Down: Trilogy Box Set (122 page)

“On the flight from London I got briefed by the government’s chief scientific advisor that the hot zones have expanded in Upminster and Leatherhead,” she said. “We’ve lost several more security personnel at both locations and God knows how many residents who were advised to shelter in place.”

“Can I ask a stupid question?” Kyle said. “John told me that before, these passageways or whatever opened then closed each time the collider ran.”

“That’s right,” Emily said. “The points of connectivity were transitory. They were wholly dependent on new energy production from the sub-atomic particle collisions.”

“But now you’re saying that the connections are permanent.”

“Well, hopefully not permanent,” she said, “but they’re persistent and expanding. We’re calling the affected areas hot zones.”

“Well, okay, here’s my question. If you’ve got someone from either side caught up in this hot zone and they zip on through from one world to another, how come they don’t zip right back?”

“It’s not a stupid question. It’s an important one. I don’t have a good answer but there seems to be some polarity at play. What I mean is, there may be some quantum effects caused by the interaction of strangelets and gravitons that …”

John interrupted. “Emily, I’m crazy about you but you’ve got two dumb shits from Bend, Oregon here.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been talking to physicists all day. Think of the points of connection as one-way tubes. You go through but you can’t travel back on the same tube. It’s as if there’s a one-way valve that lets you travel in only one direction. That must explain why people aren’t shuttling back the moment they arrive in the other dimension.”

John put his fork down. “But in Leatherhead we saw Hellers reappear after they were shot by the commandos,” John said. “How do you account for that?”

“All this is guesswork based on limited observation. It may be that you reset your polarity by leaving the hot zone. If you then re-enter you can cross back. I wish I knew more. How was your meeting with the SAS?”

“They’re pros,” John said. “Of course they’re apoplectic they’ll be reporting to me but they’ll be effective, especially if I can get Kyle on board.”

“Are you on board?” Emily asked him.

Kyle pushed his chair back and went to the coffee table. He picked up John’s handwritten statement and ripped it into several pieces.

“It’s the thought that counts, bro,” he said. “I’m in. To be honest, I’ve been spending the last few hours thinking about what you want done and how I could pull it off. I’ll need a workshop in the morning.”

“Already have one lined up,” John said, standing up. He spread his arms. “Come over here.”

While the two big men hugged, Emily’s cheeks streaked with tears.

Later, holding her close to him in bed, John asked her what she thought of Kyle.

“If it weren’t for the family resemblance I wouldn’t have known you were brothers. He’s very different.”

“How?”

“Stating the obvious, he’s rough around the edges where you, my dear, are a polished stone. He lacks self-confidence, you are brimming with it to the point of arrogance—and I say that with love. He’s suffered from living in the shadow of his accomplished big brother. It’s rather sad.”

He pulled his arm from around her shoulder and laced both hands around his neck. Staring at the ceiling he said, “Yeah, it makes me sad too. I could’ve done more to help him along.”

She put a hand on his chest and rubbed it. “You’re giving him a chance to do something really important. It has the potential to meaningfully change his life for the better.”

John turned his head to kiss her. “If it doesn’t get him killed.”

It had been five days. Five excruciatingly slow days.

John and Emily had been pushing to go in three days, four maximum, but Kyle’s work was the rate-limiting step. He had been methodical and at first wouldn’t accept help, arguing that training someone would just slow him down. He had holed up in a workshop set up for him at Holland & Holland gunsmiths in London where he toiled in isolation until, bowing to reality, he had begun delegating to eager Holland & Holland craftsmen. Due to the sheer volume of work Kyle had put in eighteen-hour days. He gave up bourbon but downed a few beers before collapsing on his workroom cot every night.

After the first day John stopped by to check his progress and had found him hunched over a workbench.

“How’s it going?” John had asked.

“It’s going.”

“Is it doable?”

“My part’s doable. We’ve got to figure out the primers.”

“What about them?” John had asked.

“The chemicals, bro. Can’t make boom-boom without the primers.”

“Shit,” John had said. “I didn’t think about that.”

“Neither did I until today.”

“What do we need?” John had asked.

“They got any quicksilver over there?”

On the way to Credenhill John had called Malcolm Gough who was on permanent babysitting duty in Hampshire.

“How’s Henry getting on?”

“I think he’s rather enjoying himself,” Gough had said. “He likes the food and the wine a great deal and thinks the bathtubs and toilets are smashing. Bit of a problem last night when he demanded a wench to be delivered to his bed. Suffice it to say, the MI5 minders were not helpful. Had to dip into my well as a father of young children. I distracted him with television.”

“I need you to ask him a question for me. Ask him if he has any quicksilver in Hampton Court or any other London palace.”

“Quicksilver? As in mercury?”

“As in mercury.”

When Gough rang him back he had told John, “Alas, no. He seemed dimly aware of the substance but has never possessed it. He suggested that one might perhaps find some in Iberia.”

John’s next call had been to Kyle.

“No joy,” he had said.

“Next best thing’s something called lead styphnate.”

“How do we get it?”

“They got lead over there?”

“Plenty.”

“We’d still need a chemist.”

“Why?”

“I looked it up. You’ve got to make it with nitric acid which I assume means you’d need to make nitric acid too. Plus maybe some other stuff.”

“That’s fucked up,” John had said. “On top of everything we need to find a chemist with a death wish?”

John had gotten MI5 involved with the chemist problem while he and Trevor concentrated on training the SAS teams. There was no way to do special-ops-grade preparation for this kind of mission. John knew that but Major Parker-Burns was decidedly uneasy that A Squadron had no objectives to drill against, no mock-ups of compounds, no aerial photos or drone footage to study, no psychological profiles of the enemy to learn. As far as John was concerned, the key was going to be orienteering, finding the hot zones in a world that lacked the landmarks of modern Earth. They had found a good topographical map of Greater London with accurate elevations, positions of rivers, tributaries, ponds, and lakes. Although there were bound to be some differences owing to modern man-made alterations in terrain, John had thought it would be as good a tool as they could get. But how to get the maps over to the other side? John knew from his experience carrying books that untreated paper printed with natural vegetable inks successfully made it across. Ben had been prepared to get the same printing company to do the job but Parker-Burns had come up with a better idea. Silk. During the Second World War the allies produced millions of silk maps of Europe and Asia for pilots to carry and use to find escape routes if shot down. Paper burned and ripped and got soggy and useless. Silk was far better and it was a natural fiber bound to make the transfer. A textile manufacturer in Leeds was identified and MI5 made it happen quickly.

The training John and Trevor introduced to the SAS was in the use of unconventional weapons. The commandos were already expert in hand-to-hand combat and knife-work but none of them had used a sword and only a few had done archery. None of them knew how to load and shoot a black-powder gun or a medieval cannon. Half of them had ridden horses before but fewer than one in ten were accomplished horsemen.

As they trained the men at Credenhill, they had wished Brian Kilmeade were there. Nobody was better at handling medieval weapons but Brian was far away in the Europa of Hell, hopefully enduring the harsh existence he had chosen. There hadn’t been time to line up a Brian substitute so John and Trevor had conducted weapons drills in the squadron’s gymnasium with sixty trash-talking commandos, irreverently skeptical of the exercises. An afternoon at an equestrian centre had at a minimum gotten the inexperienced men more comfortable around horses.

Then the blow-up. The commander of the SAS had informed Major Parker-Burns that he would not be accompanying A Squadron on the mission.

“This is intolerable,” the major had fumed at John. “I was told that because of the inability to effect a centralized command and control it would be better for me to stay behind and reconstitute the squadron should my men not return.”

“I can see their point,” John had said. “Your captains will have autonomous control of their groups. As soon as we get supplied we’re dispersing. It’s not as if they’ll be reporting to me. There won’t be any way of communicating with them. They’ll be operating on their own. If you went you’d have to pick which of the groups to accompany which, I imagine, would undercut one of your captains.”

“I suppose so, but up until the point of dispersal, they’ll have to report to someone. Otherwise it would be chaotic.”

John had suppressed a smile at the smallness of his thinking. “Well, I guess it will have to be me. I’m sure your men will let us know what they think of that.”

“They’re excellent soldiers,” Parker-Burns had said. “They will complain vocally amongst themselves but they will follow their orders to the letter.”

Three days prior to departure John had found himself on an army helicopter for a flight to Oxford. There he had met with Professor Ted Nightingale at his home near the university campus. Nightingale had appeared frail and had a sickly color to his skin that John later learned was jaundice from his liver cancer. Photos on the professor’s piano had revealed a recently vigorous sixty-year-old, hiking in the Yorkshire Dales and scuba diving in the Caribbean. After the first minute of watching the infirm man slowly making him tea, John had wanted to get back in the chopper and head back to London. But the man had quickly won him over with the strength of his spirit.

“Look, Mr. Camp,” he had said, pouring the tea in his sitting room. “I, like all of my fellow countrymen, am appalled and horrified by the invasion of London by this unspeakable enemy. I am, or I was, an atheist, but the notion of a real Hell does open up the possibility of a real Heaven, or at least the intervention of an overarching moral power who punishes and rewards. My doctors have given me perhaps six more months to live. That is my fate and I accept it. I have no wife and no children to dissuade me. When I was approached about your needs I thought, ‘Ted, you are the perfect person for this job. You are a professor of inorganic chemistry. You have a joint appointment in the faculty of history. You are steeped in the history of chemistry. If your body can bear the rigors, you must do this.’”

“Can it?” John had asked. “Do you have the stamina for it?”

“How challenging will it be?”

John pointed to the photos. “Picture the hardest day of hiking you ever did, then string a bunch of those days together. We’d have you surrounded and supported by the fittest men on the planet but it’ll be medieval.”

Nightingale’s smile had brightened the room and had made him seem younger and healthier. “Medieval. I have pored over so many alchemical and chemical texts from the past that I’ve often wished I could be a fly on the wall, watching the history of the chemical sciences unfold. It would be a capstone to my career to join your expedition and to help my fellow man defeat this horrible assault. I believe I can withstand the challenges.”

“I believe you can too,” John had said. “By the way, you don’t have any prosthetic devices implanted in your body, do you?”

“None whatsoever.”

“How about dental fillings, caps, crowns, et cetera?”

“Plenty of those.”

“We’ll need to get you to a dentist tomorrow.”

Two days prior to departure John and Trevor had been summoned to a meeting with Jeremy Slaine at the secretary of state for defense’s Whitehall office. Slaine had pushed his mop of white hair from his eyes and had slumped dog-tired on a sofa.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” he had said. “I know how busy you are.”

“I’m sure you are too, sir,” John had replied. “How are your containment efforts going?”

“Not well, I’m afraid,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his blood-shot eyes. “We’ve lost troops to expanding hot zones and before perimeters could be re-established Hellers have certainly made it out of the containment areas. We’ve been able to track some of them by drone but, I have to say, I’ve been hesitant to give kill orders. A drone can’t distinguish between a Heller and a fleeing civilian. There are still large numbers of civilians who remain inside the containment areas. They call our emergency numbers pleading for help. It’s heartbreaking. You’ve no doubt seen them, but we’ve been making dynamic maps of where the calls are coming from. It’s clear that even inside a hot zone there are shifting islands of territory where transfer between the dimensions is not occurring.”

“We’ve seen the maps,” John had said.

“How close are you to expanding the evacuation orders?” Trevor had asked.

“Bloody close. It’s a matter of logistics and frankly of pride. Even during the London blitz in the Second World War we only evacuated children. We’ll be discussing it again at the Cobra meeting this afternoon. But that’s not why I asked you to stop by. It’s about my son.”

“I’m sure it’s an awful situation for you,” John had said.

“It is, of course. Especially for my wife who has required medical care for her anxiety. I’ve been rung by the parents of the other boys from the school, all of them distraught and looking for help. Look, I’m well aware that other children residing in the hot zones have been caught up in this too but I’m asking on behalf of all the Belmeade parents whether you think you’ll be able to help these boys.”