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Vogelaar spread his arms in a gesture that took in the hinterland. ‘As you see, we live in paradise. The apples drop into your mouth, and as you would expect of any decent paradise, a snake is creeping around the place, and it wants to know that everything is under control. Kenny Xin doesn’t trust anyone. Not even me, although he describes himself as my friend and he was the one who got me this extremely remunerative job in the first place. Hi there, Kenny, by the way. You see, your suspicion was justified.’ He laughed. ‘I doubt very much that you know the guy, but he’s the reason why I’m presenting this file. Some of the attached documents deal with him, so let’s just say that in 2017, on the instructions of the Chinese oil companies and with the approval of Beijing, he organised the coup against Juan Aristide Ndongo and, with my help, or more precisely with the help of African Protection Services, carried it out and enthroned Mayé. The dossier records a chronicle of coups, internal information about Beijing’s role in Africa and much else besides, but at its heart there lies a quite different subject.’

He crossed his legs and wearily waved away a flying insect the size of a human fist.

‘Perhaps someone remembers the launch pad that Mayé had built on Bioko. International companies were involved, under the aegis of the Zheng Group, which allows us to assume that China had a hand in this as well. Personally I don’t believe that. Nor is it true, even though we’ve repeatedly sold the idea in public, that our space programme was an initiative one hundred per cent down to Mayé. In fact it was initiated by a group of
possibly
Chinese investors which, in my opinion – and contrary to their own account – is not identical with Beijing and was represented by Kenny Xin at the time. The fact is that this organisation wanted to fire an information satellite from our soil into space, supposedly as an investigation into new kinds of rocket propulsion. Mayé was supposed to be able to use the satellite for civilian purposes, with the proviso that the whole space project was presented as his own idea. I’ve attached the blueprints for the launch pad, along with a list of all the companies which helped to build it.’

‘He’s still taking the piss out of us,’ Yoyo hissed.

‘Hardly.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘He can’t take the piss out of us any more.’

‘But that’s exactly what he did in Muntu—’

‘Wait.’ Jericho raised his hand. ‘Listen!’

‘—the launch was scheduled for two days later. This meant that the preparations should actually have been completed, and only the satellite had still to be put on the tip of the rocket. That same night a convoy of armoured cars arrived in the grounds of the launch pad. Something was brought into the construction hangar and coupled with the satellite: a container the size of a very big suitcase or a small cupboard, fitted with landing equipment, jets and spherical tanks. The whole thing could be
collapsed so that it didn’t take up much room. Only close contacts of Xin dealt with the delivery and assembly of the craft, no foreign constructors were present, not even anyone from the Zheng Group. Neither Mayé nor his people knew at this point that anything but the said satellite was to be fired into space. I’m not a specialist in space travel, by the way, but I assume that the container held a small, automatic spaceship, a kind of landing unit. My people photographed the arrival of the convoy and the container; you will find the pictures in the files KON_PICS and SAT_PICS.’ Vogelaar grinned. ‘Are you still watching, Kenny? While you deludedly thought you were observing me, did it never occur to you that
we
were observing
you
?’

‘So.’ Tu came out of the cockpit and joined them in the corridor. ‘We’re flying on autopilot. We’re on course for London via Amsterdam, so let’s have a dr—’

‘Shhh!’ hissed Yoyo.

‘—was of course interested in what was in that container,’ Vogelaar went on. ‘So I had to reconstruct the route it had taken – I should perhaps mention that the people who delivered it at dead of night were almost all Chinese. Anyway, we managed to trace the route of the plane that had brought it to Africa back through a series of intermediate landings. For obvious reasons I had expected that the plane had originally started off in China, but to my surprise it came from Korea, or more precisely from a remote airport in North Korea, near the border.’

In the background it had started raining heavily. A rising rustle mingled with Vogelaar’s words, a changing grey blurred the sky, scrubland and sea.

‘I’ve built up extensive contacts over the years. Not least with south-east Asia. Someone who still owed me something set about working out what had been loaded on at the airport. You must know, the whole area is extremely unsafe. There’s a lot of piracy in the surrounding waters, a high level of criminality, unemployment and frustration. The South has been paying for the North’s reconstruction since 2015, but the money is disappearing in a vast bubble of speculation. Both sides feel they’ve been tricked, and they aren’t happy about it. Corruption and black market dealings are flourishing as a result, and one of the most lucrative markets is the trade in Kim Jong Un’s former arsenal of weapons, particularly the warheads. Especially popular are the mini-nukes, small atom bombs with considerable destructive power. The Soviets certainly experimented with them, in fact all the nuclear powers did. Kim had a few too, hundreds even. Except nobody knows where they ended up. After the collapse of the North Korean regime, the death of Kim and reunification they had suddenly disappeared, and since they aren’t particularly big—’

The soldier measured out a length of about a metre with his hands.

‘—and not much thicker than a shoe box, they won’t be all that easy to find. A mini-nuke has the advantage of fitting into the smallest hiding-place, whatever
infernal power it’s capable of unleashing.’ He smiled. ‘For example a small, automatic spaceship fired into space piggy-backing on a satellite.’

Jericho stared at the monitor. Behind Vogelaar the skies had opened.

‘I wanted to know if anyone had been doing any sort of shopping on the black market not long ago. My contact confirmed this. Just two years before, in the no man’s land between North and South, Korean nuclear material had switched owners in a private transaction. I’m always suspicious these days, and as everybody knows you should treat hearsay with caution – but there are lots of signs that I knew the buyer very well.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Tu said. ‘They fired an atom bomb into space?’

Vogelaar leaned forward.

‘Our old friend Kenny Xin had bought the thing. And I knew already why he had hit on the idea of building the launching pad in our quiet little jungle paradise. The whole thing was illegal in the extreme! It wouldn’t have been possible to plant an atom bomb unnoticed on a state space agency. Kenny’s employers
had
to find a neutral country, ideally a banana republic, whose ruling clique wasn’t above any kind of deal. Some unloved patch of soil where no one was watching your every move. And the ideal launching pads for rockets are distributed in the area around the equator. Which was proof for me that China’s Communist Party, at least at the highest levels of government, wasn’t involved in this one, or else they could simply have launched the phoney satellite from their official launch pads in Xichang, Taiyuan, Hainan or Mongolia, and not a soul would ever have guessed what it was carrying. So in my opinion we’re dealing with a non-state, criminal or terrorist association. Which doesn’t mean that
individual
state organisations aren’t involved. Let’s not forget, China’s Secret Services have been developing a grotesque life of their own in the meantime, and Washington doesn’t always know what the CIA’s getting up to. But it could also be that there’s a big company behind it. Or else good old Dr Mabuse, if anyone still remembers him.’

‘And the bomb’s target—’ whispered Yoyo.

Vogelaar leaned back, took a swig from his drink and stroked his moustache.

‘This file was actually conceived as life insurance,’ he said. ‘For me and for my wife, whom you may have met as Nyela. Clearly it hasn’t been able to save us, so now it will serve to bring down the men behind the organisation. Kenny would definitely be of crucial importance, because he has contact with the head of the gang and might know his identity. I’ve attached his eye-scans, fingerprints and voice samples, under KXIN_PERS, but he definitely isn’t the instigator. So who is? Certainly not Korea, they’re just flogging off their Great Leader’s belongings. The Communist Party, secretly arming space? As I’ve said, they wouldn’t have
needed a launch pad in Equatorial Guinea to do that. Zheng-style forces close to the government? Possibly. Perhaps the answer lies in the race to the Moon. China has made it clear more than once that it condemns America’s rush into space, and Beijing is also projecting its dissatisfaction onto Orley Enterprises, Zheng’s successful competitor. Or else somebody’s trying to use China, because it’s doing so well against the backdrop of the scramble for helium-3 and so on. With a strategically deployed atom bomb you could set the superpowers against one another, but what would be the point? They would both emerge weakened from an armed conflict. But perhaps that’s exactly what they want to achieve, so who could profit from their weakness?’

The jet sped along in a straight line. UFOs could have been flying ahead of them and they wouldn’t even have noticed. Their attention was focused on the monitor.

‘Now we get to the question of where the bomb is at the moment. Still in the satellite? Or was it dropped as the launch vehicle was carrying it into space? There was no nuclear explosion on Earth, but okay, it needn’t have exploded. On the other hand it would be idiotic to send a bomb first into orbit and from there back to Earth. Now, I think I can give a partial answer. Because even in the control room we were able to look over Kenny’s people’s shoulders. Under DISCONNECT_SAT you’ll find film material that not only shows the satellite maintaining its position in orbit, but also something breaking away and flying off on an independent course. There’s no doubt about what it is, but
where
did the mini-nuke go after decoupling? That’s easy to answer too. Somewhere that an atom bomb couldn’t have been sent by official channels. And what for? To destroy something that can’t be easily destroyed from Earth. The target lies in space.’

Vogelaar put his fingers together.

‘I’ll give you one last mystery for the road. It concerns the fact that I am speaking to you in the year 2024. I don’t want to bore you with personal stories, but our cute little state is bankrupt, no one is fighting over our oil any more, Mayé is starting to go round the bend, and to be honest I’d somehow imagined my government job would be more one of supporting the interests of the state. But no matter. Just bear in mind that construction of the launch pad began two years ago, and I’m sure the planning of the enterprise goes back even further than that. So the deployment of the bomb was planned a long time ago. Now it’s up there. When’s it going to go off? What is certain is that the target must have existed years ago, or else people knew that it
would
exist at the time of the launch of the satellite. As I said, I’m not a space expert, there are a few potential targets around the Earth and on the Moon, but to my knowledge only one has been completed and opened, probably this year. A hotel, planned for ages, location the Moon, building contractor Orley Enterprises.
Does that tell us anything? Of course it does! Julian Orley, Zheng’s great adversary, responsible for the permanent disadvantage of the Chinese.’

Vogelaar raised his glass in a toast to them. Behind him, Equatorial Guinea drowned in tropical torrents.

‘So have fun with your investigation. I haven’t been able to assemble anything more than this, you’ll have to find out the rest for yourselves. And come and see me, if you know where my grave is. Nyela and I would be delighted.’

The recording ended. The only sound was the even humming of the turbines. Slowly, as if in a trance, Yoyo turned her head and looked first at Jericho and then at Tu. Her lips formed two words.

‘Edda Hoff.’

‘Yes.’ Tu nodded grimly. ‘And fast!’

30 May 2025

The space shuttle Ganymede was a Hornet-model flying machine, with ion propulsion and pivotable jets to achieve thrust in any desired direction. In outward appearance it resembled a grotesquely swollen transport helicopter, Eurocopter HTH class without rotors, but sitting on short, fat legs; inside it offered the comfort of a private jet. All thirty-six seats could be turned into couches at the press of a button, each seat had its own multimedia console. There was a tiny, extravagantly equipped galley which lacked only alcohol, in line with the regulation that crews must not dull their senses in the course of the day.

At present Gaia had two Hornet shuttles, the Ganymede and the Callisto. That afternoon they were both hurtling through the vacuum, more than 1400 kilometres apart: Callisto heading towards Rupes Recta, a colossal fault in the middle of the Mare Nubium, 250 metres deep and so long that you had a sense that it circled the whole of the Moon; Ganymede flying straight towards the Aristarchus Plateau, an archipelago of craters in the middle of the Ocean of Storms. A few hours previously the Callisto, flown by Nina Hedegaard and carrying the Ögis, Nairs, Donoghues and Finn, had visited the Descartes Highlands, where the landing stage of Apollo 16 dozed in the sun and a derelict moon-car exuded a nostalgic charm, while Ganymede had borne down upon the crater of Copernicus. From the lofty heights of its outer ring, the travellers had admired its rough central range, they had penetrated its capacious interior and shuddered to think what sort of giant must have fallen from the sky here 800 million years ago.

The world was nothing but stone, and yet it was so much more.

The soft, undulating structure of its plains led you to forget that the maria were not true seas, nor the crater bottoms lakes. Curious structures suggested former habitation, as if H. G. Wells’ space-travelling heroes had actually encountered insect-oid selenites and herds of moon-cows here, before being abducted into the machine world of the lunar underground. They had seen a lot that day, Carl Hanna, Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker, Amber and the Locatellis, Evelyn Chambers and Oleg Rogachev, whose wife lay grimly by the moon pool, but Julian insisted that the highlight was still to come. The first spurs of the high plateau appeared in the north-west. Peter Black made the shuttle climb high above the Aristarchus Crater, which looked as if it was cast out of light.