Snakehead

by Anthony Horowitz

  Ash.

  Reef Island.

  The tsunami heading for Western Australia.

  For the last few days, Alex had been so worried about himself that he had lost sight of the bigger picture. How long did he have left before Major Yu set off the bomb that was going to have such a devastating effect on the earth’s tectonic plates? Was he already too late? Alex forced himself into a sitting position, warming himself in the sun and trying to get life back into his battered frame. At the same time, he worked it out. Yu had spoken of three days. At midnight the earth was going to be in the grip of some sort of gravitational pull and the fault line deep down in the seabed would be at its most vulnerable.

  Three days. Alex had spent two of them as a prisoner in the hospital compound. So it was going to happen today! Right now it couldn’t be much later than ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. So Alex had only twelve hours to prevent a terrible catastrophe, the murder of eight people on Reef Island and the deaths of thousands more in Australia.

  And that was when the complete hopelessness of his situation hit him. It was true that he had managed to escape from the horrific death Major Yu had planned for him. But where was he? Looking around him, Alex saw that he had left the rain forest behind him. He was on the edge of a floodplain with mountains in the far distance, perhaps thirty miles away. He was surrounded by stubby, dwarflike trees that he couldn’t name, a few boulders, and some termite mounds. There was a sweet smell—something like moldering wood—in the air. And that was all. If nowhere had a middle, this was it.

  There was nothing he could do. Nobody was going to operate on him, but he would die anyway—either from starvation or disease. Assuming, of course, that a saltwater crocodile or a snake didn’t get him first. Alex wiped a grimy hand across his face. It seemed to him that from the moment this mission had begun, nothing had gone right. He had never been in control. He cast his mind back to the office in Sydney and Ethan Brooke outlining what he would have to do. He was there to provide cover, that was all. It was going to be easy. Instead of which, he had been thrown into the worst two weeks of his life. God! He should have listened to Jack Starbright!

  He looked again at the mountains. It would take him forty-eight hours to reach them at the very least. Too long. And why should he assume anyone lived there? He hadn’t seen any roads or houses from the plane. If only he could get in touch with MI6. He glanced at his wrist. Miraculously, despite the battering it had taken, the watch was still in place. The question was—why hadn’t it worked? Smithers had built it for him personally. The watch must be sending out a signal. So what possible reason could MI6 have to ignore it? Alex remembered his meeting with Mrs. Jones and Ben Daniels—Fox, as he had once been known. Alex couldn’t believe that the SAS man would let him down. So what had gone wrong?

  He took the watch off and examined it. Although it looked cheap and tacky, like something he might have gotten in a street market in Afghanistan, the watch would have been built to last. The strap must have been strong to survive the journey over the Bora Falls, and Alex guessed the case would be waterproof. The hands were still showing eleven o’clock. Alex turned it over. There was a groove going all the way around the underside. He realized that the back must screw off. He pressed his thumb against it and twisted. The case opened with surprising ease.

  The watch contained some complicated microcircuitry that Smithers must have designed and installed. It was completely dry. There was no evidence of any water seeping in. The whole thing was powered by a battery, which should have been sitting in a circular compartment, right in the middle.

  But there was no battery. The compartment was empty.

  So that was the answer, the reason why his signal hadn’t been heard. There had been no signal. But how could it have happened? Smithers had always been on his side. It was completely unlike him to forget something so basic. Alex had to fight back a wave of fury. His whole life snatched away from him simply because of a missing battery!

  For a moment, Alex was tempted to fling the watch into the river. He never wanted to see the wretched thing again.

  For a long time he didn’t move. He let the sun beat down on him, drying out his clothes. A few flies buzzed around his face, but he ignored them. He found himself playing back everything that had happened to him…the waterfall, the flight through the rapids, the moment he had set the hospital ablaze. Had it really all been for nothing? And before that, his dinner with Major Yu, the chase on the Liberian Star, the discovery of Royal Blue, the toy warehouse in Jakarta, and the arrival of Kopassus.

  No battery!

  He remembered his time in Bangkok with Ash and the story he had been told about his father in Malta. That was the only reason he had agreed to all this, to learn something about himself. Had it been worth it? Probably not. The truth was that Ash had disappointed him. His godfather. Alex had hoped he would have been more of a friend, but despite all the time they had spent together, he had never really gotten to know him. Ash was too much of a mystery—and from the very start he had set out to trick Alex. That business on the beach in Perth.

  He remembered his first sight of Ash, dressed as a soldier and carrying an assault rifle, looming out of the darkness as Alex stood on a fake mine in the middle of a fake barrage. How could they have done that to him? It had all been a test.

  “You weren’t in any real danger. We knew exactly where you were all the time.”

  That was what Ash had told him that first night at the Peninsula Hotel, sitting out at the swimming pool. Alex remembered it now.

  And how had they known?

  “There was a beacon inside the heel of one of your sneakers.”

  His sneakers.

  Alex looked down at them. All the color had faded, and they were ragged, full of holes. Was it possible, what he was thinking? Could it possibly be true? Alex had been given the sneakers when he was on the aircraft carrier that had picked him up when he first landed in Australia. The beacon had been added by Colonel Abbott when he was staying with the SAS in Swanbourne.

  He was wearing the same sneakers now.

  He had been given a complete change of clothes by Cloudy Webber when she had dressed him as an Afghan—but the shoes hadn’t fit him, so she had allowed him to keep his own. He hadn’t changed again until his dinner with Major Yu. He had worn the English designer shirt and jeans until he had arrived at the hospital. There had been fresh clothes in his room. But neither Major Yu nor Dr. Tanner had provided him with new footwear. So the beacon that he had been given in Swanbourne must still be on him. It wouldn’t be working. It had been designed for short-range use.

  But it might be battery-operated.

  Alex fought back the surge of excitement. He was too afraid of being disappointed. He leaned down and pulled the sneakers off so that he could examine them. If there was a tracking device, it would have to be buried in one of the heels. There was nowhere else to hide it. Alex turned the shoes over. The soles were made of rubber, and he couldn’t see any openings or anything that looked like a secret compartment. He pulled out the insoles. And that was when he found it. It was in the left shoe, directly over the heel: a flap that had been cut into the fabric and then sealed.

  It took Alex ten minutes to get it open, using his fingers, his teeth, and a sharp stone from the riverbank. As he worked, he knew that this might all be for nothing. The battery had been there for two weeks. It might be dead. It surely wouldn’t fit the transmitter in the watch anyway. But the chances of finding a second battery in the Australian outback had been zero to begin with. Alex found it hard to believe that he had been carrying it all the time.

  He pulled open the flap and there it was—the little pack of circuitry that had been designed to save his life during the bombardment in Swanbourne. And there was the power source too, a straightforward lithium battery, about twice the size of the one that should have been fitted into the watch. Alex eased it out and held it in the palm of his hand as if it were a nugget of pure gold. All he
had to do was connect it. He had no screwdriver, no conductor, no metal contacts, nothing. Easy!

  In the end, he broke two spikes off a nearby shrub and used them as miniature tweezers to pry out some of the wires from inside the heel of the shoe. It seemed to take forever, and as the sun climbed higher, he felt the sweat trickling down his forehead, but he didn’t stop to rest. Painstakingly, he unstitched the inside of the radio beacon until he had two lengths of wire, each one barely more than an inch long. Did the battery still have any life? He rubbed the wires against it, and to his delight, he was rewarded by a tiny spark. So now all he had to do was connect the battery to the watch, using a couple of pebbles to keep everything in place. There really was nothing more he could do. He set the battery next to the watch with the wires trailing inside, the two of them feeding precious electricity into the transmitter, and balanced the entire thing on a rock. After that, he went and lay down in the shadow of a tree. Either the transmitter was working now or it wasn’t. He would find out soon enough.

  A few minutes later he was sound asleep.

  21

  ATTACK FORCE

  ALEX WAS WOKEN BY the sound of a helicopter. For a moment he was filled with dread, fearing that the Bell UH-1D had returned. If that were the case, he would let them take him. He simply didn’t have in him to fight anymore. There was nothing left with which to fight back. But squinting into the sun, he saw at once that this was a bigger helicopter with two sets of rotors: a Chinook. And there was a figure already leaning out of the front door.

  Blue eyes. Short black hair. A handsome, slightly boyish face. It was Ben Daniels.

  Alex clambered to his feet as the Chinook landed on a patch of scrubland a short distance away. He went over to it, taking care where he put his bare feet. It would be just his luck to step on a death adder now! Ben stepped out and stared at him.

  “So here you are!” he exclaimed, shouting over the noise of the helicopter rotors. “We were getting worried about you!” He shook his head in disbelief. “What on earth are you doing out here? Where have you been?”

  “It’s a long story,” Alex said.

  “Has it got anything to do with the smoke coming from upriver?” Ben jerked a thumb. “We saw it as we flew in.”

  “That used to be a hospital.” Alex couldn’t hide his delight that things were finally going his way. “I’m really glad to see you…”

  “Mrs. Jones has been frantic. We knew you’d flown to Jakarta, but we lost you after that. She’s got people all over Indonesia, but she sent me to Darwin in case you made it across. I’ve been waiting there for three days, hoping you’d get in touch. You look terrible! Like something the cat dragged in…”

  “That’s how I feel.” Alex stopped. “What time is it, Ben?” he asked.

  Ben was obviously surprised by the question. He looked at his watch. “It’s ten past one. Why do you ask?”

  “We have to get moving. We’ve got less than twelve hours.”

  “Until what?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way…”

  Alex was feeling a lot better than he had in a long time. He was warm and dry and well fed, and all the dangers of the last few days had slipped away behind him. He was lying on a comfortable bunk in a military compound just outside Darwin, which was where Ben Daniels had brought him earlier that day. He was wearing combat fatigues, the only clothes Ben had been able to find for him. For the last few hours he had been left on his own.

  He could see a certain amount of activity outside the window. Soldiers crossing the parade ground, jeeps speeding in and out of the main gate. The helicopter was still sitting where it landed. Half an hour ago, a gas truck had pulled up and Alex had watched as refueling began. He wondered if it was significant. Maybe something was happening at last.

  Despite everything, he couldn’t relax completely. It was six thirty, and very soon the sun would be setting, at the same time moving into the alignment with the earth and the moon that Major Yu had been waiting for. At midnight, Royal Blue would be lowered to the seabed and detonated. The devastation would begin.

  And what were MI6 or ASIS doing to prevent it?

  Alex had explained everything…not just to Ben but to a whole posse of Australian army officers. His story was incredible, almost beyond belief, but the strange thing was that not one person in the room had doubted him. This was, after all, the boy who had dropped in from outer space. Alex supposed that where he was concerned, anything was now considered possible. One of the men was a technical adviser, and he had quickly confirmed what Major Yu had said. It would be possible to manufacture an artificial tsunami. From midnight onward, the fault line would be in the grip of enormous gravitational pressure. Even a relatively small explosion would be enough to trigger a global catastrophe, and Yu had all the power of Royal Blue at his command.

  Of course, in one sense Scorpia’s mission had already failed. Thanks to Alex, the intelligence agencies knew what Scorpia were planning, and even if everyone on Reef Island were killed in a freak wave, nobody would now think it was an accident. Alex assumed that the island would be evacuated anyway, just to be on the safe side. There was no longer any need for Major Yu to press the button. If he was sensible, he’d already be looking for somewhere to hide.

  There was a knock on the door. Alex straightened up as Ben Daniels entered. He was looking grim.

  “They want you,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The cavalry’s just arrived. They’re in the mess hall…”

  Alex walked across the compound with Daniels, wondering what had gone wrong. But at least he was grateful he was still being included. MI6 had always treated him as a spy one minute, a schoolboy the next, dumping him out of the way whenever it suited them.

  The mess hall was a low wooden building running the full length of the square. With Daniels right behind him, Alex opened the door and went in.

  Most of the officers he had spoken to earlier that day were still there, poring over maps and sea charts that had been spread out over the dining tables. They had been joined by two men that Alex recognized at once. This was the cavalry that Ben had referred to. Ethan Brooke was sitting at a table, with Marc Damon standing just behind him. Presumably they had been flown up from Sydney. Garth—the guide dog—saw Alex come in and thumped his tail. At least someone was pleased to see him.

  “Alex!” The blind man had become aware of his presence. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay.” Alex wasn’t sure he was too happy to see the head of ASIS—Covert Action. Ethan Brooke had manipulated him as cold-bloodedly as Alan Blunt would have in London. It seemed to him that all these people were of a type.

  “I know what you’ve been through. I can’t believe the way things played out. But you did a fantastic job.”

  “Major Yu knew about me all the time,” Alex said. Even as he spoke the words, he knew they were true. The fight in Bangkok had been designed to cripple him. And on the Liberian Star, Alex had overheard Yu boasting to the captain. He had known Alex’s identity before he entered the container. He has simply been playing with him, for his own amusement.

  “Yes. We have a security leak, and it’s worse than we thought.” Brooke glanced in the direction of his deputy, who looked away, as if he didn’t want to make any comment.

  “What’s happened to Ash?” Alex asked.

  “We don’t know. We only know what you told us.” Brooke fell silent, and Alex could see he was preparing himself for what he had to say.

  “So what are you going to do?” Alex asked.

  “We have a problem, Alex,” Brooke explained. “Here’s the situation…I’ll give it to you straight. The first thing is, the Reef Island conference is still going ahead.”

  “Why?” Alex was shocked.

  “We told them they were in danger. Obviously, we couldn’t give them all the details, but we suggested they pack their bags and get out of there in the strongest-possible terms. They refused. They said that if they left, t
hey’d look like cowards. Tomorrow’s their main press conference, and how’s it going to look if they’ve all skulked away overnight? We’re still arguing with them, but in a way, I suppose they’ve got a point. Scorpia wanted them out of the picture. If they simply disappeared, they’d be doing the job for them.”

  Alex took this in. It was bad news—but Reef Encounter was only part of the picture. After the tsunami hit the island, it would continue on its way toward Western Australia.

  “Have you found Major Yu?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Brooke smiled briefly. “He told you he was on an oil platform in the Timor Sea, and we’ve gone through all the records, including the latest satellite images. There’s an oil rig licensed to the Chada Trading Agency in Bangkok. It’s a semi-submersible platform moored in four thousand feet of water a hundred miles north of Reef Island.”

  “Right in the subduction zone,” Damon muttered. It was the first time he had spoken since Alex came into the room. “It’s called Dragon Nine.”

  “So that’s it,” Alex said. It seemed obvious to him. “You bomb it. Blow it out of the water. Kill Major Yu and everyone who works for him.”

  “I’d love to do just that,” Brooke replied. “But first of all, Dragon Nine is just outside Australian waters. It’s in Indonesian territory. If I send a strike against it, I might accidentally start a war. It seems I can’t even send one man in a boat without written authority, and that could take days. Officially, we’re stuck…”

  “Why can’t you ask the Indonesians for help?”

  “They don’t trust us. By the time we’ve persuaded them we’re telling the truth, it’ll be too late.”

  “So you’re just going to sit back and let him get on with it?” Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Obviously not. Why do you think we’re here?”