Ark Angel (27 page)

extending in every direction, up and down. It was like an enormously complicated toy.

Alex was slumped in a chair, his face grim, still dressed in the borrowed combat clothes. Ed Shulsky and Tamara Knight were sitting opposite him. Tamara looked exhausted, grey with pain and fatigue. She’d accepted a shot of morphine but nothing else. She wasn’t leaving Alex until a decision had been made.

The fourth person in the room was Professor Sing Joo-Chan, the man in charge of the Gabriel 7 launch. The flight director seemed a completely different person. He had lost his calm and self-possession and looked as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. His face was pale and he was sweating profusely, dabbing at his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Like everyone else, he claimed to know nothing about the bomb, nothing about Drevin’s real plans. He had promised to cooperate, to do anything the CIA required, and for the time being Shulsky was giving him the benefit of the doubt. But Alex wasn’t so sure. The professor had been recruited by Drevin; he had been in charge of the operation from the very start. Alex was certain he knew more than he was letting on.

“This is the situation,” Shulsky said. “Gabriel 7 will dock with Ark Angel at half past two this afternoon.

It’s carrying a bomb which will go off exactly two hours after that.” He glanced at Alex. “Drevin told you that himself.”

Alex nodded. “That’s right. Half past four. That’s what he said.”

“Now, as I understand it, there are three docking ports on Ark Angel.” Shulsky pointed to the diagram.

“Two of them are positioned at the very centre … here. But that’s not where Gabriel 7 is heading, because if the bomb blew up there it would simply rip the whole space station apart.” He reached out and tapped a section on the other side, at the end of a long corridor. “Gabriel 7 will dock here,” he explained. “Right on the edge.”

“Yes—the very edge!” Sing agreed. Alex noticed that the professor’s eyes were wide and unfocused. He was taking care not to look at anyone directly. “That’s how it was decided. That’s what Mr Drevin insisted.”

“The bomb must be inside the observation module,” Shulsky said. “And I guess it’ll be in exactly the right position. Most of the force from the explosion will go outwards. It’ll have the effect of a push in the wrong direction, propelling the entire space station back to earth.” He took a deep breath and for a moment something like panic flashed in his eyes. “The hell of it is, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can’t blow up Gabriel 7. And according to Professor Sing here, we can’t access the computers to reprogram it.”

“You can’t!” The white handkerchief was out again. “Only Mr Drevin had the codes. Only Mr Drevin—”

“I’ve checked it, Alex,” Tamara said. “It’s true. The entire system has been shut down. It would take us days—possibly even weeks—to hack into it.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but that leaves us with just one option,” Shulsky went on. “We have to send somebody up to Ark Angel. Believe me, Alex, it’s the only way. Someone has to find the bomb and neutralize it—by which I mean switch it off. And if that isn’t possible, then they have to move it. They have to carry it into the middle of the space station and leave it there. That way, the force of the explosion will have a completely different effect. It’ll destroy Ark Angel. What pieces are left will scatter and burn up in the outer atmosphere.”

“You will destroy Ark Angel!” Professor Sing whispered the words as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard.

“I don’t give a damn about Ark Angel, Professor!” Shulsky almost shouted the words. “My only concern is Washington.”

“Move the bomb or switch it off—what difference does it make?” Alex asked. “How is anyone going to get there?”

“That’s the whole point,” Shulsky said. “The Soyuz-Fregat is ready for launching. It was all set to carry Arthur into space.” He paused. “But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t carry you.”

“Me? You really want to send me into outer space?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not an orang-utan.”

“I know. I know. But you have to understand! What we’re talking about here, it’s not as complicated as you think. I mean, a rocket is a pretty simple piece of machinery. It’s just like a tank. It’s not as if you have to control it or anything—that’s all done from here.” Shulsky gestured around the room. “We still have access to the flight programs for the Soyuz-Fregat. The computers marked COMMAND tell the rocket what to do.

The docking, the re-entry … everything. And those marked TELEMETRY allow us to monitor the health and well-being of the passenger. You.”

“Not me.”

“There is no one else,” Shulsky said, and Alex could hear the desperation in his voice. “That’s the whole point, Alex. We’re adults. We’re all too big!” He turned to Professor Sing. “Tell him!”

Sing nodded. “It’s true. We planned to put Arthur—the ape—into space. I made all the calculations personally. The launch, the approach, the docking—all of it. But the first differential is the weight. The weight of the passenger. If the weight changes, then all the calculations have to change and that will take days.”

“What makes you think I weigh the same?”

The professor spread his hands. “You weigh almost the same, and we can work within a margin. It’s possible. But it’s not just the weight. It’s the size.”

“The capsule has been modified and none of us would fit inside,” Shulsky explained. “There isn’t enough room. You’re the only one who can go, Alex. Heaven knows, I wouldn’t ask you otherwise. But there is no other way. It has to be you.”

Alex’s head was swimming. He hadn’t slept for almost thirty hours; he wondered if this whole conversation wasn’t some sort of hallucination. “But how would I even find the bomb?” he asked. “And if I did find it, how would I know where to put it?”

“You put it here.” Again Shulsky pointed at one of the modules in the diagram. “This is the sleeping area.

You’ll pass through it on your way to Gabriel 7. It’s the very heart of Ark Angel. This is where the bomb has to be when it blows up. I’ve gone over it with the professor and he agrees. If it happens here, Washington will be safe.”

“I’m just meant to carry it from one place to another?”

“It’ll weigh nothing at all,” Sing reminded him. “You see—it’s zero gravity!”

Alex felt weak. He wanted to argue but he knew that nobody was listening. They had all made up their minds.

Tamara reached out and took his hand. “Alex, I’d go if I could,” she said. “I’m just about small enough and I guess I weigh the same as you. But I don’t think I’d make it. Not with this bullet wound…”

“I thought most kids would give their right arm to go into outer space,” Shulsky added unhelpfully.

“Haven’t you ever dreamt about becoming an astronaut?”

“No,” Alex said. “I always wanted to be a train driver.”

“Statistically, the Soyuz has an excellent reliability record,” Tamara said. Alex remembered seeing her reading about space travel on Drevin’s plane. “Hundreds of them have gone up, and there have been only a couple of hiccups.”

“How long will it take him to get there?” Shulsky asked. As far as he was concerned, Alex had already agreed to go.

“He’ll be launched along the plane of orbit,” Professor Sing replied. “I can’t explain it all to you now. But he’ll follow a trajectory that exactly matches the inclination of Ark Angel. Eight minutes to leave the earth’s atmosphere. And he will dock in less than two hours.”

“And the Soyuz-Fregat is ready?”

“Yes, sir. It’s ready now.”

That struck Alex as odd. He knew that the second launch had been brought forward—but why had Drevin been preparing to send the ape into space at all, just hours after Gabriel 71 If his plan had worked, Ark Angel would have been destroyed soon after the second rocket arrived. Not for the first time, Alex was aware that there was something they didn’t know, something that everyone had overlooked. But his thoughts were in such confusion that he couldn’t work out what it was.

Tamara was still holding his hand. “I know it’s too much to ask,” she said. “I know you don’t want to do it.

But, believe me, we wouldn’t ask you if there was another way. And you’ll be safe. You’ll make it back. I know you will.”

Suddenly everyone was silent. They were all looking at him. Alex thought of the bomb that was closing in on Ark Angel even now. He thought of an explosion in outer space, and the space station plunging towards Washington. What had Drevin said? Four hundred tonnes of it would survive. The shock wave would destroy most of the city.

He thought of Jack Starbright, who was somewhere in the middle of it all, visiting her parents. And he knew that—just like Arthur—he didn’t have any choice.

He nodded.

“Let’s get you suited up,” Ed Shulsky said.

After that, things moved very quickly. For Alex, it was as if his world had disintegrated. He was aware of bits and pieces but nothing flowed. From the day he’d managed to get himself caught up with MI6, he had often found it hard to believe what was happening to him. But this was something else again. He seemed to have lost any sense of his own identity. He was being swept along, out of control, edging closer and closer to something that filled him with more horror than he had ever known.

He was made to shower and dress in the clothes that he had seen in the building where he and Tamara had been imprisoned: a white T-shirt and a blue tracksuit with the Ark Angel logo stitched onto the sleeve.

Straps passed under his feet to hold the trousers in place and there were six pockets fastened with zips.

Suddenly he was surrounded by people he had never met, all of them giving him advice, preparing him for the terrible journey he was about to make.

“You need to watch out for what we call the breakaway phenomenon!” This from a man in glasses with hair on his neck. Some sort of psychologist. “It’s a feeling of euphoria. You may like it so much up there that you won’t want to come back.”

“I somehow doubt it,” Alex growled.

“We’ll be attaching EKG and biosensor leads…”

“We’re going to give you an injection.” This was a blonde-haired woman in a white coat. She was holding a large hypodermic syringe. “This is phenergan. It’ll make you feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“You’ll almost certainly throw up when you reach zero gravity. Most astronauts do.”

“Well, that’s something you never see on Star Trek,” Alex muttered. “All right.” He rolled up his sleeve.

“Not your arm, Alex. This goes in your butt…”

He wondered why they hadn’t given him a proper spacesuit, the sort of thing he’d seen in old films of the moon landings. Professor Sing explained.

“You don’t need it, Alex. Arthur, also, wouldn’t have worn a spacesuit. You will be inside a sealed capsule.

If there was a leak, it’s true that you would need a spacesuit to protect you; but that’s not going to happen, I promise you. Trust me!”

Alex looked at the dark, blinking eyes behind the spectacles. He knew that Sing was ingratiating himself with the CIA, trying to persuade them that he had been innocent from the start. He was sure that Ed Shulsky and Tamara would be watching him throughout the entire launch. But he still didn’t trust the professor. He was certain there was something he wasn’t being told.

They gave him a headset and radio and wired up his heart. It seemed impossible to Alex that anyone could go into space like this, without months of training. Tamara never left his side, trying to reassure him. A fourteen-year-old was more adaptable than an adult, she said. It was going to be a bumpy ride, but he would come through it comfortably because he was young. And maybe Ed Shulsky was right. It would be something to talk about. An experience he would never forget.

And then he was in an electric buggy with Tamara and Professor Sing, feeling strange in his tracksuit, the material soft against his skin. The rocket was ahead of him. He looked at it but didn’t see it. It was as if the connection had been severed between his eyes and his brain. It was huge. The capsule that would carry him into space was at the very top of a silver tank as tall as an office block, suspended between two gantries. Water was cascading down. Was it raining? No, the water seemed to be coming from the rocket.

He could hear the metal creaking as if it needed a huge effort just to keep it in place. There were clouds of white steam pouring out—boil-off from the propellant. Alex saw a deep trench running from the launch pad towards the sea; he guessed it would carry the flames from the solid rocket boosters. It seemed impossible to him that this oversized firework could actually rise up and carry him into space.

In a lift, climbing higher and higher, still with Tamara and the professor. He could see the whole island, the sea stretching out an amazing blue—and there was Barbados in the distance. He was still being given advice. So many words. But they didn’t actually penetrate. They just flitted around him like moths.

“…do everything lightly, do everything slowly. Don’t look directly at the sun. It’ll blind you. Don’t even look at the clouds around the earth. The sun reflects… Some parts of Ark Angel will be hot—some will be cold. There have been problems with the air-conditioning… You’re going to feel strange. Don’t worry if your face becomes puffy or swells up. If your spine stretches. If you need to go to the toilet. It’s the same for all astronauts. Your body has to adapt to zero gravity…”

Who was talking? Were they really being serious? How could anybody expect him to do this?

“You’ll need to access the observation module of Gabriel 7 to get to the bomb. There’s a hatch. You saw it on the diagram. You move it to where Ed showed you and then you get back into the Soyuz’s re-entry module. Don’t waste any time. We’ll control everything from here. You’ll feel it disengage…”

And then he was inside. They had certainly been right about the amount of space. No adult would have been able to fit into it. He was lying on his back in a metal box that could have been some kind of complicated washing machine or water tank, his feet in the air and his legs so tightly packed in that his knees were touching his chin. There were tiny windows on either side but they were covered with some sort of material and he couldn’t see out of them. There were no controls. Of course not. Arthur the orang-utan wouldn’t have needed controls. Professor Sing was wiring him up. More monitors. Now Alex was the one who was sweating. They had told him he would sweat even more when he was in outer space. Because of fluids moving up, the body’s salt concentration being upset. Alex tried to put it out of his mind. He didn’t even believe he would get there. He didn’t think he would survive the journey.