The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (45 page)

Craine nodded sagely. ‘Professionals.’

‘Sir, the situation is reaching crisis point. We may have to get you off the ship.’

‘Evacuate?’ Craine said. ‘On the verge of the biggest moment in political history? Out of the question.’ He eyed Friedkin’s jacket. ‘Are you armed?’

The aide flapped open his jacket to reveal the holstered Glock 17. To Craine’s certain knowledge, he’d never once drawn it except on the practice range.

‘Get yourself an M4 from the armoury and join the others,’ Craine ordered him. ‘If you can’t contain this, don’t bother coming back.’

The alarmed Friedkin rushed from the room without protest.

The command centre was strangely quiet now that every member of the personnel had been sent out to hunt the boarders. Craine looked up at the atomic clock. Six minutes, forty-one seconds and they’d be within range of the target. Everything was ready. The technical stuff was all out of the way and all that remained was for him to arm the trigger device and press the red button.

Six minutes, thirty-seven seconds. Craine felt in his trouser pocket for the arming key. It was there, solid and chunky and reassuring.

Nobody could stop what was going to happen.

Craine reclined in his chair, closed his eyes and pensively caressed the carved surfaces of the ivory and ebony sticks resting across his lap. He felt tired and very, very old, yet a feeling of serenity came over him. Down here in the depths of the ship, insulated from all the chaos happening above, it was almost peaceful.

‘Victor Craine,’ said a voice behind him.

Craine opened his eyes. Snatched up his sticks and struggled out of his chair to face the presence in the room.

Ben was standing in the doorway. His MP5 dangled loosely from his hand. ‘So this is where we play with our toys,’ he said, glancing about the room.

Craine wasn’t particularly afraid. He’d lived too long and faced death too many times in the past for that. ‘Major Hope. You surprise me. I confess I’d taken your demise somewhat for granted.’

‘I told you it was
au revoir
,’ Ben said. He stepped into the room, followed by the others.

‘Nice place ye’ve got here,’ Boonzie commented gruffly.

‘Agent Quigley too,’ Craine said as he recognised the American. ‘My, my.’

Jeff stepped over to flip a wall-mounted switch. With a clunk and a whirr, an armoured steel shutter glided down to bar the doorway. Designed to isolate the main control room in time of crisis, it would resist a rocket-propelled grenade and take all day to breach with a thermal cutter.

‘It looks as though you have me at a disadvantage, Major Hope,’ Craine said, leaning wearily on his sticks. ‘You’re an incredibly persistent man.’

‘I do have that irritating tendency,’ Ben said. ‘And don’t call me Major. I’m retired.’

Craine shrugged. ‘Be that as it may, a man of such admirable tenacity would have been an asset to me.’

‘Sorry, Craine, but destroying the world, wiping out thousands of innocent people – it’s not quite my style.’

‘Your profile says you’re a drinking man,’ Craine said. ‘There seem to have been some issues with that, towards the end of your military career.’ He shuffled away from his chair and over towards a polished cabinet by the wall. ‘If you still imbibe, perhaps I can tempt you with a glass of something very special.’ Hooking the ebony stick over his arm, he opened the cabinet and lifted out a bottle. ‘This cognac is almost as old as I am. My doctor has declared it off-limits, but under the circumstances …’ He carefully poured some out into a crystal glass. ‘Care to join me?’

‘I don’t tend to drink with mass murderers so much,’ Ben said.

Craine took a sip and smacked his wrinkled lips. ‘I realise the superficial view a man like you must take of a man like me. You’re a soldier. Soldiers follow orders without thinking twice about the deeper strategies involved, strategies conceived by deeper and more knowing minds. You perceive only the obvious. There are so many things you don’t understand. You see, we’re not destroying, we’re building. Sparing lives. Working to create a better place for us all.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Quigley said. ‘Let’s take him and get out of here.’

‘Sounds good tae me,’ Boonzie grunted.

Ben said nothing. Until that moment he’d paid no notice to the screens on the wall, but he was staring at them now. He stepped closer and peered at the illuminated map with the target location flashing bright red at its centre. To its left, another screen displayed the target’s GPS coordinates. To the right, another again showed what looked like a live satellite image of a city. A city with an extremely distinctive skyline, lit in reds and golds by the rising sun.

Ben could hardly believe what he was seeing. And yet there it was.

‘Moscow,’ he said. ‘I should have seen it. This is your next target.’

Craine sighed, with the regretful look of a surgeon committed to performing an unpleasant, yet vitally necessary, operation. ‘I’m afraid that’s so. The most populous city in Europe, home to eleven million people, shortly scheduled to be hit by an earthquake measuring approximately nine point eight on the Richter Scale.’

‘The big one,’ Ben said, aghast, remembering what Lund had told them.

Craine gave a dry smile. ‘Indeed. The largest disaster in recorded history, surpassing the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile by some ten gigatons or more. But then, it takes a heavy hammer to crack a nut so tough. And believe me, it will be cracked. I only have to press that button, and our dear Moscow more or less ceases to exist. Even you would have to admit that’s quite a feat. I’d forgotten how good this brandy was. Sure you wouldn’t care for a … what is it the Scots call it? A wee dram?’

‘You’re insane,’ Ben said to him.

‘No, Major Hope. I’m simply someone very well informed, who happens to be aware of where the pieces stand on the chessboard. In this game of ours, the stakes are high and we’re playing to win.’ He paused. ‘We’re at the dawn of a new Cold War. You have no idea what it cost us to come through the old one. I know, I was there. Now Russia is rising, and she’s a far greater force to reckon with in the modern age, let alone if she were to unite with China. I don’t think we can win again. The western economies would never survive the drain on our resources.’

‘I don’t suppose it would do your global empire-building plans any good.’

‘That’s simply a long-term agenda. There are more pressing things to worry about in the meantime. Possible nuclear war is one of them. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that, would you?’

‘So you can pre-empt your worst-case scenario by wiping out a few hundred thousand innocent lives now,’ Ben said.

‘Aren’t global stability and peace worth the sacrifice of a single city and a few of its citizens?’

‘I don’t think I like the way your game is played.’

‘It’s the same one we’ve played for centuries, Major,’ Craine said. ‘The rules don’t change, only the technology does. If something like Nemesis had existed fifty years ago, don’t you think we’d have used it? Why do you suppose my predecessors were so interested in acquiring Tesla’s plans? We could see what Stalin was doing, even in 1943 while we were ostensibly allied against Nazi Germany. The moment the war ended, our real problems with the Soviets began. Unfortunately, the scientists of the day simply weren’t able to make the technology work. Now we can. The timing could not have been more opportune. Naturally, it’s easy to regard what we do as evil. But if you could learn to see with different eyes, you’d come to appreciate what Nemesis truly is. The end of war. The end of conflict. Ultimately, a force for good.’

‘And of course doing good has got no end,’ Ben said. ‘First Moscow, then what?’

Craine shrugged. ‘Since you ask: for some time now, western intelligence agencies have been concerned over the tacit support that the Pakistani government and its intelligence service, the ISI, offer to Taliban terrorist leaders. It’s one of the most significant obstacles to their plans for the Middle East. The city of Karachi, being Pakistan’s most populous city and the country’s financial centre, was selected as our next target.’

‘Destabilise the government, move in, take over, threat neutralised. You make it sound so easy.’

‘Child’s play,’ Craine said with a little smile. ‘Thanks to the Program.’

‘Sorry to tell you, Director. The Program is over. There’s a high-explosive limpet mine attached deep under the waterline of this vessel. We’re going to send your little experiment to the bottom of the sea.’ Ben nodded to Quigley. ‘Show him, Jack.’

Quigley took out the remote detonator. ‘Now I’ll get to find out what it feels like to press the button, huh?’

‘I was wondering what the purpose of this visit was,’ Craine said.

‘But we saved the best for you,’ Ben said. ‘We could just have let you go down with the wreck, but instead we’re going to spare your life. You’ll come with us, stand trial for mass murder and spend your last days behind bars.’

The old man was suddenly looking less sure of himself. A gleam of sweat appeared on his bald scalp. ‘I’d like to see you try. You can’t prove a thing.’

‘Wrong,’ Quigley said. ‘We have all the evidence we need, Craine, thanks to your friends in New York. By the time it all comes out, not even the Pentagon will stand by you. You’ll be fed to the animals.’

Craine was turning paler, and his breathing suddenly seemed to be coming in gasps. The glass dropped from his hand and shattered on the floor. He clapped his hand to his chest and collapsed, his withered legs folding under him.

‘Great. That’s all we bloody need,’ Jeff muttered.

‘Let him lie there,’ Boonzie said.

‘We have to get him out of here alive,’ Quigley said. He set the detonator on the table nearby and hurried over to help the fallen man.

Craine was writhing on the floor, clutching at his sticks. Quigley reached out to raise him up.

Ben couldn’t have moved fast enough to prevent what came next.

Chapter Sixty-Six

With surprising speed, Craine activated a hidden thumb latch on the silver ferrule of his ebony stick. Its slim carved shaft sprang away from the curved handle to reveal a concealed sword blade, thirty inches of spring steel with double razor edges and tapered to a needle point.

Nobody saw it in time. Quigley was leaning over the old man with his arms outstretched when the point of the blade hissed towards his chest with the speed of a striking rattlesnake. No sooner had it penetrated deep into his flesh than it withdrew, ready to stab him again.

Too stunned to utter a sound, the American recoiled two staggering steps, tripped over his own feet, and fell heavily backwards.

Ben raised his MP5 and fired at Craine, but the old man had already whipped out of sight under the computer table and Ben’s three-shot burst struck empty floor. Craine rolled with uncanny speed and emerged from under the other end of the table clutching his ivory stick. He pointed it at Jeff. A wizened thumb pressed a latch that released a folding trigger; Craine squeezed it and a concealed striker inside the stick snapped forwards to set off a slim high-velocity rifle cartridge that fired with an eardrum-rupturing bark and a spit of flame from the end of the shaft. It hit Jeff in the thigh, spattering blood over the wall behind him. Jeff tumbled over, clutching his leg.

Ben fired again. A computer screen burst into fragments. Craine dropped the ivory stick and scrambled with stunning agility to where Quigley had dropped his MP5. The Director was no less familiar with the weapon than anyone else in the room. Ben and Boonzie dived for cover as bullets sprayed the air. Blood sprayed up the wall behind Boonzie. The Scotsman sprawled over the floor, clutching the ragged wound in his left shoulder. Craine paused, took deliberate aim: the remote detonator sitting on the table where Quigley had left it blew apart into fragments of plastic casing and circuitry.

Ben tried to scramble to his feet to return fire, but another burst drove him back down to the floor. Craine was on his feet, moving remarkably fast towards the wall switch that activated the security shutter over the door. He was laughing, something nobody had heard in generations. ‘So you thought I’d let you undo all my plans? I was working on this before you were born.’

Quigley was down and not moving; Jeff was clutching his leg; Boonzie’s left arm was hanging limp as he crawled over to his fallen weapon. Ben got off another burst in Craine’s direction, but the old man had ducked back down behind the cover of the table, still cackling wildly.

The armoured shutter glided upwards.

And behind it were armed security guards, alerted by the deafening blast of Craine’s walking stick rifle.

Suddenly, they were swarming into the room. Gunfire erupted all over the place. Ben felt bullets ripping through the air past him. He flipped the MP5 to full-auto and emptied the magazine, saw three men go down before his weapon locked back empty; he dropped the spent mag, tore another from his pouch and rammed it in, released the bolt and kept firing. A column of hot empty 9mm cases flew into the air from his ejector port. Noise and smoke filled the room.

Craine scrambled over to the trigger. Pulling the key from his pocket he inserted it into place and twisted it a quarter turn. The arming light came on and the unbreakable glass cover whirred up on its hinges to expose the red firing button.

What nobody had noticed, while he’d been keeping them talking, was that the atomic clock and its corresponding digital countdown screen now read past zero time. The target was now comfortably within range. Craine held his finger over the button and felt the power course through him. He only had to press it, and in four minutes Moscow would cease to exist as the world knew it.

Craine’s finger descended towards the button.

But it never got there.

Boonzie had reached his fallen gun and opened up at the swarm of guards trying to storm their way into the room. Two more went down, piling on top of the bodies half-blocking the doorway. For one precious moment, the firestorm slackened and Ben saw his chance. As the old man’s bony finger was coming down on the button, he threw himself across the consoles and wrestled Craine away from the trigger device.