Snakehead (24 page)

A
LEX WAS WOKEN BY
the sound of a helicopter. For a moment he was filled with dread, fearing that the Bell UH-1D had returned. If that were the case, he would let them take him. He simply didn't have in him to fight anymore. There was nothing left with which to fight back. But squinting into the sun, he saw at once that this was a bigger helicopter with two sets of rotors: a Chinook. And there was a figure already leaning out of the front door.

Blue eyes. Short black hair. A handsome, slightly boyish face. It was Ben Daniels.

Alex clambered to his feet as the Chinook landed on a patch of scrubland a short distance away. He went over to it, taking care where he put his bare feet. It would be just his luck to step on a death adder now! Ben stepped out and stared at him.

“So here you are!” he exclaimed, shouting over the noise of the helicopter rotors. “We were getting worried about you!” He shook his head in disbelief. “What on earth are you doing out here? Where have you been?”

“It's a long story,” Alex said.

“Has it got anything to do with the smoke coming from upriver?” Ben jerked a thumb. “We saw it as we flew in.”

“That used to be a hospital.” Alex couldn't hide his delight that things were finally going his way. “I'm really glad to see you…”

“Mrs. Jones has been frantic. We knew you'd flown to Jakarta, but we lost you after that. She's got people all over Indonesia, but she sent me to Darwin in case you made it across. I've been waiting there for three days, hoping you'd get in touch. You look terrible! Like something the cat dragged in…”

“That's how I feel.” Alex stopped. “What time is it, Ben?” he asked.

Ben was obviously surprised by the question. He looked at his watch. “It's ten past one. Why do you ask?”

“We have to get moving. We've got less than twelve hours.”

“Until what?”

“I'll tell you on the way…”

 

Alex was feeling a lot better than he had in a long time. He was warm and dry and well fed, and all the dangers of the last few days had slipped away behind him. He was lying on a comfortable bunk in a military compound just outside Darwin, which was where Ben Daniels had brought him earlier that day. He was wearing combat fatigues, the only clothes Ben had been able to find for him. For the last few hours he had been left on his own.

He could see a certain amount of activity outside the window. Soldiers crossing the parade ground, jeeps speeding in and out of the main gate. The helicopter was still sitting where it landed. Half an hour ago, a gas truck had pulled up and Alex had watched as refueling began. He wondered if it was significant. Maybe something was happening at last.

Despite everything, he couldn't relax completely. It was six thirty, and very soon the sun would be setting, at the same time moving into the alignment with the earth and the moon that Major Yu had been waiting for. At midnight, Royal Blue would be lowered to the seabed and detonated. The devastation would begin.

And what were MI6 or ASIS doing to prevent it?

Alex had explained everything…not just to Ben but to a whole posse of Australian army officers. His story was incredible, almost beyond belief, but the strange thing was that not one person in the room had doubted him. This was, after all, the boy who had dropped in from outer space. Alex supposed that where he was concerned, anything was now considered possible. One of the men was a technical adviser, and he had quickly confirmed what Major Yu had said. It would be possible to manufacture an artificial tsunami. From midnight onward, the fault line would be in the grip of enormous gravitational pressure. Even a relatively small explosion would be enough to trigger a global catastrophe, and Yu had all the power of Royal Blue at his command.

Of course, in one sense Scorpia's mission had already failed. Thanks to Alex, the intelligence agencies knew what Scorpia were planning, and even if everyone on Reef Island were killed in a freak wave, nobody would now think it was an accident. Alex assumed that the island would be evacuated anyway, just to be on the safe side. There was no longer any need for Major Yu to press the button. If he was sensible, he'd already be looking for somewhere to hide.

There was a knock on the door. Alex straightened up as Ben Daniels entered. He was looking grim.

“They want you,” he said.

“Who?”

“The cavalry's just arrived. They're in the mess hall…”

Alex walked across the compound with Daniels, wondering what had gone wrong. But at least he was grateful he was still being included. MI6 had always treated him as a spy one minute, a schoolboy the next, dumping him out of the way whenever it suited them.

The mess hall was a low wooden building running the full length of the square. With Daniels right behind him, Alex opened the door and went in.

Most of the officers he had spoken to earlier that day were still there, poring over maps and sea charts that had been spread out over the dining tables. They had been joined by two men that Alex recognized at once. This was the cavalry that Ben had referred to. Ethan Brooke was sitting at a table, with Marc Damon standing just behind him. Presumably they had been flown up from Sydney. Garth—the guide dog—saw Alex come in and thumped his tail. At least someone was pleased to see him.

“Alex!” The blind man had become aware of his presence. “How are you doing?”

“I'm okay.” Alex wasn't sure he was too happy to see the head of ASIS—Covert Action. Ethan Brooke had manipulated him as cold-bloodedly as Alan Blunt would have in London. It seemed to him that all these people were of a type.

“I know what you've been through. I can't believe the way things played out. But you did a fantastic job.”

“Major Yu knew about me all the time,” Alex said. Even as he spoke the words, he knew they were true. The fight in Bangkok had been designed to cripple him. And on the
Liberian Star,
Alex had overheard Yu boasting to the captain. He had known Alex's identity before he entered the container. He has simply been playing with him, for his own amusement.

“Yes. We have a security leak, and it's worse than we thought.” Brooke glanced in the direction of his deputy, who looked away, as if he didn't want to make any comment.

“What's happened to Ash?” Alex asked.

“We don't know. We only know what you told us.” Brooke fell silent, and Alex could see he was preparing himself for what he had to say.

“So what are you going to do?” Alex asked.

“We have a problem, Alex,” Brooke explained. “Here's the situation…I'll give it to you straight. The first thing is, the Reef Island conference is still going ahead.”

“Why?” Alex was shocked.

“We told them they were in danger. Obviously, we couldn't give them all the details, but we suggested they pack their bags and get out of there in the strongest-possible terms. They refused. They said that if they left, they'd look like cowards. Tomorrow's their main press conference, and how's it going to look if they've all skulked away overnight? We're still arguing with them, but in a way, I suppose they've got a point. Scorpia wanted them out of the picture. If they simply disappeared, they'd be doing the job for them.”

Alex took this in. It was bad news—but Reef Encounter was only part of the picture. After the tsunami hit the island, it would continue on its way toward Western Australia.

“Have you found Major Yu?” he asked.

“Yes.” Brooke smiled briefly. “He told you he was on an oil platform in the Timor Sea, and we've gone through all the records, including the latest satellite images. There's an oil rig licensed to the Chada Trading Agency in Bangkok. It's a semi-submersible platform moored in four thousand feet of water a hundred miles north of Reef Island.”

“Right in the subduction zone,” Damon muttered. It was the first time he had spoken since Alex came into the room. “It's called Dragon Nine.”

“So that's it,” Alex said. It seemed obvious to him. “You bomb it. Blow it out of the water. Kill Major Yu and everyone who works for him.”

“I'd love to do just that,” Brooke replied. “But first of all, Dragon Nine is just outside Australian waters. It's in Indonesian territory. If I send a strike against it, I might accidentally start a war. It seems I can't even send one man in a boat without written authority, and that could take days. Officially, we're stuck…”

“Why can't you ask the Indonesians for help?”

“They don't trust us. By the time we've persuaded them we're telling the truth, it'll be too late.”

“So you're just going to sit back and let him get on with it?” Alex couldn't believe what he was hearing.

“Obviously not. Why do you think we're here?”

Ben Daniels took a step forward. “Why don't you tell Scorpia that you know what they're up to?” he asked. “You said it just now. The plan only worked if we all thought the tsunami was caused naturally. If we tell them they've failed, maybe they'll back off.”

“We've already tried,” Damon replied. “But Dragon Nine has shut down. It's observing radio silence. And even if we did find a way to contact Major Yu, he might go ahead anyway. Why not? He's obviously mad. And if the bomb's already in place…”

“So what is the answer, Mr. Brooke?” one of the other officers asked.

“A small British-Australian task force. Unauthorized and illegal.” Brooke turned to Alex. “I've already spoken to your Mrs. Jones and she's agreed. We have very little time, but I've assembled some of our best people. They're getting equipped right now. You and Daniels go with them. We parachute you onto the oil rig. You find Royal Blue and deactivate it. Meanwhile, my people kill Major Yu. If you can locate the whereabouts of Ash, so much the better—but he's not a priority. What do you say?”

Alex was too shocked to say anything, but next to him, Ben Daniels shook his head. “I'm happy to go,” he said. “But you can't be serious, asking Alex. He's only a kid, if you hadn't noticed. And I'd have said he's already done enough.”

Some of the Australian officers nodded in agreement, but Brooke wasn't having any of it. “We can't do it without Alex,” he said simply.

And Alex knew he was right. He had already told them what he had done on board the
Liberian Star:
the bomb and the scanning equipment. “I scanned my fingerprints into Royal Blue,” he said. “I'm the only one who can deactivate it.” He sighed. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

“I'll expect you to look after him, Mr. Daniels,” Brooke continued. “But we don't have a lot of time to argue about this. It's already seven o'clock, and it's a two-hour trip.” He turned to Alex. “So, Alex. What do you say?”

 

Two men and a woman were watching the sun set on Reef Island.

The island was only a quarter of a mile long, but it was strikingly beautiful with white beaches, deep green palm trees, and a turquoise sea…all the colors somehow too vivid to be quite real. The north side of the island rose up, with limestone cliffs covered in vegetation and mangroves below. Here sea eagles circled and monkeys chattered in the trees. But on the southern side, everything was calm and flat. There was a wooden table and a bench on the sand. But no deck chairs, no sun umbrellas, no Coke bottles or anything that might suggest that, just over the horizon, the twenty-first century was ticking on.

There was only one building on Reef Island, a long wooden house with a thatched roof, partly on stilts. Normally, there were no generators. The only electricity was supplied by wind or water power. A large organic garden provided all the food. The owner of the house ate fish but not meat. A few cows, grazing in a field, were milked twice a day. There were chickens to lay eggs. An elderly goat, wandering free, was no use at all, but it had been there so long that nobody had the heart to ask it to leave.

In the last few days, the island had been invaded by a press corps, which had established itself in a series of tentlike structures behind the house. The journalists had brought their own generators. And meat. And alcohol. And everything else they would need for the press conference the next day. They were enjoying themselves. It was nice to be able to report a story that people actually wanted to hear. And the weather during the last week had been perfect.

The woman on the beach was the actress—Eve Taylor—who owned the island. She had made quite a lot of bad films and one or two good ones, and she didn't really care which was which. They all paid the same. One of the men was an American multimillionaire…a billionaire, in fact, although in recent years he had given much of his wealth away. The other man was the pop singer Rob Goldman, who had just returned from his tour of Australia.

“ASIS are still insisting we should leave,” Goldman was saying. “They say we could all be killed.”

“Have they explained the nature of the threat?” the millionaire asked.

“No. But they sounded serious.”

“Of course they did.” The actress let sand run through her fingers. “They want us to go. This is a trick. They're just trying to scare us.”

“I don't think so, Eve,” Goldman said.

Eve Taylor gazed at the horizon. “We're safe,” she said. “Look how beautiful it is. Look at the sea! That's part of the reason we're here. To protect all this for the next generation. I don't care if there's danger. I'm not going to run away.” She turned to the billionaire. “Jason?”

The man shook his head. “I'm with you,” he said. “I never ran away from anything in my life and I'm not starting now.”

Three hundred miles farther south, in the cities of Derby, Broome, and Port Headland, thousands of people were watching the same sunset. Some of them were on their way home from work. Some were tucking children into bed. In pubs, in cars, on the beaches, wherever…they were simply edging toward the end of another day.