Velocity (26 page)

Another bark.

‘Good boy.’ Corey grabs the phone, flicks it to remove the saliva and passes it to Judd. ‘He saw you drop it and went back to get it.’

Judd feels very strange doing it but nods a thankyou to the animal. He then examines the sat phone. It’s dinged and scratched and one side is melted. He extends the aerial and works the keypad. It’s as dead as a dodo. ‘Oh,
come on.’
Frustrated, he whacks it with the palm of his hand.

It beeps. He studies the screen. Still dead. He turns it over, pulls off the battery cover. The battery isn’t seated correctly. He clicks it into place, snaps the cover back on and turns it over.

The LED screen glows. One bar of power remains on the scale. Judd dials as he walks up the incline towards the Loach, gestures for Corey to follow. ‘Come on, I need your telescope.’

**

27

Thompkins takes a breath and tells himself that if he keeps doing what he’s doing everything’s going to work out fine.

He studies the working group that circles the large table, laptops and maps and files and coffee cups spread out before them. Despite assembling twelve of the finest minds in NASA, locking them in this long room for two days and asking them to answer just one question, they have so far delivered a big fat duck egg.

They have no idea where
Atlantis
is.

There are two reasons for this. Reason one is the working group itself. Though they possess a premium of intellect they have a distinct lack of steely-eye. Their ideas for locating the shuttle are, in general, theoretical rather than practical. In short, none of them are John Aaron.

John Aaron is the most celebrated steely-eyed missile man, though few outside of NASA know his name. He isn’t famous because he wasn’t an astronaut. Aaron was an engineer from Texas, who happened to solve major issues during both Apollo 12 and 13 when the wrong call meant the end of the mission or the death of astronauts. He was the guy who, when presented with a major problem, was able to think fast, find the correct solution and act decisively, under extreme pressure. He’s also long retired. Thompkins looks around the table at the group. The minds are brilliant, no doubt, but it’s now clear that none possess Aaron’s practical ability, and he includes himself in that assessment.

The second reason they’ve failed to locate
Atlantis
is the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Thompkins has been liaising with the team of agents from the FBI, the CIA, the HLS and the NSA over the last two days and what a collection they were. Set up in the conference room next door, Dean Wyyer and his twelve-member team have been bumping into walls, tripping over their feet and pulling on doors clearly marked ‘push’ ever since they arrived. They’re constantly under foot and incessantly ask Thompkins’ people self-evident questions that only distract them from the job at hand.

The JTTF has been working here for days now and the team still doesn’t know who took
Atlantis.
Thompkins finds this interesting as it’s in stark contrast to the aftermath of 9/11, when the government knew who was responsible for the hijackings within hours of the towers falling.

Thompkins’ BlackBerry chirps. He looks at the screen. It’s a private number. Ordinarily he would never answer a private number but these aren’t ordinary times. He picks up. ‘Hello.’

‘Thompkins? Judd Bell.’

‘Judd? What’s going on —’

‘I know where
Atlantis
is.’

‘You
what
?’ Thompkins’ voice is so loud through the satellite phone’s speaker that Spike’s ears prick up, and he’s sitting five metres away. ‘How do you know this?’

‘‘Cause I’m looking at it.’ Judd stares through the Australian’s dented telescope at the distant runway,
Atlantis
large in the eyepiece. ‘And Rhonda’s on board.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Where you sent me. The Northern Territory.’

‘Where exactly?’

Judd turns to Corey. ‘Where are we exactly? I need a name.’

‘Doesn’t have one.’

‘Where are we close to?’

He thinks about it. ‘Midway between Lake Mackay and Nyirripi.’

Spike barks.

Corey looks at him. ‘Sure, if you wanna split hairs.’ He turns back to Judd. ‘A bit closer to Lake Mackay.’

Judd speaks into the sat phone. ‘It’s midway between Lake Mackay and Nyirripi in the Northern Territory. If you have a spy satellite overhead you won’t miss the runway they’ve built. It’s lit up like the Vegas strip.’

‘Who’s the other voice?’

‘The chopper pilot who picked me up at the airport.’

‘He knows about this?’

‘How do you think I got out here? I’m in the middle of nowhere.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘There’s something else you need to know. They have choppers.’

‘What kind?’

‘Nasty black ones!’

Judd holds up a hand to silence the Australian. ‘Attack choppers. European, from the look of it. I don’t know how many. At least one.’

‘Understood. Anything else?’

Judd pans the telescope, notices something behind a very large tent set up near the runway. ‘Hold on.’ He focuses, tries to work out what it is. It seems to be covered with tarpaulins.

‘Christ.’ He pulls the telescope from his eye. ‘They’re gonna fly the shuttle out. There’s a jet, a big one, covered with tarps. I can only see the side of one engine. Could be an old 747 - no, it’s a Galaxy. Wasn’t there one stolen from an air-force base last week?’

‘Davis-Monthan. Yes.’ Thompkins’ voice sounds cheerless.

Judd’s first thought is that they’ll need to lift a hundred-tonne shuttle off the ground, swing it through the air then fasten it to the top of another aircraft. That’s not the easiest thing in the world to do unless you have a seriously large crane. He pans the telescope, searches for something that could do the job.

There. A crane arm, painted the yellow of heavy construction machinery. It’s so big that it protrudes from behind the very big tent. ‘I see the crane. It’ll do the job.’

Thompkins exhales unhappily.

‘What happens now?’

‘I send the marines.’

‘We’re a long way from anywhere. What’s the ETA?’

‘Asap. What number are you calling from? It didn’t show up on the screen.’

‘Don’t know. It’s not my phone. I took it from one of the hijackers.’

‘You what?’

‘Long story.’

‘Christ. Okay. Sit tight and keep your eyes on
Atlantis.
Anything happens, call in.’

‘Will do.’ Judd hangs up and studies the satellite phone’s screen. Half a bar of power remains. He turns to Corey. ‘Cavalry’s on the way.’

‘They’re sending horses?’

‘No, no horses.’

‘You said cavalry.’

‘It means the military. The US military, and, I guess, some Australians too.’

‘What do they want you to do?’

‘Sit tight, keep an eye on it.’

‘So that’s what you’re gonna do, right?’

Judd doesn’t answer, just focuses the telescope on
Atlantis
again.

**

Thompkins hangs up, takes a deep breath and nods to himself. This is it, the end game. It’s not how he expected it to go but he’s well prepared. He knows what to do and how to do it. He takes another breath, momentarily widens his eyes to focus his nerves, then starts for the door and dials his phone.

It rings and is answered by an older woman. ‘Administrator Cunningham’s office.’

‘Barbara, it’s Will Thompkins. I need to see the boss right away. We’ve found
Atlantis
.’

**

28

Atlantis
rolls to a stop on the makeshift runway.

The landing was smooth and by the numbers, the runway perfectly lit and prepared, the weather cool and dry, exactly what Henri expected from a September evening in Central Australia. He didn’t even need to use the drogue chute in the shuttle’s tail to slow the spacecraft down.

He turns and looks out the windscreen as Dirk’s Hummer pulls up nearby. The German knows it’s unsafe to approach the shuttle straight after landing - it must be left to stand for five minutes so the superheated fuselage can cool after the extreme heat of re-entry and the poisonous fumes from the attitude controller’s hydrazine fuel can dissipate.

Henri draws the walkie from the leg pocket of his flight suit and triggers the talk button.

In the Hummer, Dirk hears his walkie crackle to life. He knows what Henri will ask even before he hears the words.

‘What happened to the Loach I saw before we landed?’

Yep, that’s the question. Dirk triggers the walkie: ‘Claude and Cobbin are taking care of it. They haven’t reported back yet.’

‘Be sure it’s been dealt with.’

‘Yes, Commander. There is one other thing. The operatives at Kinabara Dish have not reported in for over an hour. It may be the result of an equipment failure but I’ve dispatched a team to retrieve them.’

‘Make sure they’re back before sunrise. Is everything set for the turnaround?’

‘Yes, sir. Just give the order.’

‘Thank you.’

The German clicks off then changes the frequency on his walkie, triggers the talk button: ‘Claude, do you read?’

There’s no reply. He’s not happy about it.

**

Rhonda doesn’t know much about the Loach’s fate after eavesdropping on the Frenchman’s last walkie exchange. What she does know is that a ‘turnaround’ of some kind is on the agenda, which she guesses has something to do with her shuttle.

She wants to be out of this chair before it happens. Unfortunately her wrists are still tightly ziplocked to its frame and she’s surrounded by people who want her to stay put. She needs a plan, she just hasn’t been able to think of the right one yet.

When stumped for an answer to a particularly vexing question, Rhonda finds that if she lets her mind wander to other matters a solution usually presents itself. So she decides to do that and let her subconscious go to work.

At that moment her ex-best friend Martie unlocks the shuttle’s mid-deck hatch, or ‘front door’ as Judd nicknamed it. She remembers that because it was one of the first things he said to her, right before he suggested they go jogging to a movie.

Yes,
jogging to a movie.
When he asked her she laughed because she thought it was a joke. It wasn’t - and that’s what they did on their first date. She can’t remember which movie they saw but she always remembers the route they ran to get to the cinema. She knew the jogging component of the date had been nothing but a stunt to win her favour, exercise being something everyone in the program knew was her one addiction, but it worked. It became their thing, the way they connected. Judd was so funny then. Often she had to stop running because she was doubled over from one of his asides or observations. For years they jogged every day. Until
Columbia.
She missed it very much.

Martie steps back onto the flight deck and addresses Henri. ‘What should we do with her?’

‘She stays here. You watch her.’

Rhonda glares at the Frenchman as he stands. She tries her hardest not to look at the pistol jammed into his belt, pressed against his protruding belly. She’s going to need that gun or one just like it. That’s all it will take to end this, or at least put a big cat among the Frenchman’s pigeons . . .

Mountain biking!

And just like that she has an escape plan. Good old subconscious to the rescue again. And Judd, who made her think about how much she loved exercise.

Rhonda loved mountain biking, as in biking
on
mountains, but it was frowned upon by the NASA hierarchy because it was stupid-dangerous. She did it anyway, until the day she hit a tree at 50 k’s an hour and, luckily, dislocated her right shoulder instead of snapping her neck. Not only did this bring her mountain-biking career to an abrupt conclusion, but also, as she was in training for a mission at the time, she had to keep using her injured arm as if everything were just fine and dandy. As a result, it never healed correctly. Her shoulder has only popped out once since, when she was pulling herself out of a bath, of all things, and it hurt like a bastard until she worked out that if she jammed it into the bathroom wall at a very specific angle it would pop back in. It was three minutes of agony she hoped never to relive.

The plastic ties that hold her wrists to the chair are strapped before her gloves. She’ll never be able to pull those through the ties because they’re too bulky, but if she can flex her forearm and stretch the tie she might be able to get a wrist free
inside
the suit, then pull it down the sleeve, then dislocate her shoulder and slip her arm out of the sleeve and move it to a position where she can unzip the suit and get out of it, and the chair. Just thinking about it is exhausting but it’s the only option going so she must give it a try.

Martie slides into the pilot’s chair, her back to Rhonda. The Frenchman nods to the Italian and they exit the flight deck, move down the ladder. As soon as they’re gone Rhonda starts flexing her forearm against the plastic tie while making sure it doesn’t
look
like she’s doing that.