The War of Immensities (62 page)

She raced
outside, shouting and waving the torch but the chopper was only a
glow of landing lights amid the dense overhead haze. It passed
right over her, very low, and still she could not make out its
shape. Then it was landing, on the hill by the vehicle.
Frantically, stumbling and falling twice, she ran that way,
shouting and screaming like a mad thing lest they go away before
they found her. Then the pilot shut down the engine, and she
stumbled breathless into Harley’s arms.

“Where the
bloody hell were you?” he demanded with annoyance. “Didn’t I tell
you to stay with the vehicle...”

He hadn’t. She
was sure of it. But she had no breath to fight back. “There were
people... needed help... I was saving... lives...”

Harley looked
toward the village, and then held her tighter as his anxiety passed
away. “Yeah. We expect to lose a lot of sleepers before we can get
to them.”

Her breath was
coming back. She looked up at him. “You yelled at me.”

“I’m sorry. You
weren’t here and it gave me a fright.”

“I thought you
stood me up.”

“No. I’m on
time. You woke up early.”

“Did I?”

“Eight days
early, in fact.”

“Oh yes,” she
said, the significance of it only occurring to her slowly. “I was
only unconscious for a few minutes, I think.”

“Well, we’ll
have to wait and see how you behave at the next event,” Harley said
benignly, “but my guess is that you’re no longer a pilgrim.”

She thought
about it. Did she feel different? Or was it just that she was able
to feel at all. “You mean I’m cured?” she asked, wondering aloud
really.

“Well, yes,”
Harley smiled. “That is, if we are to assume you were ever
sick.”

Sulawesi, at
the best of times, was not a place where a person could expect to
lie unconscious for eight days and survive; the climate was too
hot, the air too fetid, the terrain too rugged, the earth too damp,
the insect life too rampant.

Felicity set up
operations at Makasa Airport since that was the place where she
first touched down, and started gathering the nearby victims,
attempting to control the circumstances as best she could. She
stayed at the airport because from all around the world, people and
supplies from government and private aid agencies began pouring
in.

She went on
television, and was able to transmit the situation on all news
outlets.

“The country is
littered with comatose people,” she said, her hand constantly
pushing her hair off her brow as she spoke, urgently and
unapologetically. “We estimate four million people spread over an
area of 160,000 square kilometres. The terrain is mostly
mountainous, dense jungle, there is no organised transport, few
roads, no railways, one decent airport. You reach most places by
the rivers, then you walk. Getting to the victims will be the
hardest part. Once they are located, they have to be lifted onto a
stretcher or a bunk or table or anything at all, to get them off
the ground where they are very vulnerable. Then they have to be
hooked up to a glucose drip, tagged for identification, and
examined for injuries. Any unattended wounds, no matter how minor,
could be fatal in a day or so here. We need helicopters and pilots,
medical staff, bedding of any kind, glucose, catheters and stands,
blankets, bandages, disinfectant, in short we don’t have enough of
anything. We need it all, right away. Tomorrow will be too late. We
expect people to die at a rate of 100,000 a day. Come to Makasa
Airport and we’ll direct you from there.”

She was not
overstating the situation. Possibly half the sleepers were doomed
never to wake. The response was immediate—the UN teams were on
stand-by anyway but most had gone to Java and the other islands
devastated by the volcanoes, where there were millions of rescues
awaiting them, and tens of millions of lives to save. Armies from
all of the surrounding countries—Thailand, Australia, Malaya,
friend and foe of Indonesia like—landed and took over under UN
direction. There was no longer any government in Jakarta to object.
Felicity and her sleepers were regarded as the secondary
problem.

Still, they
began to flow in and she supplied them, briefed them and dispatched
them in accordance with a huge gridmap of the Zone that she had set
up on the wall of the terminal building. Mostly they were from
private agencies, some of them decidedly shonky, but Felicity
welcomed them irrespective. Many demanded to be paid up-front and
she had found a safe in which to place several sacks of money in
various currencies from Joe, surrounded by a team of Wagner’s men,
menacing the jungle with machineguns. Out there, looters and
bandits rampaged.

In those
moments when she allowed herself to pause for a cup of tea, she
realised that she was presently the dictator of a small country,
where all of her subjects were asleep. Kevin Wagner would have
found the experience exhilarating, she only found it an appalling
responsibility and utterly exhausting.

Her teams
radio-ed in whenever they had anything to say. They had been able
to take over the control tower to facilitate communication. She had
several people receiving messages and compiling statistics and huge
charts. The reports indicated one in five sleepers were dead or
dying. Almost a million people. But that was a good result,
compared to the thirty million who had died in the islands to the
south.

She wept every
time she thought of Jami. Over a hundred members of the
International Geological Survey had been down there to observe the
eruptions at the time and more than half of them had been killed.
Jami had apparently slipped herself in amongst them, although there
was no confirmation available. They couldn’t even prove she had
arrived. Flight manifests established that she had flown to Hong
Kong, but since all traffic into the endangered area had been fully
restricted, there was no record of where she went from there. No
doubt she had talked her way onto a military or UN plane, using her
US Geological Survey status to do so, but no one knew that for
sure.

Except people
like Felicity who were only too aware of Jami Shastri’s
determination to get where she was going. The silly girl should
never have been out of hospital...

Still, Felicity
always terminated such moments of melancholy with the thought that
the `missing’ status meant that Jami might come wandering in at any
time, suddenly materialising, leaning on a doorjamb taking big
munches out of an apple, looking like a street kid checking out the
joint to see if there was anything worth stealing.

At night
Felicity wandered in the hanger which, like all other accessible
buildings, had been turned into a temporary hospital. The main
lighting had failed, and all illumination was from light stands
below eyelevel. It cast gigantic shadows, her own was a monster
fifty feet high that rippled along the galvanised iron of the
structure, massive and terrifying, following her everywhere. Her
despair was like that monster now, dwarfing her but just behind,
waiting to pounce and devour her.

She wondered
why she was bothering most of the time that she allowed herself to
wonder anything. Why not let these people die now, while they were
at peace? Why trouble to save them for the even more appalling
disasters that lay ahead of them? Hoping for the miracle that Jami
might have survived was little different to hoping for the one that
somehow the destruction of the planet might be averted. And now
Harley reckoned he had the cure for the Shastri Effect. The double
dose. Could she really, in any medical conscience, allow him to
subject these people to this a second time? And that only to die
anyway when the planet collapsed under their feet.

On the
television in the Orion, she had seen Lorna on the screen, on a
tape that Harley had sent her. Lorna spoke with great excitement of
her adventure, of how she had gone into the Zone and emerged awake
and unharmed. No longer a sleeper, no longer a pilgrim. Just
another media superstar ordinary person, healthy and unaffected. At
the bottom of the screen her words were mimicked in Arabic
subtitles, and then, on another appearance, with Italian subtitles.
Now she was off to California to spread the word. Hear ye! Hear ye!
Follow me and I will free you of the burden of the pilgrims. Like
some mad evangelist. Did Harley truly plan to stand them in the
middle of the Matto Grasso, where the next Zone of Influence was
expected to fall, and zap ‘em all again? And for what?

“That seems to
be the way to go,” Thyssen had said with a faint smile before he
left.

“But you don’t
know the long term effects.”

“In the
circumstances, long term effects are the least of our
troubles.”

“You can’t be
sure, from one instance, that they’ll all come through it the way
Lorna did.”

“You examined
her and passed her fully fit yourself.”

“But she’d had
a hell of a shock.”

Thyssen gave a
big sigh of exasperation at her persistence and explored the
distant mountains as he continued in a deliberately controlled
voice. “Felicity, I believe this is the answer. No other
suggestions are offering. Are you seriously proposing I ignore
it?”

“These are
people’s lives your playing with, Harley.”

“Yeah, I know.
I’m not God. So I’ll just have to fake it.”

The truth was,
in her grimmer moments, that she knew she had lost her faith in
Harley Thyssen completely. Even when she knew he was probably
right, still she was unable to believe him.

Beginning from
the town of Chitipa, there was a road they could follow
approximately that led them along the border between Zambia and
Tanzania, directly toward the southernmost tip of Lake Tanganyika.
Sometimes the bulk of the pilgrims travelled in one country,
sometimes the other, and sometimes Maynard wasn’t at all sure where
most of them were. But every day the two C-130s flew overhead and
parachuted supplies into the intended path and would report what
they could see of the migration from the air. Mostly, they reported
a vast cloud of dust from the tramping of a million feet.

The planes
reloaded primarily at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, when the incoming
stores were accumulated, but would usually make refuelling stops in
Tanzania, with the result that the Tanzanian officialdom knew what
was happening and chose to ignore a problem that they could be sure
would soon go away. Zambian officials, however, were of a different
attitude. Almost daily, individual or groups of officials would
arrive and seek out Andromeda Starlight, ask for her autograph for
their children and the children of friends and then inform her that
the pilgrims were not allowed to enter Zambia.

“They are not,”
Andromeda told them. “They are in Tanzania.”

She gave the
same answer, even though sometimes they were as much as twenty
miles inside Zambia.

There were
always many forms to be filled in and instructions concerning any
matter the gentlemen from Immigration could think of.

“You need a
permit to parachute in Zambian airspace,” was the sort of thing
they were told. Andromeda walked at the head of her flock, filling
in the forms on a clipboard without reading them, signing the CDs
and photographs of herself, always pressing on.

Then one
morning, a helicopter landed and Harley Thyssen stepped off.
Captain Maynard lowered his weapon and extended his hand. It was
their first meeting, but each was so familiar with the other that
they did not bother with introductions.

“Sorry to drag
you so far from the sea, Captain.”

“Most days, my
men and I climb a mountain and we can see one lake or another. That
sustains us.”

“How are your
men standing up, Captain?”

“They are
standing up very well, Professor, considering the constant
difficulties of the trek. One dead in a vehicle accident. Two
seriously injured in a food stampede...”

“Food
stampede?”

“They don’t
happen anymore, now that the pilgrims understand the food drops are
regular events.”

“It’s been a
long tour of continuous duty for your men, Captain, and in
unfamiliar circumstances. I can arrange for you to be relieved by
some of Wagner’s men if you wish.”

“We’ve already
had a meeting and canvassed that idea, Professor. My men decided by
unanimous vote that we’d like to go all the way. If that’s
okay.”

Andromeda
Starlight emerged with a broad smile and a welcoming hug for the
big man. “Harley, what a delight. Are you staying for tea?”

“No. I just
dropped in to hand you this,” Thyssen said and handed her a large
envelope in heavy paper. “It’s a right of passage from the
President of the Republic of The Congo.”

“Another friend
of yours, Harley?”

“No. But
acquaintances of mine did study with him in Paris.”

“Fine. But
we’re not in The Congo yet. And we are having enough of trouble
with the Zambians to keep us on our toes.”

“It’s just
practice for The Congo, I assure you,” Thyssen told her. “There,
every petty official will hold you up by force of arms if
necessary, until appropriate bribes are paid.”

“We’ve already
paid out a fortune in bribes to the Zambians.”

“Stop doing it.
It only encourages them.”

“They make a
pretence that it is some official tax or duty.”

“If they ask
for it in US dollars, it’s a bribe. The best policy is never pay.
In The Congo, the officials will literally queue up with their
hands out if you do.”

“So how do we
handle them?”

“That document
will help with the real officials. But most are conmen and bandits
and with them, concede nothing.”

“And if they
make a fight of it?” Maynard asked.

“Use your
discretion, Captain. One shot in the leg, I’m told, ought to get
rid of most of them. But, whatever you do, do not let them get the
upper hand. Take any action necessary to prevent that.”