Sword of Allah (34 page)

‘Yes.’

‘It’s chaos down here at the network,’ he said.

‘I thought it might be.’

‘Listen, Belle, we’ve got an assignment for you.’

‘Sorry?’ An assignment? Annabelle wasn’t a reporter, she was an anchor, and Saunders’ words threw her.

‘Yeah, I’ve spoken to management and it’s kind of your area.’

‘What is?’

‘The north. We’d like you to be on the spot.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Darwin. You leave tomorrow.’

The transmission was cut, freezing the frame on Warrant Officer Wilkes for an instant, leaving Niven, Griffin, Greenway, Mortimer and Hardcastle to consider the operation they’d just approved on the fly. If it went wrong, Wilkes and Monroe were dead men walking. And all their careers would be finished. ‘If you go with this plan you could be sending these people to their deaths,’ said Mortimer, stating the obvious. He got up off the couch in Niven’s office and poured himself a glass of water. ‘And what about the legal implications?’

The Australian defence force commander nodded slowly. There was no time and therefore few other options. Revise that, he said to himself – there were
no
other options.

Griffin had already considered the legals. ‘There’s no way we’d be able to get any cooperation from Myanmar or Thailand within the time frame.’

‘So you’re saying we have to go, and worry about the consequences afterwards?’ asked Greenway.

‘Minister, I’m just saying that if we are going to go through with this, we’ll have to toss all niceties out the window.’

‘What about the plan itself, Spike? Do you think it has a snowball’s chance in hell of coming off?’ Greenway asked.

‘It’s risky and the timing is critical but, yes, Hugh, I think it has a good chance. And at the moment, it’s not like we’re besieged with alternatives,’ said Niven. The strategy had largely come from Hardcastle with some interesting refinements from Wilkes. ‘Colonel?’

‘Wilkes’s choice of ordnance is a touch of class, but the problem, as with any mission planned in five minutes with people who don’t have the appropriate training, is that the risk of failure compounds. Bottom line? Despite a crucial part of the plan coming from Wilkes, his lack of experience in this kind of warfare again makes him the weak link.’ The colonel massaged his chin. After a moment he added, ‘But with a lot of luck and good timing?’ A shrug finished his view on the matter.

‘Is anyone else available?’ asked Niven.

‘No, sir.’

‘Well it’s academic then, isn’t it, because the alternative is turning our backs on the one solid lead to Duat.’

‘Then we’d better get onto the Americans PDQ,’ said Hardcastle. ‘Last time I checked we didn’t have any AGM-154Ds in our inventory.’

Greenway turned to Mortimer. ‘What are your thoughts on that, Felix? The Americans? What do you think their response will be?’

‘I think they’ll play ball, Minister. We all heard the president’s recent state of the union address. It fits with the bit about the front line of freedom being wherever evildoers ply their trade and all that. General Trip is one mother of an evildoer and, as you say, he’s our only potential lead to the whereabouts of the WMD.’

Greenway nodded.

‘And we know we have the support of the CIA,’ added Griffin.

‘That leaves Tadzic,’ said Mortimer. ‘What about her?’ The AFP federal agent had submitted a separate report on the Myanmar drug lord on issues unconnected with Duat. Or maybe they were related at a level they hadn’t even considered. Mortimer didn’t believe in coincidences, only connections. One just had to root them out.

‘We could consider letting her go in on the second phase,’ said Griffin. ‘But we’d be putting her in harm’s way.’

‘Tadzic’s a big girl, Graeme,’ said the air marshal. ‘She’s on the team because we value her experience.’

‘With respect, sir, before you make a final decision, I think you should put it to Wilkes first,’ Hardcastle said.

‘Yep,’ said the CDF. That went without saying.

Griffin wasn’t so sure that letting Tadzic accompany Wilkes and Monroe was the right decision, and he had an uncomfortable churn in the pit of his stomach. General Trip was a study in infamy, wanted all over the world, a drug lord and a murderer, responsible for countless deaths and a universe of misery. There was nothing sexist about his reluctance to let her go. Why put people at risk unnecessarily?

‘Anyone turned up anything on those numbers Kadar Al-Jahani kept babbling about?’ asked Mortimer.

‘No,’ said Niven. ‘We’re banking on them not being significant.’

Perhaps that wasn’t so smart, thought Mortimer. They had to mean
something
. He’d read the interrogation transcripts and they featured often enough throughout. He knew the series off by heart now: 1511472723. Everyone had hoped the numbers were some kind of code for the whereabouts of the Babu Islam encampment, but Mortimer considered that unlikely. And indeed it proved to be a dead end. The sequence remained a mystery. He’d even pulled out his Scrabble set one evening and played with the letters till dawn to see what he could come up with. But, of course, it was a ridiculous idea: were the first two digits one and five or fifteen? If the numbers represented scores for letters then the one could be an a, e, i, l, n, o, r, s, t or u. It couldn’t be fifteen unless the value was five and the letter – which would have to be a k – was sitting on a triple word score. And what language would Kadar Al-Jahani use? Arabic or English? He apparently spoke French and a smattering of Bahasa too. The sequence mightn’t even be a word but something infinitely more obscure – like a part number or something. The Scrabble thing was a pointless exercise. A whole bunch of nothing there, as he knew it would be before he started. Yet on some level, he believed he was getting close. Even just raising it again with Niven brought the answer nearer in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. And then there was the Sword of Allah guy, the general Khalid bin Al-Waleed mentioned through Kadar’s interrogation transcripts
.
He’d done a little research and knew a lot about the general’s deeds now, and again he felt this was significant but in a
way his conscious mind couldn’t identify. And was the significance of the general connected to the number sequence or to something else?

Yes, the sequence had troubled everyone, but it had led nowhere – at least, nowhere that meant anything to anyone. And yet, Mortimer believed it was the key to this madness.

‘What do you think, Hugh?’ asked Niven. The Minister for Defence, Hugh Greenway, was a farmer with no military experience; despite that, the CDFs’ confidence in the man’s judgment was growing by the day. And, of course, the prime minister relied heavily on his views when it came to military matters.

‘I think it’s time I briefed the PM,’ Greenway said, standing. ‘My recommendation? We go. He may need to speak to the governor-general.’

The cancers had aged him, accelerating him towards death. Rahim noted for the first time that his fingers had become little more than brown twigs, the skin a dry and papery bark, the hands of a very old man. He noticed this as he stroked Etti’s hair while they lay in bed. Etti’s body was still warm but it would not stay that way for long. Rahim ran his hand along the skin of her back. A large red bruise covered her shoulderblade. He circled its extremities, tracing it with his fingers. Etti’s skin had a flaccid quality about it. She was gone. The malignant agent had
somehow escaped its cage and Rahim had realised too late to administer the antidote. The encampment had lacked an incinerator with which to dispose of the exposed test animals. That had been a serious oversight. Instead they’d buried the animals deep in the earth in plastic bags. There was a slight chance this had not been an effective method of sealing the carcasses and the agent had somehow escaped into the ground water. Perhaps if he had spent less time riding the stallion, he thought. With Etti’s passing the last flickering warmth in his existence had been extinguished. His work was finished, Kadar had been captured and killed, and Etti was now growing cold. Rahim’s last reasons for drawing breath were gone and so living had ceased to be worth the effort.

Rahim pressed the needle to his skin and watched it penetrate with a feeling of erotic detachment, like a voyeur at a peepshow. The stallion was his final love and this would be the final act of lovemaking. He pressed down on the plunger and watched the ejaculation depart from the cylinder. He felt it surge through his system, up his arm, through his shoulder and heart, pumping up through his neck. The drug stormed his brain and slammed the door on all pain, both physical and mental, and when Rahim opened his eyes again, he had that feeling of déjà vu.

It was the smell, that familiar smell. It rose into his nostrils and he vomited. He’d been placed on a mountain of bodies the collective stench of which was unbearable. His eyes gradually gained their focus, as did his mind. The grey walls of the city rose from the silt plain before him. Men dressed in
animal skins and leather raced about on horseback. Something was up.

Another pile of bodies was being heaped on the ground beside him, brought by a steady stream of carts from the encampment beyond. There was a distinctive rumble. Rahim turned his head slightly to see what was making the sound and the reality of the situation suddenly became apparent. The trebuchet was wheeled to the raised earthworks in front of Rahim by a team of soldiers and horses, and Rahim began to cry. Other trebuchets were being positioned so that a line of them formed a crescent beyond the walls of the city. Rahim knew this place all too well: Caffa. The trebuchets were positioned and engineers secured their wheels with chocks and stakes driven into the muddy earth. Rahim tried to change the view and, with it, his part in this play, but for some reason he was unable to do so. He was no longer in control of his dreaming. Frighteningly, it was in control of him.

The engineers turned the large spoked wheels that brought the massive arms of the trebuchets back to their stops. There was a moment of consideration as the machines were sighted to the city’s battlements. And then the loading of the ammunition began as the machines were heaped with flesh infected by the swelling disease. Most were dead but some, like Rahim, were still alive, unable to protest loudly enough that they still drew breath. A parade of generals trotted down the line, the Khan amongst them. Behind the Khan and his council rode a man on a lame mount. The man looked familiar. It was himself. But how could that be? Rahim wondered.

The Khan said something to one of the men with him and the response was a clear note blown on a ram’s horn hung
around his neck. A mighty crash thundered in front of Rahim as the trebuchet’s arm swung through its movement and slammed into its stop. A tangle of arms and legs flew into the sky. The knot separated into individual men tumbling and spinning slowly as they reached the top of the parabola and began to fall. The elevation on the catapult servicing the mountain of bodies on which Rahim was dumped had been short and its load smashed against the grey parapets, the bodies falling to the ground like dolls thrown by angry children.

A rousing cheer went up from the thousands of the Khan’s men who’d come to watch the spectacle, thrilled to have the boredom of the siege broken by something so novel.

The weight was lifted from his back and suddenly Rahim was dragged off the mountain of corpses. He was thrown into the cup on the end of the trebuchet’s arm, his nose and mouth pressed hard against the suppurating black swelling on another man’s neck. An instant later, there was a sickening acceleration and then…silence. Rahim opened his eyes and watched the earth drop away and he could see the entire line of catapults and the sea of tents that stretched away into the distance. He spun slowly in the air, weightless for an instant, before beginning the fall. He watched with morbid interest as time slowed with the approaching grey stonework of the city’s inner walls. There was fascination on the faces of the people of Caffa, almost wonderment at this rain of people. Was this some extraordinary new way of storming the city? Were these Mongols fools? The answers were, of course, yes to the first and no to the second. Rahim’s head drove down onto stone steps, cracking as an egg might, spilling its red and grey yoke.

Rahim saw this in the brief instant before death ended for all time his ability to observe anything.

Duat heard the news on the radio first, the short-wave signal swinging in and out of reception, but what he heard quickened his pulse.
Babu Islam…VX…weapon of mass destruction…Jakarta or Darwin…
He confirmed it on the Internet and then on satellite television. There was mass hysteria at Jakarta’s railway stations and surrounding airports as people climbed over each other to leave the city. There had been shootings and riots, and one 747 had exploded when a man, maddened at having been denied a seat on a plane out of the city, had somehow managed to drive a van onto the apron and crashed it into the jumbo as it refuelled. The United States donated two hundred thousand NBC suits to the city – all the spares they had – a number totally inadequate to protect the population. There had been many casualties and deaths at one dispersion centre when stocks of the protective suits had run out.

Duat shrugged off any responsibility for the victims of the violence.
The Prophet is preferable for the believers even to their own selves.
The quote from the Qur’an came back to him easily. The people of Jakarta, if they truly loved Mohammed, should rejoice. They had been granted the opportunity to give their lives for the creation of a state dedicated to Allah’s greater glory. There were similar reports from Australia of death and mayhem evoked by the prospect of a VX attack on Darwin. And that was certainly good news.

But how, he wondered, did the authorities know that Babu Islam possessed VX and the drone? What else did they know that they were keeping to themselves? Did they know the location of the encampment? The time to act was now, and not just because the security of the group’s plans might possibly be in the process of breaking down. Several men and women had recently died of the mysterious disease. Many more were sick. Rahim, the only man in the encampment with even rudimentary medical knowledge, had himself died of a heroin overdose. And now Hitu Hendra was seriously ill and the whole plan was at risk of unravelling. The encampment would have to be abandoned and the sooner the better. He walked to Hendra’s hut and found the man sitting in the shade of a tree, sweat pouring from skin turned the grey of rotting meat. A foul stench rose from him.

‘I am sorry for the smell, Emir,’ he said when he saw Duat’s hand cover his nose. ‘I no longer have the energy to keep myself clean.’

‘Can I help you up, Hitu?’ asked Duat, deeply concerned for the success of his plans when he saw the man’s deteriorating condition.

‘Yes. If I sit down too long I fall sleep and then the nightmares come.’

That frightened Duat, for he too had started having the most frightful dreams, something others had complained of as the sickness overcame them, and he was also finding it increasingly difficult to keep food down.

Duat held Hendra under an arm and helped him to his feet. He was light and his skin felt waxy, turning blue with bruising under his fingers as he watched. ‘The weapon
must be launched against the infidels now, Hitu. We have no time left.’

Hendra managed a nod. The pressure of Duat’s fingers hurt his skin, but without the support to help him stand he knew he would collapse. ‘The weather is improving,’ he said. Duat noticed that a stack of printed meteorological reports was wedged under his other arm. ‘I believe the conditions we want will be with us the day after tomorrow. Allahu Akbar.’

‘Allahu Akbar,’ said Duat, lifting a ladle from a bucket of water to the man’s lips.
God is great.