The Black Hole

by Hammond, Ray

  There was a gruff exchange of voices at the front of the bus and then two swarthy soldiers, automatic weapons held at the ready, were walking down the aisle examining each passenger. The man in the lead was unshaven and perhaps in his mid-thirties. The other soldier looked like an overgrown boy.

  As they reached Floyd’s row of seats they stopped and gazed hard at him.

  ‘Pasaporte,’ demanded the elder soldier.

  Floyd noted the small yellow, blue and red flag of FARC on the man’s sleeve. Below it were two straight lines indicating he was a sergeant. All nearby eyes were on him as Floyd pulled Gary Tipton’s passport and ID card from his back-pack and handed them silently across.

  After a quick glance the sergeant stowed the documents in his own tunic pocket, gestured with the muzzle of his automatic rifle and said, ‘Venir.’

  ‘He wants you to go with him,’ translated Maria unnecessarily.

  *

  It was one p.m. in London as Harry Floyd was being led out of the bus and into the brilliant Venezuelan early-morning sunshine. But, as usual, all was in gloom inside the CTU control room beneath 85, Embankment. A dozen vertical, floor to ceiling laser screens shimmered brightly in the darkness.

  Ray Fox and CTU deputy director David Evans stood before a screen which showed a high-definition satellite image of the dusty road outside Puerto Páez. Luckily the morning sky in the region was clear and the powerful computer systems automatically filtered out atmospheric dust and pollution to display pin sharp interpolated pictures. Staring at the overhead image of Harry Floyd and what was presumably a band of FARC guerillas Fox could almost imagine he could hear what was being said.

  The CTU agent’s journey across Mexico and then south through Central America had been tracked by links between Floyd’s personal communicator and the CTU control room. But the moment the agent had ordered his own data to be scrubbed all permanent links had been severed. Both Floyd and CTU control knew that FARC and the HFDA direct action volunteers would scan any new arrival to check for implants, radio equipment and transmissions. Electronically, Floyd was now on his own.

  As Fox and his deputy watched, the bus restarted and continued on its journey. Floyd was led under the cover of some trees bordering the road. Then, a couple of minutes later two open-topped jeeps emerged and turned eastwards, heading away from the border town of Puerto Páez. Floyd was seated in the rear of the first vehicle.

  ‘Keep them in visual as long as you can,’ Fox told Evans as he turned away from the shimmering situation screen. ‘But I would guess they’ll turn off into the jungle soon. They never travel on open roads for long.’

  Ten

  ‘We have now recovered all the data from Project Indiana,’ Alain Nagourney told Nicole Sanderson with a sideways glance towards Craig Phelps, his former physics tutor. ‘Baxter never destroyed his designs, despite the presidential decree. He thought the quantum encryption he was using to protect the data was unbreakable, but your government IT guys are something else. We’ve now got the physics, the engineering and the designs of the Indiana Project, all in readable form.’

  The ATA agent was standing in front of her consultants as they delivered their preliminary report. The two men were seated at a table in a conference room in the agency building. Laid out in front of them were Professor Tom Baxter’s many data storage systems. Nagourney’s background checks had been completed successfully and, like Phelps, he was now bound by a National Secrecy Agreement and was officially consulting for the ATA.

  ‘The encryption technology Baxter was using at the time of his death is now four years out of date,’ Nicole said, repeating what the decryption experts at the National Security Agency had told her shortly after taking delivery of the dead physicist’s computer systems. ‘That’s a long time these days. Encryption techniques have to be upgraded constantly if they are to remain secure.’

  Nagourney nodded. ‘Well, far from destroying everything to do with the Indiana Project, Professor Baxter went on refining his theory for creating multi-dimensional artificial black holes. There’s even a paper here called “The Relative Evaporation Theory of Artificially Produced Black Holes.” It’s an incredible achievement. If his work hadn’t been classified, he’d have won a Nobel Prize.’

  ‘So, if Makowski has got hold of those files he could build a black hole weapon for himself?’ asked Nicole, still standing in front of the two men.

  ‘If he could decrypt them,’ said Nagourney.

  ‘Or if he knew Baxter’s password,’ Nicole murmured, a thought occurring to her. She mentally ordered Carl to pull the police and coroner’s files related to Baxter’s death.

  ‘Well, even then he’d need a lot of engineering capacity and some high level particle physicists,’ Nagourney told her. ‘And he would also need a quantity of a very special isotope that Baxter developed specifically for his bomb.’

  ‘Zilerium 336,’ put in Phelps, now desperately keen to be helpful. ‘It was a super-heavy metal isotope, way up on the periodic scale¬. It had an atomic weight of three hundred and thirty-six.’

  The anti-terrorism agent pulled a chair out at the top of the table and sat down with the two men at her either hand. She had to force herself to concentrate on the technical details these specialists were telling her. She was immensely tired; the continuous pressure on the department was now affecting everything. It made even simple tasks seem difficult and she had just sat through a four-hour meeting in which a succession of technical analysts had presented their best guesses about the homeland targets the HFDA might choose to attack.

  I’m recording it all, Carl reminded her, sensing her weariness.

  ‘So Baxter kept some of this…isotope,’ she asked. ‘Why is it so important?’

  ‘Because the Zilerium isotope is the key to producing small stable black holes,’ explained Nagourney. ‘I mean ones powerful enough to do enormous damage, but nothing compared to a full scale black hole in space.’

  ‘You should see that crater in Arizona if you want to see the damage one could do,’ Phelps told him with a snort.

  ‘But if Makowski’s got hold of the Indiana technology, couldn’t he just make some more of this isotope for himself?’ asked Nicole.

  ‘It’s impossible to create a new heavy-metal element without a full size collider and a whole range of donor isotopes,’ Nagourney told her with a shake of his head. ‘And there are so few particle accelerators in the world that that the physics community always knows what’s going on at each one.’

  ‘So, no isotope, no weapon?’ asked Nicole.

  ‘I should say not,’ Nagourney told her, glancing again at his former physics tutor. The older man nodded in agreement.

  ‘O.K. Thanks,’ said Nicole rising.

  ‘Would it be possible for me to go down and see that crater in Arizona?’ asked Nagourney. ‘There’s a lot that can be learned from the physical deposits left over at an explosion site.’

  *

  The leading jeep broke out of the tree-line and, up ahead of them, perched on the hilltop, Floyd saw a tall, white-stucco wall. The enclosure looked enormous and two tall construction cranes rose high over its castellated ramparts.

  The British agent was in the back seat of the leading jeep and the two vehicles had been toiling along dense jungle tracks all day. It was now nearly sundown.

  Almost has soon as he had climbed down from the bus one of the five young FARC guerrillas had searched Floyd and the sergeant had taken possession of his communicator and earpiece.

  ‘I need that,’ said Floyd. ‘That’s my translation system.’

  The sergeant hadn’t responded but had produced a hand-held wireless-emission scanner which he circled slowly around Floyd’s head and then over the rest of his body. When the check was complete he motioned the newly arrived HFDA direct action recruit towards the jeep.

  They had driven on the road out of Puerto Páez for less than a mile before turning northwards onto a narrow dirt track that had been cut through the
dense forest. Floyd knew they were in the foothills of the Serrania de Paraguaza mountains, the last great range of the East Andes before the true Amazon rain forest began to the south.

  He guessed that the CTU control room would have been tracking his progress across western Venezuela but, glancing up at the dense, dripping tree canopy high above, Floyd knew that visual contact would now be impossible.

  As they drove the CTU agent tried out some of his primitive Spanish, as he guessed a newly-arrived recruit from the UK might do.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  The sergeant, sitting in the front passenger seat beside the young driver said nothing.

  ‘O.K. How long till we get there?’ Floyd tried, realizing he sounded like a bored kid in the back of a family car.

  Again there was no answer. Apart from driving the vehicles, the only regular activity undertaken by the soldiers was the lighting of cigarettes and cheroots. Occasionally a walkie-talkie radio crackled and the sergeant issued a torrent of Spanish that Floyd could not understand. He wished Maria could translate, but she was imprisoned inside the switched off communicator that the sergeant had stowed in his tunic pocket. What was remarkable about these guerrillas was that, with the exception of the sergeant, none looked to be over twenty years of age.

  After four hours of driving on narrow tracks they had stopped for the men to top up the vehicle’s petrol tanks from jerry cans and to relieve themselves behind the trees. When he returned to the jeep Floyd saw a bottle of water and a paper bag placed on his seat. In the bag he found a lump of dense, reddish cheese and a hard, cooked sausage.

  The men ate as they drove and Floyd heard muted conversation from the jeep at the rear, but nothing had been exchanged between the men in the lead vehicle. During the journey the British CTU agent had made a thorough mental inventory of the weaponry carried by the FARC guerrillas. Each man carried Chinese-made automatic rifles that Floyd knew would be capable of firing up to 850 rounds a minute from a gas-powered magazine. To feed such prodigious rate of fire the soldiers wore a rack of four spare ammunition magazines on their belts. Each soldier also carried a large combat knife and the sergeant wore a battered leather holster containing what looked to be a well-maintained Springfield fifteen-shot handgun.

  Mounted on a swivel in the escort jeep to the rear was an old M240G, gas-operated machine gun. The three men in that vehicle also wore bandoliers of 7.62mm ammunition belts that crisscrossed their chests. This small FARC detachment looked as if it were expecting an ambush at any moment.

  Now the hill-top road became tarmac and the pair of jeeps wound their way up and around the looming castle-like structure. On the far side of the building, outside of the walls, a large flat area had been dug into the hillside and concreted over – a helicopter pad.

  Floyd guessed that this huge complex was being constructed for a local cocaine baron. There were scores of such fortified palaces dotted over the vast jungle regions of Colombia and Venezuela, all of them in FARC-controlled territory and all of them protected by sophisticated radar and anti-missile systems to deter strikes by any foreign power angered by their owners’ destructive trade.

  A small group of FARC soldiers stood idly at a wide entranceway in the wall was still lacking a gate. They waved as the jeeps came into sight. Again, the undercover agent was struck by the youth of this rebel army. Even in his guise as a twenty-five year old, he felt elderly by their standards.

  The convoy swung into a large inner courtyard and Floyd saw that the space was filled with building materials, scaffolding poles and cement mixers. On the crest of the hill, up above the outer courtyard, was a more finished looking large, two-storey villa standing proud with open terraces on all sides.

  Continuing across the stone-flagged courtyard the lead jeep turned and then swung to a stop beside a long low building that, despite its recent erection, looked like it might have been intended for stabling. Staff accommodation, guessed Floyd.

  ‘Come with me,’ said the sergeant, surprising Floyd with a guttural, knarled English.

  The man jumped out of the jeep and, as Floyd followed, the new recruit from Essex found himself not inside staff housing but entering an unfinished leisure centre. There was an unfilled swimming pool, complete except for diving board and fittings.

  The sergeant led Floyd along the tiled side of the pool to an open shower area that was built into the back of the large room. To one side a pile of bulging plastic sacks was heaped against a wall. Floyd assumed they contained cocaine.

  ‘Take a shower,’ the sergeant ordered, lighting a cigarette between cupped hands. ‘Then put those on.’ He pointed to green camouflage uniforms hanging on a rack intended for robes and bathing towels. On the floor beneath were several pairs of the rubber-soled, high-sided combat boots worn by the FARC soldiers.

  Floyd wondered how Gary Tipton would be reacting if he were here. The CTU surveillance operation had intercepted the exchanges he had made with HFDA, but they had been unable to decipher any of them. What Tipton had been told to expect on arrival was a guess.

  ‘I’m here to join Humans First Direct Action,’ Floyd said. ‘Not a rebel army.’

  The sergeant turned, stepped close towards Floyd and stared questioningly into the recruit’s eyes. He was slightly shorter than the British man and perhaps about Floyd’s proper age. But he looked battle hardened. He exuded a wholly purposeful aura of maleness. In action he would be precise and instinctive, Floyd guessed, like a machine built to superior tolerances.

  The man stuck his cigarette into his mouth. ‘FARC and FDHA like this,’ he said and he interlocked his fingers in front of Floyd’s face. ‘You will train with us, then you will have the skills to bring down the American capitalists.’

  Floyd gazed back into the man’s deep, impenetrable eyes. All he saw was hostility and suspicion.

  ‘Strip,’ ordered the sergeant.

  As Floyd unbuttoned his shirt he saw the man’s eyes run over his muscular torso. But they knew Gary Tipton kept himself in shape. The man had once been a British infantry officer and he trained in karate six times a week.

  When Floyd was completely naked he stood upright as the sergeant stared at his body.

  ‘Like this,’ said the man, stretching his own arms out to the side and spreading his legs.

  Floyd stood as instructed and the sergeant walked round him, examining his body carefully. He realized the man was checking for the presence of any form of muscle-booster or other prosthetic aid.

  ‘I am Sergeant Ramon Resigo,’ barked the sergeant when he had completed his survey. ‘After training you will be a first soldier – a private. Now shower.’

  Floyd stepped into the shower and turned on the mixer tap.

  ‘Find a uniform to fit,’ Resigo shouted to Floyd over the sound of the steaming hot water in the shower.

  *

  What President Weeks overlooked was human nature, Carl reasoned inside Nicole Sanderson’s mind. The only absolutely secure way to ensure that the black hole weapons technology never escaped would have been to imprison all of the Indiana team members for life. Or to have them killed.

  Carl! objected Nicole. You can’t do that sort of thing in a democracy!

  The ATA agent and her virtual assistant had been sifting through the police reports on all of the team members of the Indiana Project who had died suddenly. They were attempting to find a link between them.

  So Baxter died first, Carl summarized. Then, one by one, the other team members died suddenly, or were killed.

  Maybe it wasn’t Baxter who kept a stock of that isotope, said Nicole, the idea suddenly coming to her. Perhaps one of the other team members kept it.

  And the HFDA had to find out who it was, added Carl. So they worked their way through each of them until they found it.

  O.K., we’ll have to dig out all of their personnel files, Nicole told her assistant.

  Eleven

  At 7.05 on the morning after his arrival at the hill-top fortres
s, Harry Floyd found himself on board a fast, forty-foot patrol boat heading southwards along the Orinoco. At this point in its long, meandering journey the river was broad and sluggish.

  Standing or sitting in the open well at the stern of the boat were a dozen heavily armed young FARC soldiers and two other newly arrived HFDA recruits.

  After he had showered the previous evening Floyd had been led around the base of the fortress – the FARC men actually called it ‘Le Castel’– to where three large pre-fabricated construction workers’ cabins had been erected on flatter ground. Down below, at the base of this side of the hill, Floyd had glimpsed the broad Orinoco.

  Walking to the far side of the of the pre-fabricated buildings Floyd saw a group of fifteen or twenty FARC soldiers sitting around on the ground, eating. A make-shift barbeque had been created from an old oil-drum cut in half. A FARC cook was turning over chicken pieces above the flames.