“Don’t worry about the both,” the big man said. “One’ll be quite enough. You off yer flaming rocker?”
Desperately I said, “Just take me to Learoyd, fast. That’s all. Where is he?”
A hand jerked upwards as we came through the hatch — right in rear of the admin building. “Up there. In the main control centre. Has bin the last eight hours. You’ll not get in to see ’im there, mate.” He stared at me curiously. “’Oo the flipping ’ell are yer, anyway?”
Tensely I said, “All you need to know is I’m representing the federal government in Canberra and I want the power cut from the reactors. Unless you all want to be atomized.” I felt I was beginning to get through to them — maybe. I said, “This vibration — is it normal?”
“Reckon it is, yes, at certain stages of running up the reactors. We’re on an exercise, see, that’s why Learoyd’s been shut up in the MCC so flaming long.”
“And Dunwoodie?”
“Yeah, ’e’s there too. ’E’s come out from time to time, though, and ’ad a word with the boys.” He added, “’E ’as ’is missus ’ere, so —”
“I know,” I said, and that was when I saw Flair. She was running towards me from the back entrance of the admin building, and she was scared as hell, and there was a man running out behind her, not Dunwoodie, but a uniformed man carrying a gun. He was shouting at her and it looked as if she was under arrest.
I ran for her and she came into my arms. She was crying and her face was a mess. She gasped, “Thank God.”
I said, “Flair, we haven’t long. We may go up any minute. Tell me quickly what the set-up is.”
“Learoyd’s in full charge,” she said, her voice shaking. “There’s no stopping him, or Jake either. Jake ordered me to be put under guard.” By this time the uniformed man had made it and he reached out and put a hand on Flair’s shoulder.
“Sorry, Mrs Dunwoodie,” he said. “Orders. It’s not my choice.”
“And this isn’t mine either,” I said. I grabbed his shoulder and swung him towards me and I let him have it right in the face, just as hard as I could make it. He went down spurting blood and teeth, his head hit the concrete, and he went out like a light. I grabbed his gun and swung it to cover the spectators. I said, “This is for real and I’m no fairy. Nor am I mad. Not in that sense anyway. The complex is going to blow up unless someone cuts the power and lets the reactors simmer down. Who’s going to do it?”
There was a dead silence, a startled and uncertain silence that could almost be felt. The bearded man said, “Ain’t no-one here c’n do that. The power house, it’s locked and guarded all the time while exercises are on. No-one’ll get in without Learoyd’s okay.” His eyes narrowed. “Look, mister. You really on the level?”
I said, “There’s only one thing that’s leveller and that’s the grave. And that’s the one thing you’ll never lie in, because within five hours at the most, and that’s putting it bloody high, you and all the rest of us will be scattered around the upper atmosphere. Maybe we’ll all come down again in rain, one day.” I stopped when I got to that point, because several things happened. One was that a bullet snicked into my hand and made me drop the uniformed man’s gun, and I looked up and saw Dunwoodie, holding a rifle, coming for me from the left; the next thing was that very suddenly the vibration increased beneath my feet till the whole complex seemed to be doing a mad dance and, at the same time, a high whine started up, a whine that increased to a terrifying crescendo that beat and beat at my ears as Dunwoodie, before I could pick up that gun again, rammed his rifle right against my throat and I saw murder in his eyes.
20
Dunwoodie’s voice was a snarl, a sheer animal snarl. He said, “You flaming, bloody, lousy pommy. What in the flaming hell are you doing here?”
“Doing your job for you,” I said, “or trying to.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“As if you didn’t know!” I snapped, and even as I did so I knew I was wasting my breath, that of course he literally didn’t know at all. He didn’t even know why he was there — not the real reason, that is. He was still Doctor High’s man; even though High was dead and the electronic impulses were presumably no longer going out under the panel’s control, this man’s brain, his thoughts, and his resultant actions were still in thrall to that monstrous computer set-up on Kimbau. He was being as it were held to the last transmissions. I could see by the staring look in Dunwoodie’s eyes that this was so, that his was not the mind that was in control. Talking to Learoyd would be just as much a waste of time, for no doubt he too would still be under High’s domination. And now there couldn’t be long to go before High’s dead intelligence turned all this corner of Australia into a nuclear hell of flame and fallout. I wasn’t the only one now who realized what was going to happen — at last something was beginning to penetrate the watching crowd. They didn’t like that vibration and that whine any more than I did; it had gone beyond the normal now. I was just about to risk a grab at the rifle that Dunwoodie was still holding against my throat when that crowd surged forward, a hand knocked away the rifle, and something hard and heavy came down with a crack on the back of Dunwoodie’s head. He collapsed in a heap and after that there wasn’t a flicker out of him; maybe the control capsule had shifted, but just then there wasn’t the time to go into that. The whine from the reactors had now drowned out all other sound, it was almost a whistle that shivered the eardrums, and the vibration had again increased. I’d got hold of Dunwoodie’s rifle when he fell and now I grabbed Flair and turned away in front of what had become a mob, racing for the steps leading up to the main doors of the admin building. Men and women, pouring from the building, shoved roughly past us, but at the top of the steps I turned back with the rifle in my hands and tried to make my voice heard above the whine and the shouts.
I yelled, “Does anyone know how to turn off the power?”
I might as well have saved my breath. No-one was taking a blind bit of notice, even if they had heard. Already some of them were jumping over the side of the complex, risking the sharks. More, like lemmings — bloody stupid lemmings in the circumstances — were following. Then I realized Flair was trying to tell me something and I bent down close to her. She was very nearly incoherent now but I managed to catch a name. John Kingsford.
I snapped, “For Christ’s sake, who’s he?”
“Learoyd’s number two, his top man on the technical side. He was locked up, like me.”
My God, I thought, yes of course … there had to be someone who hadn’t been got at and who would know things were heading wrong. High had said as much. “Where is he?” I asked.
Flair said, “I don’t know, but probably in his room.”
“Can you take me to it?”
She nodded. I said, “Then we don’t waste any more time.”
She turned away and ran down the steps. I followed her to another building. We ran inside. Everything was shaking loose. I was convinced the building was coming down any minute. But the basic construction was sound and the steel girders held; it was just the trimmings that were falling around us as we ran for the lift. But I had a nasty feeling that with so much vibration around we might get stuck for ever in the shaft, and I had just grabbed Flair to deflect her towards the stairs when I heard something else: a loud, high, tearing noise followed by the crash of falling masonry and then a huge splash from the sea.
“Outside,” I said.
We ran for it. Out in the open we looked up. The top of the admin building had gone. We were surrounded by great broken lumps of concrete, and up top bent steel waved like sunflower stalks with the blooms knocked off by hooligans. Learoyd’s office suite had been up there. I asked, “Was that where the control centre was?”
“Yes,” Flair said.
“Then that’s the end of Tracy Learoyd,” I said. I was still having to shout everything, even at close range. The whine was deafening. I looked around, bewildered, lost in a hell of noise and movement
. Everywhere men and women were running more or less aimlessly, until I saw some of them streaming down towards the entry to the causeway. I wondered if the security men on the gates would have flown the roost themselves without opening up, but of course it wouldn’t make any difference if they had. No-one had the time to get to safety now. I saw more buildings waver, saw more cracks developing in the concrete facings. Then I saw one of the buildings develop a really big crack that ran up from a heavily constructed doorway and I saw the door fall outwards in a cloud of dust and I saw the notice that fell out with it. The notice read MAIN GENERATING UNIT.
“Come on!” I yelled. We ran for the broken doorway, jumped over the debris, pounded along a passage that was also cracking up, and into the first doorway we came to. I looked at a mass of complicated equipment, switch-gear, control panels for the substations, control desks, synchronizers. And men. Many men. Some with guns. One man in particular, a man standing on guard by what looked like the main switchgear, a man with a sub-machine gun in his hands, watching all the others. He saw Flair and me come in and he jerked the gun but I got him first. He fell by the switchgear and another man, one of the unarmed ones, ticked over fast. He seized the heavy gun and had the room covered before I was halfway towards him. He roared out, “Okay, you blokes, grab those bloody guns.” He moved sideways to the switchgear, still watching the rest of the room. He reached out and began throwing off the switches. Elsewhere, at the desks, other men, cursing luridly in their relief, threw off more switches. There was nothing more for me to do now; these men, the ones who had been held covered by the guns all the way through, knew just what to do. It wasn’t my show. As those switches went out, I became aware of a gradual lessening in the whine and in the vibration, a gradual dying away; and then, within the next few minutes, the whine and the vibration stopped altogether.
There was a dead silence.
“And just in time, too,” the man with the sub-machine gun said.
*
Flair and I went outside, into the dust and the debris. Most of the Lifeforce workers had gone now, gone along the causeway, and the place felt strangely dead. Then I heard the approaching aircraft sounds in the distance and I looked up into a blue sky to see transports coming in with their RAAF markings, their hatches opening and then the far-off clusters of blobs as the parachutes opened over the land ten miles away. I thought: it’d have taken them another half-hour, probably, to form up in their transport and come up the causeway. They’d have been just too late; but it didn’t matter any more now. Not any more at all.
*
Dunwoodie was still alive when we found him, but half his face had sagged from the left-hand corner of his mouth and it seemed that bash on the skull had given him a stroke. High was responsible for that; the damned control capsule had shifted, they found, just as I’d thought it might. Anyway, he lived. I wondered how Flair felt about that; I hardly cared to ask her outright. When they got divers down to the broken-off section of the admin building they found Learoyd, dead of course, wedged beneath a shattered computer. Others had died with him, but a few got away by some miracle. Later, they told their story. They didn’t know what had got into Learoyd, who must have known he was heading for his own destruction. They’d tried to fight back against the gunmen in charge, but they hadn’t got anywhere, and after two men had been summarily shot through the head they’d packed it in and just hoped Learoyd would have a way out for them all before the end came. They couldn’t really believe he’d want to commit suicide when it came to the point and he probably knew what he was doing.
The actual physical damage to Lifeforce wasn’t so great as it had looked to me and there was no more than a twelve-hour shutdown before the whole place was back in full swing with a temporary patch-up until permanent repairs could be effected. In the meantime I was given an airlift down to Canberra where, this time, they listened to me with what I might call bated breath. And this time, they believed me all right. A force went into Kimbau right away, complete with a medical team and air ambulances. Over the next few days, before I flew back into London, they carried out a massive air evacuation of all those poor wretches who were able to be moved. That included Harry, who, they told me, was thrilled to be aboard an aircraft. Those who couldn’t be moved were cared for on the spot by the medical teams. I heard later that the doctors attached to those teams blasphemed more than a little about the fact I hadn’t saved High for them. They’d have loved very dearly to have had a word or two with him.
Of course, on the political side, there was the biggest hoo-ha ever known in the Southern Hemisphere. A number of heads rolled in the dust … it’s easy to be wise after the event, but I must admit I did agree they could have shown me a shade more belief earlier on.
Flair came over to Sydney to see me off on the London flight. I hadn’t seen her since she’d left the complex in the ambulance with Dunwoodie only a couple of hours after the reactors had been shut down. She’d been flown out from Darwin to Canberra where she, as well as her husband, had spent a while in hospital recovering from a pretty shocking experience. Now she looked fine, if a trifle tight-lipped about something or other. Guessing what that would be, I asked after Dunwoodie.
“Oh,” she said, “he’s all right.”
“Not fully recovered?”
“No,” she said, “but they tell me he’s going to — or as much as can be expected after a stroke.”
“What’s the matrimonial set-up?” I asked. “Leaving him again, are you?”
“Well, no,” she said.
“You never did find another woman, did you?”
“No. But that’s not why.”
“Why, then?”
She looked away. “Oh … I don’t know … he’s ill, isn’t he? He kind of needs me. He didn’t seem to, before. His work, his ambition … well, that’s all gone now. He could be different in future.”
I nodded; you could, I suppose, count that as one thing on the credit side of Doctor High’s account … if you used a lot of charitable imagination. I bent and kissed Flair and I moved on with the other passengers for the London flight. I was going to miss her quite a lot. That brief spell aboard Gay Venturer had been very pleasant. She looked lost and lonely when I looked back and saw her for the last time, and she gave a little wave and turned away. I looked down from the windows when we were airborne and saw Sydney harbour slide away, and the town … I thought of her, somewhere down there, going back to Dunwoodie’s sickbed, one of the crowd in the sprawl below me. Darwin lay ahead, first stop on the homeward flight; it would hold plenty of memories.
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About the Author
Philip McCutchan (1920–1996) was a British author who grew up near Portsmouth dockyard and maintained a lifelong interest in the sea and military history. During WWII he served on warships including the cruiser Vindictive, the escort carrier Ravager and the ocean boarding vessel Largs, ending the war a lieutenant in the RNVR. He wrote over eighty books about the British army and its campaigns, including the Halfhyde adventure series and the James Ogilvie series. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Duncan MacNeil and Robert Conington.
Other titles in the Commander Shaw series available from Endeavour Press include Gibraltar Road, Redcap, Bluebolt One, The Man from Moscow and Warmaster.
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The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11) Page 19
