Circles Of Fear

by Brian Cain

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  Tuesday was a cold August morning, nature’s pallet painted frost on the ground outside. Anita had left early, to catch up on work she had left the previous night, she was to return in the evening. Harry chatted with Tammy during breakfast; Jason avoided becoming involved to help Harry come out of his shell. They made their way to Jason’s office, with the usual stop at the school for Tammy. Beagle had acted swiftly, the window wore the sign: FEDERAL MEMBER FOR PARKIN. Beagle was busy at his desk when Harry walked in. “God damn Beagle, how the hell are you?”

  Beagle looked up, he looked shocked. “Harry, I read you had been released; I never expected to see you here.” They shook hands.

  Jason was puzzled. “Have I missed something?”

  Harry put his arm around Beagle. “Beagle here was on ADAM’S team, he was our top mathematician; he’s a walking mathematical computer.”

  Jason listened to them chat for a while as he studied his diary, the day was clear, meant to be the calm after the election storm. Jason had other ideas. “Harry, do you want to go to the bunker, to see what’s going on?”

  “Yeah, I’m ready. I need to go to a bank in the city before we head off. I have to pick something up there.”

  “Beagle, hire us a jet, destination Woomera. Tell them to have it on the tarmac, we should be at the airport within the hour,” said Jason.

  Beagle held the fort at the office while Jason and Harry headed for the city. Harry picked up a small computer disk from a bank vault in Adelaide. He anxiously showed it to Jason, it apparently held the bunker code. A small executive jet touched down in Woomera an hour later. They hired a Ford sedan and Harry headed north into the desert, twenty minutes later the car died on a straight stretch of road, only a few metres from an open gateway in a fence that stretched out of sight in either direction. A warning sign was just outside the fence line. WARNING. RESTRICTED AREA. AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE ARMS MANUFACTURES PERSONNEL ONLY. DISREGARD FOR THIS WARNING MAY CAUSE DEATH.

  Jason looked at the dashboard. “What’s wrong with the car?”

  Harry climbed out. He pointed to a glowing blue sphere on the horizon; it flashed orange and red intermittently. “It’s an A10, as I explained before, no electrical circuit will work this close to it. It’s sitting over the top of the bunker entrance, about one and a half kilometres inside the fence line. It will allow us to approach; we’ll have to walk.” They took two water bottles Harry had prepared; the wind blew dust from the flat desolate red landscape across the neat straight bitumen road. The sphere had risen above the cloud cover directly above them, when they reached the end of the road. There was only a small car park, nothing was in sight. Harry stood on a small steel plate on the edge of the bitumen, a square building rose from the earth directly in front of them, they stepped back shielding their eyes from the dust. The wind carried the dust across the landscape in a red cloud. Two silver sliding doors took up one side of the building, to the right hand side at shoulder height was a small keypad and monitor. Harry took Jason by the arm and walked up to it. “You put the wrong information in this and the A10 will kill you.” He pointed to black marks on the ground. “Looks like Sharp had some people try.” Harry pulled out the small disk he had in his pocket and put it into a slot above the keyboard, within a second, the doors opened. It was a lift cubicle, Jason went to walk in; Harry stopped him, “No, No! There’s one more thing, I set it up so if I was being forced to do this, we would be killed.” He punched some numbers into the keyboard, a robotic voice boomed from the lift.

  “Welcome Harry, please enter.” They stepped inside, the doors closed and the lift descended at high speed.

  “If we had climbed in without the keypad number, the place would have self-destructed. I set it up like that in case Sharp forced me to open up.” The lift came to a stop, the doors opened revealing an underground cavern of considerable dimensions. “This is no ordinary lift Jason, it runs on electro magnets on the opposing sides to the doors. It’s a result of our magnetic bearing technology; it follows rails on the sides of the shaft, but doesn’t touch them.”

  On the wall directly in front of them was a huge illuminated map of the world, small different coloured lights were dotted all over it. “This is the bunker, our satellite receiving equipment is a series of grids just below the surface of the ground in several places all round the bunker. The lift head retracted when we came down, the installation is completely invisible. Come this way.” Harry climbed aboard a small bullet shaped car sitting on a single rail in a corner of the bunker, he pushed a button on its dash. A door opened in front of it and it rocketed up a well lit incline for about a minute, before stopping in front of a closed door. They climbed out onto a small walkway beside them, the push of another button on a keyboard saw the door slide open.

  Inside were five spheres, they had a bright metallic appearance and measured about twenty-five metres in diameter. The lower end of the spheres sat on a base hiding their detail.

  “These five A10s are not running at present, we were going to sell them to buyers with the rest of the system when Sharp got greedy. Once we charge them with an electrical current, these big rubber wheels you can see round the bottom of them come up to start the rotation. Once they reach one hundred revolutions per minute, they start producing their own power. They spin up to one hundred thousand RPM, depending on how much power they need. You can’t see the sphere inside, they spin in opposite directions; the secret is in the atom structure in the molecules of the metals. Come up top.” Jason followed Harry up a gantry surrounding the spheres. Running down the centre of the spheres was a central axis, about two metres in diameter. Looking down on the top of the axis Jason could plainly see a small dome in the centre, surrounded by about one hundred what looked to be nozzles which could be rotated 180 degrees in all directions. “The bottom has a plugging system set up to sit on the base, the dome on top is for communication, the bottom has the nozzles. It’s the pods weapon system, powerful lasers earth out the pods immense electrical power in bursts, two hundred in all; it can supply power as quick as it can aim them. The communication and weapons systems are shielded inside the centre axis. The immense energy is transferred across the electro magnetic air bearings and down the sides of the central axis to the lasers, some machine eh?”

  Jason was in awe, he touched the cold shiny surface. “How does it steer itself? It has nothing on the outside.”

  “Quite simple really, it’s programmed to fly in a northerly direction all the time, all you have to do is convince it north is whatever direction you want it to go. The sphere amplifies the earth’s magnetic field thousands of times around it, a powerful gyro compass inside changes that field to show north for whatever direction travel is required. We coupled that to a sophisticated global positioning program and bingo, look ma no hands. We lost an early one; the system multiplies itself to infinity. An A5 reached the speed of light or disintegrated prior to that, we can’t be sure which, if it didn’t it just vanisheed. A10s can fly around one hundred thousand kilometres an hour, only in a straight line. It has to stop to manoeuvre.” They made their way back to the bunker along the tunnel. There are two of these rail tunnels either side of the bunker, the pod bunkers are one hundred metres below the surface, with a common launch shaft to the surface. We can’t go to the other one, the pods in it are operational. That’s why there are two, so you can work on the pods in the other one. Two pods are flying all the time, two are running ready for back up and one supplies power to the complex. We have fifteen operational pods in all, with the five you just saw. There are five pods held in a storage room below the bunker if we need them and the five that are operating now.” They climbed from the rail car. Harry took Jason through the living quarters behind the huge wall screen, coming back to the bunker main room in front of the screen. Harry sat down in front of several keyboards and monitors, sitting Jason beside him. He touched the keyboard in front of him and all the
monitors came to life. “This screen on the wall will show me the position of any country’s army, navy and weapons that our satellites are monitoring.”

  He entered: status; navy; Russian; nuclear submarines; the wall screen lit up with green, yellow and red lights. “The yellow ones are operational subs with reactors shut down, the green ones are operational subs on routine patrol, the red ones are operational submarines on full battle alert, condition red.”

  Jason studied the screen. “What is a nuclear submarine doing in the middle of the Yellow Sea off the coast of China with its reactor shut down?”

  Harry entered: status; yellow sea; his monitor showed The Rostov, second strike, bottom, silent, six weeks, condition green. “It’s lying silent on the sea bed, its naval use is a second strike on China if first efforts fail. The Chinese wouldn’t know it’s there, it’s been there six weeks; they change them about every six months. ADAM tells us condition green, nothing to worry about, just like car insurance, you only need it if there’s an accident.”

  “There are several of them,” said Jason. “All over the globe, two at the North Pole.”

  “Sitting under the ice, no one can get at them there, they fire up when all else has failed,” said Harry.

  “Show me the American nuclear subs,” asked Jason.

  Harry entered: status; navy; American; Nuclear submarines; the screen lit up with the new information.

  Jason stood up. “That many, there’s one close to Australia, the Indian Ocean, what’s it doing?”

  “There are several in the Indian Ocean, I’ll use its position.” Harry entered: status; 28 deg lat south; 103 deg long north; his monitor showed; USS Charleston, patrol, heading Osaka naval installation, condition green. “She’s en route to Japan, normal patrol, nothing to worry about. If you knew all ADAM could tell you, you wouldn’t sleep.”

  “How does it know all this?”

  “It monitors all military frequencies, selects the information that is of use, then stores it. It can make an assumption of military movements and commands, but it can’t act on them, only bring our attention to it. Twenty people worked on this directly, hundreds indirectly. The main players had all this worked out before we even started, all we did was put it together; the spheres were the main breakthrough. All the main players except me and Sharp are gone, no other people really know what’s going on here. The computer and satellite system is so complex; I don’t understand some of it myself. It even changes its communication code every twenty four hours by itself, just in case someone does find the frequencies we work on. It has a hole in it; it’s only effective in the sky and on the earth’s surface. It’s no use under water, it can destroy airborne weapons launched from under water, but it can destroy nothing deeper than a few metres.”

  “Can any of this technology be used for peaceful means, like power generation for the public?” asked Jason.

  “Two spheres would make the entire Australian power industry redundant. Other parts could be used for all kinds of things, truck and bus systems that work by themselves with zero pollution, the advances could be endless. I don’t really know, it was all developed for warfare, not public use.”

  “I would like to see some research done on the things you mentioned,” said Jason. “ADAM is an incredible machine as long as it stays with us and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Could you start some research on public use soon?”

  “I have to go through ADAM’S memory banks, see what she has found over the last few years, that will take a while. Public development research can go on with the development of the system, we can work them hand in hand. Have a look at this,” Harry entered: status; enemies priority; his monitor showed; Matt Sharp; enemy no 1; attempted unlawful access to ADAM; location; Great Barrier Reef, Australia aboard jet ski alone; permission requested to destroy. “God damn, ADAM must have monitored Sharp’s movements on public frequencies like his mobile phone. It’s done it by itself, it worked out he was trying to foil the failsafe program I put in. Would you believe that, does that answer your questions on its safety?”

  Jason studied the screen. “He could put another system together like this you think?”

  “You just gave him five million dollars; he could be doing a lot of things, none of them good.”

  “What would happen if you instruct ADAM to act?”

  “Sharp would disappear in a flash of light within ten seconds of the command. If ADAM doesn’t kill him, then I will.”

  “That’s what I thought. I need you here, this man is evil, give ADAM the command. As long as it will harm no one else.”

  “I was gonna do that anyway, glad to see you’re with me, everything’s safe except Sharp.” Harry typed Matt Sharp; priority one; destroy; He then entered a code of numbers and looked at the wall screen. The lights flashed in a straight line from Woomera to eight kilometres off the coast of Mackay in Queensland and back again, in a few seconds. “Sharp is history, sometimes you get lucky,” said Harry.

  “I’d like a password put in by myself,” said Jason. “So any further strikes by ADAM can only be made with my consent.”

  Harry nodded in approval. “I think that’s a great idea, you are the only man I ever met who I would trust with this thing.” He spent a couple of minutes on the keyboard. “Here, put in your word, it must be more than six letters, then push enter.” Harry got up, turned his back on the screen and walked away. Jason looked at the command; enter password; he could think of nothing. Suddenly his fingers moved without him, ARMAGEDDON was the word his hands wrote for him, he looked at it for a few seconds then he pushed enter.

  “There, it’s done,” said Jason.

  “You are now the controller of the most powerful weapon that exists, no aggressive strike can be initiated without that word entering the system, ADAM will only defend of its own accord. I’m glad I don’t have that responsibility.”

  They left ADAM in its surveillance test mode as it had been for the last five years and returned to the surface. Jason wanted Harry to meet the rest of the board on Wednesday and Harry wanted Beagle in Woomera with him. Jason had agreed but only with Beagle’s consent. They walked back to the car. “I find it hard to believe that no one has found this, or at least asked questions,” said Jason.

  Harry pointed west across the red wasteland. “The Japanese are launching rockets and testing aircraft without pilots only forty kilometres from here. They launched three satellites for us; we still don’t really know what’s going on there. When they come up with something, they tell everyone to get backing, we kept this very quiet.” He turned and pointed east. “Sixty kilometres over this way, the Australian government test all kinds of surface weapons for their army. We know as much of that, as they know of ADAM. Even the American spy that was with us had suspicions, but never got to see any of it, everyone’s too busy with their own.”

  They drove to the airport. The little executive jet had them back in Adelaide in less than an hour. They listened to the radio on the way through the city in Jason’s car; the news was especially interesting. “A man was killed whilst riding a jet ski on the Great Barrier Reef east of Mackay today. The man was struck by a powerful bolt of lightning in an electrical storm at about two thirty this afternoon. Police are going on eyewitness accounts as no trace of the man or his jet ski have been found. Police have also had reports of a UFO in the same area. Mackay airport radar has reported no abnormal aircraft movement in the area for the last twenty-four hours.” They pulled up in Jason’s driveway; Jason was the only one who was any the wiser.