She swam four strokes with one arm, before pulling up and going into a doggy paddle. She felt around with her toes and was reassured to feel the sunken white bow beneath her feet. It hadn’t even been underwater long enough to rust.
After a couple of deep breaths to oxygenate her blood, Dana tipped forwards and plunged blindly underwater. As her fingers felt along the metal hull, she pulled the heavy can away from her chest. Its powerful magnetic base took on its own momentum and clamped itself to the hull with a hollow thunk. She sensed a rush of water from some unseen sea creature disturbed by the noise.
Once the dummy bomb was in position, she fumbled until she found a switch, which was locked in place with a steel pin to prevent accidental activation. Dana was getting desperate for breath, but she knew it would be a nightmare relocating the device after surfacing, so she stayed under.
It was always fiddly getting the pin out and not being able to see made it harder. When it finally twisted away, Dana flipped the switch and kicked her feet against the hull, filling her lungs with air as her face broke the surface.
The boat had drifted a few metres, meaning she faced a longer swim back. She grasped the rope on the side of the dinghy, expecting to clamber back aboard, but found Barry holding another dummy bomb in her face.
‘Not too bad,’ Barry said firmly. ‘But you’ve got to release the charge slowly. I heard that magnet thunk against the hull from up here. Remember, there might be people standing on deck twenty or thirty metres above your head. They would have heard a noise like that.’
People you’re happy to kill, Dana thought to herself, as she sighed and swept a strand of hair away from her face.
‘Let me catch my breath for a second.’
Barry shook his head. ‘Get back out there. You’ve got to make three dives in rapid succession tonight, so you’d better get used to it.’
32. CONTACTS
James, Ernie and Mike took half an hour loading the truck with household stuff and metal trunks containing heavy equipment from the outbuilding.
James was desperate to contact John and tell him what was going on, but even if there’d been a chance to get away from the two men, his tiny radio didn’t have enough transmission power to get picked up this far from the Ark.
It was noon when they arrived back. Ernie charged the truck through a broken section of fencing around Joel Regan Airport. The only aircraft in town was a small cargo jet. Ernie pulled up to a screeching halt beside it.
While the turbo fans whined above their heads, the co-pilot opened up the hold and lowered a power-assisted ramp. Loading up was a laborious process, hindered by the jet exhaust making the air even more unbelievably hot than it was already.
Every piece of cargo had to be weighed before they pushed it up the ramp. It then had to be manhandled across the shiny plastic floor inside the hold and strapped down. The co-pilot refused to muck in and stood with a clipboard and smug look, calculating the weight of the payload.
James had sweat pouring out of his hair by the time everything was packed securely inside. Ernie looked at his watch as the jet taxied towards the runway, with Mike Evans and the two pilots on board.
‘You might as well head through the terminal, catch a service and some lunch,’ Ernie said. ‘I’ll take the truck round the back to the compound and see you over there at one for the delivery route.’
‘Gotcha, boss,’ James said, faking enthusiasm.
As Ernie pulled away in the truck, a deafening roar erupted. The pilot had opened up the throttles for take-off and the jet powered past less than twenty metres away. James squeezed his palms against his ears as the grey haze choked him. Once the worst was past, he rubbed his stinging eyes and spat on the tarmac to get the acrid taste of jet exhaust out of his mouth. Then he jogged off towards the terminal.
By the time he’d made it inside, Ernie’s truck was out of sight and the jet was a grey dot on the narrow end of a plume in the sky. James had got over the initial shock of stumbling into Help Earth’s laboratory, but he couldn’t relax. There was still a chance that an encounter with Brian Evans would blow his cover and the contents of the weapons lab were currently heading away at several hundred kilometres an hour. He desperately needed to make contact with his mission controllers and tell them what was going on.
Although there was no one around, James couldn’t rule out the possibility of surveillance cameras inside the terminal building, so he cut into the first toilet he found. He figured he could spare a few seconds to splash cool water on his face, but he turned on a tap and found it was dead. So were the next two along.
Abandoning this idea, James locked himself into a toilet cubicle. There was no water in the bowl and a nasty funk rising out of the hole, but time was tight so he had to live with it. He flipped the toilet lid down to sit on, pulled off his trainer and reached under the soggy inner sole to retrieve the radio.
He pressed the on button and held the thin plastic strip up to his ear. It was warm and smelled like his feet.
‘John, are you out there?’
Chloe’s voice came back through the tiny loudspeaker. ‘Loud and clear, James.’
‘Where’s John?’
‘He had to fly up to monitor Dana in Darwin.’
‘What’s she doing up there?’
‘No idea yet,’ Chloe shrugged. ‘Ween sent her up there on some special mission.’
‘OK,’ James gasped, as he tried to digest this surprising piece of information. ‘Listen, I don’t have much time. The Help Earth laboratory was located in an outbuilding off a dirt track seven kilometres away from the Ark.’
‘Was located?’
‘I just helped pack it up. It’s on a jet, tail number A0113D. I’ve got no idea where it’s heading.’
‘OK,’ Chloe said. ‘I’ll get that information to ASIS. They should be able to track the aircraft transponder.’
‘Provided they haven’t switched it off.’
‘Which is entirely possible, maybe even probable,’ Chloe acknowledged. ‘I’m glad you called in again. I’ve been in contact with ASIS this morning. They’ve been monitoring the Survivors’ financial dealings through Lomborg Financial. They’re trading heavily in the Japanese stock market, buying into companies whose shares will go up if there’s a sudden rise in energy prices, like you get whenever there’s a Help Earth attack.’
‘Any idea why it’s focused on Japan?’
‘Not yet, James.’
James thought for a second. ‘Help Earth’s target must be big if they’re investing this much money.’
‘Exactly,’ Chloe said. ‘The Survivors seem pretty confident: they’ve borrowed millions from merchant banks and they’re buying derivatives instead of shares to maximise their profits. A lot of these investments are short-term futures contracts, which means this thing has to happen in the next day or two for the Survivors to make the big bucks.’
‘Right,’ James said. ‘I’ll find out what I can and try getting in touch again later. I can’t promise though, you know how awkward it can be getting time to yourself around here.’
*
Barry Cox ordered the girls to get some sleep when they arrived back from the beach. Dana took the radio out of her trainer and lay under her duvet with the microphone up to her mouth.
‘Anybody out there?’ she whispered.
She was reassured to hear John’s voice come back in her ear, ‘Loud and clear, Dana.’
‘Thank god,’ Dana gasped. ‘Listen John, this is red hot.
I’m right in the middle of a Help Earth operation. It looks like we’re gonna be attacking a supertanker terminal, either late tonight or in the early hours of tomorrow morning.’
‘Have you got any idea where it is?’
‘No, but apparently the tanker will be docked at a terminal that produces a kind of refrigerated gas called LNG. Have you ever heard of that?’
‘Can’t say I have, but that probably makes it easier for us to identify your target. Give me two se
conds, I’ve got an ASIS agent sitting alongside me, she’s a local girl.’
Dana anxiously waited for John’s voice to come back.
‘OK,’ John said.‘She says there are only a handful of LNG terminals in Australia. Apparently they export the gas to China and Japan. The nearest is only about thirty clicks from here. It’s one of the biggest employers in town.’
‘Sounds like our target,’ Dana said.
‘She says it’s the only one in northern Australia, so it must be. By the way, I was watching you down at the beach through binoculars. Can you confirm that it’s Barry Cox you’re with?’
‘Sure, I recognised him as soon as I arrived. You know, his jaw still makes a funny clicking noise from where Bruce busted it.’
‘That’s a pain,’ John said. ‘If I’d known he was here, I would have sent Chloe up from the Ark.’
‘How come?’
‘Cox eyeballed me in Hong Kong. I’ll have to keep my distance in case he remembers my face. The woman who waited with the car on the beach is called Nina Richards. She’s a veteran environmental campaigner. ASIS have suspected her involvement with Help Earth for a while, but there’s been nothing concrete until now.’
This revelation surprised Dana. ‘Are you sure? She acts exactly like a Survivor.’
John laughed. ‘So do you. My guess is that Help Earth wanted a couple of bodies along for the most dangerous part of the operation and Susie Regan was willing to supply them. Nina must have realised that acting like a Survivor would make it easier to keep you girls in line.’
‘So what’s gonna happen?’ Dana asked. ‘We know the target and we know it’s tonight. How far are we going to let this attack run before we put a stop to it?’
‘It’ll be easier to nail Barry and Nina if we catch them in the act, but I don’t want you exposed to an unacceptable level of danger. I’ll have to speak with the ASIS people and work out a strategy. Make sure you call me on the radio again before you leave the house.’
‘OK, I’ll check in later,’ Dana said. ‘I’ve got my own room, so it’s a lot easier here than it was inside the commune.’
33. WORK
Most of what Lauren saw around the office was mundane: queries from the communes, transfers of Survivors from one location to another, paying bills and bulk purchasing the produce that fed and clothed cult members around the world.
She knew some of this information might provide evidence of links between the Survivors and Help Earth, but there were thousands of computer files, rooms lined with filing cabinets and no easy way to distinguish between routine paperwork and valuable intelligence. Her only option was to stick her nose in whenever she could and hope for the best, but she wasn’t optimistic. It might take weeks or even months to get lucky.
Rat hated working in the office. He’d sorted out a regular skive, spending hours of every shift hiding out in a room used to store old bits of furniture. The office was large enough for people to lose track of each other, so it was easy to sneak off.
Rat’s favourite scam was to grab a glass of milk and some biscuits from the kitchen and sit under a broken desk reading a paperback. Sadly, reading matter inside the Ark was restricted to the wisdom of Joel Regan and a few classic novels studied by older kids in English Literature classes. Rat’s favourite was a paperback copy of Oliver Twist, which he’d stolen from a classroom and read more than a dozen times. It was now in tatters and Rat kept an elastic band around it to stop the pages dropping out.
Lauren enjoyed hanging out with Rat more than doing office work, but she kept herself busy because she knew the mission wouldn’t get anywhere while she sat around chatting. Still, Rat could be persistent and he managed to talk Lauren into spending half an hour sitting under the desk talking about different kinds of video games. Rat had played them on aeroplanes when he was a toddler, but they weren’t allowed inside the Ark and he was fascinated by them. He wanted to know every detail, like how many buttons the controllers on different consoles had, what type of things you saved on a memory card and what the most popular games were.
When Lauren finally headed off to do some work, she heard voices on the other side of the door and held back, not wanting to give away Rat’s hiding place. She waited for the talking to stop, but instead it started turning into a row.
‘Who is it?’ Rat whispered.
Lauren got excited when she realised the voices belonged to Joel Regan’s wife and eldest daughter.
‘It’s Susie and The Spider.’
Rat enjoyed a good bit of gossip and crawled out from under the desk. The two kids had their ears almost touching the door and sprang away as Susie backed into it.
‘Get your freak hands off me, Spider,’ Susie shouted.
‘I’ve found a hole,’ Eleanor shouted back. ‘Seventy million
dollars have vanished over the last five days.’
‘So what’s that got to do with me?’ Susie yelled.
‘My father and I were the only ones who had access to those funds. Now, Lomborg Financial are draining it.’
‘Why don’t you ask your father before accusing me?’
‘Don’t bullshit me Susie, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know you gave my father grief until he let you have control over that account. He’s a sick man and you’re abusing his trust.’
‘Arnos Lomborg has made us a lot of money,’ Susie shouted back. ‘You don’t mind when it comes rolling in, do you? Your precious Ark in Nevada would still be a blueprint if it wasn’t for me. Japan and Europe would be pipe dreams.’
‘But where does this miraculous ability to make money come from?’
‘Investments.’
‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. I’m no financial whiz, but it doesn’t take one to know that two hundred per cent returns on a three-week investment aren’t legitimate.’
‘Just count your money and shut your mouth,’ Susie snapped. ‘The only reason you don’t like this is because my people set up the contacts with Lomborg. What did the Survivors have before I started taking an interest? Vending machines, collection tins and red bills from the electricity company. Joel nearly bankrupted us trying to turn this godforsaken stretch of desert into some pathetic copy of Disneyland.’
Rat grinned at Lauren and shrugged, as if to say I don’t understand any more of this than you do. He had no reason to suspect that Lauren understood the implications of every word: Susie Regan was behind the links between Help Earth and the Survivors; Joel was too ill to make decisions and The Spider was out of the loop.
‘Besides,’ Susie said, ‘all this talk about your precious father, when did you last spend a night looking after him? When did you last even visit him?’
‘I can’t get near him without you standing two metres away trying to score points off me.’
‘Get out of my face, Spider,’ Susie said, sounding exasperated. ‘Haven’t you got a service to conduct, or some stupid little beads to hand out?’
‘Devil,’ Eleanor screamed. ‘It sickens me that my father takes to his bed each night with an unbeliever.’
Susie chuckled, ‘Oh no, here we go. Your daddy didn’t meet god, Eleanor. He invented the Survivors as a way to make a bit of cash.’
Rat broke into a huge grin when he heard this blasphemy. Lauren pretended to be shocked.
Eleanor sounded genuinely upset and gave a big sob. ‘My father is a great man. A prophet. God will punish you for what you’ve done to us.’
Lauren knew all about the power struggle between Susie and Eleanor, but only now was she realising how different the two womens’ opinions about Joel Regan and being a Survivor were.
‘I’m not even interested in arguing with you,’ Susie said finally. ‘Piss off out of my way.’
The Spider pounded angrily on the door. Lauren and Rat scurried back towards the desk, half expecting her to come into the room, but after a few seconds’ silence they realised Eleanor and Susie had moved on.
Lauren gave Rat a relieved smile, followed by an e
xcuse about having some photocopying to do. She dived off to lock herself in a toilet cubicle, grabbed the radio out of her trainer and called Chloe to tell her about Susie and Eleanor’s conversation.
‘What you say about Susie confirms the picture ASIS have been getting from other sources, including your brother,’ Chloe said. ‘But we didn’t realise that Eleanor and the other devout Survivors knew nothing about the links.’
‘Did Susie have anything to do with environmental groups before she came to the Ark?’
‘Not really,’ Chloe said. ‘The only thing the Americans turned up was that Susie refused to wear fur when she worked as a model, but a lot of models insist on that. We’ve got no idea if Susie cares about the environment, or if she’s skimming the proceeds to line her own pockets. Whatever the case, she’s definitely been using Survivor money to fund Help Earth.’
Lauren hadn’t been in touch with James since the morning run, so Chloe brought her up to speed on everything that was going on, including James finding the laboratory and the latest news from Dana.
‘Do you know where your brother is?’ Chloe asked.
‘I expect he’ll go for dinner and evening service as soon as he gets back from his delivery run,’ Lauren replied, keeping her voice really low because one of the admin staff was washing their hands on the other side of the cubicle door.
‘Right, do you think you’ll be able to ditch your schedule and meet up with James as soon as he arrives back?’
‘I guess,’ Lauren said warily. ‘This office is right next to the vehicle compound, but the teachers at the boarding school keep close tabs on us. We’ll get asked questions if we disappear for long and skipping a service is a paddling offence.’
‘OK,’ Chloe said. ‘Try not to worry about that. ASIS would prefer to wait while you guys and some of their other operations gather more evidence, but the Australian government now know that a Help Earth attack is imminent. If the public found out that the government knew in advance and didn’t warn them, the political implications would be enormous.’
CHERUB: Divine Madness Page 19
