cold up here that his gloved fingers did not seem to follow his commands properly, but it was still only a matter of seconds before the pack was open and the second bug was pulled from its pouch. When it was folded up, the bug was not much bigger than a cat, but it represented the latest in reconnaissance technology. It was essentially a tiny helicopter, capable of speeds upwards of two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. Small enough for a soldier to carry on his back and deploy within a minute, it gave him the ability to see what was over the next hill, or indeed the next twenty miles’ worth of hills, without complex controls.
McCabe had marvelled when the bugs were first explained to him. The key to their success was the fact that they were self-navigating. They had the ability to fly along under radar, close to the ground, and yet follow the landscape beneath them. They could intelligently avoid obstacles and items that were not on any maps. The previous form of the bugs still relied on the inbuilt three-dimensional mappings of their GPS system to navigate the terrain. This was all well and good until someone parked a van in the bug’s flight path. Because this obstacle wasn’t there when the mapping had been done
, the bug would not know about it until it was too late … usually at the expense of being smashed into a thousand of its intricate pieces. The model before that was even less effective, requiring a soldier to be specially trained in the flight and navigation of the unit. This meant the controller had to take his valuable concentration and divert it to a radio control unit and try to fly around terrain he could not see, using only the bug’s inbuilt camera for a guidance system.
They had tried lasers and even sonar, but these systems proved expensive and drained power quickly, giving the bug only a few minutes of flying time. Not anymore. The new system was based, of all things, on a bug. It was research into the optics of the humble bumble bee that had given the US military this now highly self-sufficient technology.
It had to do with the way bees saw the world McCabe had been told. A bee’s view of the world was three-dimensional, but not based on the same system as humans’ idea of three dimensions. In humans, eyes were far enough apart to view a different enough perspective to give depth perception. In a bee, this was not the case. But the system they used was quite ingenious. A bee measured the velocity of objects moving past its eyes and was able to judge distance based on this motion. This gave an amazing take-off and landing ability. They had used the analogy of driving in a car. Objects that were closer rushed by at a fast speed, while the mountains in the distance seemed to barely move at all. So, like a bee landing delicately on the lip of a teacup, the discovery had been made that if the velocity was kept constant as the bug flew closer to the ground it was almost like using an auto pilot; allowing the recon bug to navigate and touch down on the most precarious terrain.
Dan McCabe now hit the button that released the springs that locked the eight rotors into place. He hit another button and threw the bug into the air. It immediately took off and followed in the path of its predecessor.
From where he was, the trek down to the road running into the Khyber Pass was all but impossible. But making that trek was not his job.
