Apocalypse

33

The giant rotor blades of the V-22 Osprey rotated as the aircraft descended toward a landing platform at the space complex, avoiding the huge runway. Ethan Warner looked down at a scattering of unmarked cars forming a defensive phalanx around an Air Force transport. Soldiers with guns surrounded the cavalcade, some of them accompanied by guard dogs.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Jarvis.

The old man shook his head at Ethan. Don’t ask, don’t tell, he guessed. Ethan unbuckled himself as the Osprey touched down and a crewman hurried up and guided them aft. The rear ramp of the Osprey had lowered, allowing them to jog down onto the asphalt landing pad amid clouds of dust and sand whipped up by the giant twin rotors.

Ethan was ushered with Lopez out across the asphalt and into the waiting Air Force transport. The vehicle pulled away quickly, armed soldiers sitting silently either side of Ethan and Lopez, their expressions hidden behind sunglasses. Jarvis remained silent as the escort travelled across the vast complex toward ranks of security gates far from the administrative buildings and visitor centers to the east. The escorting unmarked cars peeled away as the transport passed through the gates and eased to a stop alongside a heavily fortified building that looked to Ethan like some kind of bunker. The transport doors opened and the soldiers spilled out into the bright sunshine, weapons at the ready as Ethan and Lopez followed Jarvis out of the transport and through an eight-inch-thick steel door.

The interior of the bunker was cool, the heavy walls sealing it from the blazing sun outside. Bare white walls stared at Ethan and simple gray tiles lined the floor. The bunker was entirely empty but for the industrial elevator shaft in the center. Outside the elevator stood four extremely competent-looking soldiers, each carrying enough weapons and ammunition to start a small war.

‘What is this place?’ Lopez asked.

‘Former observation bunker for watching rocket launches,’ Jarvis explained as he gestured toward the elevator. ‘Hasn’t been used since the fifties.’

Ethan looked at the heavily armed soldiers. If ever a place had screamed ‘secret facility’, this was it. He glanced questioningly across at Jarvis.

‘What’s down there?’

A bearded man wearing a light shirt and casual shorts opened the elevator’s shutter doors as he beckoned for Ethan, Lopez and Jarvis to follow him.

‘Something so classified,’ Jarvis explained, ‘that there was no real way to protect it except by making it look so uninteresting that nobody would bother investigating it. It can only be accessed via direct clearance from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, which I obtained earlier this morning when the nature of this case became clear.’

The four guards moved neatly aside as Ethan stepped into the elevator alongside Lopez and Jarvis. The man in the shorts pulled the shutters closed, and with a press of a button they were on their way.

‘You knew what we were up against beforehand?’ Lopez asked Jarvis.

Ethan replied before Jarvis could.

‘Of course he did. It’s becoming your modus operandi, Doug, telling us the minimum that we need to know.’

‘Official secrets are exactly that,’ Jarvis responded. ‘Secret. I wouldn’t have brought us down here unless it was absolutely necessary.’

Lopez snapped, ‘How many deaths does it take before something becomes necessary to you?’

Jarvis sighed, keeping his voice low. The man in shorts remained discreetly silent, standing with his hands behind his back.

‘It’s not always my call to make, Nicola,’ he said, clearly frustrated at the limitations of his influence at the DIA. ‘Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to get the top brass to relinquish some of their paranoia and give permission for classified technology like this to be used in non-military investigations. You know the score, both of you. It takes a lot of effort to support you from behind the scenes, and there are plenty of pen-pushing bureaucrats at the Pentagon who would be only too happy to see us shut down.’

Ethan watched as walls of dark earth passed by, braced back by huge steel pillars. Lights set into the bare soil cast shifting shadows through the elevator as it descended into the depths.

‘How far down does this go?’ Lopez asked.

‘Three hundred meters,’ came the response from the man in shorts, speaking for the first time. ‘Deep enough to prevent any electromagnetic signatures showing up on privately held orbiting cameras or foreign spy satellites.’

‘This is Michael Ottaway,’ Jarvis said. ‘He’s our lead scientist here.’

The elevator continued to sink, and then the sound of activity permeated the air as the temperature began to rise. Ethan belatedly realized why Ottaway was wearing shorts. The elevator slowed down and an exit appeared that opened out onto a long, well-lit corridor. Four more guards awaited them and opened the elevator’s shutter doors before forming a phalanx and marching away down the corridor.

Ethan followed, flanked by Lopez and Jarvis as they were led to the doors at the far end. The soldiers stopped, and one of them entered a key-code into a pad. The doors hissed open and the soldiers stood aside, allowing Ethan to pass through.

The underground facility was about the size of a basketball court and half-filled with computer terminals manned by an odd assortment of uniformed military figures and scientists whose civilian clothes, almost without exception, included shorts.

Across one wall, a huge screen displayed a digital map of the earth, laced with orange lines mapping the trajectories of what Ethan guessed were satellites or spacecraft.

‘This way,’ Jarvis said, walking past Ethan and heading toward a large raised platform edged with padded railings, like a giant boxing ring.

Within the platform, a pair of soldiers stood wearing strange dark-gray helmets with visors and blocky-looking gloves. Each stood upon a rolling platform like a running machine. The platforms themselves were supported by a gyroscopic frame that rotated to match the soldier’s direction of travel.

‘What are they doing?’ Lopez asked, watching the two soldiers.

‘Retracing the paths of their fallen comrades,’ Jarvis explained.

Ethan said nothing as they walked to where a group of men wearing the obligatory shorts were watching a series of plasma screens next to a computer terminal. Ethan spotted a large steel casing descending from the ceiling on the opposite side of the underground facility, a thick bundle of wires and optical fibers spilling from within the casing and snaking their way to the rear of the facility. Across the entire back wall were ranks of what Ethan could tell were supercomputers, all humming as they ran trillions of calculations through immense databanks.

Ottaway gestured to the plasma screens as he turned to Jarvis.

‘So, what can I do for you?’

Jarvis handed Ottaway the photograph of Charles Purcell.

‘I need you to find this man and let us follow him up until the present day, right this moment, if possible.’

Ottaway took the photograph from Jarvis and glanced at it.

‘Do we have a name, address, where we should be looking, all that kind of stuff?’

‘You will,’ Jarvis said. ‘His name’s Charles Purcell and he used to work upstairs at NASA. Start searching in Miami.’

‘Okay, no problem. It’ll take us about ten minutes to track him down.’

Ottaway turned and pressed a button on his computer before speaking into a microphone that he clipped around his ear.

‘Okay, change of plan. We need you to perform a search-and-identify mission. Stand by.’

The two soldiers on the platform stopped moving and waited with their hands clasped before them as Ottaway began scanning the image of Charles Purcell into his computer. Lopez turned to Jarvis.

‘Okay, why don’t you quit the cloak-and-dagger and tell us what this place is?’

‘This,’ Jarvis replied, ‘is Project Watchman.’

‘What does it do?’ Ethan asked.

Ottaway looked up from his computer.

‘Watchman is a classified program handled by the Air Force and NASA. Put simply, we collaborate with the Air Force’s spy satellite program, gathering visual intelligence from global sources, and crunch the data streams here at this facility to produce a three-dimensional representation of the entire planet.’

Ethan hesitated for a moment as his brain attempted to digest and process what he had just heard.

‘You mean this is some kind of virtual-reality device?’

‘In a sense,’ Ottaway confirmed. ‘But this is a bit more than just virtual reality.’

Jarvis grinned as he looked at Ethan.

‘Charles Purcell seems somehow to be able to see into the future. It would also appear likely that Joaquin Abell, or somebody within IRIS, possesses that same ability. But here, we can do something that they cannot.’

Michael Ottaway tapped a button on his keyboard and an image of Charles Purcell appeared, along with a progress bar emblazoned with the word SEARCHING. He turned to look at Ethan.

‘We can look into the past.’