State of Emergency

by Sam Fisher

  Twice more the connection cut out for a few seconds before settling down. Mai managed to bring Mark up to speed.

  'So you've reached them? Good work. Put the senator on.'

  'Hello?'

  'Hello, Senator Foreman. This is Mark Harrison. What's your condition?'

  'I've been better.'

  'Sure, but you're fit enough to force your way out somehow?'

  'I am. Dave is. But Marty's very bad.'

  'Look, we're going to get you all out somehow. Josh, Mai? The blockage in the tunnel is at least 30 feet thick, but we're searching for a way through.'

  'What about from the other direction?' Mai asked. 'Northeast of the CCC? Aren't there any other exits?'

  'Negative. Tom's studied the drain right back to where it starts. There are pipes but none bigger than a foot wide.'

  'Great!'

  'We need to attack the problem from two directions. I'm going to take the second Mole down to the tunnel and try to break through to your side. Pete's still in the other Mole and is coming down from B3. I'm going to send in a couple of Hunters. They can feed info back to Pete. Senator? How clear is the route down to B6? I assume you took the ramps?'

  'Yes, we did, but the smoke was getting real bad.'

  'That's no problem. The biggest difficulty will be if the recent explosion has blocked the way. It'll slow us down.'

  'Mark, I'll go out to the main area of B6 to assess the situation,' Josh said. 'If we can meet Pete halfway –'

  'There's something you should know,' Kyle Foreman interrupted. Josh and Mai turned to him as he spoke to the air, his voice carrying 1500 miles to Tintara. 'There's an assassin out there. Calls himself the Dragon. He almost had me just before the explosion. He was hit by some debris. I tied him up and took his weapon.'

  There was a long silence over the line. 'I see,' Mark said at last.

  80

  The Maldives

  War was still in a sullen mood. He had moved from the deck of the Rosebud and was slouched in a leather chair behind his desk, his eyes glued to a 60-inch flat-screen monitor on the wall of his office. He gave the other three a sour look.

  Death spoke first. 'I'm growing concerned. My people tell me they haven't heard from the Dragon and can't reach him.'

  'That is out of character,' Pestilence intoned, lowering his gin and tonic to the armrest of his chair aboard his Hawker, which was now 30,000 feet above Newfoundland.

  'There is apparently a lot of interference on the ground. Residuals from the blasts, and radio traffic from the fucking emergency services.'

  War giggled, finally snapping out of his bad mood. Death glared at him and he poked out his tongue. 'So what now?' he said.

  'Have you learned anything more about this rescue organisation?' Conquest asked, directing his question towards War.

  'I thought Little Miss Cyberspace was onto that.'

  'It's going to take time.'

  'Time is something we don't have in abundance,' Death said, fixing the other three on his screen.

  'So, I ask again,' War said through a toothy grin, his lips hardly moving, 'what now?'

  'The Dragon knows what to do if there's no contact after two call-in periods.'

  'That's rather drastic, isn't it?' Death said, half to himself.

  The other three looked at him, their expressions hard.

  'Oh, I think it will be hysterical,' War said and giggled. 'But we are, of course, assuming the man is still alive.'

  'Oh, he's alive,' Conquest retorted. 'I'd bet my last billion dollars on it.'

  81

  Base One, Tintara

  Tom was on the balcony above Cyber Control. The doors had opened automatically as he approached in his motorised wheelchair and rolled out into the balmy night. He needed to get away from the hubbub at the workstations down there. He needed some clarity. His laptop was still linked to the mainframe, though, so he had full access to Sybil and comms. Overhead, the sky was filled with stars, the slipstream of the Milky Way a ribbon of a billion lights set against the black velvet night.

  He felt disturbed. The closest he could describe it to anyone – other than a fellow cybergeek – was that he felt like someone was looking over his shoulder. Not in the 'real' world, but in cyberspace. His primary job these past few months had been to develop Sybil further than the E-Force engineers who had designed it. His specialty was hacking, and that's what he had concentrated on – building defence systems into the mainframe, as well as systems to detect cyber-intruders.

  His comms sounded and the interior of the Big Mac appeared on his holoscreen. It was Mark and Stephanie.

  'I've spoken to Josh and Mai,' Mark began. 'They're in trouble. The cave-in has trapped them with Foreman and two others, a young guy called Dave Golding and an elderly man, Marty Gardiner. Gardiner's in a bad way.'

  Tom nodded. 'Pete was in touch a few minutes ago. He's not finding it easy either, even in the Mole. The structural integrity of the building is badly compromised and he's worried he'll kill survivors if he goes charging in. I've been trying to map the stress regions, but there's just too much interference. At least, that's what I think it is.'

  'Okay. I've instructed Josh to find a way to get up from B6, try and meet Pete coming down. Meanwhile, I'm going to tackle the blockage in the tunnel.' He paused for a beat. 'There's another problem. Foreman was attacked.'

  'Attacked?'

  Mark told him about the assassin who called himself the Dragon.

  'This is just getting worse,' Tom sighed. 'How's Steph?'

  She came into view. 'Good, Tom.' She sent him a couple of images.

  'These are the two goons who were filming the inside of the Big Mac. I'm really pissed off about it. I should have been more careful. The funny thing is, they seemed to know what they wanted, and where they were going.'

  Tom looked puzzled but said nothing.

  'Tom,' Mark butted in. 'I want anything you can get on these guys. Looks like they're genuine marines, but we need a lot more. Who they're working for is the number-one question.'

  'Sure.'

  'Keep us in the loop. Out.'

  Tom took a deep breath. He called up the file on Major Larry Simpson. Text flowed down the holoscreen and he extracted the essentials.

  Major Larry Harold Simpson

  Age: 32

  Joined the Marine Corps in 2008

  Fast-track promotion; impeccable record

  Decorations: Distinguished Service Metal, Bronze Star

  Served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Special training for presidential bodyguard duties

  Sergeant Vincent George Paolomo

  Age: 25

  Joined the Marines in 2004

  Father is General Anthony Paolomo, presently Senior Advisor to the National Security Council

  Tom raised an eyebrow at this last piece of information. He typed in an encrypted alphanumeric sequence, and a series of prompts flashed across his holoscreen. He responded to the prompts and in a few seconds he was into the US Marines database at its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. He typed in Vincent Paolomo's serial number. A few seconds passed before a message came up. 'File Unavailable.'

  Tom felt a tingle of excitement shoot through him. 'Well, isn't that just dandy?' he said to the warm night air. 'Right. Let's take a look at the good major, shall we?'

  He returned to the database and ran his fingers rapidly over the keys, inserting Simpson's serial number. The display turned black. Then, to Tom's horror, a skull and crossbones appeared in the centre of the holoscreen. It flashed red and black. The computer was under attack.

  'No!' Tom exclaimed. His fingers darted over the keys in a blur. With lightning speed, he keyed in a personalised firewall. It appeared as a set of interlocking chainmail fences in front of the skull and crossbones. The skull on the holoscreen smiled menacingly and appeared to move towards him. The chainmail shattered, its metal links flying apart.

  Tom broke out in a sweat, his palms suddenly clammy. He kept typing, his fing
ers moving with phenomenal speed, his eyes darting across the holoscreen. 'Sybil, help!' he shouted. But there was no response. His mind in a whirl, he hit more strings of numbers and letters, then stabbed 'Enter'.

  The skull and crossbones stopped moving. The smile faded. An old-fashioned cannon appeared on the screen. It fired a cannonball, and the skull and crossbones smashed into a thousand pieces. The screen went blue.

  Tom was shaking, his mind racing. That attack happened too quickly, he thought. Far too quickly. Suppressing his panic, he typed in an alphanumeric code only he knew, a sequence he kept in his head. For several long, anxiety-filled moments nothing happened. Then out of nowhere a small figure appeared on the screen. It was a cartoon of Tom himself, except he was standing on two legs – athletic, powerful legs. It was his avatar, Tommy Boy, and he was armed to the teeth. He had a fuck-off assault rifle in his right hand, and at his waist hung a pistol with a massive barrel.

  Tom took a deep breath. Now his avatar was on screen he knew he had stabilised the system – that he had a fighting chance. But he also knew the comms breakdown earlier that evening had been nothing to do with a failure of the E-Force network. Someone had broken into the computer system and gotten through his carefully constructed defence systems.

  Tom's mind was racing, threads of half-formed thoughts coming together. He remembered what Mark had said. How had the assassin known where Kyle Foreman was? How had he got to him so easily? How did he even know the senator was still alive? And Steph had said that Simpson and Paolomo seemed to know what they wanted and where they were going aboard the Big Mac. There had definitely been a security breach. Someone, somewhere had been monitoring every move E-Force had made. They had been tracking every communication since the team had arrived at the CCC.

  Tom was about to instruct his avatar when Sybil's voice broke through the silence of the night. It reverberated around Base One, poured from every speaker at every computer workstation. But it wasn't the voice everyone on the base knew as Sybil's. It was androgynous, oddly weak and high-pitched.

  Tom felt a fear he had never known before. It was paralysing, and filled his mind with dread, with a draining, cloying sense of hopelessness. Looking at the holoscreen, he felt a cold shiver pass through him as though fingers of ice were pulling at his heart. Another avatar had appeared and was walking towards Tommy Boy. It was a slim young woman in her twenties. She was wearing a frumpy tweed skirt, a turtleneck sweater and a string of pearls, her hair up in a bun. She looked like a librarian.

  'You!' Tom exclaimed.

  82

  California Conference Center, Los Angeles

  Mark drove the second Mole out of the holding bay of the Big Mac and tore along the tarmac towards the north-west of the CCC. Sixty seconds later, he passed the Pram and pulled up at the entrance to the drain. Setting the drill to minimum power, he nudged the Mole forward. It chewed through the rim of the doorframe as though it were tissue paper, then rumbled along the short passageway that led to the vertical shaft which dropped 80 feet down to the floor of the drain.

  The shaft was less than four feet wide, while the drill of the Mole was seven feet wide at its base. Without hesitating for a second, Mark ramped up the drill speed, pivoted it downwards and started to burrow into the shaft. For twenty seconds he cut through the soil around the shaft, effortlessly chewing through its concrete lining. Just short of the floor of the shaft he slowed the drill, pulled the nose up, and steered the machine into the drain itself, churning up soil, concrete and chunks of rock as he went.

  Setting the headlights of the Mole to max, Mark studied the tunnel ahead of him. There were huge cracks along the walls, and in several places jagged chunks of rock had pushed through. Running the camera images through a set of analysers, the onboard computer system built up a picture of the structural integrity of the drain. It didn't look good.

  On his screen Mark could see thick and ragged red lines running the length of the tunnel, like blood vessels through flesh. These indicated the worst fault lines. They were bad enough, but there was also a latticework of fragmented orange lines clustered around them, representing only slightly less serious fissures. Together they showed that the mere presence of the Mole could cause more harm than good. Mark knew he would be safe whatever sort of disruption was caused to the integrity of the drain, but that wouldn't help him rescue the survivors trapped on B6. Problem was, there were no other viable options.

  Following the path taken by Mai and Josh a short time before, Mark rolled forward, the tunnel lit up by the enormous beams of the Mole. Two minutes later the lights illuminated the wall of rock and soil that had sealed up the drain. The blockage stretched from floor to ceiling, sloping outward at its base.

  'Steph – I've reached the cave-in,' Mark said into his comms.

  'How does it look?'

  'Not good. I'm going to run a full spectroscopic analysis. Out.'

  He ran his fingers over the flat plastic control panel. Sensors on the exterior of the Mole probed the material of the blockage. The computer used infrared analysers, a petrographic polarising light microscope, a micro mass-spectrometer and a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to construct a data profile of the blockage. It then sent the information to the Big Mac to be processed.

  'So what're we dealing with?' Mark asked after a few seconds.

  Stephanie sent images back to the Mole. 'The obstruction has the following composition,' she began. As she spoke, Mark studied a histogram on his holoscreen. 'Composition of the blockage is 84.2 per cent soil originating from around the tunnel lining, 14.6 per cent concrete from the lining, and 1.2 per cent miscellaneous material, including water, organic substances and oxygen. The soil fits broadly into the Ardisol category. It's 38.5 per cent clay, 42.9 per cent sand, 9.7 per cent water and 4.6 per cent air. The other 4.3 per cent is made up of miscellaneous minerals and organic material. The obstruction depth varies between 27.4 and 32.6 feet. The average density of blockage is 5.67 pounds per cubic inch.' A coloured 3D representation of the obstruction appeared on the screen. 'The green areas are air pockets in the obstruction,' Stephanie concluded.

  'Print that out for me, please, Steph,' Mark said.

  A few seconds later he plucked a glossy print from the edge of the control panel. It showed the tunnel and the obstruction. The drain appeared generally cylindrical. On the far side of the blockage, there was about a hundred feet of clear tunnel leading to the hole Josh had made into B6 earlier.

  'Alright, Steph, plot the fastest course through the obstruction which offers us the best chance of maintaining structural integrity – both for the blockage and for the drain on either side.'

  'Course plotted,' she replied, and sent it over.

  'What's the percentage risk to the structural integrity using this route?'

  'Overall risk to blockage is 16.7 per cent. For the section you're in now, the risk is 11.2 per cent. For the eastern section, 30.9 per cent.'

  'Is that the best we can do?'

  'Yes. The alternative is a route that will take 59 per cent longer and only reduce overall integrity risk by an average of 1.3 per cent.'

  The correct decision was obvious. 'Set the first course, please, Steph,' Mark said without hesitating.

  A moment later, the drill of the Mole began to scythe its way into the west face of the blockage.

  83

  Room B63, California Conference Center

  Kyle Foreman pulled on the oxygen mask Josh had handed him. It was identical to the one over Marty's face. It weighed less than a gram and would give him air for 24 hours if needed. It clung to his face. Josh adjusted a tiny control near Foreman's chin and told him to breath deeply. 'It'll take a little getting used to,' Josh added.

  'Are you guys armed?' Foreman asked, his voice distorted by the mask.

  Josh patted a lump at his hip. 'Stun pistols. Not deadly, but effective.'

  'Okay,' Foreman replied, removing the assassin's Magnum from his pocket. 'This Dragon character is a pro.
I'll rely on this, if it's all the same to you.'

  'But you said he was injured and tied up.'

  'Even so,' Foreman replied.

  Josh shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, let's go see.' He turned to the door and lifted the shutter.

  'Josh?'

  He turned to Mai, who was applying spray-on skin to Dave's wounded arm.

  'Take care,' she said.

  Josh flicked on his helmet light and handed Foreman a powerful halogen torch from his kitbag. The beams cut through the smoky air. They could see a dull orange glow coming from the fires in the main part of B6.

  Foreman led the way. Turning right at the end of the corridor, they emerged into the wider passageway that led to the open area and the ramp in the car park section. They could see the fresh devastation caused by the exploded gas cylinder. A corridor leading to the north-east section of the floor was strewn with debris, and black smoke hung in the air. Through the smoke, yellow flames could be seen lapping the walls. The two men turned in the opposite direction, towards the emergency exit in the south-west corner.

  The car park was swamped in a grey haze that hung about five feet above the ground. The cars were caked with dust and detritus, and the floor crunched underfoot.

  'This way,' Foreman said, squeezing between two lines of cars. A second later he emerged onto an open area. It was strewn with chunks of concrete and pools of glass; there was dust everywhere. There was no sign of the Dragon.

  'This is where I left him,' Foreman said. He crouched down to move away some of the rubble and spotted the car stereo – the leads from the back had been wrenched away. In the dust he could just make out patches of blood.

  Josh drew his stun pistol from its holster. He gazed around the car park, but even with his enhanced vision he could see no sign of the assassin.

  'Let's check out the emergency exit,' Josh said, and he clambered over the piles of shattered concrete and twisted metal. It was only a few paces away, and its door had been wrenched from the hinges. Josh approached the door from the side, his back hard against the pitted wall, the stun gun poised in front of his nose. Foreman followed him closely.