Thermals

by Evan Currie

  Thermals

  Evan C. Currie

  Published by Evan Currie at Amazon.com

  Copyright 2007 Evan C Currie

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for you, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Book Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Thermals is the first novel I’ve been comfortable enough to offer up for sale, and I’m really pretty proud of it. The concept came from my earlier days of writing and hanging around Baen’s Bar at Baen.com. Jim Baen created a forum specifically to challenge writers, and the first challenge he posted was to write a story about a new type of Power Generation Facility. There were actually several different versions proposed at the time, but the one used here in Thermals just caught my attention.

  About four months of writing resulted in this novel, which was pretty decent time for me, and I really liked the outcome. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to impress Mr Baen, so it stayed on my hard drive until just recently.

  Whether he wanted to publish it or not, I have to thank Jim Baen for challenging me to write this novel, it’s been a great experience and I’m proud of the outcome. He and I didn’t actually get along on the boards, but for all his bluntness and irascible nature, I can only hope and pray to one day add a tenth of the contribution he has to the science fiction community.

  I hope you enjoy the ride, and thank you for buying Thermals

  Evan C. Currie

  Author

  Chapter 1

  Australia, June 18th, 2023AD

  Anselm Gunnar leaned over slightly in his seat so he could stare out the side window of the two-seater Piper as the small aircraft circled around the spectacular construction that lay below, and towered above.

  The Australian Tower of Power project lay both five thousand feet below them and also loomed another twenty thousand feet above. Light glistened off the thirteen square kilometers of glass and metal below, providing blinding reflections whenever the piper crossed just the right, or wrong, angle of attack over the amazing structure, one of the hazards of approaching the tower by air that kept the major airlines from servicing the city below.

  When the light wasn’t blinding, there was another dazzling sight to deal with, in that the immense structure created a huge dot of green, of life itself, in the middle of the dull brown of the Australian desert. Anselm remembered from his briefing that the Tower Project generated enough food to feed the city of more than eighty thousand that had grown up around the huge greenhouse, plus a substantial export industry as well.

  It was a net importer of grains, because those required more space to grow than more economically viable specialty products like strawberries and kiwis, and Canada was more than happy to ship in all the grains the fledgling city needed anyway. The project had been intended to provide power to more than two hundred thousand homes when it was begun thirteen years earlier, after over a decade of political setbacks delayed the concept, but no one had really predicted what had happened.

  Almost overnight a city grew up around the tower, sucking up a lot of the juice that the massive structure could provide in short order as workers and families found that living nearby wasn’t the hardship it might otherwise have been and began buying and leasing land in the area. The fledgling community took things in hand quickly and the Tower itself proved a nice inducement to think ‘green’ as they said. So now the city below was probably the most ecologically minded on the planet and, surprisingly perhaps, topped the list of most desirable places to live. All that in the middle of a desert, no less.

  That didn’t mean that they didn’t have problems, however, otherwise they wouldn’t need the services of Anselm Gunnar.

  The Interpol Security and Counter Terrorist specialist looked up as they continued to circle, the rough air buffeting the small plane. His eyes followed the checkered spire that made up the huge central tower of the project. He knew that the idea behind the project was simplicity itself, but the execution of it still took his breath away.

  The tower was probably four or five hundred feet in diameter, or maybe radius, Anselm couldn’t tell by eye and he couldn’t remember the exact number from the briefing. A number he could remember, though, was its height. The immense structure touched the sky itself at one kilometer in height, earning it a place in any history or record book you’d care to name. Thirteen square kilometers, twenty five thousand acres, of greenhouse below and around the tower provided the impetus to trap heat into the water and earth, warming the air trapped inside. As it grew warmer the air naturally had to rise, and it was guided by the design of the glass and steel inwards to the tower.

  Cooler air from the surrounding desert was drawn in around the skirt, warming as it flowed in toward the center of the tower, then it too would rise up the kilometer long passage to the sky. Inside the tower, dozens of turbines were run by the rising air, generating power for the community that had grown up around it, and still leaving a substantial amount for export to a nearby city.

  All in all, it was one of the foremost marvels of construction and engineering in the world, which had absolutely nothing to do with Anselm’s reason for being there, in the slightest. He was deep in thought over his mission when something at the top of the tower caught his eye and he frowned.

  “What’s that?” He asked.

  “What!?” The pilot yelled, looking over.

  Anselm checked his headset and turned on the microphone. “What’s that? Up over the tower!?”

  The pilot leaned forward and pitched the plane up so he could see the top of the tower as they flitted along past it.

  “Oh, them,” he shrugged, leveling out again. “Thermies.”

  “What!?” Anselm looked at him in total confusion.

  “Thrill seekers!” The pilot yelled over the engine. “They get in a glider, or a para-pack, and get a lift up over the tower. Day or night, you get into the thermals there, its one hell of a ride, man!”

  Anselm leaned back over, staring up at the dots in the blue sky over the tower and shuddered.

  “How high do they go?”

  “Huh? Oh hell, way the hell above what this thing is rated for!” The pilot laughed, “Some of them carry freaking space suits for the ride!”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Naw, man, those guys…they’re extreme. One guy caught the Jetstream a while back. He was wearing a Vac-suit like they use on the space station, you know? Says it whipped him eight ways to Sunday before he dropped out of it. Coast guard picked him up, heading out to sea near New Zealand!”

  “Jesus,” Anselm muttered under his breath.

  The Jetstream was ten kilometers up and that was a long way to fall if your gear screwed up. From what Anselm knew, if the story was true, than that crazy bastard was lucky he hadn’t dropped through some poor sucker’s roof in America.

  “What was he using?”

  “What!?”

  Anselm growled over the roar of the old piper’s engine, “That guy! What was he using!?”

  “Oh! A Para-Pack!” The guy yelled
back, “he got it all tangled to hell too. Came down hard in the water, broke both legs! Good thing he had his GPS unit, or he’d a been shark bait for sure!”

  No kidding .

  Anselm shook his head, and turned back to the amazing piece of engineering. Some people were completely insane. This was why he did what he did, of course. Though it was a different kind of insanity that brought him to the Tower Project.

  Abdallah Amir, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, had been spotted in the area by an Interpol agent on vacation. The news came as something of a shock, since the man was supposed to have been dead for the past five years, after an aborted bombing attempt at the Japanese Embassy in London.

  The man had been responsible for nearly thirty bombings and biological attacks in the previous two decades, beginning when he’d publically renounced his American citizenship and changed his name in Oh Eight. Abdallah, or ‘Slave of God’, as the name meant, was of mixed nationality and had joined the fundamentalist movement when his father was killed in a bombing of a bunker during the American siege of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

  Born Raymond Gorra, Amir had been part of a long term sleeper cell that had infiltrated the United States dozens of years earlier. Originally entering the country as Illegals, his parents had been ‘grandfathered’ in after the riots in Oh Six and Seven caused lawmakers to ease up on the immigration laws.

  His father’s death had tipped him over the edge, but most reports, though Anselm rather suspected that the man wasn’t particularly stable to begin with. After the public revelation of his father’s death, and the man’s American passport, Gorra had publically stepped into the limelight with a series of bombings of public buildings, including a school, in his home town of Santa Barbra.

  Over the next twelve years or so, he’d waged a war of terror across the planet, destroying more lives than Anselm could count, more, in fact, than he wanted to count. The ‘Slave of God’ had climbed the most wanted lists quickly, landing at the top of the CIA and Interpol’s short lists within a few years. And he’d stayed there too, until his reported death in ’Eighteen when one of his bombs had apparently gone off prematurely and killed him, his Jihadi cell, and the fifty-three hostages he had taken in the Japanese Embassy in London.

  And now he turns up here. Anselm watched the glass below get closer as the pilot circled around and lined up with the air strip.

  “Gonna take her down now,” the pilot said nonchalantly. “Might be a bit rough, even at low altitude we sometimes get weird thermals off the glass. Don’t worry about it though, done this hundreds of times and I ain’t dead yet!”

  The sentiment didn’t comfort Anselm much, but he just nodded as the pilot took her down.

  Down where below the Interpol agent, there were over eighty thousand people.

  And at least one of them was a mass murderer.

  *****

  The plane taxied to a stop near a small prefab building that apparently served as the airport and control tower for the area, and the pilot simply flipped open the cargo section of the small craft as Anselm stepped out.

  “Help yourself, Mate,” he told the agent, “I’m heading into get a brew. Catch ya later.”

  Anselm watched him walk off as a marked police vehicle slid to a near silent stop just a short distance away. He watched the officer slip out of the car, then turned to grab his bags as she approached along the tarmac.

  “Agent Gunnar?”

  Anselm pulled his carry-on from the cargo section of the small plane, turning as he withdrew the moderately heavy bag, and nodded. “That’s me.”

  “Inspector Dougal,” the woman approaching him said, extending a hand. “Always a pleasure to help Interpol.”

  Anselm took her hand with his free one, noting instantly that the woman had an impressive grip. He smiled slightly at her greeting and shrugged, “I suspect that might be a slight exaggeration, Inspector.”

  She smiled in return, “perhaps, but only slightly. If you’ll come with me, I have my car waiting.”

  She nodded to a sleek Electric Vehicle painted in the white and checkered black of the local PD, waiting just off the small strip and Anselm nodded as he followed her off.

  “I’d have expected a bigger airstrip for a city of eighty thousand,” he said as they walked.

  “We get people suggesting it every now and then,” she admitted, “but it’s not a priority. We get our bulk stuff in through the road trains, and to be honest we don’t really want thousands of tourists showing up. Too damn many of them as it is.”

  Anselm chuckled, “I guess I can understand that.”

  She nodded, gesturing to the back of the car. “Toss your kit in the back, I’ll give you a drive into town.”

  Anselm did as she said, taking another long look at the car.

  It was quite large, a wagon actually, painted in a familiar police pattern but it was the eight tires that caught his attention.

  “Hey…is this an Eliica?” He asked suddenly, blinking in surprise.

  Dougal smiled and nodded, “we’ve got fifteen of them on the force. Only allow electric vehicles around here, you know, local ordinance.”

  “Damn,” Anselm shook his head as he walked around. “These things cost two hundred grand.”

  “We got them for cost,” she told him, sliding into the driver’s seat of the electric vehicle. “Kiro Nugawa Corporation leased them to us to use as a showcase.”

  “Good deal, if you can get it.”

  She just nodded as she punched the start button and threw the electric vehicle into reverse. The Eliica whipped around like a bottle rocket, and then slammed Anselm back into his seat. Four seconds later, they were doing a hundred kilometers an hour and still climbing.

  “I love these things,” Inspector Dougal grinned, glancing over to where Anselm was pressed hard back into his seat. “Don’t get a chance to let it out very often. We don’t really drive much around The Project.”

  The dusty road was whipping past so fast that Anselm, who was used to the autobahn, had to tear his eyes from the road to look over at the driver. “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, keeping the pedal down as the car passed three hundred kilometers per hour and kept climbing. “The Project is completely served with a Mag-Lev mono-rail, so when the Shanties popped up it were decided that we’d just extend the rails.”

  “Shanties?”

  She laughed, “That’s what we call the city, Agent Gunnar. It’s traditional, you know…started with people just building with whatever they had, like a Shanty Town.”

  Anselm nodded, “Anselm.”

  “What?”

  “My name, you can call me Anselm.”

  Inspector Dougal smiled, “I’m Gwen. Gwendolyn actually, Gwendolyn Dougal, but you can call me Gwen.”

  Anselm nodded, returning the smile, especially as the car had topped out to just under four hundred kilometers per hour and he wasn’t being slammed back in the seat like he was on a jet taking off. “Nice to meet you, Gwen.”

  “Now,” Gwen Dougal said, casually checking her instruments and adjusting the steering column. “Why don’t you tell me about this guy you’re after?”

  Anselm frowned, “Abdallah Amir. It means, roughly, The Slave of God is a King, or Prince, or something like that. He’s been on our most wanted list for almost two decades now. Well, he would have been if we knew he was still alive.”

  “Arab guy?”

  “Uncertain. His records indicate not, he claims otherwise. He was born Raymond Gorra, in Santa Barbra California,” Amselm said, “He changed his name himself when he publically ‘embraced Allah’.”

  “Sounds like an interesting guy.”

  Amselm nodded, “You could say that. Well educated, trained as a medical doctor, and has a proven ability and desire to learn new and dangerous skills. Dangerous to us, anyway.”

  Gwen shook her head, “Hard to believe. What would a guy like that be doing at The Project, anyway?”

  “Amir has a
reason,” Anselm said seriously. “He doesn’t screw around and he rarely makes mistakes.”

  “So how’d you find him?” Gwen asked with a hint of a chuckle.

  Amselm had to laugh himself at that, “Would you believe honeymoon photos?”

  “What?” She looked over at him like he was crazy.

  He just laughed, “We have an agent here on her honeymoon. Her husband was taking photos of her near a fountain somewhere in the project…”

  “That’d be the Pleasant Chimes Fountain.”

  Amselm shot her a querying look.

  Gwen just shrugged as she steered the car around a snake in the road at three hundred and ninety kilometers an hour. “It’s the most beautiful fountain in The Project. That’s where honeymoon types go.”

  “Ah,” Anselm nodded. “Well anyway, they were admiring the photos later and damned if she didn’t recognize a face in the background. One email later and we have a computer run a facial topography scan, it came back ninety-seven percent match to our man, Amir.”

  Gwen shook her head as the car roared toward a group of buildings that were approaching very rapidly, chuckling lightly. “Well wouldn’t that just suck? You’re hiding out, lying low, and get spotted on someone’s vacation photos.”

  “I’ve seen weirder ways to catch a perp.” Anselm said, but then admitted, “Not many though. But I’m not sure that he’s laying low.”

  “What else would he be doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Anselm admitted again, taking a breath. “But laying low isn’t this guy’s MO.”

  “If that was true, then what do you suppose he’s been doing for the past five years?”

  “That’s sort of what’s worrying me, Inspector.” The blonde man said grimly.

  *****

  “You can put your stuff on that desk for now,” Gwen told him as Anselm followed her into the small office space that had been appropriated by the Project Police Force.

  He nodded and dropped his bag onto the empty desk and looked around.

  The Police Headquarters were clean, neat, and very quiet. As far as he could tell they were the only people present at the moment, and there hadn’t been any sign of other cars or officers on the way in.