‘Rahim…Rahim.’ Rahim felt the hand shaking his shoulders and he opened his eyes. ‘You were tossing and turning and calling out. Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he said, blinking. Such a rapid journey from the distant past to the present was disorienting. No, it was only a dream, fool. Yet the dream had become so vivid since his cancer had been diagnosed, he often wondered whether he really had been at the Mongol siege of Caffa in 1346, the first recorded instance of the use of biological weapons. He had studied it when the Saudi army appointed him to head up its defensive chemical/biological weapons program. Renamed Feodoysia, he had even visited the city in the Crimea and, frighteningly, parts of the old centre had been familiar to him. The infected corpses, riddled with the bacillus Yersinia pestis, and their clothes harbouring the most likely carrier, the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, had had the desired effect. The plague raced through the town and Caffa was taken. But not before many townspeople had escaped and carried the Black Death to other population centres, bringing about the Great Plague of Europe in which millions perished.
Rahim knew that the notion of punishment for deeds in a previous life was against the teachings of Mohammed, may His name be praised, but he considered it anyway. He wondered whether the vivid dream was an actual moment from a life lived long ago. Perhaps his rapidly advancing cancer was God’s way of evening the score over past misdeeds. And yet here he was again, loading a modern trebuchet with a biological agent to spread death and destruction. Rahim lay quietly on his bed for a time and considered the parallels.
‘Etti,’ he called out. ‘Prepare my medicine.’ Why face the day without it? Rahim told himself.
A short time later and with Etti’s help, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim climbed into the one-piece rubberised suit as the warmth of the medicine spread through his veins, wiping out the pain as effectively as rain extinguishing fire. Only the barest hint of the agony that had been his constant companion remained. He sat patiently while Etti packed away the quarter brick wrapped in its red wax paper, placing it in a strong box. Initially she had disapproved, but then she’d seen the change, the benefits it brought. The drug gave Rahim the strength to lift his limbs off the bed. Under its influence, he no longer seemed a walking cadaver.
Rahim had calculated his consumption of the White Stallion at present dosage levels and determined that he had enough to last a year. However, the dosage was increasing steadily, his body building its tolerance to the alkaloid’s invasion of his nervous system. Rahim had three, or perhaps four, months left to live before the cancer took him to his grave. How much he would need in that final month was anyone’s guess, but Rahim wanted to be sure there was more than enough. The pain was unendurable without the white powder now, and its ferocity would build in his last days, blotting out memory, invading his every cell with its malevolence. The pain would occasionally even spike through the drug’s protective blanket, a foretaste of what was in store for him. Rahim was terrified. The White Stallion would protect him and eventually carry him into the earth’s embrace. He would sit on its wide back, out of reach of the demons that clawed up from the blackness to take him to their breast. Enough. Rahim’s heart raced as his mind grappled momentarily with reality. He had considered killing himself after the news of Kadar Al-Jahani’s death, his one and only link with the Holy Land. But his increasing love of the drug kept him from taking his own life, fortifying him with stamina to go on. Rahim pressed the seal closed on the NBC suit. He had work to do, dosages of another kind to determine.
A knock on the door made him lift his bloodshot eyes. Rahim realised the sound had been increasing in volume for some time. How long had the man been standing in the doorway? ‘Yes, what is it?’ he asked dreamily.
‘Do you have it, doctor?’ asked the man wearing shorts and nothing else. His body, Rahim noted, was covered in crude tattoos, mostly aimless doodles of self-mutilation.
‘Yes, there on the bench.’
The man’s bare feet tracked dirt and sand across the clean, freshly swept floorboards as he made his way to the workbench. He picked up the brick and examined it closely. It was yellow, transparent and heavy, but buried deep within the transparent yellow casing was what appeared to be a white tile. ‘Doctor, you are a miracle man,’ he said as he tossed the brick spinning into the air above and caught it. ‘This is perfect.’
‘There are fifty more curing in moulds. You can have them this afternoon,’ said Rahim.
‘Now we can finish production. Emir will be pleased,’ said the man, spinning the brick again into the air, much to Rahim’s annoyance, as he ran out the door.
Rahim summoned the energy to stand. The effort made his head swim. ‘Help me with this, woman,’ he said. Etti quickly closed and locked the door and turned the air-conditioning to full. She then hurried to Rahim’s side.
‘You should be in bed,’ she said, lifting the hood of the rubber suit over his head.
‘Ah, woman. You are like a scratched record. There will be plenty of time for lying down. An eternity of it.’ Rahim was beginning to warm to his assistant despite himself. Her concern for him was genuine. And when the drug was coursing through his veins, he even had the strength to at least consider filling her with his seed but, unfortunately, that part of his body had long since ceased to function as God intended.
The suit smelled of rubber and bleach, its outer shiny brown skin still slick in parts from the dousing she’d given it the day before. Etti also checked that the filter canister through which Rahim’s air passed was properly sealed. Next the gloves and galoshes. Rahim was barely strong enough to stand unassisted in the weight of the protective suit, but there was no choice for him. He had to wear it. To say that the agent they worked with was lethal was an understatement, the tiniest quantity of it capable of killing and doing so horribly – the ghastly deaths it visited on the test animals had proved that. The assistant helped Rahim to his workbench, where he would sit until she too was suited up.
‘Have the antidote ready, woman,’ he said.
‘Yes, doctor,’ Etti said obediently. She was already in the process of doing just that, anyway.
Etti removed the syringes marked ‘Atropine’ from the locked refrigerator and placed them within easy reach on the workbench. It was hot inside the suit and even a healthy person could not wear it for long; but it provided the best possible protection, so it was worth the discomfort. The time spent in the suit was critical where Rahim was concerned. Just forty-five minutes was all he could endure. That meant they had to work fast. ‘Come, doctor.’
Etti again checked that the seams were interlocked properly.
Rahim had cleverly devised a canister for the agent of death moulded from epoxy resin. Once sealed inside, the nerve agent commonly called VX was held in two parts. Each part was still deadly, but nowhere near as dangerous as when combined in the right proportions. When the time came, the canisters would shatter under the implosive force of shaped charges, combining the two solutions to become one of the most lethal weapons ever devised. Rahim’s innovation had further improved the delivery. The molecules of the epoxy would fuse with those of the agent to create a sticky, deadly slag that caused a hotspot beneath the point of detonation, the heavier epoxy particles coated with VX falling more rapidly to earth. There were four canisters in all, each capable of holding a little under five litres.
The schedule called for a final test. Rahim was still unsure of the optimum ratio of the two components. Everything had been prepared the previous day, including a third mixing drum containing the two parts of the VX combined. Rahim’s failing strength meant that his role had become largely supervisory, the way an old surgeon who’d lost the required sensitivity in his fingers might direct a young apprentice.
The assistant took the special tool Rahim had the machinists make and loosened the unusual bolts that fastened the lid on the heavy concrete drum. The bolts were well lubricated and easily released. The lid was heavy, and she grunted as she lifted i
t off and placed it on the floor. A second drum was revealed inside, as with a Russian doll, this one made of stainless steel itself encased in thick rubber. Rahim watched patiently, aware of his own short, hot breaths. Neither container carried any dire warnings, no indication of what lay within.
The lid on the second drum within the drum was simply unscrewed. Rahim took a torch and shone it into the darkness. It was less than a quarter full. Satisfied, he gestured at Etti to continue. She reached into the depths of the rubber flask with a small plastic cup attached to a long, thin extension – a ladle – and pushed it into the liquid. She paused to get her breath and then lifted the cup out, intensely aware that the contents were capable of killing more than a hundred thousand people. Her hand shook with its proximity to the fluid. The power of this mighty weapon made her feel faint. Slowly, slowly she raised the cup until she had it over the brim of the rubber canister and then swung it carefully across to the beaker on the benchtop. She began to pour it carefully, so very carefully, into the glass container. The liquid was a light honey colour and looked – strangely – good enough to drink.
And then suddenly, ka-boom! The shock wave of an explosion rattled the walls of their demountable, shattering two windows. Etti flinched with shock as the glass blew in. She froze for a moment and then looked up, sweat trickling down her brow. ‘Ignore it, concentrate,’ said Rahim tersely, his lack of health a keen example to her of the dangers of being distracted at critical moments.
The rat froze when the vibrations from the explosion hummed through the floor. And then a large splash of liquid had fallen from a height and plastered it along the centre of its back, almost rolling it over. A human’s foot shifted towards it, and the movement broke through its fear. The rat scampered off to the safety of a darkened corner, where Etti’s cat pounced on it.
Just on thirty minutes later, Rahim and Etti were done and the drum resealed. This trial would kill the last of the pigs and no more of these animals would be used to test the agent – they were too big and disposal of them was proving difficult. Etti steeled herself to check the floor under the table to see if any VX had been accidentally spilled. She believed a small amount had sloshed out of the ladle when the explosion had made her jump. Etti had not mentioned this to Rahim for fear of upsetting him. She looked on the floor under the workbench but the floorboards appeared to be clear of any telltale spatters. She told herself that she must have imagined the spillage and was enormously relieved – as much for the sake of her own health as for Rahim’s. She looked across the room and saw him slumped on a stool, exhausted.
Duat supervised the removal of the remains of the dead caused by the accident with the claymore mine while he inwardly cursed their stupidity. But accidents like this had happened before and they would happen again. Praise be to Allah that the death toll was not higher.
One of the carpenters ran up to Duat as he left the grisly scene at the weapons range and presented him with a yellow epoxy brick, a compressed tile of heroin buried deep within. At least here was some good news. Duat turned it over in his hand and smiled. That Rahim was indeed a genius.
The cat ran a considerable distance with the rat in its mouth. When it finally paused to inspect its catch in the rafters of its favourite hiding place, the cat found that the rodent had died. There was no opportunity to tease it, play with it. The hunter began to feast on its catch. Within a minute of licking its dinner’s fur, the cat began to convulse. Seconds later, it fell into a drainpipe, dead. The afternoon monsoon washed the animals, both contaminated with massive amounts of VX, into the encampment’s main water tank. There, they became stuck in a feeder pipe to the encampment’s mess.
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Wilkes had to admit to himself that he was afraid. The ridiculousness of that fear made him angry with himself. The fact was, he would rather storm a machine gun emplacement than face Annabelle’s displeasure. She had real power over his state of mind, he realised. That, and the fact that he was fearful of the way things seemed to have changed between them.
A homecoming was once a relatively simple moment when they were overwhelmed with the emotion of being together again and went straight off to the sack. But now, since the simplicity of their relationship had been changed by their engagement, a homecoming seemed to be more about something he was denying her. He shrugged. Perhaps he was mistaken and was just feeling uncertain because they’d parted on such a bum note. Maybe he was getting worked up over nothing and they would embrace, kiss and one thing would lead to another and…Well, he warmed at the remembrance of Annabelle’s touch.
The C-130’s ramp cracked open, the struts wheezing. Wilkes’s ears rang from the assault of the Hercules’s propeller noise, despite the earplugs he’d been given. The heat of Townsville hit his face as he hopped down onto the tarmac, the heavy kitbag swung over his shoulder. The C-5 Galaxy had earlier delivered him and Atticus to Fairbairn AFB in Canberra, where they’d gone straight to a debrief with Air Marshal Ted Niven, Graeme Griffin, Gia Ferallo and Felix Mortimer, the DIO man. Wilkes and Monroe had already forwarded home a report detailing Kadar Al-Jahani’s capture. Canberra just wanted an initial verbal debrief on the terrorist’s delivery to Guantanamo Bay. That was all pretty straightforward, but both he and Atticus were surprised when they’d heard that Kadar Al-Jahani had been reported killed in a capture gone horribly wrong. Wilkes was sure ASIS, or more likely the CIA, had its reasons for the lie, and that more than likely those reasons wouldn’t be happy ones for Kadar Al-Jahani.
Wilkes breathed in the hot, clean air of home. It smelled of concrete and grass and imminent rain. Towering white and grey cumulonimbus clouds portended a storm and they reared up in the sky like knights in a joust. Wilkes walked across the tarmac to the terminal and felt a genuine relief to be back in Australia. He knew he wasn’t alone in that. What Aussie didn’t feel the same way when returning from a long stint overseas, relieved to be back in a country that made sense, where people didn’t shoot at each other for having a contrary point of view or a different skin colour. Wilkes thought about Kadar Al-Jahani and the land he’d come from, eternally torn with anger and blood.
Wilkes had seen enough misery to last several lifetimes and three things he knew to be true: that human beings bled the same, that they all had feelings, and that a sense of shared humanity was the most important belief system there was. Wilkes realised it was a strange philosophy for a bloke who was trained to kill, but it made a lot more sense than two people prepared to slaughter one another because each believed the other worshipped the same god in the wrong way. He knew the Israel–Palestine mess was more complicated than that, but surely, if people realised how much they were the same rather than how much they differed, the situation there would improve, wouldn’t it?
Wilkes walked across the tarmac and through the terminal deep in a jumble of thoughts and emotions. He looked up and suddenly realised he was at the taxi rank.
‘Where to, digger?’ asked the driver as Wilkes opened the door and tossed his kit in the back seat, then sat in the front passenger seat. It was a new taxi – air-conditioned – and it smelled cool and fresh inside with a hint of pine.
Wilkes knew he had to go back to barracks, at least to report in, but first there was something more important to do – tell Annabelle how much he loved her and missed her. ‘You know where NQTV is, mate?’
‘One of my best customers,’ said the driver, accelerating slowly away. ‘So, been protecting Australia lately?’
‘Sure, if you call devising field menus for the combat troops protecting Australia,’ Wilkes said.
‘Oh well, I guess a hungry soldier can’t fight,’ the driver agreed.
‘Ever heard the expression “An army marches on its stomach”? Well, it’s very important getting the diet right. Too many legumes and the boys fart. It’s noisy, smelly, and it’s dangerous, too. No point setting an ambush if the enemy can smell you a mile away,’ Wilkes said, straight-faced.
‘Gee,
I never thought of that,’ said the driver. ‘Makes sense, though.’ He fiddled with the radio receiver. ‘Didn’t realise it was all so scientific. What do you want to listen to? Music? News?’
‘Bit of music would be fine, thanks,’ said Wilkes. Cook or sanitation officer were the two occupations he usually drew on to throw off idle conversation about his work. Wilkes felt a bit rude employing the tactic, but anything he could offer would be a lie. At least this one was a little less impolite than telling the man he didn’t want to talk.
Ten minutes later, Wilkes stood outside the TV station, heart pounding. He was sweating. Was this anxiety because of Annabelle, or weather induced? he wondered. Wilkes put his nose inside his fatigues, took a sniff, and detected a vague trace of deodorant. Good enough. He walked into reception and said hello to the woman behind the desk. She was around fifty and a fixture at the station. ‘Hi, Janet,’ he said. ‘Annabelle around?’
‘Hi, Tom. Yeah, just go on in. You know where she lives.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ Wilkes made his way through the open-plan office. Things were pretty quiet. It was mid afternoon on a Friday and most of the staff were probably off having a late lunch. He rounded the corner and walked up to Annabelle’s door. She was at her desk and Saunders was leaning over her, laughing softly about something.
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