Spiral (44 page)

Darkness rushed past in a flurry of wind and rain.

Cold drops stung his eyes, and he blinked them free.

His heart was thundering in his chest.

Below and before him the Kamus was a rectangle of dim light; even as he plunged through the darkness he could see more Chinooks leaving their sanctuary. He glanced right and could see The Priest matching him for speed on this insane descent, arms above his head, swaying in time with the cables.

The suspension cables were massive, descending from the cable-car base to the central ‘slack’ area at the midpoint over the valley and then pulling up towards the Kamus, which was at a slightly lower elevation to the cable-car base. Now, as Jam flashed down the descent stretch of the cable, he reached the slack area and felt his speed begin to drop as the cable levelled out. With his thumb he flicked a tiny switch on the skimmer and felt the motor inside it begin to take over. His speed kicked in again, accelerating him past the dip in the cable and on to the ascent towards the Kamus military complex itself.

The huge bulk of Grossglockner reared ahead of and around him. Above, he could see trees made miniature by distance, along with sprinklings of snow and ice. And there, carved into the heart of the mountain, was the Kamus itself.

He felt more than saw The Priest start to slow; thinking something was wrong, Jam slowed his own ascent and glanced over at his swaying partner in this offbeat circus-act. They halted.

Much closer now, they could see the activity in the base. The Priest pulled free his digital binoculars and, dangling by one hand, surveyed the scene.

Jam licked his lips, tasting sweat beneath his sodden balaclava. His arms and shoulders were beginning to nag him with this constant pressure, and he rolled his neck, attempting to ease the tension. He glanced down, past his dangling legs. A tiny demon in his mind mocked him: what if the skimmer fails? What if it leaves you stranded here? What if they see you and start shooting?

Jam smiled. The wind buffeted him. Rain ran into his eyes.

I wouldn’t give this up for
anything,
he thought.

The Priest signalled him, and tossed the binoculars. Jam snatched them from the air and, dangling from one arm now, surveyed the base. There were perhaps eight Chinooks left, and Nex - lots of Nex, clad in grey and black. Many of them marching aboard the Chinooks, and Carter saw other, smaller, black helicopters.

At least we’ve found the fuckers, he said to himself, grimacing.

What now?

A swarm of Chinooks and smaller helicopters lifted from the Kamus. They swept away into the night, lights flickering, leaving two CH-47s behind. Jam signalled to The Priest—

We going in?

Yes. They are leaving. Soon it will be too late.

Great, thought Jam. Just as we find them, the fuckers are abandoning ship. He stowed the binoculars and, with muscles screaming, drew round his H&K G3, flicking off the safety. With his right hand, he spun the dial on the skimmer and felt the tiny machine accelerate under his touch. Across from him, swaying and buffeted, The Priest followed a similar procedure.

They flashed through the night, towards the wide bright concrete bay carved from the side of Grossglockner. Huge stacks of crates sat rimed with frost, and the two remaining Chinooks squatted silent.

Jam’s brain began calculating; three guards, four, five. He could see their weapons now and, looking up ahead, saw the arrival point for the cable cars - and the place where their mad journey would end.

Machine-gun fire rattled, to the left. Light blazed, and from nowhere spun a small black helicopter. Jam squawked as bullets whizzed past him and he spun, rain pounding him, could see fire flickering from the barrels of the helicopter’s machine guns as his own weapon began pumping in his fist—

On the ground, in the Kamus, the Nex guards had come suddenly alert. They ran forward across the concrete, lifted their weapons and searched the night. The Priest rained bullets down on them, and Jam, spinning now, hurtling backwards across the wide cable with a helicopter swooping above him, cursed this sudden turn of luck...

How had they seen him?

Fuckers! Had it been a sentry? A patrolling helicopter?

It didn’t matter now - all that mattered were the—

Bullets. They snapped past him. Jam emptied the magazine and allowed it to fall free; it tumbled into the black void below, following the sheets of icy rain, and Jam shouldered his weapon even as the helicopter spun around in a wide arc, a searchlight beaming through the heavens now to pick out both him and The Priest. More bullets howled past the two speeding men - Jam wrestled a fresh mag into his gun, flicking it around so that his arm snapped out, holding the sub-machine gun like a pistol.

‘You want to fuck with me?’ he growled, sighting on the charging helicopter with its screaming bullets and bright white eye of illumination. A stream of bullets shot out from the G3, spun across the darkness and ate a line up the cockpit. Inside, they trailed wisps of shattered glass as they smacked into the body of the Nex pilot, splashing his blood over the helicopter’s interior. The machine bucked suddenly, nose dipping, and with rotors flashing it headed straight towards—

Jam and The Priest.

Jam met The Priest’s gaze for the briefest instant; there was madness there, and anger, and strength. Bullets hurtled up from the Kamus platform, spitting around them, and as one the two men soared towards the cable car arrival point and leaped—

The pilotless black helicopter roared into the first thick cable, rotors folding around the heavy steel wire; there was a spark, a
crack
and flames billowed through an ejaculation of black smoke.

Jam and The Priest fell through the darkness, boots connecting with the edge of the icy Kamus parapet. They landed heavily, rolling across the slick platform as flames blossomed close behind and sheets of flaming steel and shrapnel from the burning rotors scythed around them. The two men rolled with thuds into a stack of crates and lay stunned for a moment, perhaps twenty feet apart.

The sky was lit up.

The fire died as quickly as it had been born.

Jam rolled to his feet as a Nex appeared - he fired five bullets into the black-clad killer’s face, and the Nex dropped without a sound. Jam flicked his gaze right, and The Priest had gone.

He ran around the crates and then halted, dropping to a crouch. He could smell something burning and, reaching up, plucked a glowing shrapnel fragment from where his singed hair and balaclava merged. It burned his fingers and he dropped the piece of metal to the ground. ‘Bitch.’

Machine guns echoed. Then came a stream of return fire. There were two thuds as bodies slapped to the concrete. Jam ran to crouch beside the wall, eyes scanning, these shadows his new-found friends. Before him the Kamus landing platform stretched out; the lights had dimmed when the helicopter had caught the thick cable and now everything was bathed in gloom.

Silence followed...

From behind came a strange creaking noise. Jam focused back on the landing area; vast, and littered with crates. It was a sniper’s heaven. But the problem was, Jam wasn’t a sniper.

How many guards?
Nex,
he corrected himself.

Five. Three dead. That left—

He saw the two survivors - they were operating as a unit. As he watched, they moved fluidly into shadows beside a stack of cargo crates - the sort used for road freight. Jam watched them climb smoothly up the sides and disappear from view. His eyes flickered to the Chinooks - deserted now, prey awaiting the final killing blow.

Jam remained in a crouch. Once more there came a strange creaking, which rose to a shrieking sound; he could see one of the cables swaying madly in the wind and it was this, he realised, that was speaking to him—

Danger, said the voice in syllables of stressed steel.

Was the cable severed?

Jam saw The Priest; he moved warily from the shadows and Jam realised, too late, that the Nex had flanked the huge man - were above him now. Jam’s Glock came up and he started firing—

Bullets struck sparks from the cargo containers, and ploughed furrows in the concrete ground. The Priest whirled - and with a scream of tortured metal one of the huge cable-car wires snapped, sending deafening echoes reverberating across the Kamus yard and down into the valley below. As the cable snapped, one half fell away into the darkness of the valley - the second half whipped back towards the base, a wrist-thick garrotte that slashed through the rain, hit the concrete of the yard and snaked at high speed across the ground—

The Priest leaped, moving fast for such a huge man. The Nex opened fire from the cargo containers, bullets whining from machine guns as the cable was drawn back to connect with the gearing mechanism of the cable-car delivery system - it heaved through crates, smashing wood apart like a thick steel fist, tearing through everything outside and within; it struck the cargo containers with deafening booms, rending their steel, wrapping them in a tight grip and dragging them squealing against concrete across the yard.

Off balance, the two Nex leaped to be free of the danger.

Jam’s sub-machine gun cut them in half.

There were more booms as the containers connected with the wall and then everything finally settled into stillness; the rain pattered all around them, and Jam, still crouched as if to spring, uncoiled and nodded towards The Priest. They both moved warily towards the helicopters, and gazed back at the destruction - the snapped, blackened cable, the smashed crates, the bodies, the flaming remains of part of the helicopter and the cable-squeezed deformed cargo containers.

‘A nice, quiet entrance, then,’ said Jam, rolling up his balaclava to sit atop his head, wiping a sheen of sweat from his face, and lighting a celebratory cigarette.

‘It might have gone smoother,’ acknowledged The Priest slowly.

‘How long do you think we have?’

‘Perhaps thirty minutes, if we are lucky,’ said The Priest. ‘I am hoping that the helicopter pilot did not have time to communicate with his fellows; otherwise we might have company sooner than we think. Maybe God was smiling, though - perhaps this whole incident has gone undiscovered.’

‘I’ll work on thirty minutes,’ said Jam sardonically. ‘You go and snoop around - check that there are none of our new-found friends waiting for us in there. I’ll get Nicky and Slater to shift their arses over here ASAP.’

‘That would be a good idea,’ said The Priest with pious sobriety, and disappeared into the wide grey tunnels of Kamus-5.

Jam finished his cigarette and pulled free his ECube. He sent an acknowledgement
blip;
it was their agreed signal for Slater and Nicky to follow up in the Apache.

‘OK, Kamus, let’s see what secrets you are hiding,’ he muttered, calming his fluttering heart. He followed The Priest and both men were soon hidden by the grey walls of mountain rock.

Jessica Rade paused, staring around guiltily like a child caught stealing a cake. She licked at nervous lips, brushed away the sweat running down her forehead, and moved closer to the large unit.

Her pass key slid easily into the lock.

She turned it.

The panel opened; she keyed in a complex series of digits on the pad. The inner sanctum opened then, to reveal a nucleus matrix of pins and shaped aluminium casting.

This was the core of Spiral_Q data.

The master of WorldCode.

The genesis of QIII logic programming.

She tapped in a few digits; there was a hiss, a disk slid into place and within ten seconds it was done. She pulled free the tiny silver optical disk and stared thoughtfully at its surface.

To hold the most damaging data in the world in your hands, she thought: the schematics for the QIII. The
plans
for how the processor worked. Its design. Its blueprint. Its heart...

The blueprints for the cubic processor’s
soul.

She smiled nastily to herself. Fuck you, you murderers, she thought; I have something you want! I have the plans for the QIII processor, and I can build as many as I like ...

Jessica thought back to all the blueprints, the design modes and nodules, the castings and design mechs. A QIII processor was an independent piece of hardware: place a QIII processor on a table top beside a PC with even the most basic of infra-red capabilities - or even more primitive than that! - and the QIII would hijack the computer’s system resources totally. Place the QIII next to a DVD drive in mid-data transfer and the QIII would leach data from the EIDE or SCSI cables, or pass alternative data through those cables. Carry the QIII into British Telecom’s HQ and place it on a couch in the foyer: within three seconds it would take control of all the machines in the building; five seconds, the UK; ten seconds, the world - including satellite links.

It was a digital parasite.

It could control anything, anywhere.

It was the God of all processors.

The QIII undeniably worked at optimum with the surrounding paraphernalia designed with its advanced specification in mind, such as integrated digital and optical links and servers. But it would also - unlike ‘dumb’ processors - make the best of a worse situation.