Lethal Sky

by Greg Barron

  There is a quicker way. The man in that craft may well answer a radio call — he will want to cast some doubt that he is on an offensive mission. Any kind of believable radio banter would make it hard for the ADF to launch an offensive action against them.

  Marika addresses the pilot. ‘What frequency do these training schools work on?’

  ‘Standard CTAF channel 126.7 VHF is their main point of communication.’

  ‘Thanks — I’ll make sure the ASD are ready.’

  Removing the comms headset she makes a call on the GU, talks tersely, hard to hear above the screaming turbines. When it’s done she gets back to the pilot, ‘OK, that’s all set, now call the Evektor on the channel you just gave me. See if you can get him to reply.’

  ‘OK. I’ll patch you in.’ A pause, then: ‘Unidentified light aircraft over Sydney, this is Australian Army Taipan-five-three, over.’

  There is a long silence, and Marika starts to worry that the Evektor pilot won’t respond. But surely it is in his interest to do so. The fact that he is being called will lead him to suspect that they already know where he is. Blustering his way through will surely seem to be his best chance.

  Pick up the mic. Please, pick up the mic.

  Static changes to relative silence as the chopper pilot adjusts the squelch control, then repeats the call.

  ‘Unidentified light aircraft over Sydney, this is Australian Army Taipan-five-three, over. Respond please.’

  No response.

  ‘Tell him you mean business,’ Marika suggests. ‘A threat wouldn’t go astray.’

  ‘Will do,’ says the pilot. ‘Light aircraft over Sydney. I am Australian Army Taipan-five-three. I have you on radar. If you do not respond in five seconds I will assume you are not under control and will be compelled to destroy you by missile fire as you are a hazard to the city of Sydney. Five, four, three, two …’

  Just as Marika feels despair, a voice crackles through. ‘Taipan-five-three. This is SportStar oscar-zero-three-zero.’ The voice is cold, without accent or emotion. Hearing the voice of a man attempting to commit mass murder on an unprecedented scale is chilling.

  ‘SportStar oscar-zero-three-zero, you are in prohibited airspace, I insist that you return to base.’

  ‘Equipment malfunctioning. Very sorry …’

  ‘SportStar, I must ask you to return to the airfield with all possible speed.’

  ‘You are breaking up … cannot read you …’

  There is no further reply. Marika hears the pilot keep trying to raise him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she tells him. ‘In a moment we should get a position and bearing through for him.’

  From her time in ASIS, years earlier, Marika can almost picture what is happening now. The grunt work is done by the ASD — a semi-secret organisation whose main task is to monitor SIGINT signals from across the globe, part of the ‘five eyes’ network of allied signals services.

  To determine the location of a radio broadcast, the ASD knob-turners use a far more advanced technique than the old directional antenna method. The signals are received by a Wullenweber array — circular arrangements of antenna elements, clearly denoting the direction of the best reception and reducing strength on either side, providing an exact bearing on the signal. The time of arrival is also measured from various points, thus triangulating the position.

  At the new lakeside ASD/ASIO complex in Canberra, the facility that, embarrassingly, Chinese state-sponsored hackers managed to steal plans for during construction, technicians process the information using high-end computers. As complicated as it sounds, position-finding using this technique takes less than a minute from start to finish, the result quickly disseminated, scrolling out onto the colour screen of Marika’s GU.

  ‘He’s over Kellyville now,’ she says aloud. ‘He’s made no move to turn around. I’m afraid this is for real. We need more speed. I want you to redline this damn thing.’

  The engines scream, and the pilot says, ‘We’re just over one-five-five knots, but we’re burning fuel like a bitch.’

  ‘Keep it up.’

  ‘What are we going to do if we find him?’

  Marika turns back, looking down through the side windows. The outer suburbs are spread out below them, and the pilot’s question repeats in her head.

  What are we going to do if we find him?

  She searches her mind for an answer. They can’t let the Evektor, with its payload, crash to the ground. A disaster even at ground level, if it struck a skyscraper up high the spores would be dispersed on the wind over ten or more suburbs.

  Marika looks blankly out at the chopper’s configuration. In a war zone this craft would carry two door gunners, but now, the port-side door is set up for SAR — Search and Rescue. Just one mini-gun is in place, on the starboard side.

  The commandos on the bench seats carry an array of weapons. Most have the distinctive F88 Austeyr rifles. One is packing a bipod-equipped FN MAG-58, the 7.62mm medium machine gun that replaced the long-serving and ubiquitous M60. This one is equipped with a standard Elcan Wildcat sight.

  Another holds a Barrett M82 .50 calibre sniper rifle, instantly recognisable to Marika with its vented forestock and box magazine, oversized to accommodate the huge cartridges. This is the same rifle carried by her 2CG comrade Kutay, and she notes the beautifully kept weapon.

  The man who holds it, butt down, propped against his knee, smiles at her and shouts, ‘You like my baby?’

  Marika slips off the headset. ‘One of my mates uses one. Saved our arses with it heaps of times.’

  Her eyes continue to wander, moving to the SAR reel mounted near the ceiling at the port-side door, along with a nylon sling neatly coiled on the deck. Standard rescue gear, designed for winching rescuers down and the rescued up, from almost any terrain.

  Again the question fills her head. What are we going to do if we find him?

  The forces arrayed against Sydney, she decides, have hit on a near failsafe plan. The Evektor cannot be shot down over the city, because that would only ensure the spread of this terrible weapon. Down there are not only five million faceless people, but Marika’s parents, sister, childhood friends, uncles, cousins.

  So many memories. The Easter Show packed on the final day, running through the crowds, showbags swinging, music booming from the rides. The Manly Ferry on an ice-clear winter’s day, sitting outside in the sun with a freezing wind biting through three layers. Centrepoint tower, Darling Harbour, Central Station and the walk through Ultimo up towards the city, past all those strange little pawn shops, pubs and people of a hundred different cultures living together in this incredible melting pot.

  Live bands in basement dives, Westfield food courts and tennis courts. Summer days with the heat hammering down on the concrete paths and green grass of the parks. Sydney in her many forms and moods is an absorbing slideshow. Now under threat. Today might mean the end of a great city.

  In the distance, looking at an acute angle through the open door, she sees two things that have loomed large in her life. The ocean. Summer days under a tasselled brolly, twisted into the sand, feet in the sandy wash. Bluebottle stings and music in cars along the esplanade. Rubber thongs left at the back door, feet cool on the lino.

  The Blue Mountains to the west. Trails along sandstone escarpments with deep sockets and jutting jawlines of black and grey, becoming red, pink and orange where the rock has not weathered. Clear waterways over stone, campsites and trees and the clicking tymbals of the cicadas in that constant summer rhythm.

  Marika thinks of the people she loves. She thinks of her mum, just moving into the morning sunshine of her sewing room. Her dad pottering in the backyard. She could call now and tell them to get out. How? By car. Head out through Randwick, past the airport on the M5 Expressway and south.

  How much time would they need?

  Her mother isn’t capable of instant evacuation. She would collect things. Call the people she knows and loves, all of them. That’s wh
at she’s like. Her own safety would be the last thing on her mind.

  ‘OK,’ the pilot calls, ‘we’ve got the bastard on the FLIR screen now, and double tracking on radar. You were right. He’s heading plumb for Centrepoint fucking Tower.’

  SIXTEEN

  LONDON

  LOCAL TIME: 2230

  Tom Mossel has been at his desk for twenty hours straight. His eyes periodically flick closed and he sways on his seat before waking, taking a sip of tea and starting the process all over again.

  For almost a decade Tom has headed up one of the world’s most important security agencies, Britain’s Directorate of Resource and Future Security, a clandestine division of the SIS, or MI6 as it is popularly known, and based in the same Vauxhall Cross facility. Years of lack of sleep, endless meetings and stress are starting to tell.

  An honours degree in international relations hangs on the wall near shelves of unread reports and papers that make him feel guilty every time he looks at them. Incoming email correspondence each morning takes two hours to read, and keeping a grasp on the intelligence situation with his allies is tough enough, let alone enemies of state.

  It was his organisation — the DRFS — that had, months earlier, failed to stop the theft of anthrax spores from the desert bunker where they had been stored. Tom Mossel has scarcely slept a night through since. How and when this weapon might be unleashed has been the focus of the world’s intelligence services ever since.

  Just as embarrassing was the escape of the Syrian hostage now identified as Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani al-Assadi. A remarkable man in many ways, with a prodigious memory, he played them for fools.

  Reports about Badi have arrived by the dozen during the course of the previous month. Most are historical, or post-assessed. Tom Mossel has not had time to do more than read the abstracts. Now, looking for more in-depth information about his enemy, he revisits them one by one. Many focus on expert study of footage of his incarceration in both a London safe house and a heavily secured cottage in Hythe, Kent. There are reports on his table manners, choice of foods. His habit of playing chess by himself. Indications, from instruments and music books found at his mother’s villa, along with finger calluses, that he commonly plays a stringed musical instrument.

  Most of that information, Mossel knows, is irrelevant, just endless clutter that a well-funded bureaucracy produces. The report he now opens, in PDF format, however, looks mildly interesting. He starts to read, his brow heavily furrowed with concentration. The report is titled: ‘Unusual behavioural modesty during the incarceration of Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani al-Assadi.’

  The content is dry, written by an analyst not in the DRFS itself, but the Information Research section of the SIS.

  It has been noted, from exhaustive viewing of thousands of hours of footage, that the prisoner learned rapidly where cameras were located in the rooms, and avoided frontal nudity as a point of compulsion.

  This included carrying a towel into the shower cubicle, and drying and dressing in a blind spot nearby.

  The prisoner is presumed to be sexually normal. A karyotype of his DNA has shown that he has regular male XY genes.

  The reasons for the heightened modesty, we have concluded, are most likely cultural. Members of the Alawi sect generally are highly modest. In this case it seems at odds with the prisoner’s personality, but that can be deceiving.

  Tom Mossel looks at one image. Badi has half turned, and as if realising that his body is in view of the camera for a moment, is snarling up at it.

  Between his legs is a copious nest of pubic hair, and his penis is mostly obscured by a hand. His upper body has turned away, showing the strong but graceful musculature of his shoulders.

  There is a knock on the door. Tom’s assistant, Will Grace, fills the space with his tall but stooped frame. The hangdog expression underlines the aptness of his nickname — the Watcher, after the birds that guard the tower of Cirith Ungol in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

  His face is unusually animated. ‘I’ve just been on the phone with a tech from GCHQ. They think they might have cracked the EMK proxy.’

  GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — is one of several organisations with which Tom Mossel and the DRFS work in partnership. In general terms, they are the British equivalent of the USA’s National Security Agency. Despite a public outcry over recent years, their technicians pore through the electromagnetic spectrum looking for communications that might indicate a threat to national security.

  ‘What have they got?’

  ‘Well, as you know, the EMK Corporation uses a deep proxy similar to TOR to keep all their communications private. The boffins at GCHQ have managed a partial crack into the system a couple of days ago. Now they think they might have tracked an outgoing message acknowledgement to a flat in North London. They’re working on it.’

  ‘Are there any field agents still in the building?’

  ‘PJ Johnson, sir.’

  ‘OK, send him in here, and get a mobile tech crew assembled.’

  Will Grace hurries back through the door and Tom Mossel thoughtfully closes the report on the screen. It feels good to have something to follow up on. Maybe this one might even lead to something.

  To avoid the need for a constant four-hour round trip to the training centre at Fort Monckton, or at the very least a drive to a private range like Croydon, a secret small arms range was built in an underground floor at the Vauxhall Cross Secret Intelligence Services building. Hidden from the media and general public, the range allows operational staff to maintain their marksmanship ratings, and for the training of new ‘hands’.

  PJ Johnson strips his overalls down to his waist, just a singlet covering his upper body, displaying the hard chiselled muscle of his biceps, deltoids and lats.

  He is not exceptionally tall, about five foot eleven in his socks, but solid in the shoulders and legs. His body has utility in just about every sport and physical endeavour, from boxing to tennis. In unarmed combat he is deadly, yet his softer side is never far from the surface.

  The previous days have been hard, working sixteen-hour shifts, still waiting for word from his new employers, worrying about the timing, not wanting to let his colleagues down when it happens. Even so, there is a spark of excitement. The unknown looms on the horizon like the sunrise of a new day.

  The armourer and range supervisor is a wizened little man in his late fifties and, despite the grey coat and oiled hair combed over his bald spot, is one of the most knowledgeable and capable small-arms experts in the country.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he tells PJ.

  ‘Jesus, Frank. Not another one of those calendars, I hope.’

  The armourer grins. ‘No, better than that.’

  One wall of the room is filled with locker-like safe drawers. Frank walks across, presses a keypad and a drawer slides open. From the red baize interior he withdraws a black revolver.

  PJ smiles. ‘Where did you get that? An antique shop?’

  ‘It’s brand new, actually — but the design is loosely based on the old Webley Mark IV, first designed and made between the World Wars. Now a small firm in Birmingham is making them — chambered for the .41 Remington Magnum.’

  ‘That’s a hefty cartridge.’

  ‘You bet. Not as sexy as the .44, but a better compromise. If you miss the torso you’ll still take an arm or leg off. This model has an eight-inch barrel. Great balance, way better than your fancy automatic. Wet, dry, muddy, frozen. You can put a hole in a man at fifty paces, no matter where you are. Six rounds in the cylinder but you can reload faster than you can repack a magazine. A good man should be able to put twenty-four rounds a minute through her.’

  ‘A man with four hands, maybe.’

  ‘Don’t be smart.’

  Frank hands the pistol to PJ, who breaks it open and sights down the cylinder, eyes crinkling almost shut. ‘At least it hasn’t got Countashot fitted. I hate that.’ Countashot is an electronic system that counts
the number of rounds fired. All DRFS operatives were required to use it, for a while, a regulation that proved to be universally unpopular.

  ‘See, I look after you,’ says the armourer, returning from a storage cupboard with a holster. ‘This is a custom-made skeleton shoulder holster. How about we hang the SIG up for a couple of weeks and give it a run?’

  ‘I love my SIG.’

  ‘You’ll love this too, I promise. They call it a Warlock, by the way.’

  PJ dons the holster over his singlet, slides in the handgun, then waits while the armourer makes minute adjustments to the straps. ‘Makes me look like a cowboy.’

  The armourer grins. ‘You are a cowboy.’

  PJ smiles back. ‘It’s a monster handgun. Not exactly concealable.’

  ‘You want a toy that’s bleedin’ well concealable or a man-stopper?’

  ‘Are you on a commission from the factory or something?’

  The armourer looks away. ‘An old mate of mine is involved in the company. I said I’d get one of the boys to carry their piece for a bit.’

  ‘So they can tell everyone that the secret service uses them …’ PJ shakes his head sadly. ‘Shit, Frank, the things I do for you.’

  ‘You want to talk all night or run some lead through that barrel?’

  PJ swivels, quick-draws the Warlock, takes up the stance and aims two handed out through the door at the range. ‘Heavy, but it feels good.’

  ‘How many rounds, fifty?’

  ‘Twenty or so will be fine.’

  ‘Say two dozen — that’s four reloads.’

  PJ walks back out to the range, shakes his hips twice in time to the elevator music that never stops down here and slips the muffs over his head. The armourer brings a plastic block with twenty-four hollow point .41 Magnum calibre rounds.

  ‘These are Cor-Bon 180 grain DPX copper-jacketed hollow points, about right for what you’re doing.’