“We don’t know how many more of them might be on the island,” Blake said. “It’s obvious what they’re here for. They know the Lincoln’s down there, they know the Canberra’s dredging a nuke. They wanted the codebook. Keep looking!”
The privates had been sent down to help after Blake and Sullivan took over the interrogation, and they were shitting bricks. “This is bad,” Lomax said, as we pawed through the rubbish. “Really fucking bad. What do you reckon they’re doing, just waiting around? Building up a bigger force?”
“Waiting for us to get a nuke, maybe,” Dresner said. “We do the hard work, they come in and take it.”
“The Canberra can handle a couple of attack choppers,” Rahvi said. “No sweat. And a hundred men? That’s nothing.”
It didn’t feel like nothing. Not when we didn’t know where they were, or what their plans were. “Let’s just find that codebook and get the hell out of here,” I said.
I don’t know how long we spent sifting through endless junk: driftwood, deflated beach balls, outdoor chairs, rags, car seats. We were all beginning to lose hope, thinking that the PAL codes were lost somewhere in the Lincoln, that we were back to square one, that a month of effort and this entire voyage had been for nothing.
Then I found the suit. Just the same as the one the crazed captain had been wearing, but still covered in dry-cleaning plastic, buried beneath a pile of mouldy books. Pressed black trousers, and a black jacket with golden rings around the cuff. I dragged it out of the pile, tore the plastic off, ran my hands over the pockets.
“Sergeant!” I yelled.
The others gathered around me as I pulled it from the breast pocket. A little blue booklet, the size and shape of a passport, wrapped in a watertight plastic sheath. There was a picture on the front cover: a bald eagle with its wings spread wide, clutching a bundle of spears in one talon and an olive branch in the other. The seal of the United States of America.
Blake took it from my hands, opened it, flicked through it. “This is it,” he said in disbelief. “This is actually it. We’ve got it!”
“Good,” Lieutenant Sullivan said. “Let’s move out!”
Back up the corridor, past the endless piles of junk, past the bodies of the dead New Englanders. Back out into the jungle and the light, the sun dipping low in the sky. All of us were feeling elated. We’d come so close to despair, but now? We had it! So what if New England had realised, too late, what we were up to, and snuck an Army company up here? We had the nuke, we had the PAL codes, we had the Canberra, and we’d be weighing anchor and sailing away by sundown.
We took Private Glynn, the prisoner, along with us, hands flex-tied behind his back. We moved back through the jungle at a steady pace, carefully avoiding the traps we’d encountered last time, the clearance divers picking off the occasional approaching zombie with neat headshots. Once we got back to the ship we’d be safe, but we weren’t out of the woods yet – that force of a hundred men could be on Moreton Island itself, for all we knew.
We hit the beach. Out across the bay, the golden ball of the sun was sinking down towards the distant Brisbane skyline, tinging the clouds yellow and orange. Our shadows stretched out behind us across the sand. We shoved the RIBs out past the breakers, piled into them and fired up the engines. Soon we were cutting north back along the island’s coast, gripping the gunwales as the boats dropped and rose on the swell, zipping across the waves towards the reassuring grey bulk of the HMAS Canberra.
I felt safe. We had the PAL codes. We’d made it off the island. We were almost home free.
As we cut across the bay, approaching the Canberra, we could see something different at the dive pontoon. There were more people above the surface than usual – divers in RIBs, stripping their rigs off, sailors operating the crane mechanism. Rahvi, perched on the gunwale next to me, gripped the rope with one hand and held his binoculars to his eyes with the other. “They’re bringing the nuke up,” he reported. “They’ve nearly got it.”
Even without binoculars, I could see it – we were only a few hundred metres away. A bulky white missile-shaped thing, dripping with seawater, only one or two metres long. The nuclear warhead. One of the clearance divers was standing atop the bomb itself, gripping the chain as it emerged above the water, and the other sailors and divers broke into cheering and applause.
On the RIBs, on the approach, we felt exactly the same. Success, accomplishment, and relief. We had the nuke. We had the codebook. We were done.
Then the Canberra exploded.
There was no warning. Just a gargantuan noise like a volcano erupting, and a geyser of white foam and seawater spewing off the starboard side of the ship. Even from hundreds of metres away I felt the pressure of the blast on my eardrums. Then a huge plume of fire, billowing into the sky, reminding me of that night so long ago now when the Mundrabillans had blown the fuel tanks at Eucla’s airstrip. As the blast subsided it was clear that an enormous hole had been torn through the hull. Already the ship was foundering, beginning to list, the deck visibly tilting as sirens and klaxons started ringing out across the still evening water.
Our RIBs had come to a halt, still distant from the Canberra, dead in our tracks. Over at the dive pontoon, closer to the ship itself, the sailors and divers had ducked for cover as fragments of debris hissed down into the water around them – but now they sat up again, just as flabbergasted as we were, staring in disbelief as our mighty floating fortress began to groan and shift and sink.
“No way,” Rickenbacker breathed, sitting next to me. “No way, no fucking way, no way, this can’t be happening…”
“What the hell was it?” one of the divers yelled. “Did anybody see anything? A missile?”
The skies around us were still and calm, apart from the sirens wailing on the Canberra. There was nothing – no choppers, no planes, no sudden vessels on the horizon.
“A torpedo – a submarine, maybe?” Dresner said.
“Can’t be a sub,” Rahvi said. “The whole fleet’s at Christmas Island!”
“Limpet mines,” one of the divers said. “Must have been fucking limpet mines, they must have their own divers!”
I suddenly recalled the American captain, crouching in his wet concrete bunker, sprouting what I’d thought was gibberish: “Don’t talk about my ship. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you over there, with your divers, more divers now, everybody’s diving down, everybody’s getting their grubby little hands inside my ship…”
I thought of the clearance divers who’d thought they were hallucinating from stress and exhaustion, glimpsing other divers off in the murky distance along the seabed.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
Up on the Canberra’s flight deck, people were emerging from below – sailors, soldiers, civilians, life rafts being launched, life jackets handed out. “Come on, let’s move!” Lieutenant Sullivan shouted suddenly, breaking us all out of our shock. “They need help, come on, let’s go!”
And so we were off again, powering towards the Canberra, a sick feeling of dread swelling in my stomach. We’d thought we were safe, but New England had the drop on us. They’d knocked the Canberra out of contention when we’d barely even seen them. What the hell were we going to do now?
We approached the dive pontoon first, where the other clearance team had secured the warhead into a RIB but were left with nowhere to take it. They were still staring at the ship in numb disbelief. Flames were pouring out of the breach in the hull now, even as more seawater swept in – something flammable must have caught, because there was a second explosion, a burst of fiery hot light, screams and shouts from the people up on deck. Some of them fell to the water – not so far now, the deck was tilted almost twenty degrees as the ship eased down into the bay. There was a terrible, ear-splitting screech of metal under pressure, and the Canberra began to split in two, the aircraft deck tearing itself apart, the superstructure and the stern breaking off from the rest of the ship.
I tore my eyes away from it a
s we pulled up alongside the pontoon. There were three RIBs there, including the one with the nuke strapped into it; ten clearance divers and half a dozen sailors. “What the hell’s going on?” one of the divers shouted at us.
“New England’s here in force!” Lieutenant Sullivan said. “We ran into them on the island – a hundred men, they said, and looks like they had divers too...”
“And choppers,” Lomax said faintly, by my side. “They said they had choppers.” He raised a finger and pointed.
Out to the west – past the horrible cacophony of the sinking Canberra, the shouts and splashes of people entering the water, the sundering of metal – we could just make out a steady thundering beat. Three shapes silhouetted against the fiery sunset, moving in formation, approaching rapidly from somewhere in Brisbane’s immense suburban sprawl.
Three choppers. Not the large, multipurpose choppers I’d grown used to seeing, the Black Hawks and Chinooks that ferried supplies to and from Jagungal, or which had rescued me from Moreton Island. These were smaller and faster, little cockpits embedded in sleek frames, snub-nosed missiles poking out from beneath tiny wings. These were designed to do one thing only: attack.
They wouldn’t have stood a chance against the Canberra’s anti-air defences. But we didn’t have the Canberra anymore.
“We have to go,” Sergeant Blake said urgently. “We have to get the nuke to the airport.”
A glimmer of hope arose inside me. I’d forgotten entirely about the airport, the Globemaster, the skeleton crew of RAAF personnel on permanent standby. That had been our way in. That could be our way out.
“We’re not going anywhere!” Sullivan barked. “There are people in the water!”
The stern of the Canberra had sunk entirely now. Much of the bow remained afloat, but it was sinking fast, surrounded by hundreds of people in the water – some with life jackets, most without. The surface was covered in the splashes of people swimming away in every direction, trying not to get dragged down by the ship, and shouts and cries filled the air.
“Lieutenant,” Blake yelled, across the gap of water between our RIBs, “we can’t help them. They can swim to the island. Those choppers are coming. We stay here, they see we have the nuke, they’ve got us at gunpoint…”
“There are people in the water,” Sullivan repeated. “Move out, let’s go!”
The divers obeyed their CO. All six boats fired up their engines, moving towards the wreck of the Canberra, towards the ever-expanding ring of survivors in the water. I felt sick to my stomach. The choppers were nearly here. So we were captured, probably – us and however many people made it off the Canberra. What would happen next? Escorted at airborne gunpoint to Moreton Island, or the shores of the city, or wherever New England’s ground forces were hiding?
As it turned out, they had no plans for any such thing. When we were still fifty metres from the survivors in the water, the choppers arrived, and they opened fire. They roared overhead with their machine guns churning and tore the swimmers apart.
The divers at the tillers of the RIBs stopped immediately, pulling up short, throwing half of us against each other. A wave came over the bow, drenching me, and I spluttered and struggled to keep my eyes open, to witness what I couldn’t believe. I’d thought people had been crying out before – now the air was truly full of screams, the water slick with red, high-calibre bullets tearing off people’s arms or legs or punching through their torsos. Many were already dead, floating face-down in the water. “Oh, no,” Rickenbacker whispered beside me.
The choppers roared past, pivoted, came back again. On the fast-sinking stump of the Canberra, an air-defence system sprang to life – some brave bunch of sailors must still be in there, manning one of the guns, even with water lapping around their ankles. A volley of missiles launched at the choppers, erupting from a cloud of white smoke, and for a moment my heart leapt in excitement – but the choppers dropped their flares, magnesium spewing out down towards the water, and the missiles went haywire, plunging into the bay or shooting off into the distance. And that was all, the only shot, because even now the gun was sinking beneath the water as the Canberra continued its descent below the surface.
A scant few of the survivors had made it to our RIBs, and the divers were hauling them aboard – a few sailors, a few Army survivors, a few civilians. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the water around the Canberra. It was soaked red, an absolute killing field, corpses bobbing amid flaming debris and weak cries for help.
The choppers came in for another sweep. I closed my eyes, heard the terrible churning of the guns, and when they’d passed by again the water was silent. There was just a long, sad, creaking gurgle as the last of the HMAS Canberra slid down below the fire-streaked water and vanished forever.
And then there was just us: six RIBs, overcrowded with survivors, floating at the edge of the killing field, waiting for the attack choppers to come back around again.
They came in more slowly than before, separating, approaching from all sides, like wolves prowling around a flock of sheep. The noise of their rotors was deafening, wrinkling the surface of the water, plastering my wet hair and clothes against my skin. “Eurocopter Tigers,” Rickenbacker said, staring up at them, still not quite processing what was happening. “Those are 30mm cannons. They can punch a hole through a brick wall…”
I’d had guns pointed at me before. I’d never had an attack chopper’s machine gun pointed at me. The nose cannons were flexing, rotating, ready to fire. I could almost make out the shape of the pilots sitting in the cockpits, the silhouette of their helmets and visors. I imagined their thumbs on the joysticks, ready to shoot…
So why didn’t they?
A megaphone answered my unasked question. “Remain where you are,” one of the pilots announced, his voice booming out over the sound of the rotors. “Drop your weapons and surrender. You are now in the custody of the Republic of New England. Surrender peacefully, and you will be prisoners of war treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Resist and we will be forced to execute you as unlawful combatants.”
“Vessels inbound!” one of the sailors cried.
I craned my neck to look. Past the flotsam of the Canberra, out across the bay, a group of boats were approaching from the north. Seven or eight of them, maybe. They were heading right towards us.
“It’s the nuke!” Blake shouted over the roar of the rotors. “They don’t want to risk hitting the nuke, so they won’t fire on us with heavy weapons! But if those boats reach us, game over! We have to make a run for the airport! We have to go now!”
Sullivan didn’t take his eyes off the choppers. “Get on the blower to the airport crew,” he yelled at one of his men. “Tell them to prep the Globemaster and ready any AA they’ve got. Everybody else, hang the fuck on. Let’s move!”
The divers started up the engines of the RIBs again. My heart was hammering inside my chest. Six little inflatable boats, one with a nuke strapped inside it, about to try and outrun three attack helicopters. The airport was thirty kilometres away. I felt like a mouse trying to walk away in plain view of a cat.
We took off. The pilots must have thought we were crazy or brave or both. After a few seconds they were on our tails, right behind us and just thirty or forty metres above. Further back still were the New England boats, powering towards the wreckage of the Canberra, no doubt gaining on us.
My adrenaline was pumping. The water shot past on both sides of the boat, rising and dropping as we cut across the waves, and I was shoved next to the gunwale alongside Rahvi and Rickenbacker and it was all I could do to see what was going on. The boats were pressing as close together as they could – we hoped they wouldn’t fire on the nuke, but if we drifted too far away from it…
A few minutes into the chase, after giving up on megaphone warnings we could barely hear, the Tigers displayed their first show of power. One of the RIBs on the outer edge of the cluster, holding some of the clearance divers still in wetsuits and chest rig
s, strayed a little too far from the group. Maybe it hit a wave at the wrong angle – I don’t know, I didn’t see it, I was craning my head to look up at the choppers. A missile burst out, screaming over our heads in a trail of white smoke, and a moment later the RIB on the outer edge was gone. I glimpsed a sudden explosion, upflung seawater, a glimpse of bodies hurled into the air…
…and then it was gone, vanishing behind us, a burning piece of wreckage dwindling in our wake.
“Stay closer!” Sergeant Blake shouted over the wind. “Stay closer!” The boats pressed closer together, rubber hulls edging against each other, sometimes even threatening to wedge in on top of one another when they hit different levels of chop. Thank God it was a calm day.
With one of the boats destroyed, the caution that had kept fingers away from triggers was broken, and some of the divers were returning fire at the choppers, bracing themselves against the floor or the gunwales and taking aim with their M4s. Lieutenant Sullivan gave no orders for them to stop, and the choppers backed off slightly, gaining altitude, wary of the small arms fire. But in the distance, beyond the wreckage of the Canberra, the New England boats were gaining on us.
Between the rotors and the engines and the whipping wind and the gunfire, I felt half-deafened. I could still hear one of the clearance divers on the same RIB as me, yelling into his radio. “It doesn’t matter!” he yelled. “Anything you’ve got! We’ll be coming in at the north-east runway and you’d better be fucking ready!”
Beside him, Sergeant Blake was loading a grenade into the launcher on the underside of his M4. It looked like an oversized cartoon bullet. He raised it to his shoulder, shoved in between Rahvi and the clearance diver, braced a boot against the gunwale, and fired. There was a recoil, a jerk, but the grenade shot out so fast it left no trace. I hoped for a spectacular explosion, square against the cockpit of a Tiger, but he’d missed. Still, they’d seen it, and they lingered further back.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 22
