by Ray Hammond
The President nodded. ‘None of my own people think there’s any link either, otherwise I’d have to shut you all down.’
Negromonte knew this threat was merely bravado – there wasn’t a serving government on Earth that would risk depriving the electorate of its managed weather. Not only would voters hate reverting to an uncontrolled climate, the world economy would be plunged into chaos.
There was a hollow bark from somewhere behind them. This time Sandy’s return from the water was more of a nuisance – the dog was soaked from nose to tail. He circled the two men, barking furiously.
President and business leader both backed away as the dog vociferously threatened first this one, then that. Finally he settled on his owner, and shook a huge spray of water all over the President’s immaculately pressed brown trousers.
‘Get away, Sandy,’ shouted Underwood, as he turned and twisted. Then the President picked up the ball and hurled it back into the dark water of the lake.
‘I need a favour from you, Nick,’ said Underwood, as they resumed their pre-dinner stroll. ‘These hulk people out in the Pacific are still on a heading that will bring them into our territorial waters during the next day or so. Can you give me a little of your new moon output for them? If I could guarantee them one reliable session of rain each week, I could probably persuade them to head back down south.’
*
Emilia Knight seemed either asleep or unconscious inside what looked like a biohazard tent. Her skin was pale, and Michael and Steve could see large red blotches glowing on her face and lower arms. Both men were now wearing white biohazard suits, and had pulled plastic covers on over their shoes.
‘All this protection is for her, not you,’ explained the young bio-suited doctor who had escorted them to Emilia’s private ward. ‘Exposure to radioactivity impairs the immune system, so we’re just making sure that she doesn’t pick up any infection while she’s here with us. That’s why you couldn’t bring your flowers into her room.’
The visitors had been kept waiting downstairs for over two hours, at the end of which time Michael had returned to the main reception desk and threatened to return with the police. As he’d jabbed a finger on the counter top to underline his point, a male nurse had suddenly appeared to escort them to the fourteenth floor.
Michael stared down at the unmoving form of Emilia Patricia Knight, a woman he hardly knew yet who already seemed to occupy a central role in his thoughts. He glanced at his companion and saw the anxiety in Steve’s dark eyes.
‘She’s just been undergoing a bone-marrow biopsy,’ explained the doctor. ‘I’m afraid she’ll be out now for some hours.’
‘I’d like to see Doctor Bowman,’ said Michael, feeling faintly ridiculous as he turned his entire visored head to talk to the medic.
‘I’m afraid Doctor Bowman is currently in theatre.’
‘Will you find out for me how long he is going to be there?’ asked the lawyer forcefully. He was getting sick of all these obfuscations and delays, although he did have to admit that his unconscious witness seemed to be suffering from something very unpleasant.
The doctor nodded briefly, turned away awkwardly in his clumsy suit and left the room.
Steve Bardini suddenly lifted the side of the tent suspended over Emilia. Michael reached forward to grab the man’s arm, not sure what he was intending, and then he noticed the stainless-steel Geiger counter in the seismologist’s hand. Steve pressed a button and slowly ran the instrument across the patient’s face, down her blistered arm, then across the sheets covering her chest and stomach and down over her legs.
He had only just dropped the tent flap when the young doctor lumbered back into the room.
‘I’m afraid it looks as if he’s going to be in surgery all night, Counsellor Fairfax,’ he explained. ‘He’s assisting at a thyroid transplant – for a Chinese submariner who tried to shut down an overheating nuclear core.’
‘How long do you expect to keep Emilia in here?’ asked Steve.
The doctor glanced at his DigiPad. ‘She’s still showing over thirty rads superficial,’ he said. ‘Normally, it should have dissipated by now. But she suffered a slight back injury at the same time as her exposure, and I’m afraid we think her blood became contaminated. We’ll know more once we’ve got the bone-marrow analysis back.’
‘So how long?’ repeated her former boyfriend.
‘Six, perhaps eight weeks,’ said the doctor.
Chapter Sixteen
The breakaway hulk-people convoy had survived the Hawaiian tsunami simply by adopting the tried and tested method they had used for decades to ride out the hideous storms of the Antarctic. They had chained their vessels loosely together.
A wall of water over forty miles long had swept right underneath the old ships, lifting each of them in turn like logs in a giant raft.
The US Pacific Fleet that had been dispatched to turn back the convoy and to retake the Global Haven from its pirate captors had instead been ordered to return to the safety of sheltered Pearl Harbor as soon as Geohazard Laboratories had issued its definitive tsunami alert. But the underwater earthquake had struck twelve hours earlier than predicted. Thirteen ships of the fleet had been caught in shallow water as they raced back to port and were either capsized or run aground.
But the American military authorities had quickly regrouped and, now that the hulk-people convoy – its component ships steaming separately once again – was less than twenty-four hours away from entering US territorial waters, the deterrent had been upped significantly.
A total of twenty-two US warships now circled the hulk convoy at high speed. The surviving ships of the Pacific Fleet had been ordered back to sea; the President had declared all navy leave cancelled, and had ordered every available ship in San Diego to lend assistance. Eight missile-carrying catamaran-frigates had even steamed down from devastated San Francisco in a single night’s high-speed dash.
It seemed as if a whole squadron of unmanned reconnaissance planes swooped and circled overhead, transmitting back a stream of images and data concerning the fleet of old vessels and their gleaming flagship.
Most worryingly for the breakaway group of hulk people, a number of the latest Red Eagle MMM cruise missiles were circling the convoy – stubby-winged projectiles that were programed to identify a pre-designated target and then remain circling it while their remote mission controllers thousands of miles away chose their moment to strike. The MMM or Triple-M (for Multi-Mission Missile) was the US government’s most effective weapon of extreme-force blackmail. Not only did it have a very long range and substantial slow-speed endurance, it also had the ability to depart the target area and return to base – landing on its own retractable undercarriage – for use on another occasion.
On the bridge of the Global Haven, John Gogotya shook his head in despair as the recorded image of the US President froze once again and the screen turned dark.
‘It doesn’t get any better, no matter how many times you play it,’ sneered Muhammad Sitta. ‘You promised us we would all be American citizens by tomorrow.’
As if it had heard these words spoken, a Red Eagle Triple-M swept across the bow of the giant cruise ship and circled round behind it.
‘See that?’ screamed Gogotya, pointing at the missile trail. ‘That thing’s got a tactical gamma-ray payload. It could kill every single person on this ship yet leave the boat itself wholly intact – still steaming on towards Los Angeles but filled only with corpses. Is that what you want?’
In his recent message to the breakaway convoy of hulk people, the President of the United States had been very clear about the nature of the weaponry he had sent against this mass of asylum seekers. He had been unsure how much, or how little, these poorly armed, poorly educated, unofficial refugees would know about modern armaments.
‘We can kill you all without damaging your ships,’ he had warned them. ‘Or we can sink every one of your vessels, if you do not turn back.’
Then the Pr
esident had extended his olive branch. ‘Your future must be decided by the United Nations. Every country in the world must play its part in providing you with immigration opportunities. The United States is prepared to sponsor a resolution granting you all official refugee status, so long as you will, for now, return and rejoin the main body of your ships in the Southern Ocean. If you do not turn and follow a course south by eight p.m. Pacific Time tonight, we will have no choice but to strike against all your vessels.’
Then, as if he were a car salesman throwing in an extra luxury accessory to close the deal, the President added: ‘I understand your plight and I have arranged for each community of ship dwellers in the Southern Ocean to receive Level Two rainfall for eight hours once a week, for every week until the United Nations and its member states take responsibility for your welfare.’
‘Look,’ shouted Muhammad Sitta, as he stared up at another screen on the bridge display panel. ‘We’re on American TV again.’
John Gogotya went to stand beside his contrary lieutenant. A Los Angeles station was indeed showing a live feed from some satellite far overhead. HULK CONVOY NOW ONLY 300 MILES AWAY ran the caption. There was a roar as the Red Eagle missile flashed past the windows of the bridge once again.
‘They’re never going to let us land,’ Gogotya told his followers, the twenty or so young men who had led the breakaway expedition, and who now had come across from the other vessels to attend this crucial meeting.
‘They wouldn’t bomb us live on TV,’ bellowed Sitta. ‘That’s not the American way.’
‘Oh yes, they would,’ yelled Gogotya. ‘They think we’re threatening them in their own homes. They just want to see us blown back to where we came from.’
There was a silence up on the bridge. None of these young men actually had any true concept of what was, or was not, the real American way. Each had only his own fantasy notions of that culture.
‘We must start turning back now,’ said their leader. ‘There’s only thirty minutes left before the deadline, and we don’t want them to make any mistakes.’
‘But we need dry land, homes, work, hospitals, schools, libraries,’ snapped Muhammad Sitta. ‘We must go on.’
‘Well, we don’t have the dry land or the work,’ said Gogotya, ‘But we have luxury homes, hospitals, schools and libraries . . .’ He banged his fist against the Global Haven’s control panel. ‘We’ve even got aircraft and maintenance facilities – and desalination plants! They haven’t demanded back this ship, have they? And if they were going to take her, they’d already have done it. Don’t you think we’ve got enough for the moment?’
The young men glanced at each other, and Gogotya saw nods being exchanged. ‘Get back to your own ships quickly,’ he said. ‘Let’s take this ship home so that everyone can benefit from it.’
*
‘Look at this.’ Steve Bardini held out the pocket Geiger counter so that the lawyer could see its display. ‘There’s not a single read-out from her body above one-point-five. That doctor claimed she had over thirty rads.’
Michael Fairfax took the stainless-steel instrument from him and tried to make sense of the data. It was shortly before eight p.m. and they were seated in the lawyer’s parked BMW, right outside the Naval Hospital building.
‘I’m not familiar with these. What are rads?’
‘It’s very simple,’ said Steve curtly. ‘She’s no more radioactive than you are. I swept every part of her body that was supposedly affected – nothing showing. Here.’ He punched a data-recall button. ‘These are the figures I was getting the day after she had handled the hot stuff’
Michael examined the two sets of data. They certainly seemed very different.
A marine suddenly tapped on Michael’s window.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to move on, sir. This is a secure area.’
As they drove out of the base, Steve tried to educate Emilia’s attorney in the basics of radioactivity and human exposure. As he explained, he himself had researched the subject thoroughly after his boss had first become contaminated.
‘Let’s find a motel where we can go over this properly,’ suggested Michael.
They took two rooms at the Shoreline Motel off Highway 5, bought themselves sandwiches from a small deli counter, and agreed to meet up again in an hour.
Michael wolfed down his roast beef sandwich – he hadn’t realized how hungry he was – and then stood under a scalding shower for ten minutes. As the water cascaded over his tired body, he tried to make sense of the conflicting evidence he had heard in the last few hours.
Emilia Knight had looked to be seriously ill. But her former boyfriend insisted that, whatever was wrong with her, it wasn’t being caused by exposure to radioactivity.
Then there was her abrupt removal from her home during the night; that hardly seemed part of any normal medical treatment. All of Michael’s instincts told him there was something wrong here, something connected with what she had found on Samoa, with the assumptions that the security services had jumped to, and perhaps with her decision to provide testimony to the court in The Hague.
Stepping out of the bathroom, Michael pulled on clean clothes and then automatically reached for his phone. He would speak to the boys before . . .
A wave of sadness washed over him, and he sank down onto the bed. There was a hard rap on the door.
Steve Bardini, who had also showered and changed, put his finger to his lips as he entered, then stretched out a palm for Michael’s inspection.
Cradled in the seismologist’s hand were objects that looked like tiny buttons attached to sticky pads. Each had a fine wire trailing from it, like a single hair.
Steve transferred these finds into Michael’s cupped hands, put a warning finger to his lips once again, then pulled a circular black pod from his jeans pocket. Positioning himself in the centre of the room, he pressed a button on the pod itself and a thin line of red light appeared across the ceiling and down both walls, like a laser-beam projection.
Slowly, he worked the beam across the ceiling and walls towards the curtained window. Then he stopped and nodded at the light-beam. Michael saw that a section of the red line, just beside a bedside cabinet, had turned green.
Steve pointed urgently and Michael crossed the room, pulling the cabinet away from the wall. Stuck to its back was another of the tiny button-like objects. Michael removed it and added it to the collection in his other hand.
Three more of the miniature radio microphones were found – one near the computer display and fixed phone, one behind the curtain pelmet, and the third behind a cabinet in the bathroom.
When his sweep was complete, Steve indicated for them to maintain their silence, then gathered the listening devices into a plastic laundry bag. Running the bathroom tap, he filled the bag with water, drained it, stamped on the damp contents and then threw the broken mess into the trash bin.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Michael, as soon as Steve had finished his act of destruction. ‘How did you know there would be bugs here – and what’s that thing?’ He pointed to the black scanner that his travelling companion had now placed on top of a drawer unit.
‘They weren’t meant for us, obviously,’ said Steve as he eased himself into one of the two easy chairs in the room. ‘Nobody could know we were coming here. But this is a naval town, so they’ll have every hotel and motel room in the city cold-wired.’
‘Cold-wired?’
‘The security services bug every room and meeting space for miles around sensitive locations, using passive mikes with very long-life batteries. Computers listen in to what these bugs are hearing twenty-four-seven. If they pick up a word or a phrase that’s in an alert index, they summon a human to listen in. At any one time computers in Washington will probably be listening to twenty or thirty thousand locations in this naval town alone.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Michael. He sensed a more serious, more capable air about the young scientist now.
‘That’s how your friend Carole Gonzaga was caught. The bomb-maker was in a public washroom in Newport Beach, and he gave the courier her address. They’d filled the bathroom with cold wires – Newport Beach is only twenty miles from Camp Pendleton.’
Michael sat down opposite Steve and stared into the younger man’s face.
‘How do you know how Carole was caught? How do you know about “cold wires”? And where did you get that thing, anyway?’ He pointed again to the bug detector on the drawer unit.
‘Can I rely on your confidentiality, counsellor?’ asked Steve. ‘No matter what I tell you?’
‘If you tell me anything in my capacity as a lawyer, yes, you can – if there’s a legal aspect to all of this.’
‘There’s a legal aspect to it, sure enough,’ said Steve. ‘I’m a scientific adviser to the Planet First Organization.’ He laughed grimly as he saw the surprise register on the attorney’s face.
Partly to buy himself thinking time, Michael rose from his chair and crossed the room to stare thoughtfully into the large mirror fixed on the wall opposite his king-size bed. Was this the missing link? Were this young man’s covert activities the reason why the security agencies seemed to be overreacting so grossly?
‘You were over in Samoa with Emilia, weren’t you?’ He turned back to face the seismologist once more. ‘Are you procuring plutonium for the PFO?’
It was now Steve Bardini’s turn to look shocked.
‘Of course I’m not! I didn’t even know what it was she’d discovered until weeks later,’ he protested. ‘We’d both signed a secrecy order, and she only told me subsequently.’
The attorney weighed up carefully what he was hearing.
‘And I don’t plant bombs either, counsellor,’ Steve added. ‘Like I said, I’m just a scientific adviser. Most of the organization is made up of people like me, people who care passionately about the health of this planet. Anyway, since the earthquake, the PFO has announced an end to all terrorist activity. Nature itself has sent the world a far better wake-up call than we could ever have managed.’
