Thunder Down Under

by Don Pendleton

  Martin harrumphed in reply. “Fuck Sydney. First, I was born here, so when it came time to build our new headquarters, of course I was gonna come back to my roots. Second, Melbourne’s where all these left-wing government bastards are holed up, so I gotta stick close by and make sure they’re not pissing our country away by being too busy sniffing each other’s arses and voting on minor issues like that gay marriage amendment instead of tackling the real problems facing this nation.”

  “Oh? And what are those?”

  “Increased competition from Southeast Asia for both mineral mining and manufacturing, for starters,” Martin said. He took a healthy slug of his drink and began pacing around the huge office space. “Then you got the unrest here, as well, with these indigenous crybabies protesting about companies like mine doing what we do best—extracting valuable minerals from the land and selling them to improve our economy and make our nation ever stronger. All these braying jackasses care about is preserving the fuckin’ land. The desert’s been there for thousands of years and it’ll be there for another thousand after we’re all dead and gone. But the time to get at what’s under it, and to use that for the benefit of humankind, is right now!”

  Bolan had been studying Martin while he made his little speech, and although it sounded good and even hit the right notes—for an industrialist, at least—it also sounded a little rote. It came off as something he’d memorized and practiced until it sounded practiced, but he’d said it over and over until now it came off as canned.

  But Bolan simply raised his glass in response. “Hear, hear.”

  Martin stared at him for a few moments then smiled and walked over to him. “I like you, Cooper. I like the way you think. You best be careful—you do too good of a job here and I might just have to hire you away from the States, bring you down here to work full-time for me! What’d you say to that, mate?”

  “Well, I’d have to say let’s see how this first assignment goes and we’ll go from there, okay?”

  “Smart—smart man. I think you’re gonna do all right.” He downed the rest of his whiskey in a single, long swallow. “Now come on, let’s eat.”

  Without saying a word to Tate, who had stood near the elevator during their entire exchange, Martin hit the up button for the elevator.

  “I thought we were already on the top floor,” Bolan commented.

  “Almost,” Martin replied. “My penthouse is on the entire top floor. If you liked what you saw here, wait until you see the dining hall upstairs—it’ll knock your socks off!”

  “Can’t wait. Say, would you mind if Ms. Tate joins us?” Bolan asked. “As my assistant, it would be good to have her on hand for our discussion and any necessary follow-up.”

  Bolan’s request stopped Martin nearly in his tracks and he swiveled his head around to regard her. Again, as if he was seeing her for the first time. “Eh?”

  “Actually, I should be heading back down—” she began.

  “Nonsense!” That wide, half-sincere smile spread across the industrialist’s face again. “If it weren’t for you, Brent might not be with us now. Come along now.”

  With a half pained, half resigned look on her face, Tate joined them in the elevator.

  Bolan shot her an approving look and nod, which she didn’t return.

  Chapter Eight

  Akira Tokaido leaned back, stretching his arms up over his head and flexing his interlaced fingers. His vertebrae popped and he knew he’d been sitting glued to his station for too long.

  A small price to pay for doing his part to save the world, he thought, grinning to himself. Although he had a humorous side—like when he had taken Bear’s fifty-dollar bet that he wouldn’t serve coffee to that stuffed shirt who had insisted on coming to the Farm—when he was on duty, it was all business. Like Kurtzman, Tokaido knew that lives could go from safe to at risk in a moment’s notice, as that business on the Melbourne freeway, when Striker had been attacked out of the blue, had demonstrated.

  Speaking of... He glanced at his lower left monitor to check the progress of his analysis program to dissect the several gigabytes of data received from Striker’s recording glasses. The program was breaking down every frame and compiling a data point list that would be used to create a profile of the two assailants, their motorcycles, weapons and even their body types. Granted, there was a lot of extrapolation involved, but when the near-AI was done crunching the numbers, Tokaido would have a pretty good idea of the physical characteristics of the two attackers and could then start the AI searching through the terabytes of security footage they were able to view from cameras all around Melbourne to see if it could find a match.

  The only issue was that it might take days, which they didn’t really have, he thought. Still, it was a starting point—even if the program had to scan all five-plus-million people in the city.

  Satisfied the program was progressing as quickly as it could, he turned to the report given by the Wallcorloo follow-up team that had processed the site of the two dead Mobile Patrol officers. Tokaido scanned those documents, as well, looking for any inconsistences, anything that seemed out of place—other than how people had managed to infiltrate what seemed to be a highly secure, multimillion-dollar facility without leaving any trace besides what had been seen on that drone. Although the company had been using a wireless camera system for visual security—which was their first mistake—he bet they wouldn’t do that again.

  Before he moved on, the young hacker conducted a quick search of US satellites with orbits that might have taken them over the site during the timeframe the two MPs were being gunned down. He came up empty, however. The only things orbiting the area at the time were a French telecommunications satellite with no visual capability, a Russian satellite that transmitted state oil company data and a German radio transceiver. Unlike the movies, where there always seemed to be a handy satellite right overhead when you needed it, real life wasn’t that convenient.

  “Back to the drawing board...er, computer screen,” he muttered, draining the last of a can of energy drink and shooting the empty toward the recycling basket near the door. It caromed off the rim then fell in.

  “Nice shot—still shooting 86 percent,” he said as he focused on another monitor, this one running the drone footage. Cycling back to the beginning, Tokaido began running it again, watching closely and matching what he saw with the reported data from both the victims as well as WN internal reports. The timelines seemed to match up. No inconsistencies there, he thought.

  Reaching the point where the first man got shot, he ran a program that calculated the angle the bullet entered the body. It was fortunate that the drone had maintained a perfect level. The calculation came back at 27.4 degrees. He then brought up an image of the facility, taken by a US satellite, and looked for points that matched the estimated trajectory, as well as where the shooter would have had to be positioned to take it.

  No matching location parameters found, the program told him.

  He ran it again and got the same result. Okay...

  After widening his coverage area to a quarter-kilometer radius outside the facility, there were still no hits. Then a half kilometer. And there—

  Qualifying location parameter found.

  Tokaido blinked then ran the program from scratch one more time. It came up with the same location.

  The intruders had set up a sniper about eight hundred yards out to cover the whole base while they did their thing.

  Who did that? Who were these guys? he thought.

  Only one way to find out. Tokaido fast-forwarded to where the guy in the SUV got shot and reverse-engineered the shot based on the photos of the parked SUV and the angle of the bullet hole in the center console after it had passed completely through the poor bastard’s body. The computer crunched the numbers and came up with the same trajectory.

  So, their sniper took out both guys, he muse
d silently. Then who was the dude at the SUV door? No way could he have gotten there so fast.

  He brought up the footage of the talking guy outside the SUV and played it at normal speed, then half, then one-quarter speed. Finally he played it at normal speed again and stopped the footage right where the masked figure entered the frame.

  There. The young hacker had noticed a slight discoloration in the frame before the man entered, which was different than in the one where he’d first appeared. It was so minor that a casual observer would have missed it. Tokaido was anything but, however.

  That could be explained, however, by several things, he thought, leaning closer for a better look. Dust on the lens, perhaps. The man’s shadow falling over the camera...

  Or it could be that someone had modified the footage...

  “Time to eliminate the impossible,” he muttered as he brought up his video enhancement and editing suite and began to work on forensically examining the footage. But after a few minutes, he sat back and frowned.

  The image of the footage recorded by Striker’s glasses wasn’t enough to analyze in the way he needed. He needed the actual footage file from the company.

  Cracking his knuckles, Tokaido set about breaking into Wallcorloo’s computer system, humming a K-pop remake of an old Australian ’80s rock hit, a tune about coming from Down Under.

  Chapter Nine

  Bolan had been in many tight spots over the years, in every corner of the globe. He had faced down all manner of threats, both to himself and often the free world, and had come out on top every time. None of them had been easy; many had pushed him to his limits. But he had always found a way to prevail.

  The past hour, however, had been one of the most excruciating experiences of his life, but for a completely different reason: in one of the few times in his long war against evil, Bolan found himself in a situation where he was uniquely unable to do anything.

  As Matt Cooper, environmental engineer, he had to maintain his cover, which meant he had to listen to Angus Martin talk. That was the first problem.

  The man was incapable of staying on a topic for more than a minute, often veering off into something entirely unrelated—going from business to art to politics to sports to family, then back to something he may or may not have touched on fifteen minutes ago—or he would zoom off into something entirely new. He also barely paid attention to anything anyone else said. He would look as if he was listening, but when the speaker was finished, he launched into the next thing that was on his mind.

  It seemed like he was afraid of silence, Bolan thought. About twenty minutes into the dinner, he made a mental note to thank Kurtzman for the glasses, because he was going to need to review the footage of Martin rambling on and on afterward if he wanted to make any sense of what the man was saying.

  Then there was the businessman’s wife, Sunny, a former actress who had risen to fame in a well-received Australian TV drama series before marrying Martin in what was touted as the wedding of the decade. A trophy spouse, to be sure, she was at least twenty years younger than him, with short blond hair and a toned, bronzed body, and wearing a sky-blue and white dress that barely covered enough for the imagination to wonder at the rest. She greeted her husband effusively, was distantly polite to Tate, and positively beamed at Bolan.

  They ended up sitting at one end of a giant red-and-black hardwood table—“Jarrah wood, at least a thousand years old,” Martin boasted—that could have held twenty people with ease. Martin sat at the head, with his wife on his left and Bolan on his right. Tate sat on Bolan’s right and was immediately cut out of the conversation, despite several attempts by him to bring her into it.

  Martin had been right about one thing—the view from up here was amazing, putting the one in his office to shame. In effect, he had built a glass enclosure for his guests, with a 360-degree view of the city all around them. The effect, especially with the sun sinking into the west and the approaching cloud front building up into what was likely to be a substantial storm, was magnificent.

  The food was excellent, as well. The menu featured a choice of free-range fowl or grass-fed steak, veal, lamb or mutton. Martin ordered veal, well done, a preparation Bolan had never heard of. He stuck with grilled scallops as an appetizer, then went with a New York strip, medium rare.

  They were also enjoying an excellent Australian Shiraz, with Martin saying he had an even better Cabernet Sauvignon to go with the entrée. He was raising his glass for a toast when Bolan felt the unmistakable, unsubtle pressure of an unshod foot in his crotch.

  Without being obvious, he leaned back in his chair and glanced down for a moment, just long enough to confirm that there was indeed a silk-stockinged foot between his legs. On his right, Tate picked through her seaweed salad. If she had any idea about what was going on next to her, she gave no sign of it.

  He immediately glanced back up, but Sunny was staring at her husband while he droned on about his first oil field deal back in the early ’90s. Bolan tried to gently scoot back in his chair to take the pressure off, but the woman apparently had the legs of a giraffe because she stayed right with him. There wasn’t enough room under the table for him to cross his legs, so he had to settle for shifting toward Martin and, setting his fork down, ducking his hand under the table and quickly but firmly removing the offending foot.

  Clamping his legs together, Bolan turned his attention to Martin as their entrées arrived. “Angus, I’m curious to get your thoughts on the AFN. I’ve seen several of your recent interviews and, from what I can tell, it seems like you’re being unfairly targeted.”

  “See, our American friend knows what’s going on,” Martin said to his wife, who nodded and beamed another high-voltage smile at Bolan, this one with a definite sly undertone.

  He didn’t react in any way, just kept his gaze on the industrialist.

  “You’re absolutely right about them—the bleeding-heart bastards are always getting in my way, whether it’s filing lawsuits in court to prevent me from starting projects I have every right to do, to protesting at every site of ours they can get to. We’ve had to get a bloody restraining order to keep them off my property here, otherwise you would have had to run a gauntlet of them on the way in. Bad enough they’re on always the other side of the damn street most days, waving their signs and chanting like a buncha loonies, always trying to draw more attention to themselves.”

  “I did some research,” Bolan said, “and it seems their primary goal is to simply protect the ancestral lands that were the indigenous tribe’s hunting grounds from a few hundred years ago—”

  “Oh, sod all that nonsense!” Martin said as he sawed at his veal tenderloin. “Look, my father told me that progress is the way of the world, and it always has been. These people are trying to retard progress by keeping this land the way it’s always been—nothing. There’s millions of dollars of minerals down there that will keep moving Australia and the world into the future, and I intend to get it out, one way or the other.

  “This ludicrous idea of ‘ancestral lands’ is a fantasy these people cling to because, for some reason, they don’t want to live in the right now, in this century, so they want to deprive others of that, as well, all in the name of ‘history’ or ‘preservation’ or some such nonsense. Well, let me tell you, you can’t go back. There is only one way—forward, along with the rest of us. And the sooner they realize that, the better!”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Bolan turned to Tate. “What do you think about what Mr. Martin said, say, from a legal perspective?”

  She had been raising a bite of lamb chop to her mouth and ate it, chewing slowly, most likely to consider exactly how she was going to answer the question. Bolan thought she might have been stalling to give Martin a chance to speak, however, he was busy attacking his veal again and currently wasn’t saying anything.

  Finally she swallowed and sipped her wine, then cleared h
er throat. “So far, the courts have been fairly clear on the matter—”

  Martin snorted around a mouthful of meat. “Courts, judges, lawyers—bunch of bought-and-paid-for simpering morons pandering to the government and these extremist groups, that’s what they are.”

  Tate continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Recent decisions have expanded the rights of the native tribes in terms of their relationship with the rest of the population—and that does include land rights, such as defined in Mabo versus Queensland in 1992, for example.”

  Martin waved a hand at her. “That one I know all about. Turned out the ruling also screwed the indigenous people, since it was so restrictive they couldn’t even develop the land they owned themselves. The environmentalists were bloody ecstatic over that, never mind that it actually impoverished the very people it was supposed to help in the first place.”

  “True, the ruling wasn’t perfect, but it was a start,” Tate countered. “I think if terms could be reached with them that do not despoil the land, and make a reasonable effort to return it to its untouched state once the resources are removed—”

  “Oh, come on—there’s no use in mining an area if I have to spend half my profit to restore the ground to sand dunes and desert flowers!” Martin exclaimed. “That’s how they try to stick it to us, by loading down each of our requests with so many damned rules and regulations that we can’t even move once we’ve started, or we’ve violated half a dozen bylaws about this, that or the other.”

  He pointed his fork at Bolan. “That’s the whole bloody reason I brought you in on this in the first place. I want you to inspect the Amadeus site as an objective observer and make sure it’s up to snuff with their goddamn regulations, so the sneaky bastards can’t turn around and try to say we didn’t do this or that to comply with their bloody demands. Then, I want you to craft a system that we can use going forward to stop these buggers in their tracks. I want them nullified from here on out. The more restrictive, the better.”