Aftershock (14 page)

Mengde Sun surveyed the main control room of the base at Hang Cheng and thought, not for the first time, how astonishingly it had all changed.

The original base, the one he had overseen, had been closed down in 1992, just when his experiments were beginning to bear fruit. He had always prided himself on his ability to manipulate politicians and the men who held the purse strings of state. He had given them the things they wanted. He had been a great scientific worker for the party. But he had not relied on such ephemera alone. He had always taken out insurance. He had known so many dirty secrets, he could barely manage the information. But it had been good insurance, great insurance, everyone, everyone had been scared of him.

But then the glorious but geriatric leader, Deng Xiaoping had handed over power to Jiang Zemin, the Eighth General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. And, for the first time in his life, Mengde had been unprepared. For reasons he still did not fully understand, Jiang hated him, and Mengde had nothing in the way of insurance, nothing with which to blackmail the man. Within a month of the handing over of power from Deng to Jiang, Base 44 at Hang Cheng had been closed down, stripped bare and bulldozed. The following week, Mengde was arrested and imprisoned without trial.

Mengde stared at the banks of sophisticated electronics, the plasma screens and the men in crisp white boiler suits. Then his gaze was drawn to a massive flat screen taking up an entire wall of the room. It reminded him of a time almost two decades earlier when a similar room had stood on this spot. There had been a wall-sized window, behind which experimental subjects had been mutilated and killed in terrible ways. He smiled to himself. He was back. He had served 12 years in China's worst political prison, Jing Shak. But General Secretary Jiang Zemin had been replaced, just as all leaders are, and he, Mengde Sun, was now back in favour. He had returned to his old job as Party Chief Scientist.

With the ascension of Jiang, in 1992, fate had dealt him a terrible blow. But the new leader was an old associate, and Mengde Sun knew a great deal about him. Within six months, the Chief Scientist's base at Hang Cheng had been rebuilt, and it was better than it could ever have been before. He was back, and with greater power than he had ever enjoyed. So much power in fact that he was completely autonomous. No one in Beijing had the slightest idea what experiments he was conducting. He had an almost limitless budget and zero accountability. He was a law unto himself, and he was exploiting it to the full. This was to be an über insurance policy. With work completed on his latest experiments he would be untouchable, and if he chose to, the total control of China, perhaps even the world, would be his.

‘Relay station 1 online,' a technician announced.

‘Relay station 2 online,' said another from across the room.

‘Relay station 3 online,' declared a third technician.

The wall screen lit up. Mengde settled himself into a leather chair, a much bigger and better chair than he had used in the old days. A technician approached and the tingle of déjà vu passed through the Chief Scientist. But it was not his old lab manager, Yung Sing. Yung had been hanged in Ying Shak. His replacement was a fresh-faced youth, no more than 30, Mengde mused. His ID told the Chief Scientist the kid's name was Fu Tang. ‘All is prepared, sir,' Fu said and pointed to a counter in the bottom right of the screen. Then, as Mengde watched, an image appeared. He knew what it was. He had been working on this project, supervising every detail of it for two years.

A bridge. A bridge half a kilometre long and crossing a series of swampy rivers. It was the Florida Road Bridge, a section of the I-75, 11 kilometres outside Miami. It was early morning, rush hour. The bridge, a 10-lane behemoth, was packed with cars, bumper to bumper, all crawling along at 30 kilometres per hour. The counter in the bottom right corner clicked on. It said: 00.20.

The room fell silent. The numbers ticked down.

Mengde felt supernaturally calm. He lived for these moments. These were the times he felt truly alive ... just before he snatched the lives of others. There was an extra delicious frisson about this experiment – who knew how many would die? Who would they be? So-called innocents? Yes, women, children. Oh yes, lots of them, mummies and kiddies on the school run.

00.02.

00.01.

00.00.

For one and a half seconds it seemed as though nothing had happened, that nothing would happen, that the test had failed. Then the bridge started to vibrate. At first, the motion was almost imperceptible. But after three seconds, the entire structure started to shake and then to rock from side to side. Red taillights flicked on all along the bridge. From the other side of the world, the men in the laboratory at Hang Cheng could hear brakes squeal. Then came the thud of impact and car horns sounding.

The bridge snapped into three pieces. A middle section 100 metres long simply plunged 25 metres into the swamp, vanishing from sight and taking with it scores of cars. The southern section of the bridge shot up as though it were a drawbridge. Millions of tonnes of concrete and steel levered to the vertical. Cars flew backwards, cascading into others behind them. Trucks jack-knifed and tumbled like falling dominos. Within 10 seconds, the image on the screen was one of unimaginable carnage.

Except for the sounds coming from the I-75, 14,000 kilometres away, the room remained absolutely silent. Then Mengde pulled himself up from the chair and started to clap. The sound grew louder. Two of the men at the computers between the Chief Scientist and the wall-sized screen looked around. Turning back, they began to clap in time with Mengde. Soon, everyone in the room was applauding loudly. A technician started to whoop. He turned and embraced his colleague.

As hearts stopped and lungs collapsed, as heads were sliced from bodies and limbs were crushed to pulp on a Florida bridge, the laboratory at Hang Cheng erupted into ecstatic celebration.

She span around, the light from the beam of her torch darting about like a huge firefly. A man stood a few paces away. He was very tall, dressed in a tatty greatcoat over ragged jeans. His long hair and beard were streaked with grey. He was holding a lantern high in his left hand. It cast a sparse, greenish light across his face.

Steph instinctively adopted a defensive pose, brandishing the burning branch in front of her like a weapon.

‘Forgive me. I didn't mean to startle you,' the man said. His voice was a baritone, pure Home Counties. It sounded so ridiculously incongruous, so out of place and time, it was almost comical.

‘Who are you?' Steph said, keeping a tight grip on the burning wood. ‘Where is my friend?'

‘Josh? Oh, he's fine. Your plane crashed, yes? Made quite a racket, I might say! Certain to have woken the neighbours, dear girl.' He laughed suddenly. Two front teeth were missing.

Steph held his gaze. He appeared to be in his fifties, but he may have been younger; the beard and hair aged him. Steph weighed things up. His face was thin, the big greatcoat hung off him, he looked undernourished and unhealthy. Possibly unarmed. She could take him, if she needed to. The man seemed completely relaxed. He smiled and tilted his head.

‘Who am I, you ask? Who are any of us? I've been trying to answer that one for 20 years. My name is Howard. You look cold, young lady. Come.'

‘Come where?'

‘My home is close by.'

‘Home?' Steph asked, aghast.

He simply turned and walked away, leaving Steph little option but to follow. She kept her distance, the burning branch at arm's length.

It was dark, but Steph could just make out rocks, sand, dead plants, the occasional piece of tangled wreckage from
Paul
. She kept 3 or 4 metres back from Howard, eyeing him suspiciously. After a while, a pale light appeared in the distance. It grew and brightened as they approached.

Howard's home was an astonishing, amorphous thing. Steph's first impression was that it was something from the props department of a fantasy movie. The centrepiece was an old four-wheel-drive, a 30-year-old Toyota. The sides had been ripped away and canvas structures extended from each side. Where the driver's cabin had once been, the doors had been taken off and more box shapes stretched from the edges of the wagon to posts buried deep in the sand. Five metres from the Toyota stood a line of poles. Wrapped around the top of each were bundles of burning twigs. Together, these lit up the area with a pasty yellow luminescence, throwing weird shadows and black shapes against the canvas and tangled metal.

Howard stopped at the end of one of the canvas constructions that stretched from the mutilated Toyota. ‘Welcome to Chez Howard,' he said with a smile, and dived inside.

For several moments, Steph stood alone, the burning branch in her hand. Howard's shape was just visible for a second behind the canvas structures. Discarding the burning wood, Steph removed the torch from her belt bag and gripped it tight. Pushing aside the canvas flap Howard had used, she took slow, cautious steps into the shadows and flicked on the torch. To her amazement, she saw a set of roughly hewn steps in front of her. It looked like a picture she had seen of Tutankhamen's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, a series of hand-cut blocks leading underground.

Ten steps down, she had no need for the torch. The steps led to a cavern some 8 metres square. The ceiling was low, but the walls glowed orange. Light came from a dozen lanterns in alcoves spaced around the room.

Howard stood a short distance away. ‘Welcome,' he said.

In the centre of the strange subterranean room stood a byre made from bits of car and twisted wood. Josh lay on the bed, his head raised on a couple of pillows.

‘Isn't this just so cool?' he said.

‘How the hell did I end up here?' Howard asked, repeating Steph's question. ‘Fate? Karma? Meticulous planning? Who knows?'

Josh was sitting up in the bed drinking a cup of steaming liquid, which Howard had told him was called Gung Ging tea. Steph cradled hers and took a few small sips. It wasn't half bad. She had topped up Josh's painkillers with supplies from her cybersuit. Josh looked surprisingly comfortable, but both of them knew the drugs would not last forever. The room was welcomingly warm, a fire burned in a metre square opening in the centre of one wall, the chimney had been cut into the wall and exited in the sand at ground level. Steph studied Howard's face. She had been wrong about his age, she decided. In the orange light of the subterranean room, he looked older, at least 60. His beard and long shaggy hair were more white than dark and his skin was leathery, worn and pitted. Steph could imagine each line and crag told a story. He had large, dark brown eyes, long lashes, a narrow mouth. He was probably once rather handsome, she concluded.

‘You want the simple version?' Howard asked, looking from one of his guests to the other.

Josh nodded.

‘Well, I was in my early twenties I guess, back in the seventies. Everyone was off on the magic bus, searching for enlightenment, tripping on acid in Goa. And I went along with them, straight out of university – Cambridge, Trinity, would you believe?' And he produced a rasping self-mocking laugh. ‘I washed up on Goa's lovely warm shores too and I took my share of whatever drug was offered, in search of my spiritual guide. Didn't find one though. Then, one day, I had a minor epiphany. I looked around at all the people I had fallen in with and I thought to myself ... Look at you. You're all trying to be so unorthodox, all trying to be so alternative, and what do you do? You all troupe off to India like a herd of sheep. How radical! How individualistic of you!'

‘So you dropped back in?' Steph said.

‘Oh very good,' Howard laughed. ‘Yes, I did for a bit, Stephanie. I did. I went back to London. Got myself a job, got married and had two children.'

‘So, what happened?' Josh said, wincing as he tried to move up in the bed.

‘Melissa, my wife, and the two girls were killed in a car crash.'

‘I'm sorry,' Steph began, but Howard had a palm raised.

‘You shouldn't be. You didn't know them. Besides, it was over 30 years ago and, well, the world didn't stop moving in its orbit. But it was the pivotal event in my life. I realised I had gone to India for a reason. I really was uncomfortable with the orthodox life. I sold everything I had, gave up the job, bought a four-wheel-drive, loaded her up with supplies, tools everything I needed ... and I drove.'

Steph shook her head. ‘So you've been here for...?'

‘Not sure, my dear. What year is it?'

Steph gazed into his eyes and was about to reply.

‘Actually, don't tell me,' Howard interrupted. ‘It really doesn't matter ... So, this E-Force is a rescue team?' he asked, quickly changing the subject. ‘I saw your plane come down. It was getting dark, but I still saw it quite clearly. I know I've been away a long time, but it looked like a fine piece of kit, Stephanie.'

‘It is ... was.' Steph glanced over to Josh who had fallen asleep. He was snoring quietly.

‘You're worried about your friend.'

‘Well, yes. I've cleaned his wounds and we have painkillers available from my suit. Josh's was too badly damaged in the crash. But they're running out.'

‘So, what do you plan to do?'

‘Good question,' Steph responded. ‘Our comms are out. You don't have a radio, I imagine?'

‘I do, but it doesn't work any more, my dear.'

‘No power, right?'

‘It's not that. I have a solar power system. Which works rather well, I might add. I generate just enough for my needs, and until a few years ago, I had a working radio. I venture into Fung Ching Wa occasionally. It's a small town about 130 kilometres south-east of here. I stock up on replacement electrical components, new cooking utensils, anything I couldn't make myself. Anyway, the radio still works, but the signal is nothing but static.'

‘What?'

‘Look.' He took Steph over to an ancient-looking Rediffusion two-way valve set. Turning it on, Howard shifted the dial. Nothing but a stream of static tumbled from the tinny speaker. ‘It happened suddenly, one night. I don't mind confessing that for some time I thought they'd finally dropped the bomb and civilisation was history.' He produced his raspy laugh again and his eyes shone. Steph looked at him, and for an instant she saw a new light there, an excitement, a flicker of wishful thoughts lost in disappointment. ‘But, no. It was just the bloody Chinese,' Howard concluded.

‘The Chinese?' Steph asked.

‘Their base, Hang Cheng. It's about 60 kilometres northwest of here.' Howard was pointing across the room. ‘I don't know what they're doing there of course. And to be honest, dear girl, I have absolutely no interest in knowing either. But, I must admit, I am rather peeved they've buggered up my radio.'

‘You've seen this base?'

‘Yes. You probably did too. You would have flown over it.'

Steph was nodding, lost in thought. Then she said, ‘Well, that answers some questions, I guess. But, the long and short of it is that you can't contact the outside world ... right?'

‘Not any more. Sorry.'

‘What medical supplies do you have?'

‘You saw them. The kit I gave you to patch up Josh.'

‘That's it?' Steph exclaimed. Then she sighed heavily. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude.'

‘It's quite all right. You've had a rather trying day. The fact is, I don't need anything more. If I hurt myself badly or I contract some horrible disease, I will simply die. My medical supplies are enough to help with a cut finger or a cold.' He looked at Steph. ‘You're all in, young lady. Why don't you follow your friend's example and get some sleep?'

Steph sat down and ran a hand through her hair, then rested her fingertips on her temples. ‘I can think of nothing nicer, but I have to find something in the wreckage to help us.'

‘Well in that case, the best I can do is offer to keep you company. Lead the way.'