by Sam Fisher
Once suited, the team boarded an electric cart that took them from the Prep Room into a wide passage that ran 200 metres beyond the main Base One buildings, onto Hangar A.
The hangar was massive, a little over 150 metres long and 100 wide. At the far end, half the wall had been opened up and beyond that could be seen a second hangar, Hangar B. This was a twin of Hangar A and housed two Big Macs, the enormous E-Force workhorses that carried the heavy equipment the team used in most rescue missions.
The six of them knew exactly what to do. Mark had created the entire set-up and was familiar with every nut and bolt of each piece of equipment. He had written the book on every procedure and tactic. Steph, Pete and Mai had been operational with E-Force for over a year, Dimitri had been working at the organisation’s Polar Base, flying Silverbacks since E-Force started and in the six months since she had replaced Josh Thompson, Chloe, a woman of enormous flying experience, had been on eight missions.
Steph, Pete, Mai and Chloe jumped off the cart and headed for the four Silverbacks lined up along the right-hand side of the vast hangar. Mark and Dimitri stayed on the cart as it sped off across the concrete floor towards the opening leading into Hangar B and the nearest of the two Big Macs.
Technicians and engineers in pastel-coloured boiler suits clustered around the Silverbacks. Like all the aircraft at the base, they were fuelled, checked and continuously overhauled, prepared to go just as soon as the pilots were ready to fly. Steph headed for Ringo, the auburn-coloured Silverback closest to the entrance of the hangar. Beyond that stood the black shape of John, Pete Sherringham’s regular ride. Next to John was Paul, its sleek grey camouflaged against the grey floor and walls of the building. Mai ran over to it. Last of the four, Chloe reached George, the deep-blue Silverback. An engineer handed her a flight helmet and she immediately ran up the steps recessed into the side of the plane, pulling on the helmet as she went.
Above each of the planes, a panel slid open revealing a starry black sky. Aboard the Big Mac, Mark and Dimitri set the flight parameters and coordinates into the navigational computers and the Silverback pilots went through a litany of checks. Everything else was overseen by Sybil. All the voice comms from the five aircraft fed to a control centre positioned on the far side of Hangar A. There, a team of specially trained techs and air-traffic controllers worked around a horseshoe of smooth control panels and holographic displays similar to the ones in Cyber Control.
‘All systems green,’ Pete said. This was echoed by each of the other Silverback pilots. The techs on the hangar floor withdrew to bunkers close to the control centre and the engines of the powerful jets fired up. In unison, the four Silverbacks lifted from the floor, incredibly slowly at first, but then picking up speed. Each passed through the appropriate opening in the roof and continued upwards to a point 100 metres above the hangars. There they stopped and hovered.
From their cockpits, Steph, Pete, Mai and Chloe could see a vast canopy of stars puncturing the night like pin pricks in a blackout curtain. Below lay the roofs of Tintara’s buildings. From here, the place looked deceptively small, a scattering of flat metal roofs painted with Camoflin, a special material that had the ability to confuse any form of scanner or camera that took an interest in Base One from a plane or a satellite. Beneath these buildings, the bulk of the base was spread over 17 floors, descending almost 100 metres underground. Each level covered more than two acres and housed administration, control, comms, accommodation, storage and maintenance facilities, with a workforce of 1816 men and women.
‘Okay, guys,’ Mark said from the flight deck of the Big Mac. ‘As you all realise, Dubai is one of the furthest points from here, a shade under 14,000 kilometres as a Silverback flies. Your flight time is 1 hour 27 minutes, so your ETA is 10.58 am local time. At Mach 6, Dimitri and I will be 32 minutes behind you in the Big Mac, ETA 11.30 am. I don’t need to tell you, a lot can happen to the people in that tower before we get there, so speed is of the essence, but so is our safety. We can’t save people if we’re in trouble ourselves. So care and speed, yeah?’
The Silverbacks hovered for another second, then Steph, Mai, Pete and Chloe engaged vertical ascent at maximum thrust. The four planes shot upward at 930 kilometres per hour, reaching 7000 metres in 17.2 seconds. Beneath them, the roof of Hangar B slid open and they could see the Big Mac begin to climb up above the building. It hovered before Dimitri engaged its own vertical thrusters and the plane climbed with staggering speed through the darkness.
Twenty seconds later, the Big Mac had drawn parallel with the Silverbacks.
‘Okay, guys. Bon voyages,’ Mark said and the five aircraft shot away into the night, heading northwest in a direct flight-path to Dubai . . . and the unknown.
19
72 metres beneath the English Channel, 7.50 am local time
He was in position precisely on time. Everything had been calculated to the second. It had been rehearsed and practised.
The bomb did not have to be powerful. It needed to be just potent enough to do its job. He glanced down at the device. A simple contraption – a timer, a trigger and a small knot of explosive.
He flicked on the trigger mechanism and watched the lights come alive and flash green . . . one, two, three, then an orange bulb lit up and started to pulsate in the dark.
Next he turned to the timer – an iPhone on the alarm clock function. He checked his wristwatch and nudged the controls on the phone, setting the timer to precisely 9 minutes 30 seconds. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the alarm ‘on’ and flicked another switch on the trigger. The orange light turned green.
He pulled himself upright and swung around his torch, sending a patch of white across the walls of the tunnel. Taking a step back, he crossed a set of rails and strode about 20 metres back along the tracks towards the hatch in the side wall.
20
She had never felt so excited in her life. This was better than any sex, any drug. In her hand lay a tiny phial containing an innocuous-looking colourless liquid. She lowered herself onto her haunches and held the torch over the box of tricks at her feet. It was a relatively plain looking metal case.
She lifted the lid. Inside, she could see the row of switches and the red light blinking. Next to the light was a circular plastic cover. She prised it up and placed the phial into the hole and closed the cover. It clicked as the plastic slotted into place.
She turned to the timer. Checking her wristwatch, she set it to 10 minutes 30 seconds and flicked up the row of switches in quick succession. As the last switch slid into place, it completed a circuit inside the metal box. The red light turned green. The timer started to count down.
She straightened, looked around the tunnel, the wall lit up by her torch, and walked quickly away towards the hatch in the side wall.
21
He watched her tumble into the opening and quickly pull herself to her feet. She checked the door was closed and then smeared petroleum gel around the seam where it sank into the wall. There was no lock on the door but she hardly imagined they would need one.
‘Done?’ she asked.
‘Done. You?’
She merely smiled, turned and led the way along the narrow corridor that ran parallel to the tunnel.
The room had been located and prepared in advance. Two chairs, some food, gas masks, antitoxin (just in case), a map and weapons. It was all a precaution. If everything went according to plan they should be out in a few hours.
Everything was ready.
22
22 kilometres south of Dubai, 9.10 am
‘Good morning,’ Azrael said over an encrypted video link.
There was a delay on the line, he looked around him for a second. Sand as far as the eye could see, not a single discordant feature, no sign of civilisation – just how he liked it. The bodies of the eight dead soldiers who had had the nerve to pursue him lay in the bloodied sand 8 kilometres back.
‘No amusing hats and scarves today, Azrael?’ War said, then exploded with a high-pitched laug
h that went on and on.
Azrael said nothing, his face expressionless.
Finally, War managed to control himself. ‘Good news, I hope?’
Azrael had no visual of War, just his irritating, permanently amused voice. ‘That would depend upon whether or not you were in the Tower, I suppose.’
War started up again, an inane chuckle coming down the line. Azrael could imagine the repulsive great slug shaking on his sun lounger. He had seen some rare press photographs of the man.
‘I downloaded these images 60 seconds ago from a news helicopter that has arrived at the scene.’ Azrael depressed a button on his phone and War received the video footage of the burning Cloud Tower, black smoke billowing from one side.
Azrael heard War clap his hands together. ‘Oh my. That’s just . . . just . . . beautiful. Don’t you think?’
Azrael took a deep breath. He’d never met War but he would have loved to slit his fat throat . . . slowly.
‘Right,’ War was saying. ‘So far, so good. My friends will be very pleased. And,’ he tapped at the screen of his tablet computer, ‘your second payment is now in your Swiss account. Congratulations. I assume everything is ready for Phase Two?’
‘It is. And the first payment for that work?’
‘Ah yes,’ War responded with a brief chortle. ‘How silly of me.’ More taps on the touch-sensitive screen. ‘And . . . that’s now keeping the rest of your fees company. I have calculated that the first E-Force planes will be arriving at the Cloud Tower in little more than an hour. Contact me as soon as Phase Two has been successfully accomplished.’ The line went dead.
Azrael clicked shut his video phone and slipped it into the top pocket of his sweat-stained shirt, pulled back on the throttle of the mini-desert bike and shot away. Following a sat nav built into the handlebars of the bike, he set a course northwest. A red light began to blink on the screen. He made a few minor adjustments, keeping the source of the signal directly ahead. Four minutes 23 seconds later, he was very close to the source. Removing a small metal detector from his backpack, he eased himself off the bike and stood, stretching for a moment. Then he switched on the detector and located the precise position of the source in the sand.
He found the control panel half a metre beneath the surface of the desert, wiped away the final grains of sand, keyed in a memorised alphanumeric and stepped back. Azrael heard a high-pitched whine and the sand around the control panel began to vibrate. Taking a couple more steps back, the terrorist watched as a narrow opening appeared in the ground. The sides of the fissure parted steadily until a hole some 4 metres square had opened up. He looked down into a cubic space the size of a well-proportioned room. To one side, a metal ladder was clamped to the wall. It descended to the floor of the chasm.
Sitting in the middle of the space was a gleaming microlight.
23
Floor 199, Cloud Tower, Dubai, 9.11 am
Outside, in the mall, there was white powder everywhere. It had already formed a thin, pearlescent layer over everything. But Abu was not paying much attention. He was transfixed by the scene of devastation.
‘What in the name of Allah has happened?’ he said aloud.
Back in the store, he had half-convinced himself that something had blown in the shop and that it was not some horror affecting the entire floor or even, Allah forbid, the entire tower. But now the full truth hit him, hard. This was much, much bigger than he could have imagined. Either a bomb had gone off, or it was a repeat of 9/11.
Floor 199, like all the floors in the Sky Mall, was triangular- shaped, 70 metres a side. There were 10 stores on each of the three sides and a vast open space in the middle. In the centre of the space was a parapeted area with a large contemporary fountain sculpture rising up from a pool. Every shop window was smashed to powder, most door frames and window frames had been mangled. The statue had fallen, smashing into a cluster of what had once been tables and chairs outside Café 199.
Through the miasma of white powder, Abu could see the shapes of crushed and torn bodies and pieces of human being. A few survivors stumbled around, their clothes ripped and stained, covered in white dust. A woman ran towards him. She was screaming hysterically, her face lined with cuts, caked in powder and blood dripping from her chin. Abu tried to stop her, to talk to her, but she pushed him aside and staggered off towards an exit sign.
Abu could hear a horrible menagerie of sounds: moaning, screaming, crying. Mingled with this came the creaking of strained metal, a scraping and groaning of steel and concrete. Then came a crash and the splash of glass on concrete. He whirled around and saw immediately where the sound had come from. The back walls of all the shops in the triangular floor contained massive windows offering incredible views out to the desert. One of them had just imploded.
Air rushed in from outside. It was a freezing wind that ravaged the hovering haze of white powder, scattering it all around. Then something appeared at the very edge of Abu’s vision: a dark shape. He ducked instinctively and a screaming human being flew across his field of view no more than 2 metres away. The person had been spat out of the store where the window had crumbled. The body slammed into a concrete column and slid to the floor like a thrown tomato.
Abu tried to think, tried to assess the situation. His father had insisted he attend survival classes when they were offered at school. It was something he hated intensely. In Term 1, they had gone out into the desert and learned how to find water and food, how to live in one of the most alien environments on earth. It was absolutely horrible and the others in his class had teased him, calling him a sissy and a wimp.
In Term 2, they had been taken to a network of caves almost 50 kilometres outside the city. As they were leaving, there was a cave-in and they became trapped. Worse still, the radio had smashed under a rock fall and the teacher had broken his leg. He and his school friends had been shocked but then natural instinct kicked in. They did all the right things – preserved their strength, found water and kept the teacher warm after binding up his leg with a makeshift splint. But by the next morning some of the boys were beginning to panic. Abu kept his head. Retreating to the back of the cave with just a torch and a screwdriver, he fixed the radio, called base camp and two hours later they were taken home. After that, the others had a newfound respect for Abu.
But here and now in the Cloud Tower, things were very different. It was something he could never have prepared for, something no one could ever have contemplated living through. But now, now he was here, he was in the thick of it and he had something to prove. He wanted to show his father, to show everyone that he was not just a nerd obsessed with computers, a boy out of touch with the real world. He wanted to survive. No, more than that – he would be a hero again.
24
Abu turned to follow the woman who had run towards the exit. It was a pretty clear path around the twisted remnants of a chair, a puddle of glass and a computer that had flown through the window of the Apple store.
The woman was there at the emergency exit door, squatting with her head in her hands, sobbing. Abu ignored her and tried the handle. It was either sealed or blocked.
‘Some idiot locked it,’ the woman said between sobs.
Abu pushed it as hard as he could but it felt like a brick wall. ‘There’s a second staircase, over there,’ the boy said. He was pointing to the southwest corner, a sign at the end of a long row of shop fronts. ‘Come on.’
The woman didn’t answer. Abu crouched down beside her. ‘There’s another exit –’
‘So what?’ the woman said, then lifted her head. ‘SO WHAT!’
Abu recoiled. ‘We can . . . er . . . get down . . . maybe.’
The woman laughed hysterically. ‘No we can’t. We’re 200 floors up!’ Her voice was cracking. ‘We’re dead, you stupid child.’
Abu stood, shook his head in confusion and turned away. The woman ignored him.
The route to the other emergency stairway was far harder-going. A section of the roof had c
ollapsed, a column of water cascading down from a hole overhead. The floor was strewn with a miscellany of objects from the shops and cafes: clothes, CDs, furniture, shattered marble flooring and glass . . . lots of glass. He skirted the mess close to the central parapet, then stopped suddenly, almost tripping over a body.
It was a woman lying bent towards the floor. She was wearing a long black cotton robe and yashmak. Her body seemed unnaturally twisted. Abu crouched down and pulled on the woman’s shoulder, turning her to check if there was anything he could do. The yashmak had slipped away and Abu could see it was a young woman, a teenager with a very pretty face, her long black hair silky and fine and tucked under her robe.
He leaned close to check if she was breathing, putting his ear to her mouth. There was nothing. It was only as he pulled upright and knocked the woman’s head slightly that he could see it was barely attached to her body. He leapt back, horrified, taking deep gulps of air. Then he lowered himself beside her again and gently pulled the yashmak back in place over the young woman’s dead face.
The final stretch of floor was covered with water, and treacherous. Abu took it slowly. He was just about to reach the door to the emergency exit when he heard a man’s voice.
‘Hey, boy. Hey!’
Abu turned.
Two men were stumbling towards him. They were in a sorry state. One of them seemed barely conscious and had what looked like a badly injured right arm. He was wearing a traditional thoub. Once pure white, it was now smudged with random patches of dirt and dust and blood. The man’s headwear had gone, his long hair hung over his eyes.
The other man was supporting him under the shoulder. He wore a ripped and stained black suit with one of the jacket sleeves torn away completely. He had a gash along his left cheek from the eye socket to the base of his ear. He was a small, thin man with black hair and beard, all dusted with white powder.
