The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (39 page)

The Uzbeks said it was the white faces which did it.  It was the Red Cross workers whose insignia and white faces inflamed the Taliban – or so the story went.  Not Special Forces, who were looking as rough as the Taliban by now.  Stone knew it would have kicked off anyway.  Why else smuggle grenades in? 

A CIA interrogator was dead already.  Twenty Uzbeks dead.  Dozens of Taliban and Al-Qaeda were down.   It was a suicide job.  They knew they were going to die.  The Uzbek tanks were waiting outside.  The Americans would start with the gunships within minutes.  No civilians here to worry about – they were all Taliban and therefore bad guys.  Dostum and the Allies would wipe out the lot.

Stone forced the Red Cross guys to climb out over the walls, practically at gunpoint.  Twenty metres high, but scalable.  Then word came there were US and Brit interrogators stuck in cellars of the fort.  Trapped with the bodies of twenty more Uzbeks and Taliban after a grenade blast.    Stone and Hooper went down to bring them out.  Another stupid thing Hooper had agreed to.  That guy needed to choose his friends better.  Thirty-four steps below ground.

Stone’s cage rattled downwards.  Strangely muffled, like there was no echo at all.  Like he was sealed in the middle of the earth, where sound and light don’t exist anymore, where his own existence had become entirely theoretical.  Theoretically possible to be in that cage.  But a very foolish place to find yourself. 

Like the place he’d found himself when Hooper had risked his neck to go with him.  Thirty-four steps below Kalai Kumza.  Stone killed seven Taliban who’d been occupying steps twenty-nine to thirty-four at the bottom, the last two with face shots as they turned back up the steps.  The first took it in the upper lip and the second directly in the right eye.  Their heads exploded like coconuts filled with raw meat, all shell and blood and weird white stuff.   A CIA guy in the chamber below, an ex-Marine, had been holding them off with an empty pistol.  A fine effort.  He’d used every round in every weapon he could find.  When they got to him, he wanted to run right out up the steps.  Stone knew better.  The C130’s were already outside, pouring fire from their .50 calibre Gatling guns into the Taliban in the compound.  The B52’s would be overhead soon.  It would be an extinction-level event if they went up those steps.  Thirty-four steps down, below many metres of mud baked two centuries ago.  They might have a chance.  Just might.  But it was a very foolish place to find yourself.

Stone, Hooper and the three Americans were dragged from the wreckage fourteen hours after the B52 strike.  Stone had thought he was dead, and had plenty of time to dwell on the fact.  Hope, despair, panic, delusion, hallucination.  Pain.  Pain was the least of it.  Pain lasts only so long, and Stone had long ago learnt to deal with pain.

The claustrophobia hadn’t started straightaway for Stone.  It had come with the dreams of being stuck under the mud and clay.  Dreams, recurring for years, again and again.  Dreams can be really bad for you.

Now he was heading down another hole, much deeper this time.  In a tin cage he could barely squeeze into.  The rattling began to slow.  There was a faint glow, a centimetre of light around the edges of the cage.  This was it.   The cage flopped slowly out from the ceiling of a low tunnel, not quite high enough to stand up in.

 Chapter 70 -
8:06am 14 April
- Garzê Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

Sheeee-Hshawww.

Sheeee-Hshawww.

Stone put on the hat and now the breathing mask.  He felt like a diver in an underground river, walking carefully along the tunnel.  There were telephone points every hundred metres or so, and one by the shaft so he could speak to Virginia.  With so many heavy metals around Semyonov had advised the breathing gear, but the air looked clear.  The tunnel was dimly lit by strip lights, and held up by steel pit props.  It wasn’t quite high enough for him to walk upright, but not far off.   Not as bad as he’d expected.  He walked up an incline.  This was it, he could sense it.  There was something ahead.  He could even hear it.

Stone pulled down the mask for a moment to listen.  An electric humming, a low buzzing, like a large transformer.  He walked up a little further.  He was now maybe four hundred metres from the shaft where he’d come down from the surface.  Up here the pit props were made of wood. 

Round a left hand bend.  The buzzing was louder, and there was an eerie glow of blue light in the tunnel, about thirty metres off, brighter than the strip lights.  Wispy clouds of fog hung in the dead, dank air, the blue light glowing through them.  So this was it - Semyonov’s masterwork.  The alien intelligence, shrouded in mysterious blue clouds.  Stone walked up slowly and felt the chill as he entered the cloud.  He thought it might be dry ice.  More like the vapour of liquid nitrogen from the chiller Semyonov had told him about, stingingly cold on the exposed skin of his face.  He wafted at it, and it dissipated.  Cold as death, but ultimately harmless.  It was just condensation from the intense cold of the liquid nitrogen in the cooling unit.  Perhaps it was leaking.  He made towards the blue light through the mist.

Thump! 
What the hell?
  Something flew past his head, into the cloud.  Stone turned, crouching into the wall, a soldier looking instinctively for cover.  There was nothing there.  No sound.  Nothing to be seen.  Only a man-sized tunnel where he’d walked through the still, dead cloud of the mist.  He wasn’t dreaming though, he’d heard that dull thump as it flew past and hit something.  Someone had thrown a rock, or maybe a clod of earth from behind him, but it had flown past and landed harmlessly.  What the hell was it?  He turned again and edged further into the cloud.

What had he expected?  Some malign black tube, whose blue lights flickered as it talked to him in staccato English?  It was a black cylinder, granite-like, standing upright on a concrete plinth, almost reaching to the top of the tunnel.  Blue halogen lamps lit it from four sides.  The electrical and cooling plant were behind it in a tunnel, just as Semyonov described, and beyond it a huge yellow-black warning sign in Chinese, as big as Stone himself. 

非 请 勿 进

核 能 源

FEI QING WU JIN

Stone loved the way they put in the Roman letters.  As if it would help anyone, Chinese or not.  The first bit was something like
Strictly No Entry
.  The symbol for radioactivity said the rest.  Huge power lines lay in coils behind the sign, then snaked away to the reactor somewhere beyond in the darkness of the tunnels. 

Hope they’ve done their risk assessment. 

The really strange bit was that the black cylinder, squatting there on the concrete plinth, was not clear of obstruction, clean and looking well kept.  It was surrounded by debris, covered with rock and dirt, stuck to its sides. 

Stone could hazard a guess here.  The rocks contained a large percentage of iron.  He was in a tunnel, actually bored within an ancient meteorite.  There was a large percentage of iron in the meteor, iron being the commonest element in the universe aside from hydrogen itself.  Space is full of the stuff.  Stone stepped up and tried to pull away one of the shards of rock stuck to the side of the cylinder.  It was stuck fast, held tight by the superconducting magnets.  He’d seen one of these things once, in a lab at university.  They’ll rip a credit card out of your pocket and send it flying across the room.  The cylinder had dragged in loose rocks from many metres around.  One had just gone whistling past his head.  It was another reason to power the thing down to hibernation.  Impossible to move it otherwise.  Certainly impossible to get it in the cage.

Stone stumbled around, wafting the mist aside.   It wasn’t a concrete plinth the Machine was sitting on, but a large flat truck.  The Machine, the powerpack and the cooler were all on the flat truck, as Semyonov had described.  The powerdown controls were on the large square slab of batteries nearby, according to Semyonov.  They were there to smooth the power supply and protect from outages.  They’d been humming constantly.  He found them easily enough, but the powerdown controls were harder to find.

Wuuuuurg.
 
Wuuuuurg.
  A noise behind him.  Loud.  Like an alarm, an urgent klaxon behind in the tunnel.  Stone went back, half running, half walking.  What on earth was going on?  He made it through the mist, waving his arms like a lunatic. 

‘It’s me, Stone,’ he shouted English.  ‘It’s OK.  Semyonov sent me!’  Shouting into the mist of the tunnel.  At what?  Who?  Were there cameras on him?  If there were he hadn’t s seen them.  Maybe he’d hit an alarm by touching the power system over there. 

Stone changed tack, crouched right in by the wall.  The thing could have it’s own defence system Semyonov had forgotten about.  Guns, gases, lasers?  It could be absolutely anything down there.

Wuuuuurg.
 
Wuuuuurg. 
The alarm continued.  He needed to be on his mettle.  His heart rate had slowed.  He was ready for it, whatever it was.  Immediate, maximum violence if he needed to.  He had to take it slowly.  If he came out of the mist and just showed himself…  But what, or who, was it?  If it was a radiation leak he needed to run.  Stone flattened himself to the rocky floor of the tunnel and eased forward.  He came gently, slowly out of the freezing mist.  Warmth suddenly on his face – he was sweating hot after coming out of the Nitrogen mist.

Sheeee-Hshawww. 

He breathed slowly, steadily into the apparatus.  No way you could get over-excited with this thing on your face in any case.  There it was, ahead in the half-light.  A tiny red light ahead of him, flashing in time with the klaxon.  Stone stood up and walked over.

It was a telephone.  He picked up.

‘Stone?’ said a crackly American voice.  ‘It’s Virginia.  Something’s happened.  You’d better come back up.’

Chapter 71 -
9:23am 14 April
- Garzê Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

Carslake’s stone cell was like the others.  Square, high ceiling, stone walls.  Grey and bare.  Damp.  There was an easy chair from about 1965 - Cultural Revolution red of course.

The bed was too small for Carslake, and narrow.  There was a nice red pattern to that too.  It was Carslake’s blood.  Virginia had come to find him and wake him up, but had to leave to throw up. 

Now Semyonov was in there, in an electric wheel chair, health improving all the time.  His unmoving face gazed down on the scene.  Stone wondered if Virginia knew what The Man was thinking, because nobody else did.

Carslake had been killed wearing only his shorts.  It would have been dark in that room while he slept - dark as a sealed, stone tomb.  There was one bright light on the ceiling, and when that was out, no chink from any other source.  The body lay beside the bed.  His chest hairs were graying, and though he’d seemed lazy, Carslake’s body was fit.  Built, in fact.  There were traces of grey roots in his hair, and unbelievably, his moustache.  This man had dyed his hair.  He was older than he looked. 

Carslake, evidently, had been a man who looked after himself.  Dyed his hair, trimmed his fingernails – but cultivated the straggly hair and moustache.  Not all he seemed then.  Maybe Semyonov had noticed that, like he noticed everything else. 

Determining cause of death didn’t exactly require the services of a path-lab.  A deep cut across the front of his neck, five centimeters deep, through the windpipe and carotid arteries.  It does the trick in most cases.  Carslake’s fingernails were neatly trimmed though.

Stone disgusted himself when he looked at these things so dispassionately.  He was already going over unarmed combat and assassination manuals in his mind.  Some of those methods were as old as the hills, and this was one of them.  The manuals he himself had used were written for SOE in World War Two.  Only the photos were updated. 

Despite the litres of Carslake’s blood around the place, this had been no fight with blades.  The cutting mark extended full circle around the man’s neck.  The tongue stuck out, and the eyes bulged wide in silent shock.  Strangulation.  Garrotting – that was the technical term used in the books.  Valued as an assassination method because it was silent.  There were two variants.  The “compression”, and the “cutter”.  As Carslake’s head was half-severed, so it could be safely said this was the “cutter”.  The assassin would have woken Carslake somehow.  Carslake stands bolt upright, half-asleep.  The killer flips the wire over his head from behind.  The classic method is to stamp hard on the back of the right knee to unbalance, crossing the wire at the back and tightening.  In this case, the killer had been behind Carslake, flipped the wire over his head, then turned himself back to back with him.  The assassin’s arms would cross above their head in the turn, and then push outwards.  The wire would squeeze and cut round Carslake’s neck.

Stone guessed that the killer went back to back with Carslake, then bent over forward, right over so that Carslake was yanked off his feet by the wire.  Only that kind of pressure could have cut so deeply.  Also, there was some dried blood under his fingernails, but not much.  You’d expect a man to scrabble at the wire, but Carslake had had no chance, it had been too quick.  Someone here was an operator, a trained killer.

All this Stone explained to Semyonov, who may well have figured it for himself, depending which trio of TV channels he’d been watching recently.  Was he an expert on assassination as well as everything else?  Semyonov had never trusted Carslake in any case, and didn’t look sad to see him gone.

‘Carslake was a big guy,’ said Semyonov.  ‘Strong too.  Look at the muscle tone.  I guess whoever did this was worried about that strength.  That’s why they chose the back-to-back thing, to gain extra leverage on a big man, and for surprise.  There was some planning involved I think.’  Semyonov’s red eyes and expressionless moon-face turned ominously at Stone.  ‘You are the obvious candidate of course, Stone.  A trained killer.’