The War of Immensities (32 page)

“Are you sure
your detectors are stuck on properly?” Wagner asked him.

“It’s not my
fucking fault!” Joe snapped back.

“All that
sweating. Maybe they aren’t connecting properly.”

“I’m holding
them down with me fucking fingers, okay?”

At twenty past
two, he linked, and they headed for the waiting aircraft.

“We’ll be in
Hong Kong at sundown,” Brian told them.

“Isn’t this the
time Harley predicted?” Andromeda wondered.

“Yeah,” Brian
pointed out. “But we’re about seven hours behind the time zone at
the latitude he named.”

They landed in
Hong Kong and just after eight, gliding in amidst the mountains and
apartment buildings to where Harley Thyssen met them as they came
through the aero-bridge.

“Well, is this
the place?” he asked them.

They knew it
was, almost.

“Just over
there a little way,” Brian considered. They all agreed.

Just over there
a little way was Hong Kong Island with its luxury hotels to which
they proceeded on the ferry. When, eventually, they came to rest,
they saw they were standing right in the middle of the lobby of the
Hong Kong Sheridan and Thyssen bought them all drinks.

“All right,
Harley,” Andromeda smiled. “You’ve hit the spot, right on.”

“Certainly near
enough for my liking,” Joe Solomon concurred.

“So, let’s see
if I understand how you did this,” Brian said suspiciously. “By
manipulating the position of the control group in their boat, you
were able to cause the focal point to be right where we are
standing.”

“You got it,”
Harley said proudly.

“Why here?”
Chrissie asked.

“Most
comfortable place I could think of,” Harley grinned. “Anyone
disapprove?”

“What a clever
little Harley,” Lorna grinned and raised her cocktail in a toast to
him.

In Sicily was
twin cratered Mount Etna, at 10,902 feet and climbing, the tallest
volcano in Europe, continuously active since the days of
Pythagoras. In ancient times its continual bursts of flame and lava
and the constant rumblings within the mountain gave rise to the
myth of Vulcan, the Roman God of fire, toiling on his forge deep
beneath the earth. Here too, Odysseus encountered mad one-eyed
Cyclops. In the fertile soil, farmers occupied lava flows only 70
years old and sightseers engulfed the region whenever the word was
out that activity was intensifying.

There was a
place where the lava flow was so thick and turgid that they had
built a concrete platform for the tourists to stand and watch the
heated rock creep forward, an inch or so each hour. With the
spectacular sunsets that always accompanied volcanoes, the platform
was full that evening. And the wall of incandescent lava that had
inched along for centuries, suddenly leapt upon them and swallowed
them. Vulcan growled in rage and all the new farmers on the lava
flow and all the tourists to Etna were vaporised in a final moment
of seething terror.

Across the bay
from Naples, Vesuvius let fly with one single great ball of cloud,
pumped into the clear twilight sky to cast a deep shadow over the
ruins of Pompeii and all points south of the city. The three
million inhabitants of Naples and environs felt the earth shake
briefly and then heard the roar, and when they saw the cloud they
dreaded that the apocalyptic moment that had threatened their city
for 6000 years had finally come. But then, as the cloud rose and
dispersed into the upper atmosphere, the moment was passed and the
Queen of Vulcan fell silent again.

Stromboli, the
lighthouse of the Mediterranean, an island cone that burps with
great regularity every twenty minutes without disturbing the
villagers below its slopes, broke its routine to emit a thundering
blast that knocked a hundred feet off the top of the mountain and
showered it into the sea all about the island.

Across the
Lipari Islands, the earth shook and the sea broiled and the black
plume brought on nightfall an hour early. Hot muddy rain fell on
the villages and the people ran to their boats with their ears
covered, such was the impact of the blast. Vulcano and its child
Vuncanello roared to life for the first time since 1890.

But it was away
from roaring Vesuvius and thundering calderas of the Lipari Islands
that the full force of the impact was felt. On mainland Italy,
inland from Salerno in Province Lucania, a sudden earthquake
struck. Here the villages that had clung to hilltops for centuries
tumbled into the valleys below and great fissures opened in the
earth, from some of which fire burst forth. A deep cloud enveloped
the landscape and the people blundered about, screaming the names
of lost loved ones in their blindness. A region twenty kilometres
in diameter was completely destroyed and with it 4000 souls. And
the damage stretched fifty kilometres from the epicentre, and fires
raged amongst the forests and vineyards and olive groves, killing
hundreds more and causing untold thousands of injuries.

In a street
cafe in Rome, a sudden silence amid the urban cacophony told Jami
Shastri something had happened. All about, men—for there were only
men—clustered about cars with their radios or televisions in the
cafes and bars. Commuters stopped in a stride, their mobile phones
or pocket radios clutched to their ears, gasping frantic words and
all around them.

An Indian girl
amongst Italians, Jami had to ask the waiter to translate what had
happened.

“All of the
south. She blow up. Boom.”

At this news,
Jami simply nodded. She paid for her cappuccino, walked to a kerb
and hailed a taxi to the airport.

When the First
Secretary spoke her name, she wanted to fall right through the
floor. It was no different now, she tried telling herself, than any
of the other innumerable medical conferences that she had addressed
in her career, but there was no persuading herself of that. In this
room of shiny coloured marble and frescoed walls and ceilings by
Michelangelo’s apprentices, at the head of a huge table of polished
mahogany, in plush matching chairs with pure silk liners, was the
most powerful gathering of people she had ever seen in one
room.

The First
Secretary of Italy, the Deputy Secretary General of the United
Nations, the European Director of the Red Cross, the European
Secretaries for Sciences and Medicine, a Brigadier General in
charge of the NATO Central Region, three officials from United
Europe, and she—Felicity Campbell, MD. To her shame, she had
forgotten all of their names—though not their titles—while everyone
one of them knew exactly who she was.

She rose to
speak on knees trembling in a way they hadn’t since she was a
student doing her first medical demonstration. This was both the
worst and most important moment of her life, and she feared
mightily that she was inadequate in every way.

All along, she
had seen herself as seconded on a temporary basis. Already the
Earthshaker team possessed nine medical staff more senior and more
experienced and better qualified than herself and at any time she
expected her position to be usurped by one of them, if not all. She
believed that she would be overrun by events and finally left
behind to her domestic bliss and a dream of private practice. But
unfailingly they had accepted her authority without question,
although that was only because they knew that behind her stood the
formidable bulk of Harley Thyssen. But still she had been a
pretender, waiting to be exposed. Only now she realised that she
never would be—or if she was it wouldn’t matter. Thyssen had caused
her to become recognised as the world’s leading authority on the
Shastri Effect and now she stood to speak in that capacity, in her
own right. Now, the pretence would no longer be sustainable. Nor
would her dreams of home and peace.

If she’d had
any residual doubts, they had evaporated when the telephone beside
her bed in the Sheraton rang and she heard Harley’s voice thunder
down the line.

“It’s happened.
Get your skates on. We’re meeting in the lobby cafe in twenty
minutes.”

They were all
there. Andromeda was in her performance dress; a dazzling spangled
thing that, Felicity realised, bore the colours and patterns of the
earth viewed from space. She and Lorna had plainly enjoyed one or
two cocktails too many and had entered leaning on each other
exchanging fits of giggling. Now, they obediently sipped coffee. So
did Kevin and Brian, both wet haired from showers and puffy-eyed
from sleep. Joe Solomon rolled his wheelchair up to the table and
ordered tea while Chrissie lounged serenely on a couch. And
Thyssen, massive, was busily ensuring that they were all ready to
listen.

“Okay. The hit
was Southern Italy, just inland from Salerno if you know the place.
Jami has already flown over the area and reports a wide area of
devastation. It’s much bigger than expected. Every volcano from
Etna to Vesuvius erupted simultaneously, which is newly different
and frightening, but the epicentre was away from the mountains and
whole towns and villages have been destroyed. The primary impact
zone was about twenty kilometres in diameter, and all around the
circumference we can expect there to be hundreds of sleepers. If
so, it gets deadly serious from now on.”

“But we don’t
know for sure?” Felicity said hopefully.

“It was a
definite Shastri event. You can bet on it.”

“Shit,” Brian
muttered and they all nodded agreement to that.

They sat around
one table, their coffee and tea ignored now, while Thyssen sat on
the top of the next table, his hands pressed together with an
uncommon show of anxiety.

“Okay, so now
we go into action. First job is to get in there and collect and tag
all the sleepers. Fee, when we hit the ground, you will be in
command. You just do it any way you can. No doubt you’ll have all
sorts of difficulties with emergency services and local
authorities, not to mention outside agencies, all of whom will be
getting under your feet, but you just get in and do it.”

“I can’t even
imagine how,” Felicity heard herself say nervously.

“Hopefully, it
will become clearer as we proceed,” Thyssen sighed. “Kevin. You go
in and liaise with Fee and Jami and whoever else you have to and
secure the whole situation. The important thing is this. If we lose
track of just one of the sleepers, we lose the ability to predict
the next pilgrim focal point. You all saw how difficult it was to
get six of you to the right place. Next time we might be moving
hundreds. Which is where you come in Brian. You have to start
figuring out the best and easiest ways of moving these people
around. And therefore, in co-ordination with Kevin, how to tag them
so you can round them up when you need to.”

“Fuckin’ hell,”
Brian gasped.

“I think that a
likely prediction,” Thyssen agreed. “Plane leaves as soon as we get
to the airport. We will take the 707, and the medical team.”

“Right,” Brian
nodded and waved a finger around the room. “What about the
others?”

“Andromeda—you
can go to bed. Lorna, you’re with me so you better hit the black
coffee.”

“Oh goody,”
Lorna breathed sleepily. “Where are we going, boss?”

“Rome with the
others, then on to Geneva and Brussels and anywhere else we have to
go to talk to the top brass and get Felicity, Kevin and Brian the
co-operation they need. And you promote the cause all the way.”

“Aye, aye,
sir.”

“Joe and
Chrissie—you make your way home in your own time...”

“I want to go
to Italy,” Chrissie said adamantly.

For the first
time in Felicity’s memory, Thyssen hesitated. He looked at
diminutive French-Vietnamese girl thoughtfully for a long moment,
and eventually she continued. “The dying and the injured will need
my ministrations.” To which Thyssen offered a dubious look.
“Anyway,” Chrissie added with a faint smile. “You’ll need me. I
speak Italian.”

Thyssen was
floored. Felicity could see it took everything he had to restrain
himself, but somehow he managed to cave in. You could see this
wasn’t something that happened to him every day. “All right. But
remember, once this gets underway, the paperwork will be piling up
in Melbourne.”

“Direct it to
my office,” Joe Solomon said. “I’ll take care of it until Christine
is back in harness.”

Joe Solomon
co-operating? Felicity could hardly believe her ears by then.

“Thanks, Joe,”
Thyssen said with breath-taking sincerity.

“I’ll just hang
in here a couple of days and make my own way home,” Joe added
quietly. “And I can organise the control group back to base if you
want to get to Italy immediately, Brian.”

It was just too
much. Thyssen, unresisted, was at a loss. The glance he exchanged
with Felicity said so plainly.

“Good on yer,
mate,” Brian said in vague disbelief.

They were a
team, working together as harmonious as any team could, and even
the man who had moulded them was astonished. And so it continued as
they flew into the disaster zone. There was Jami at her shoulder,
making sure she understood the proportions of the disaster; there
was Kevin poised to back up her every whim; there was Brian,
harried and uncertain, ensuring their every transportation need was
met.

They flew over
the impact zone, a burned and blackened region and charred chunks
of stone and rubble and naked tree trunks, still smouldering and
burning freely in places. Jami had a map on which the circle was
drawn and they flew that circle, noting the roads and villages and
emergency bases.

“How the hell
are we going to do this?” Wagner wondered.

“We just start
where we land and work our way around the circle,” Felicity told
them. “And hope we find them all within the eight days.”