Part Three MEXICAN CARNIVAL

carnival [carnem levare, to remove meat] 1. the period of feasting and revelry just before Lent. 2. a programme of contests, etc.

Cape Canaveral

Forty days.

Catch Karibisha a minimal five days from impact. To achieve this, spend ten days getting to it (the spacecraft’s speed is optimistically half that of the death asteroid; therefore ten days of travel by the spacecraft on the way out is covered in five by Karibisha on the way in).

Subtract those ten days of travel time from the forty to impact.

The balance is the time which remains to prepare and launch the spacecraft.

It’s simple: cut the one hundred days of spacecraft preparation to thirty, or die.

* * *

“Doctor Merryweather? I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour… my name is Rickman, Walt Rickman… no, we haven’t met, sir… Chairman of Rockwell Industries, the Aerospace Division… I have a problem… it’s pretty late here too — I’m calling from Downey, California.”

“Is that your sister, honey?”

Merryweather struggled up to a sitting position on his bed. “Okay, Mister Rickman, I guess I’m awake. What can I do for you?”

“I’m told you’re the best weather man in Texas.”

“Not at three in the morning.”

“That’s right, sweetie, tell her to take a taxi.” Merryweather waved his wife to silence with an annoyed gesture.

The Rockwell Chairman’s voice had a worried edge to it. “I’ve just been wakened by my engineers at Canaveral. You know the Venus probe we’re launching?”

“Of course.”

“They’re catching a launch window in six hours. They’ve broken out of the T minus six hour hold and have started on the tank chilldown and propellant loading.”

Merryweather scratched his head. “So what, Mister Rickman?”

“Something bizarre is going on out there. The MMT at Johnson are ignoring the Weather Launch Commit Criteria. My engineers think they’ve gone mad.”

“Who is the Flight Director at Johnson these days?”

“A guy called Farrell.”

Merryweather’s wife was poking his ribs. “Joe Farrell. He’s rock solid, Mister Rickman.”

“Doctor Merryweather, that’s a five-billion-dollar bird out there and they’re ignoring the wind criteria and my people tell me that if they attempt a launch the Shuttle will hit the gantry on the way up.”

“Mister Rickman. There are ten first-class meteorologists out at JSC and an equally good team at Canaveral. On Shuttle weather support they have about a hundred years of corporate experience between them. If they say it’s okay to launch, believe me, it’s okay to launch.”

“It’s the SMG who’ve asked for you. They want you at Johnson. You’re expected and authorized. I spoke to Senator Brown.”

The statement brought Merryweather up short. The chief of the Spaceflight Meteorology Group, after he himself had retired from the post, was Emerson, a young, slightly anxious but highly able man. If George Emerson was asking for his former boss, something bizarre was indeed going on. Merryweather had one last shot: “If FD is violating the launch commit criteria he’ll be overruled by his own MMT.”

“Except that it’s not working out that way. The Mission Management Team seem to be hypnotized or something. Look, my engineers are a hard-nosed bunch and they’re telling me something weird is going on out there.”

Merryweather said, “This is a joke, right?” There was a silence at the other end of the line. “Okay, maybe I should get on over.”

“A helicopter is on its way and should reach you in five minutes. You have no overhead wires or other impediments in your back garden? Restricted entry to the prime firing room begins in two hours but I’ve fixed you up with a badge. I’m grateful, Doctor.”

“Don’t be. I have no official standing now and I can’t influence events. I’m just curious.”

* * *

Cut an improbable one hundred days to an impossible thirty. How?

In an organization as open to public scrutiny as NASA, internally and externally, with an ethos of safety and careful, meticulous planning drummed into its soul following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, how?

First explain to your top managers and your celestial mechanicians and your flight design analysts that sleep is hazardous to their health. Then, with due authorization and swearings to secrecy, tell them why. Then step back; get out of their hair.

Abandon flotation tanks and prolonged astronaut training. Stick the inexperienced mission specialists into existing Hamilton Standard space suits, show them the oxygen switch and the waste management facility, and tell them to touch nothing else.

Use experienced Shuttle pilots and arrange it so that the mission specialists, safely inside the orbiter, tell them how to prime the nukes during EVA. Don’t get that bit wrong.

Abandon all thought of spacecraft environmental testing, simulated mission environments and the like.

Use big hunks of old interplanetary mission and operational support planning. Tear out the pages that don’t apply. Do likewise with the computer programmes on board and on the ground.

Improvise.

Pray.

KSC press release no. 257-02

The Venus probe passed an important milestone today when it was hoisted atop the Air Force inertial upper stage, prior to being loaded into the Frontiersman Space Shuttle. The operation was begun at midnight precisely and it was on the upper stage by 1 a.m. Until now, IUS and the probe it carries have been undergoing integration and testing at the Payload Hazardous Services Facility (PHSF) at Kennedy Space Center. Verification tests will begin immediately and are expected to be complete within twenty-four hours. Probe close-up activities will begin on the following day, February 13, leading to its encapsulation inside the Shuttle cargo bay. The long crawl to Launch Complex 39-B on Cape Canaveral Air Station will then begin.

“In this weather? Idiots.”

“Sir?” The young Air Force pilot, startled, looked across at the white-haired meteorologist.

“Just talking to myself, son. It happens when you get to my age.”

“Yes sir. I talk to my teddy bear.”

Merryweather put the press release back in his briefcase. He glanced down at the chalets and villas of the NASA executives over which they were flying. The familiar outline of the Johnson Space Center, a sixteen-hundred-acre sprawl, appeared ahead. Merryweather tapped the pilot’s shoulder and indicated a spot near the warehouses at the edge of the site: he wanted to walk. The helicopter sank over warehouses and test facilities, flew low over the astronaut isolation HQ, and settled gently down on to a field at the edge of the site.

Merryweather collected his badge and shook hands with a young, plump man. “Hi George. It’s gusty out there, prevailing west-nor’west, humidity eighty per cent. Cloud ceiling moderate.”

“Am I glad to see you, sir. I’m going nuts. Come along to the Weather Room.”

A bank of familiar terminals faced Merryweather. He went straight to one of them, and looked at a set of black lines covering a map of North America. Over Canada, the USA and Mexico the lines seemed to meander aimlessly. Further out they wandered over Cuba and the islands of the West Indies. But just outside Mexico, they formed into tight, concentric circles.

“Ho hum. Anything from GOES or the DMSPs?”

“Over here.”

For the next forty minutes Merryweather immersed himself in a complex mass of data from geostationary satellites, polar orbiters, radars from Cocoa Beach to Melbourne, sixty-foot towers scattered around the launch pad, buoys in the heaving seas up to 160 miles from Cape Canaveral, balloons at 100,000 feet in the stratosphere and lightning detection systems at over thirty sites around the Cape. Telephone exchanges with the USAF 45th Space Wing Commander and the Weather Team at Canaveral confirmed what Merryweather clearly saw: the weather pattern was unstable and deteriorating.

Two sets of weather criteria have to be satisfied before a Shuttle launch is permitted. The weather has to be right for launch, and it has to be right for landing. The launch criteria need only the observed weather at the moment of launch; but the end-of-mission criteria require a forecast. Merryweather concurred with his worried colleague: neither set of conditions was satisfied.

* * *

Merryweather entered the third-floor Flight Control Room, the one used for Department of Defense payloads. The Flight Director was sitting on the bench with his back to a console, in conversation with the CAPCOM, Gus Malloy, a former astronaut.

“Jim, heard you’d turned up. Good to see you.” The FD’s expression did not match his words of welcome.

Without preliminaries, Merryweather leapt into the attack. “Joe, what’s going on here? They tell me you’re overriding your Weather Team. The landing criteria will not be satisfied. You need a cloud ceiling more than eight thousand feet and you’ll have six. You need visibility five miles and you’ll have four. You know crosswinds have to be less than twenty-five knots and you’ll have forty. There’s an even chance of strong turbulence at the point of landing, and I couldn’t rule out a thunderstorm in forty-eight hours. You want to fly your Shuttle back through anvil cirrus? Maybe in a thunderstorm?”

“Jim, at the worst, we can put down in Morocco instead of Edwards. You guys are all the same. You know the standard weather parameters are conservative. We’re just giving a little flexibility.”

“A little? There’s a storm heading in from the Gulf. I practically guarantee precipitation at Kennedy within the next four hours. You’ll be gusting well over the thirty-four-knot peak. The damn thing could hit the gantry on the way up.”

“Jim, you’re retired, remember?”

“You’ll never get this through the poll.”

If only I could explain, the FD thought. But he simply shrugged and said, “We’ve taken an executive decision. And the final decision to launch or scrub is mine.”

“I have no official status here but I want it noted that I concur with your SMG. The Flight Rules are not satisfied, neither LCC nor RTLS criteria. And the downrange weather advisory gives seas in excess of five: there are twenty-foot waves out there, Joe. Launch Frontiersman in this and I’ll personally crucify you at the congressional inquiry.”

“So noted. We’re tanking up now and we GO in four hours and twenty minutes.”

“If I recall the routine, the astronauts are due a weather briefing in fifteen minutes. They’ll refuse to fly.”

“You’ll see.”

* * *

The prime firing room at the Kennedy Space Center has its own code of discipline. Conversation is limited to the business in hand: there is no place for idle chatter between the serious professionals who man it. No personal telephone calls are made except in an emergency. No reading material unrelated to the business in hand will be seen therein. The professionals do not wander about; each man (and they are nearly all men) remains at his assigned station, concentrating on the task in hand.

The vocabulary of the firing room is terse, technical and laden with acronyms. This clipped conversation is not used to exclude the uninitiated; rather, by stripping away non-essential verbiage, the language yields precision of speech and concept; and the vital outcome is that, in a complex, changing and highly technical environment, individuals understand each other perfectly. As a sub-set of the English language it serves its purpose even though, to the outsider, there is something faintly absurd about describing a lavatory as a waste management facility, or a stranded astronaut’s fate as an ongoing death situation.

Three hours before launch, entrance to the firing room is restricted; movement within the room is minimized. Twenty minutes before launch, while the “ice team” are making a last check on the ice which builds around the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks, and the white room close-out crew help the astronauts into their little vehicle, the door of the firing room is locked. And fifteen minutes before launch, readiness polls are conducted amongst the Shuttle Launch team. These polls ensure collective responsibility, and protect the system against eccentric or arbitrary decisions by highly placed officials.

Launch Director: Russ, on the weather, we have an update.

Spacecraft: Shoot.

LD: SMG confirm exceedence on the landing crosswinds at Edwards.

Spacecraft: Badly?

LD: Gusting up to forty knots, six over limit. You could always put down in Morocco. The main problem is Ailsa. She’s moving our way faster than predicted. Giving us a high gust situation now and 45WS tell us we’re close to violation of the weather LCCs. And it’s going to get worse. We either break out of hold now or abort.

Spacecraft: Roger. We can feel the shaking in here. What gives with the MEC?

LD: Our programmers are still on it.

Spacecraft: What’s the time factor on the crosswind?

LD: We have a Jimsphere up and your old pal Tony is now overhead in the T-38. SWO has issued a down-range weather advisory.

Spacecraft: I copy. Look, Zeek, why don’t we just break out of hold and launch? Give us a mark at T minus five minutes and one minute prior to exit. JSC can play with the Mach attack angles and get a fresh load profile while we’re counting down.

LD: Patience. JSC are polling now. Let’s wait for verification. Spacecraft: The guys in the spacesuits say yes.

LD: Russ, you don’t even have a vote.

Spacecraft: We can manual override on the tank separation.

Houston Flight: NTD, this is Flight on channel 212.

LD: Go ahead.

Houston Flight: The KSC Management poll is in. Prime Launch Team report no violation of the LCC.

That was a lie.

Engineering verifies no impediments to continuation of the count. MMT Chair verifies that continuation is approved by the senior managers. What is the KSC poll?

LD: We agree with continuation and are loading up a new I-profile.

Spacecraft: What’s happening on the tail computer?

LD: Still trying, and we’ll initialize the IUS before we pick up the count.

Houston: Launch Director, Operations Manager here on 212 circuit. LSEAT have made a final recommendation. We’re permitting some flexibility in the LCC wind criteria.

But they had just said the criteria were met. Someone was attempting the old CYA: Cover Your Ass.

We confirm you are GO to continue the count.

The voices were as calm and controlled as ever. But to Merryweather, sitting aghast in the discretionary chair next to the Flight Director, the firing room had been hi-jacked by maniacs.

LD: Ah, copy. Thank you.

NTD: The countdown clock will resume in two minutes on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.

NTD: The countdown clock will resume in one minute on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.

NTD: Stand by. Four, three, two, one, mark. Ground Launch Sequencer has been initiated.

Orbiter Test Conductor: Commence purge sequence four.

OTC: You have go for LOX ET pressurization.

OTC: Flight crew, close and lock your visors. Initiate O2 flow.

OTC: T minus one minute thirty seconds.

OTC: Minus one minute.

OTC: Go for auto sequence start.

OTC: Fifteen seconds. Ten. Main engine start, three, two, one. Ignition.

The light, when it reached the dark-adapted eyes of the spectators, was painful in intensity. A blowtorch flame thrust down from the rockets in a kaleidoscope of shock waves and swept out from underground tunnels in a carnival of steam.

The thunder, when it reached them, bellowed out over the swamps, tore at sinews, shook ground and bones and flesh. Then the retaining clamps swung back and Frontiersman surged upwards.

It almost made it. A sudden squall of wind and rain, a freak thing, tilted the ship and swung it away from the tower. Rapidly, the onboard computers tried to compensate; the sudden angry roar would reach the onlookers twenty seconds later. But then the freak gust dropped at the very second the computers were compensating and the huge fuel valves were trying to respond. Frontiersman flung itself against the tower like a man pushing against a door which suddenly opens. It just touched. A collective Aah! went up from thousands of people braving the wind on the hoods and roofs of their cars. A loud Bang!, like a metal hatch being slammed shut, would reach them, but disaster was already plain to see.

The Shuttle began to spin. The flaming tail disappeared into the clouds half a mile above, but the direction was wrong. Seconds later the clouds lit up as if a giant flashbulb had popped, and shock waves ripped overhead, with a deep Thud! which was more felt than heard. And then there was a luminous, spreading yellow ocean, and the heat on the face even at five miles, and the fragments of tank and booster raining out of the illuminated clouds, and crashing to the ground along with the debris was the hope, the only hope, of averting Nemesis.

Not that Merryweather, staring horrified at the sight on the giant screen in the Houston firing room, knew it. But the Chief Engineer knew it; and the Flight Director knew it; and a small group of powerful men, clustered grimly around a television in the Oval Office, knew it too.

His Majesty’s Treasury

It was a brief paragraph, tucked away in page two of The Times:

Cresak flies in and out

Mr. Arnold Cresak, President Grant’s National Security Adviser, flew into London this morning and had lunch with the Prime Minister. He flew back on a regular commercial flight in the afternoon. The meeting was concerned with mutual security matters of a routine nature.

Routine like a nuclear strike, Webb thought, sipping his second tea of the morning.

Graham bustled importantly into the Hall carrying a pile of papers which Webb recognized as the new publicity drive forms from Central Office. He spotted Webb and adopted an “I want words with you” expression before joining the self-service breakfast queue.

Screw that, Webb thought. He quickly folded away The Times, slipped out and made his way to the Common Room. A smokeless coal fire was glowing bright red and his favourite leather armchair was empty. He picked up Icarus from the coffee table, sat down with a sigh of pleasure and swore quietly when Arnold tapped him on the shoulder. Webb followed the janitor across the drizzling quadrangle to the Lodge.

“Sorry about the mess, Doctor,” Arnold said, clearing the Sun, the Sporting Life and a half-eaten slice of toast from a spindly wooden chair. Webb sat down and found himself facing a pouting nymph with enormous breasts. She was wearing only torn, thigh-length jeans and was straddling a giant spark plug. The calendar was two years old and it was too early in the morning for busty nymphs.

“About time,” the Astronomer Royal growled over the telephone. “The Houseman would like to know the right ascension of Praesepe. Another damned freebie for you, Mister Kahn.”

Webb had been dreading it for weeks; he felt himself going pale. He went smartly back to his flat and quickly stuffed clothes, toiletries, papers and false passport into his backpack. A casual eavesdropper would probably not know that a Houseman was a fellow of Christ Church College; nor that Praesepe, the Beehive, was a star cluster. He took down a perspex star globe from the top of a wardrobe, blew off the dust and found Praesepe: its right ascension — its longitude in the sky — was nine hours and thirty minutes. His watch read ten minutes past nine. That gave him twenty minutes to reach Christ Church College, presumably the main entrance at St. Aldates. Enough time for Webb, but not for the casual eavesdropper to work out the AR’s message even if it had been recognized as coded. The fact of speaking in code was itself disturbing information. As an afterthought, Webb grabbed his laptop computer on the way out.

Feeling slightly foolish, he took a side door and trespassed through the Warden’s back garden, not daring to look towards the windows of the house. He climbed over a garden wall, half expecting an outraged shout, and found himself in the college car park. He crossed Parks Road, looking back at Wadham, and had a near-miss with a female cyclist wearing a long scarf and a Peruvian hat. Nobody was hanging about the college; there were only the usual motley students coming and going. He walked briskly north, away from Christ Church, before turning left on Keble Road and back south on a parallel track along Giles Causeway. A black Jaguar was parked on the double yellow lines outside Christ Church, its motor purring. The chauffeur opened the rear door of the ministerial car and Webb sank into the red leather seat.

They joined the M40; the traffic moved smoothly enough along the motorway and through the endless grey suburbs of Ealing and Acton, but in Kensington the flow began to congeal like water turning to ice. The chauffeur looked worried. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. He picked his nose. He switched on Radio One and switched it off again.

“Where am I headed?” Webb asked.

“I have to get you to the Treasury Building by noon sharp, sir,” said the chauffeur, looking in the rear mirror.

“Relax. I’ll walk.” Webb left the chauffeur to the traffic jam. He walked along busy streets to the Mall, where he cut off through St. James’s Park. In Horse Guards, men dressed in red were responding with wonderful precision to the sharp, echoing commands of a sergeant major with a superb repertoire of insults. He moved quickly along Whitehall and turned into the Treasury building as Big Ben started to chime.

“Name?” said the thin man at the desk.

“Mister Khan.” The man gave Webb a look but ticked his name off. Webb waited in the inquiries office for some minutes, until a tall, cheerful man not much older than himself came to collect him.

“Tods Murray,” said the man, in an accent which Webb connected with polo and country clubs in Henley. The man’s handshake was weak and clammy. There was an impressively grand staircase but they squeezed into a small lift, and emerged on to a broad circular corridor with a red carpet. There was a smell of expensive coffee, probably Jamaican Blue Mountain. Tods Murray knocked at a door and led Webb into a small, comfortable office. At a heavy table sat the Astronomer Royal and the Minister of Defence. The AR wasn’t smoking and Webb thought he looked a bit wild-eyed.

“Coffee?” asked the Minister, waving at a chair.

“No thank you, sir.”

“Something stronger, perhaps?”

“No.”

The Minister looked at Sir Bertrand, who shook his head, and then poured black coffee into a Worcester cup. “Would normally have held this meeting in Northumberland House, but we don’t want you wandering in and out of the MOD. Not that we think anyone’s keeping an eye on you, nothing so melodramatic. Just a belts and braces thing.”

“That’s good to know, Minister. I recall the last such reassurance.”

The Minister gave him a look.

“Is that a complaint, Webb?” the Astronomer Royal asked.

“Your theory,” the Minister said.

“Which one is that, Minister?”

“These suspicions about the signals from the robot telescope, a traitor on the Nemesis team and so on. We sent it all on to the CIA. They have reported that every American on that team had been thoroughly vetted and each one was regarded as loyal beyond question. Yankee White was the term used.”

“But Minister, a determined attempt was made to keep that manuscript from me. One of your own staff died in front of my eyes in Italy. Someone paid these people to kill me.”

Tods Murray responded, “If there was a leak, it didn’t come from the Eagle Peak team.”

The Minister said, “For all we know your assassin was a pathological liar. The whole business could have been local private enterprise. After all, you let it be known that you were very keen on that manuscript.”

Webb said, “But the Tenerife telescope. From the outset it was responding too quickly. Transatlantic connections aren’t that fast.”

“Webb,” said the Astronomer Royal, “you made the connection during the graveyard watch. Transatlantic communication would have been quiet.”

Tods Murray added, “And the CIA telecommunications experts checked the routing. It’s fine.”

Webb shook his head stubbornly. “But La Palma was clouded over. I saw it myself.”

The Astronomer Royal picked up on that. “The Met Office tell us that the cloud was broken at the time of your observations, Webb. You just happened to log on to the Spot satellite at a moment when everything was overcast.”

“I was being fed false pictures.”

The Astronomer Royal sighed. “That is ludicrous.”

“And Leclerc?”

“There was no sign of tampered switches in the wheel-house. It was an accident.” The Minister’s tone was final. “Let’s not get obsessive about this. Your suspicions were exhaustively investigated and found to be without foundation.” He pretended to read a sheet of paper. “However, you were not invited here for a discussion about your latent paranoia, Doctor Webb. We have other plans for you. But first, I’ll hand you over to Bertrand for some news.”

The Astronomer Royal said, “There is good and bad. The bad news is that the Americans have given up trying to reach Nemesis. There’s just no time.”

He gave Webb a moment to assimilate the information, and then added: “The good news is that Karibisha might miss. There’s an even chance. I’m afraid it’s going to be a cliffhanger right to the end.”

“They’ve seen Karibisha, then?”

“Yes. The US Naval Observatory managed to pick it up pre-dawn. They only have a short arc to go on. NASA’s best estimate is that its perigee will be one Earth radius. We will have either an extremely close encounter or a grazing collision.”

“What do the errors look like on the target plane?” Webb asked.

“A very elongated ellipse, almost a narrow bar, passing from the Pacific through central Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico. One sigma on the long axis is two thousand kilometres, on the short one a couple of hundred.”

“We could still have an ocean impact, then?”

“Or a miss. The asteroid came within range of the Gold-stone radar some hours ago and they should be sharpening up on the orbit now.”

The Minister interrupted the technical exchange. “It says here it’s approaching us at fifteen miles a second and is four million miles away at the moment. It will pass the Earth in three days and”—he looked at his watch—“eight hours.”

“Can you imagine the public reaction if this gets out?” Tods Murray said.

The Minister looked as if he could. He added brown sugar crystals to his coffee. “I don’t know how much longer we can keep it quiet.”

Webb said, “With Karibisha’s orbit it will be the devil to detect until the very last hours. But once it clears the solar disc it will be visible even in binoculars, just immediately before dawn.”

“We’d like you to go to Mexico,” said the Minister, stirring. “To the point of closest approach.”

Webb puffed out his cheeks.

“Of course our satellite intelligence should let us know immediately whether this Karibisha has hit, but GCHQ do worry a little bit about signal failure at the critical moment due to electrical disturbances in the ionosphere. They’re not sure they could immediately tell the difference between a freakishly close encounter and a hit.”

“EMP, Webb,” Sir Bertrand explained.

“Frankly,” the Minister continued, “we want as many channels of communication as we can get, including old-fashioned transatlantic cable. It has been agreed with the Americans that there will be two scientific observers, one from America and one from Europe. On a matter of this supreme importance, HMG prefers to have a hit or miss verified not only by remote sensors but also by our man on the spot. You will understand that, depending on the outcome of the event, certain actions may be taken within minutes of it.”

Tods Murray said, “We’re asking you to take an even chance of being obliterated.”

The Minister adopted a tone of excessive politeness. “It doesn’t have to be you. Would you prefer we found someone to take your place?”

Webb felt the Astronomer Royal’s eyes on him. “I insist on going,” Webb said, heart pounding in rib cage. The Minister grunted his satisfaction.

“Do I know the American observer?” Webb asked.

The Minister looked at a sheet of paper. “A Doctor Whaler.”

“I know her.”

“The centre of the two-D error ellipse is somewhere over central Mexico, according to NASA,” said the Astronomer Royal. “Close to bandit country.”

The Minister peered at Webb closely. “You remain convinced that there was some sort of conspiracy to keep you from identifying Nemesis?”

“I do, sir. That’s why I insist on going. I want to keep my ear to the ground.”

“Mexico, Webb,” said the Astronomer Royal, for no discernible reason.

Webb said, “I’d like to see the NASA report.”

The Minister added more sugar, slurped and closed his eyes briefly with satisfaction. “That’s better. I’ll see you get it, Doctor Webb.”

Tods Murray said, “The Americans are setting up a link from the epicentre and we will be waiting for your call. Should you, for whatever reason, not be in a position to use their link, then we can alternatively be reached through this number.” He slid a card across the table. “Of course we can’t imagine how such a situation would arise.”

“Don’t let this simple precaution feed your fantasies about a conspiracy, Doctor Webb,” said the Minister.

“I’m being reassured to death here,” said Webb.

“Your flight leaves from Heathrow in three hours,” said Tods Murray. “The same need for security applies, and you are still Mister Fish from the moment you leave this building.”

“Phone in from Mexico the instant the asteroid has passed overhead,” the Minister said as Webb reached the door.

“What if it hits?”

The Minister showed surprise. “We’ll know. You won’t call in.”

Judge Dredd and the Angels of Doom

Outside the Treasury building, Webb found a telephone and made a brief call. Then he went to a Barclays Bank and drew two thousand pounds in the name of Mr. L. Fish, and took a taxi to the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. In the atrium he stood underneath the jaws of the long-necked Diplodocus which greets visitors to that great museum, while Japanese tourists and school parties swirled around him.

In five minutes, Judge Dredd emerged from the Japanese tourists and the school parties. He was red-eyed, skinny and stooped, had long, black, filthy uncombed hair and was dressed in Oxfam cast-offs. All he lacked, Webb thought, was the anorak.

They shook hands. Webb noticed the slightly red-rimmed eyes of his old friend. He hasn’t changed, Webb thought. Still living in the virtual world while the real one passes him by. I was like you not so long ago.

“Jimmy! How’s life treating you?”

Judge Dredd shrugged. “You know.”

And as socially clueless as ever.

“Jimmy, I need some help. Look, I don’t have any time as I have a plane to catch. Would you mind sharing a taxi with me to Heathrow and I’ll explain as I go? I’ll pay the return fare, don’t worry. It’s worth a hundred pounds to me to have you even listen to my problem.”

“A hundred? In the name o’ the wee man where do ye get money like that, Ollie? Are you cracking banks these days?”

Webb laughed. “No, still at the Oxford institute. They actually pay me to pursue my hobby.”

They random-walked their way through the crowds and on to Cromwell Road. Webb waved down a taxi, asked for the airport, and closed the window connecting them to the driver. He passed over a hundred pounds in small denominations.

There was a certain honesty about Judge Dredd. He took the money with pleasure, without feigning reluctance or asking why. “Well, Ollie, I’m listening with both ears.”

“I need to break into a highly secure American installation.”

The Judge sniffed. “America’s neither here nor there. But if you’re talking about the Milnet, that’s a big problem. And if it’s air-gapped there’s nothin you can do unless you’re on the inside. Is it VMS, Unix, Win NT or what?”

“It’s Unix-based.”

“You need a name and a password. Usernames are nae bother. But ye’ll no get in without a password.”

“I need access to the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque.”

Judge Dredd displayed rows of yellow teeth. “So that’s where the money’s coming from? You’ve got in with the KGB, right?”

“Come on Jimmy, you know I’m a peace activist.”

“Aye, and I’m Napoleon Bonaparte.” He paused thoughtfully, drumming his skinny fingers lightly on his knee. “The Holy Grail is the password file.”

“Which you can’t access because you need a password to log in, in the first place.”

The man looked at Webb with amusement. “You always were a bit of a lamer, Ollie. If it was an ordinary business it could be easy. The Citibank job wasn’t even clever. The number of Freds and Barneys I’ve come across in passwords would crack you up. If there’s a modem at the other end we could just keep dialling and hanging up automated-like.”

“Transatlantic, isn’t that expensive?”

Judge Dredd giggled. “I never paid for a transatlantic call yet. It would be unprofessional. But it’s crass 1980s stuff and it takes ages. And these days most places automatically block you after a few misses.”

“Jimmy, I need an answer within thirty-six hours.”

“Thirty-six hours! Ye’re away wi’ the fairies, Ollie. These jobs take weeks.”

“Is it beyond you?” Webb asked to provoke.

Judge Dredd thought about it. “I’m thinkin, I’m thinkin. Sometimes ye can get the password file from FTP or CGI scripts. You don’t even need to log in, you just do an anonymous download. The CIA and NASA were cracked that way through ordinary web browsers, exploitin a programme called PHF.” A dreamy look flitted across the man’s face, as if he was reliving some past triumph. “But after the Rome Lab job the military started installing a lot more firewalls. A decent packet-level firewall restricts you to a couple of machines inside their network. Mind you, there’s ways round that now, with packet fragmentation and the like. Of course you spread the probes and attacks around, and nothin is traceable. The Rome Lab attackers leapfrogged their way in through phone switches in South America.”

He paused again. Webb took that as a cue. “Jimmy, I’ll pay you a thousand pounds for a successful penetration.”

The man’s bloodshot eyes widened, and alarm flickered over his face. “You’re intae somethin heavy here.”

Webb nodded. In the confines of the taxi, a sour, unwashed smell was quickly building up.

“It’s your business why ye want in, I guess. Okay let me think.” The man was silent for a minute. Webb looked out at the congealed traffic. Then Judge Dredd was saying, “These high security places sometimes have a soft underbelly. They rely on outside systems like suppliers, research labs, civilian phone networks and so on. Somebody in Argentina tunnelled into Los Alamos via a legitimate university connection. It might be worth a try. But even when you get the password file you still have another problem.”

Webb waited.

“The passwords are encrypted. So you have to run a cracker on it.”

“You mean a decryption package?”

A pained expression crossed the Judge’s face. “You cannae decrypt a password once it’s encoded, not in Unix. It’s a oneway system. However what you can do is run a dictionary file. What this does is apply the encryption routine to thousands of words, crap like Fred and Barney high on the list. You end up with millions of possibilities for thousands of words. It compares this encrypted output with the encrypted passwords in the file. When it finds a match, bingo, ye’ve got the password.”

The taxi had cleared Central London and was moving briskly; signs for Hounslow, Staines and the airport were appearing at intervals. The taxi was reeking of unwashed body.

Webb knew that with his next words he would be in grave breach of the Official Secrets Act; but he saw no alternative. “Jimmy, it’s important that you keep quiet about this. I have to know the source of messages going in to a place called Eagle Peak Observatory in Arizona. There’s a telescope in Tenerife. It can be controlled remotely through an intermediate node and I can give you the PIN numbers to do it. When I operate it from Arizona I see signals which look as if they come from the Tenerife telescope. I need to know whether they really do. I suspect they don’t.”

Webb pulled a fat brown envelope from his backpack, keeping it out of sight of the driver’s rear view. The man stared incredulously at it.

Jimmy asked, “Where is this intermediate node?”

“The Physics Department, Keble Road, Oxford University.”

“And where does the military come intae it?”

“I suspect the signals really originate from the Sandia Laboratory.”

“You don’t mean yon Teraflop?”

“I do. Can’t you do it?”

“In thirty-six hours? It’s a megachallenge, no question.”

Webb slipped the envelope over. Judge Dredd riffled the banknotes as if he couldn’t believe it, and slipped it into a pocket. The smell was turning into a stench and Webb wondered when Judge Dredd had last had a bath.

“But it might be done. I’ll no be able to penetrate the whole Teraflop Box, yon iron’s too big for that. But with root access I could install a packet sniffer at some network switch. A desktop PC will do. You just sit quietly watching the data and biding your time. Like a crocodile watching the comings and goings on a river bank. If you keep seeing the same sequence of signals near the start of a message you might be on to a password. Then you pounce. Once you’re in, you get out before anyone even notices. But you hide away a few lines of code that lets you get in the back door again whenever you feel like it.”

“Jimmy, I don’t care how you do it, so long as it’s done surreptitiously,” said Webb.

“This is a big job, ye appreciate. If I cannae hack it in time I might get the Angels of Doom on to it. Surreptitious-like. They say their latest SATAN scripts will find holes in almost anything.”

Webb scribbled down a set of numbers. “I’ll call you at midnight tomorrow. I’ll see you get the other half within a week.”

At the airport, Judge Dredd directed the taxi back home without stepping out, and Webb made his way through the crowds to Terminal One, gulping fresh air and feeling like Klaus Fuchs.

* * *

Shortly after Webb’s Jumbo had hauled itself into the air, an unknown, but clearly disguised, man entered the secure London office of Spink & Son wheeling a tartan shopping trolley and carrying a brown paper bag filled with breakfast rolls and tins of beans. He made a purchase extraordinary even by the standards of that office, paying a fortune in cash in return for gold coins. In the main he bought the “old” sovereigns, with 0.2354 of a Troy ounce of pure gold. These he weighed in heaps of ten on his own scales, before loading them into the trolley. He then placed the rolls and beans on top of the coins, and wheeled the trolley out on to the street, towards some destination unknown. The transaction took up much of the afternoon. Also that afternoon, Albemarle, Samuel and other coin dealers in the London area likewise found heavy runs on the Krugerrand, the maple leaf, the US Eagle and the Britannia.

And in Zurich and London, the world centres for the exchange of gold, the price of the yellow metal moved imperceptibly upwards. It was the merest nudge, barely detectable above the random tremors of the global market.

* * *

The huge aircraft started the big haul and dwindled to a tiny flying insect skimming just above the Atlantic. Webb travelled first class. And while the sun stood still in the sky outside, and air of lethal coldness hurtled past inches from his head, he dined six miles high on smoked salmon and champagne, and he watched Loren and Mastroianni in love, and he worried.

* * *

While the tiny insect skimmed over the water, gold kept drifting up; still a whisper all but lost in noise. The exchanges in Hong Kong and Singapore had closed for the night; but clever men and women in London and New York, people who spent their days alert for tiny fluctuations in the jagged curves on their monitor screens, had noticed the trend on their monitors; they worried too, but about different things. But then these markets too closed, and waited for the Earth to turn, for the sun to rise and pierce the Tokyo smog.


There was a thunderstorm over Newfoundland and congestion in the air over JFK, and the turbulence played with the huge aircraft like a cat with a mouse. At each bump Webb, in a state of terror, peered backwards into the dark; he could just make out the engine trying to shake itself loose from the flapping wing. He tried not to weep with relief when the Jumbo landed smoothly and taxied off the runway. A tired lady with a bright floral display in her lapel kept saying “Welcome to New York” to the ragged passengers pouring into Customs & Immigration. Webb sat worn out on a plastic seat while world travellers were whisked in limousines to Manhattan or took the helicopter, still flying in this weather, to East 60th Street.

An hour passed before a tall Indian appeared, black hair sweeping down his shoulders. “Mister Fish? Mexico bound? Would you follow me, please?”

Almost past caring, he followed the Indian on to a walkway and into the dark New York night. The air was bitter outside the terminal and snow was fluttering down.

“I’m Free Spirit,” said the man, ushering Webb into a Cadillac. “It don’t mean free liquor either, it’s my tribal name and I’m proud of it.”

“Right on,” Webb said.

Free Spirit stopped to pick up an old woman who should have been meeting her son at St. Louis by now are you a stranded passenger too, four boys they have and still trying for a girl he should cut it off and pickle it if you ask me you did say you’re a stranded passenger? Webb tried to nod in the right places.

The car stopped outside the Plantation Hotel and the clerk, a balding man of about sixty, gave the woman a ground floor room and took Webb up to the first floor. The man hovered. Webb told him he had no dollars. The man said he took the other stuff too. Webb said he didn’t have any of that either and the clerk left shaking his head. Webb locked the door, had a warm shower and collapsed into bed.

He lay in the semi-dark and listened to the night sounds of New York and the elevator disgorging the late-night arrivals.

He worried because something didn’t fit. He was still worrying when he drifted into a confused, restless, dream-filled sleep.

* * *

While Webb slept, the quiet little run on gold continued, a trickle slowly gaining strength. More ominously, the dollar began to drift down against other currencies.

The meridian drifted at a thousand miles an hour across the Pacific, the vast, empty, watery hemisphere of the planet. Twelve thousand miles across the ocean, dawn touched the Sea of Okhotsk and the northernmost islands of Japan. An hour later the sun pierced the morning fog over Tokyo; an hour later again and Singapore awoke; and once again clever people, this time in glass-fronted towers overlooking Kowloon and Clearwater Bay, began to worry. They made precautionary moves.

The dollar’s drift became a slide.

Just before 1030 GMT, in London, three taxis drew up in New Court, a small courtyard in a narrow street close to the Bank of England. Three men emerged from the taxis and, as they entered the offices of N.M. Rothschild, were joined by a fourth man arriving on foot from the direction of the Bank tube station. As happened every morning at this hour, they were ushered into a small, quiet, wood-panelled office. The walls were lined with portraits of past monarchs, like hunting trophies: a reminder that, historically, even kings had needed the moneylenders. Each man had a desk on which was a telephone and a small Union Jack. The chairman of Rothschild’s was already seated, and he welcomed the arrivals with a nod; it was a routine repeated twice daily, at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m.

The five constituted an inner circle of the London Bullion Market Association. They traded gold between themselves without ever physically exchanging the yellow metal. On their word, the twice-daily “fixing” of the price of gold, the value of gold was decided, and so the wealth of the world’s central banks, holding vast gold reserves, was determined.

The chairman of Rothschild’s (N.M. Rothschild, founded in 1804) opened the proceedings. He spoke in a soft, colourless voice, almost a monotone: here, gold and money, the most emotionally charged subjects known to man, were traded in an atmosphere from which all passion was ruthlessly expunged. “Gentlemen, we are faced with an extraordinary situation. My office informs me that there has been a sharp upwards movement in bullion within the last few hours.”

The man from the Standard Chartered Bank (a subsidiary of Mocatta and Goldsmid, founded 1684) nodded. “It’s small, but quite distinct. However, my office can find no reason for it.”

There were murmurs of assent. The man from Montagu Precious Metals (Samuel Montagu, a relative newcomer, having been founded in 1853) tapped a folder in front of him. “It is very mysterious. My buying orders from our Middle East offices alone amount to nearly a billion dollars at last night’s Comex rate.”

The man from Deutsche Bank Sharps Pixley (Sharps, founded 1750 and merged with Pixley in 1852) raised an eyebrow. “But what about security? Can you physically export so much gold from London to Saudi?”

Rothschild’s gave Sharps Pixley a disapproving look: the tone of surprise had been a tad too strong, too colourful, for this office.

The man from the Republic National Bank of New York spoke in a measured, cultured American accent. “My office feels that this is being driven by a small number of individuals who, for whatever reason, are trying to capture as much of the private gold market as they can. The market has spotted this and is responding irrationally.”

“We must not have panic,” Deutsche Bank Sharps Pixley said, looking worried.

Rothschild’s almost smiled. “Panic can be profitable. As one of my predecessors said, the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets.”

And with what passed for social chit-chat over, the five began the serious business of fixing the price of gold, of resolving the age-old tension between buyer and seller. Each man had a portfolio before him, and referred constantly to his office through the telephone. As the prices began to converge, each dealer lowered his little flag to indicate agreement with the fixing price. The man from New York was the last to agree. The flight from the dollar would be catastrophic, but the force of the market was overwhelming. As soon as he had lowered his flag, a messenger was summoned and the price of gold was published worldwide. Overnight, it had almost doubled.

Immediately after the Rothschild’s morning session, encrypted information began to flow along the Highway from Midland Global Markets to the offices of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, whose assets under management were four hundred billion dollars. Midland Global owned the Corporation and four hundred billion dollars was a lot of responsibility. The Corporation began to offload its derivatives market, quietly tried to go short on the Nikkei.

For South Africa, the world’s largest gold producer, the news was good. Barclays de Zoete Wedd contacted their owners, Barclays Bank, for instructions, but the message was already on its way from London: somebody knows something, thinks the future is bad news. Some unspecified calamity may be on the way; maybe the greenhouse is beginning to run, or the Arctic ice cap is about to break off. Whatever. So reduce exposure to the future; get out of leveraged currency swaps. And do it quietly, always quietly. No panic selling.

The Nikkei 225 Index faltered. By the close of day it had begun to plunge. On the Square Mile, the Bank of England raised interest rates, and raised them again, but the slide was becoming uncontrollable, the strain on currencies intolerable.

As the sun moved round, rumours began to sweep the markets. Whatever the calamity, somebody knew it was going to hit the States; maybe the big one was about to hit San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Whatever.

Panic. The slide on shares and currencies, now out of control, accelerated towards a precipice. Gold, the one certainty in an uncertain world, went stratospheric.

All this without knowledge of the nature of the impending disaster. But in the early hours of the morning, Eastern Standard Time, while Webb tossed and turned in a stifling hotel room, that information reached the offices of the New York Times.

The Situation Room, T-49 Hours

The Admiral was a six o’clock riser. At six fifteen, as on most mornings excepting Thanksgiving, birthdays and the like, hot water was spraying on his head and down over his scrawny, suntanned neck. He turned and shut his eyes, letting the stream hit his face and run down over his chest and his trim stomach. He groped for the shower switch, turned it off and was just turning to the shower door when his wife opened it.

“Robert. Were you expecting a car this morning?”

The Admiral showed surprise. “No I was not. What’s going on?” Hastily, he dried himself off. Only once, in his ten years at Washington, had he been summoned from his home, and that had been at the outbreak of the Second Korean War.

He dressed quickly, ran a comb through his grey, wiry hair, grabbed a briefcase, sipped in passing at the coffee which his wife held for him, and made for the door. A young ensign was waiting, and a black limousine was parked on the street outside.

The car took off smoothly, the ensign taking the Admiral quickly on to Columbia Pike and past Arlington Cemetery before turning right on to the Jefferson Davis Highway. The ensign, Admiral Mitchell soon realized, knew nothing beyond his orders to transport him to the briefing chamber on the third floor of the Pentagon as quickly as possible.

The Emergency Conference Room was as large as several tennis courts. Mitchell looked down on it through the glass partition with alarm. The room was a hive of activity, the focus of the “battle staff” being four duty officers at the head of the enormous T-shaped table, peering at consoles, talking into telephones, taking messages, giving orders.

Hooper, on a telephone, beckoned the Admiral over with a wave of the arm. “Mitchell, over here.” For some reason lost in the mists of time, nobody but his wife ever addressed Mitchell as anything other than Mitchell.

“What gives, Sam?”

Hooper put down the telephone. “Take a look at this. Your office just relayed it through.” Hooper thrust a sheaf of papers into the Admiral’s hand.

Mitchell felt himself flushing as he skimmed through the reports. “What are these guys playing at?”

“The Bear’s on the move, what else?”

“But why? What precipitated this?”

The Chairman of the JCS gave the Admiral a strange look. “Mitchell, you’re about to be told a story which you simply will not believe.”

Something like fear flickered across Mitchell’s face. “I saw a Sikorsky on the helipad. That can’t mean what I think.”

Hooper nodded grimly. “We’re gathering up the JEEP-1 civilians. They’ll be dispersed to Site R and Mount Weather. And we’re stocking the civil defence bunkers in Denton with bureaucrats.”

“What?”

“Like I said, there are things going on that you just won’t believe. Let’s get to the Gold Room — Bellarmine’s waiting.”

The Gold Room should have been filled with senior officers and their aides. The Admiral was astonished to find it empty except for the Secretary of Defense, who waved him impatiently into a chair.

“What is this?” the Admiral asked.

“Mitchell, we’re heading for the Sit Room in a few minutes. But first, pin back your ears and listen to this.”

* * *

“They say Nemesis will miss with fifty per cent probability,” Heilbron informed the President.

Grant scowled. “Meaning it will hit with fifty per cent probability. An even chance that we’re history. Anything more on that probe?”

“They’ve abandoned the attempt. They needed more time.”

“We’re helpless, then.”

The Situation Room was low-ceilinged, small and cramped, with dark wood panelling on three of the walls, and a large curtain covering the fourth. The Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director, the National Security Adviser and the Chairman of the JCS were sitting around a large teak table which dominated the room. Admiral Mitchell, not a member of the NSC, was nevertheless seated at it, on Hooper’s right.

“Mister President,” the CIA Director added, “As the asteroid approaches they’ll be able to sharpen up the orbit. Meaning we’ll move towards certainty one way or another over the next forty-nine hours.”

President Grant opened a drawer in the table and took out a telephone. He spoke briefly into it and the curtains behind him parted. A large screen covered much of the wall. The land masses of the United States and Russia faced each other across the North Pole. “Admiral Mitchell, what gives with these naval movements?”

Mitchell stood up and walked over to the screen. “Mister President, the Russians are mobilizing. They’re moving their entire Baltic Fleet.” His hand waved over the screen. “They appear to be evacuating the Kola peninsula. And their ships are pouring out here, through the Kattegat. Northern Command tell me the Swedes are lining the roads to get a view. Normally they have only a third of their Northern Fleet at sea, but they seem to be dispersing almost their whole surface fleet into the Atlantic. And down here, sir, they’re moving an abnormal tonnage through the Bosphorus.”

Grant said, “Tell me about their submarines.”

“I’ll remind you, sir, that Navy Operations Intelligence Center have been logging a sharp increase in submarine movement over the past few days. SIGINT have been picking up the communications activity that goes on when their subs slip out of berth. Over here at Petropavlosk, we believe they have maybe sixty subs out, three of them Akula class. Now we can make it hot for them in the Pacific as necessary, but over here, in the Polyarny Sea and around the Motovskiy Gulf, they can give their undersea craft reasonable air coverage. As you know, sir, we have SOSUS cables round Murmansk and the Kola Inlet. They’ve been picking up exceptional traffic for some days at these locations too.”

“Exceptional traffic — what does that translate into?” Grant wanted to know.

“We think they may have put eighty submarines in that area, half of them strategic. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mister President, they’re dispersing their whole submarine fleet.”

“Thank you, Admiral Mitchell. Now that you’re in on Nemesis, perhaps you’d like to sit in on this session.”

Mitchell sat down. “Sir, are we going nuclear?”

Bellarmine had been bottling up the same question. Now he could contain himself no longer. “Mister President, these submarine movements are as clear a signal as you can get. Do you finally agree to a counterstrike?”

Cresak cut in. “What we’re seeing is a defensive reaction to our State Orange.”

Hooper tapped the table. “This is it, gentlemen. They know we’re wise to the Nemesis game. They’re aiming to get theirs in first.”

Bellarmine cut in. “Mister President, we have to conduct the war from a secure location.”

Grant looked stunned. “War? What are you talking about, Bellarmine? The asteroid could miss and Cresak could be right. This is not necessarily a prelude to a nuclear strike.”

Hooper’s eyes had a glazed look. “Can you possibly be serious?”

The telephone in front of the President buzzed. He picked it up and listened. “Yes, bring it in.”

A door opened and a military aide stepped in smartly. He handed the President a sheet of paper and left. Grant felt light-headed as he read it. He passed it to Bellarmine, and the paper was circulated round the teak table, ending up with Hooper.

FLASH

FROM: CINCEUR VAIHINGEN GE

TO: JCS WASHINGTON DC / /J9 NMCC

TOP SECRET PEAK

(T1/S1) SIGINT REPORTS BARRACKS EVACUATION BY RUSSIAN FORCES IN KIEV, GOMEL, VITEBSK, MINSK AND WEST MOSCOW. TANK MOVEMENTS NEAR SLOVAK BORDER AT TATRANSKA LOMNICA IN HIGH TATRAS. LARGE-SCALE CALL-UP OF RESERVISTS. TANK MOVEMENTS REPORTED EAST OF PRIPET MARSHES AND (UNCONFIRMED) THROUGH CARPATHIANS. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE UPGRADE OF DEFCON AND DECISION ON EUCOM REINFORCEMENT OF SLOVAK AND GERMAN FORCES. DETAILED REPORTS WILL FOLLOW.

Hooper said, “It figures. We know they’ve been evacuating barracks and bringing up troop-carrying helicopters all the way from the Ukraine to Chechnya. In my opinion the dispositions are shaping up to a mass movement through central Slovakia, converging on the Pilzen area.”

“Pure speculation,” said Cresak.

The buzzer went again. This time Bellarmine went to the door and took the papers from the aide. The Secretary of Defense turned, grey-faced. “Mister President, that’s the least of it.”

“Go on,” said Grant.

“They’re bringing Backfires into Kola from their eastern airfields. Maybe a hundred of them.”

“Um-huh.”

“Mister President,” said Hooper, “they don’t aim to hang about. Just as soon as Nemesis zaps us they’ll roll over Europe. We no longer have tactical stuff in Europe and the Brits and French wouldn’t dare use their strategics without us to back them up.”

Bellarmine said, “The temptation must be irresistible. When the asteroid hits us, Europe will be plunged into chaos. The Russians will roll their tanks in faster than decision-making machinery in Europe can assess policy. With us dead and Europe overrun they’ve got the world.”

Cresak said, “Our scenarios assume a two-thousand-second nuclear war. If they’re planning to hit us with nukes what’s the point of starting a mobilization that would take a month to complete? Anyway the dispositions aren’t right for a European incursion. We’ve always looked to a thrust across the plains to the north. Why all the tank movements on the Slovak border?”

“So they’ve had us fooled,” said Hooper.

“The pattern in Europe doesn’t fit an imminent invasion,” Cresak insisted. “Where are the Spetsnaz attacks? Where are the airborne forces? They should be setting up to take Bremen airfield and move towards the Weser and the Rhine. Backfire bombers in Kola make no sense for a European attack.”

“The first and oldest rule of warfare,” said Hooper. “Deception. You’re talking the orthodoxy they put into our heads. The Kola bombers are aimed at us over the polar route. They’re going to finish us off in all the confusion. And with us gone who needs commandos? They don’t need to alert anybody with D-1 incursions. It’s safer to roll over Europe without any softening up.”

“But the Slovak border movements…”

“A lead-up to a flank attack through Bavaria or even a thrust through Frankfurt. Hell, if we’re out of the way they can take Europe any which way they please. Leave soldiering to the soldiers, Cresak.”

“They’re sabre-rattling. What we’re seeing is a defensive reaction to our State Orange,” Cresak insisted. “Nobody’s going to invade anybody.”

* * *

What wakened Anton Vanysek was the shaking of his bed.

At first, it sounded as if an unusually heavy lorry was passing below his seventh storey flat. But the rumbling went on and on. He threw back his blankets and opened his window. Bitterly cold air wafted into the room. The street below was empty, but then he saw, between the high-rise flats, dark shapes rumbling on the road about a kilometre away. It was impossible to say what they were in the early morning gloom. He was tempted to go back to his warm bed, but the whole building was vibrating. He quickly dressed, ignoring the sleepy questions from his wife, wrapped up warmly, and ran down the stone stairs.

Trnava was typical of many middle-sized towns in Slovakia. A picturesque old town was surrounded by high-rise flats, white identikit monstrosities built in the days of the communists, whose concrete cladding had long cracked and crumbled. The whole district was connected by a network of cracked and crumbling roads. Interspersing these great rabbit warrens were factories and chemical works whose outputs left strange smells in the air and brought out mysterious rashes in children, nervous complaints in the middle-aged and lung problems in the old.

Anton Vanysek had, for over twenty years, been irregularly paid small sums of money to report on local political activity, gossip, anything at all which might interest his controllers who, he assumed, passed it on to the CIA. Almost always, apart from the heady days of the bloodless revolution, his information was banal, but then, the sums of money were pitifully small.

This morning, however, as he nervously approached the main road which cut through the centre of the town, he was astonished to see that the dark green shapes were tanks. His astonishment turned to fear as he approached closer in the dull light and made out the red stars on their sides.

This information would either earn him a great deal of money or a firing squad.

For the third time in fifty years, Russian tanks were rolling into Slovakia.

The Road to Mexico

In the pale morning light, the hotel looked not so much seedy as tottering. There were a dozen motley guests in the dining room, looking like last night’s collection of stranded travellers; the room smelled of cheap waffles and bacon frying in old fat; but there was something else in the air. Webb joined a little group clustering around newspapers on a table, and looked over shoulders.

The Examiner said

KILLER ROCK THREATENS AMERICA

and followed it up with a lurid and largely fictitious piece about astronomers huddled at secret meetings. Unbelievable words were being put into the mouths of sober colleagues. Only that well-known British expert Phippson, Webb thought, might actually have spoken the words attributed to him. More soberly, the New York Times ran

NEAR-MISS ASTEROID APPROACHING

with the sub-headings

But No Danger, say NASA Scientists

and

Financial Markets Plummet

To ensure the public were not unduly disturbed by false alarms, the orbits of close encounter asteroids were routinely put through a careful refereeing procedure, involving international teams of astronomers, with guidelines for media contact. But there was no mention of this. Had they bypassed the procedure in the name of secrecy? If so, if Nemesis was a secret, how did it get out?

There was something odd about that.

He found a table with a semi-clean cover and asked for bacon, eggs and tea. The waiter, a hunched man with Greek features, came back after some minutes with scrambled eggs and coffee. “Seen the nooz?” he asked.

“Media hype.”

“I reckon. I got shares in Chrysler. Say, you sure you’re the scrambled egg?”

* * *

Free Spirit drove Webb back to JFK. The traffic was nose to tail and eventually slowed to walking pace on the approach road to the airport. A group of men and women were parading with hastily constructed placards near the entrance, ignored by the police. A white-haired man with a sandwich-board proclaiming Behold I Come Quickly stepped in front of the car and Free Spirit slammed on the brakes.

“Did you see that, Mister? Did you see that? That’s my problem too,” Free Spirit laughed, clapping his hands.

Within the terminal, chaos ruled. The reassurances of NASA scientists notwithstanding, it seemed that half of New York State had suddenly decided to take a New Year vacation in Europe.

By contrast, the international departure lounge for the flight to Mexico City was a haven of solitude: apparently there had been about two hundred early morning cancellations and a similar number of no-shows. Webb had a coffee and shared the lounge with about twenty families of Hasidic Jews, the men with big beards and broad black hats. Why they were going to Mexico he couldn’t guess. Apart from the Jews and Webb, there was only a scattering of Mexican business types, presumably returning to families back home, and a blonde female wearing a slightly old-fashioned dress with a black shoulder bag. She looked up from her magazine, glanced at him and resumed her reading. Webb took his cue and ignored her.

American Airlines hauled them into a bright sunny sky. They tilted up over Manhattan and the Hudson River and turned south, still climbing. When the plane had levelled out the blonde woman moved across the aisle and sat beside him; they were the only two travelling first class. “Oliver! The hero returns.” Unexpectedly, she kissed him on the cheek. She was still into cheap perfume.

“Hi Judy, they told me you’d volunteered for this.”

“You know how it is. Some politicians use moral blackmail as a tool of the trade.”

“What were you doing in New York?” Webb asked.

“Briefing some UN people. Have you heard the latest about Karibisha? They’ve got the probable error of perigee down to — wait for it — five hundred miles. And it’s still fifty-fifty whether it will hit.” She smiled. “I’d make a will but who’d collect?”

“So, what’s been happening at Eagle Peak?”

“I wish you’d been there when your word came through. Noordhof and Herb took off like bats out of hell and haven’t been seen since. No doubt they’ve been doing the rounds of Washington briefings. And no word from Willy. Either he’s in his beach house or else he’s quietly emigrated to Antarctica. The truth is, there was nothing much to be done there before Karibisha emerged from the blind spot. Kowalski stayed on as a caretaker.”

“And when they pick it up?”

“Mighty will be the panic. Herb and Kowalski will be getting high-precision astrometry.”

“From the 94-inch?”

“And the Hubble. They’ve been testing a direct link.”

“Did you come up with a means of deflecting Karibisha?”

“They didn’t tell you? Staggered explosions. The idea was to deploy a dozen baby nukes, strung out along Karibisha’s path like beads on a wire and each one going off in its face to slow it down; kind of like stopping an express train by gently puffing at it.”

“How baby were they?”

“A third of a megaton each. We needed four Shuttle launches, in two sets of two. One Shuttle in each pair carried an upper stage rocket in its cargo bay, the other half a dozen bombs. Mission specialists were supposed to connect the bombs to the upper stage in orbit. Six bombs weren’t going to be enough on their own which is why we needed a second dual launch. The Shuttle accident killed the scheme.”

“Of course it was carrying a Venus probe, ha ha. What was it actually carrying?”

“Unfortunately, half a dozen of my B61s, modified with neutron generators. They’re clearing up an awful lot of plutonium at Cape Canaveral. Take my advice, Oliver, don’t eat tuna for the next million years.”

Webb looked around at the empty cabin. “How close are we to war?”

“Who can say? But I’ll tell you something,” Judy leaned towards Webb. Her tone was conspiratorial. “The Teraflop has been real slow recently.”

“You mean…?”

She was almost whispering in the big empty aircraft. “They’re gearing up for something.”

* * *

Over the Florida swamplands Webb could make out tiny clusters of houses in little clearings; and then a stretch of sand was cutting across their line of motion. A few boats trailed long white wakes and then there was nothing but blue water: the Gulf of Mexico. A menu appeared. Webb ordered mignons de filet de boeuf Rosini, and Judy had poached salmon with a mousseline sauce. She studied the wine list closely and four half-bottles of champagne took them merrily across the Gulf.

In the early afternoon the engine sound changed and Webb felt his ears going funny; the Lockheed was dropping. They flew over tree-covered mountains. Broad highways apparently led nowhere into the hills. Minutes later they were weaving a path between hills covered with houses and roads. Mexico City, an unplanned sprawl stretching to the horizon; bigger than Tokyo, London, Singapore, New York City; Sacheverell’s “irrelevant puff of smoke.” Some boys were kicking a football on grass at the edge of the runway as the plane hurtled past, wings flexing. They didn’t look up.

The pilot expressed the hope that y’all enjoy your stay in Mexico and that y’all will fly with American Airlines again soon. The hostesses at the door were smiling, but Webb had the feeling that it was a bit forced. The sounds of a riot were coming from the direction of the terminal.

“You’re not staying over in Mexico?” Webb asked the cabin steward at the aircraft door.

“No way, sir. It’s fuel up and get the hell out. This is our last flight in.”

As they approached the luggage terminal the sound intensified. It was like an angry football match. Round the last corner of the corridor, and there was the main hallway and a brawling, bellowing mob. Between the mob and the international arrival lounges was a thin, ragged line of teenage soldiers.

A steady trickle of passengers, life-giving boarding cards tightly clutched, was filtering through, ducking under the arms of the soldiers. There was no question of passport or security checks. A lieutenant was in the rear of the line, pacing nervously up and down.

Webb, Judy and the orthodox Jews approached. The lieutenant turned in astonishment. He raised his hands.

“You cannot get through!” he shouted above the baying.

“We must!” Webb shouted back. “Our business is urgent.”

“But señor, you see it is impossible.”

“I’d like to speak to your superior officer.”

“So would I. He has not been seen all morning.”

“We’re here on diplomatic business. We have to get through.”

He pursed his lips, marched over to his men, issued some order and then turned back, nervously fingering the holster of his gun. “I can spare only a dozen men. You must keep together. If you stray you are lost.”

The soldiers formed up into a thin wedge; they were plainly scared. At an order they began to push into the crowd. Webb and Judy huddled together with the Jewish families, following behind the wedge.

The soldiers began to use their rifle butts in a violent, panicky fashion. Slowly they pushed away from the check-in area where the staff, faces lined with tension, seemed to be taking bundles of money or tickets at random from a sea of thrusting hands. A well-dressed businessman was punching someone repeatedly on the head. The other party was kicking at the businessman’s shins. Webb glimpsed a woman on her knees.

Midway to the main exit, an arm emerged from the crowd and grabbed at Webb’s sleeve. It was rifle-butted away. It came back, tugging. A dark-suited, pock-faced little man. “Doctor Webb?” he shouted. “Signorita Whaler? My name is Señor Rivas. Welcome to Mexico. Please can you come this way?”

They left their protective wedge, the little man muscling his way through the crowds and Webb taking up the rear. For a few panicky moments he lost his orientation, half fell and was unable to breathe, but then he forced himself to his feet and glimpsed Judy’s blonde hair some yards ahead. Over to the right he caught sight of a solid phalanx of black hats and beards, and then the crowd had swallowed them up.

The crowd density fell away at the entrance to the airport. An official with a green suit and impassive Aztec features was, by some miracle, loading their suitcases and Webb’s laptop into the boot of a car, a black Lincoln Continental with darkened windows. Rivas opened the front passenger door for Judy. Stepping into the back of the car, Webb caught a glimpse of a holstered gun under the man’s armpit. The interior of the car was cool.

There was a sudden roar from the direction of the terminal. Webb glanced back; the crowd had broken through the line. It was surging towards the departure lounges.

“Good to see you again, Oliver,” said Noordhof, paying little attention to the riot developing yards from them. His handshake was firm and businesslike. He was wearing light tan trousers and jacket. “It’s prudent to wear civilian clothes in Mexico City just now,” he said without explanation.

“Why are you here, Mark? For the same salary you could be tucked away in a deep limestone cave somewhere.”

“I’m responsible for you people. But I won’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind.”

Rivas took the wheel and they pulled away in silence. He took them along the airport boulevard, past unbelievable slums, and on to the Avenue Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, heading downtown.

The car swept them silently along broad streets. Away from the airport there was something like normality apart from the occasional machine gun poking over sandbags at strategic corners; and for all Webb knew, that too was normality in Mexico City.

Judy, a child in a magic garden, kept looking back at him, enthusiastically pointing out street markets and mosaic-covered buildings designed by architects from Mars.

“You’re looking a bit strung up, Oliver,” said Noordhof. “Why don’t you relax?”

Webb put a hand to his brow. “Relax? By this time tomorrow we could be little stars twinkling in the sky.”

The colonel put his hands together in an attitude of prayer.

The Mexican whisked them along the broad Avenue Insurgentes. Apart from a lot of broken glass, there were still few signs that things were crumbling. All the same Rivas was visibly tense, looking up and down roads as they passed and generally wasting no time.

“University City straight ahead,” said Noordhof. “Once we’re through that we’re in the clear.”

“In the clear?”

There was a queue of traffic ahead, and flashing lights in the distance. An army truck raced past, overtaking them on their right. Noordhof said, “Yeah. Mexico City is being sealed off. Something to do with the roads north being jammed.”

“But we’re going south.”

Ahead, soldiers were jumping out of the back of a truck. Barbed wire was being stretched across the street. An officer looked up sharply and then jumped as the big car squeezed through the gap, but then the Lincoln was round a corner and the cameo had vanished. A sign showed a little yacht on waves; below the yacht were the words “Acapulco 400 km.”

The road was starting to climb; soon they were winding through a countryside of tall mountains, rearing out of stubbled fields yellow with corn. Noordhof looked at his watch. “Step on it, Rivas. You’re racing an asteroid.”

Rivas stepped on it. Unfortunately it turned out that, while he had a great deal of speed, he had very little skill. Taking one corner too wide, the car had a hairsbreadth miss with a red bus, stacked to the roof with straw-hatted Mexicans. Rivas shouted something colourful; there was an exchange of hooting, and then the bus had vanished in a trail of blue smoke.

They roared through a dusty little village. A wedding procession scattered. Angry shouts and the barking of a dog receded into the distance.

An hour on, Rivas slowed down. They came to a turning, an open parking area, and a lodge house. The car braked to a halt. Rivas and Noordhof held out identity cards. Judy and Webb produced passports, which were closely scrutinized by an American GI. The soldier checked their names against a list and waved them in.

“Oaxtepec,” Rivas said. “I get you here in time, yes? This is a government recreation centre. The American soldiers and yourselves are our guests until the asteroid flies past. At least I hope she flies past.” Rivas was driving them, now at a leisurely pace, along a well-surfaced road. Acres of lawn were randomly broken up by swimming pools and colourful flower beds. The road climbed, and finally stopped at what seemed to be a big ranch house.

Noordhof excused himself, explaining that he had a chalet bungalow down the hill. Rivas was escorted towards a room in the main building. A man of Indian extraction, wearing a white jacket and dark flannels, led Judy and Webb along a cloister to adjacent rooms.

Webb’s room was spacious and the furniture was ornate and solid. One wall was a French window leading out to a lawn dotted with palm trees and sub-tropical bushes. A fan took up half the ceiling. He threw his backpack and jacket on a chair, walked over to the window and looked out at the swaying trees.

The phone rang. Noordhof said, “They’ve picked it up at Gran Sasso, Nice and Tenerife, and the HST are locked on. Goldstone have it on radar.”

“Orbit?”

“The Harvard-Smithsonian, JPL, Finland and Palomar all agree on perigee. It’s somewhere in an east — west narrow arc about ninety miles wide. A fair drive south of here.”

“Collision probability?”

“Still fifty-fifty.”

Webb put the receiver down and looked at his watch. It was just past three o’clock. Nemesis, alias Karibisha, would come in at 06:15, in just over fifteen hours.

If it existed.

* * *

Webb wiped sweat from his eyelids. He took a few deep breaths, and tried to keep his voice steady. The sweat on his palms made the receiver slippery.

Judge Dredd answered with a tired “Yeah.”

“How did it go?” Webb asked.

“Ollie! It’s a bummer. I just could not get root access to the Teraflop. It’s no often I’m beat but there you are.”

Webb groaned.

“I’m awfie sorry about that, Ollie.”

“You tried. Thanks, Jimmy.”

“Real sorry. Mind you, I got your answer.”

“What?”

“Oh aye, it was easy. I just gave the Tenerife telescope instructions through Eagle Peak and the Oxford terminal at one and the same time. I got different pictures from both. Either yon telescope points in two directions at once or the Eagle Peak pictures are a barefaced fraud.”

Webb felt himself going light-headed. “Jimmy, you’ll never know how grateful I am. I’ll see you next week. Meantime remember the second half of our deal.”

“Which is?”

“Keep quiet about this or I’m in trouble.”

The reply was pained. “You’re in trouble! What about me? If the Social found out I was earning on the side…”

Webb put the receiver down. The light-headedness was worse; a feeling of detachment began to wash over him, as if his soul was outside, looking down on his tormented mind from a point just below the ceiling. He went to the toilet and sat on the lid with his eyes closed and his head in his hands.

Xochicalco

Judy was tapping at the French window. She had a bright yellow towel under her arm and was wearing a crocheted, cream-coloured bikini with a matching shawl draped round her shoulders. Webb hauled himself from his exhausted sleep into the conscious world.

She put her arm in his. Webb let himself be led down a long hill, past swimming pools and through acres of landscaped garden. Her arm was trembling slightly. The touch of her skin, the inflexion of her voice, the intimacy of her presence, even the hint of perspiration from her body, all these he found both delicious and disturbing.

He sensed that she had something to tell him.

A jellyfish on stilts, as they approached, turned out to be an enormous geodesic umbrella underneath which was a small sub-tropical jungle of orchids and palm trees. They stood on a little hump-backed bridge under the umbrella and watched the volcanic spring water bubbling below. The air was acrid and sulphurous, and the woman led him along a narrow path through the tropicana. Away from the hot spring the air was heavy with scent. Butterflies the size of handkerchiefs were flitting around the palm trees and the orchids. Judy looked around conspiratorially, and they sat down on a bench. “I’ve something to tell you.”

She paused. A jeep was approaching down the hill at speed.

“Yes?”

The vehicle braked to a halt outside the dome, a little American flag fluttering on its bonnet.

“Spill it, woman!” Webb swallowed a lump in his throat.

She put a protective hand on Webb’s. “Oliver, we’re both in great danger here.”

A squat GI with a head like a bullet was clambering out. Judy leaned forward. “Later. We mustn’t speak of this in the hacienda.”

The soldier was on the hump-backed bridge. “Compliments of Colonel Noordhof, folks,” he said in a Brooklyn accent. “He would like you to join him for a light snack. Gee it stinks in here.” The soldier took them briskly back up the hill, in a straight line which shaved swimming pools and ploughed through flower beds as necessary.

They met up in the big restaurant, all wood and tall ceilings with an enormous empty fireplace. Aztec descendants wore white jackets and hovered around with impassive expressions. Their calmness mystified Webb. Either they believed their government’s reassurances about Nemesis or they were indifferent to vaporization; neither seemed likely. Judy had reappeared in a short denim skirt, white cotton top and walking boots. She wore long dangling silver earrings and was carrying a canvas shoulder bag. After the frantic exit from Mexico City, Noordhof seemed in a good humour, and if the astronomer’s nerves had been less taut he would have missed the occasional appraising glance in his direction. The soldier kept cracking jokes about Jane Fonda; from their content, Webb assumed they had a military circulation. They had enchiladas stuffed with chicken and a sauce with little jalapeño peppers in it, and candied sweet potatoes for a side dish. Two dishes of sauce, one red and one green, were placed in front of Webb.

“The waiters use this as a test of virility,” Noordhof explained. “The green sauce is for ladies and wimps. The red one is for real men.”

“I don’t hold with these stunted concepts of masculinity,” Webb declared. He dipped a thin slice of a turnip-like vegetable into the green sauce, nibbled it, turned red, spluttered and then tried to swallow the Orinoco River. The Aztecs smiled their approval.

“Or was it the other way round?” Noordhof wondered.

They finished off with a dessert of baked bananas with egg whites and sweet condensed milk poured over them, washing it down with coffee spiced with vanilla and cloves, poured over cream and crushed ice.

Finally, Noordhof looked at his watch and said, “You want to check out the setup at ground zero, Doc?”

“What about my siesta?” Webb asked, bloated.

They heaved themselves up the wooden steps of the hacienda. The jeep was waiting at the front door. Judy and Webb sat in the back. Bullet Head revved the engine and they took off smartly down the hill and out of the complex, driving towards the sun, and the hinterlands.

The road was narrow and dusty. A few family homes, little more than corrugated iron huts with three walls, were scattered around the fields, with scraggy children playing happily enough, or heaving buckets of water. The soil was thin and stony, and broken up by outcrops of rock. Eventually, even the houses petered out, and the cacti took over, tall, emaciated giants standing like motionless Triffids. Buzzards were gliding in big lazy circles high in the mountains. Sacheverell’s scenario again; but it hadn’t described the hot, humid air which streamed past the army jeep. Webb’s shirt was sticky with sweat. Metal was painful to touch. Judy wore dark sunglasses and her vaquero hat. Ahead of them, low on the horizon to the south, dark clouds were building up.

As they drove steadily south, towards the dark horizon, the temperature rose inexorably. For a mile behind them, a long billowing wake of dust marked out their trail. Webb’s throat turned into a hot, desiccated tube, and he felt his face going the colour of beetroot. Noordhof’s conversation began to wilt, and then died, and they headed out, into the deserted inferno, in a mood of grim endurance. Still jetlagged, Webb tried to stretch out, laying his head back on the seat.

There was a blonde, Nordic maiden. Her eyes were glacier-blue and she was wearing a white gown. She was up to her waist in a pool of turquoise meltwater which cascaded down from Buachaille Etive Mor, spraying them both. She smiled enigmatically, and waded forwards carrying an icefilled tumbler of Coke on a silver tray. She held the tray out to Webb. He stretched out for the cold drink, but there was the sudden roar of an avalanche, and a rock struck him on the head, and there was a crash of gears and a heavy lurch, and the ice maiden was gone, and a pitiless sun was burning into his eyes. The jeep was slowing, the driver turning off the road. They started to bump and grind along a little donkey track. The track snaked its way upwards through foothills, weaving its way around boulders. The soldier worked hard on the wheel, cursing and begging your pardon ma’am, while the jeep’s suspension squealed in complaint. Ahead of them was a wooden hut, an anomaly in these primordial surroundings, like a telephone booth on a mountain top. The jeep reached it and stopped with a groan. A red-faced soldier emerged hastily and came to attention. His shirt was sticky with sweat.

Noordhof stepped out of the jeep and stretched himself. His brow was damp with sweat. He grinned wolfishly. “That was the easy bit. Epicentre dead ahead. From here on in we walk.” He returned the soldier’s salute smartly, and led the group off in single file.

The air was even hotter, and it was scented. As they climbed up, they were surrounded by the drone and clicking of a billion invisible insects. Irrationally, Webb began to feel hemmed in, overwhelmed. We are the true rulers of the Earth, they were saying; you are the temporary guests; we were here a billion years before you, will be here a billion years after you have gone.

They scrambled upwards over boulder-strewn ground in grim silence. Once a twin-rotor helicopter passed, thundering overhead, a jeep swinging below it on a long cable. It disappeared over the horizon ahead and the insects returned. After half an hour of it, the ground began to level out and they began to see signs of ancient cultivation. The path was taking them through terracing. There was a hilltop ahead and as they approached it, structures began to appear in silhouette against the sky. Reaching the summit, they found themselves looking out over a small city. Some community long gone had levelled the ground. Stone pyramids, temples and walls were everywhere. Hundreds of camouflage-green tents were laid out about half a mile to the right, and the city was swarming with soldiers.

Noordhof waved an arm around. “Ground zero. The place of decision.”

“My feet are killing me,” Webb said.

“I have to see the boss,” said Noordhof, leaving them; he had slipped into a brisk, military style, marching rather than strolling. Judy and Webb had simultaneously spotted a van with an open side and an awning. The woman who handed out tumblers of iced Coke was middle-aged, wrinkled and wore a shapeless khaki overall, but to Webb she was the Ice Maiden of his dream. They downed two each in quick succession and Webb thought that maybe there was a God after all.

A GI sidled up. He looked about sixteen. He was small, freckled and had ginger hair cut almost to the scalp. “You the Brit?”

Webb nodded.

The soldier licked his lips nervously. “Say, this asteroid thing — the line is it’s going to miss. Or we wouldn’t be here, right?”

“Right,” Webb said reassuringly.

The young soldier wasn’t reassured. “You can give it to me straight, sir. We really are okay?”

A tall, thin bespectacled sergeant approached. “Are you in pain, Briggs?”

“No, sarge.”

“That’s strange, because I’m standing on your hair. Get it cut.”

The soldier hurried off. “Say, can I show y’all around?” the sergeant asked, nominally nodding in Webb’s direction before fixing a grin on Judy. Webb wandered off with a wave.

There were bas-relief carvings around the sides of the squat, stony buildings: armed warriors, human sacrifices, arms and legs and dismembered trunks. Waiting for the skygod. On one side of a truncated pyramid Webb recognized a stylized cosmic serpent, winged and feathered, the ancient symbol of catastrophic skies from the Norse lands to Sri Lanka, from China to Mexico: the ancient giant comet, father of a hundred Karibishas.

He climbed the ancient steps of a pyramid. A thick black cable trailed up and on to the observing platform, and wound its way into the base of a big shiny paraboloid staring fixedly at a point on the blue sky. The blue lightning logo of Mercury Inc. was painted near the top of the dish. The Valley of Morelos, flanked by steep-sided mountains, stretched to the southern horizon. Whoever once controlled this ancient hilltop also controlled the valley, and passing traffic, and probably territory far beyond. The thunderclouds to the south were building up rapidly. Big Daddy, when he came, would approach from there.

“You’re looking at thirty megabytes a second, son,” a voice said. A short, white-haired man in a khaki shirt, with a belly overhanging his belt, was looking up at Webb. Small blue eyes were set back in a round head.

“I’m impressed.”

“We use it to patch straight into the White House via one of our geosynchronous DSPs. You also link straight in to your Whitehall number through this selfsame dish so once the Holy Passover occurs you just pick up that phone over there and let ’em know. So you’re the Brit who identified Nemesis. General Arkle.”

“How do you do, sir?”

“I do fine. What’ll we see?”

“At two hundred miles impact parameter? A rapidly rising moon. It’ll cross the sky in a few seconds, going through all the phases of the moon as it passes. My guess is Nemesis will have a rough, pitted surface.”

Arkle nodded thoughtfully. “And if it’s a bit closer?”

“Say it touches the stratosphere. It’ll leave a black smoky trail, and tomorrow will be dark.”

“Closer still?”

“In that case, General, Nemesis won’t seem to move much. We’ll see a small crescent, very bright, low in the morning sky, coming from over there.” Webb pointed in the direction of the thunderclouds. “The crescent will grow very fast — in a few seconds it will form a yellow arch straddling the sky from horizon to horizon.”

“And what then?”

“The sky will go incandescent, but I doubt if our brains will have time to register the fact.”

“And then goodbye America. We should have zapped the bastards long ago.”

“There’s a lot riding on your communications, General, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way,” Webb said, pointing south. “What if your system is struck by lightning?”

“We got two of everything in this man’s army. Two backup systems, two generators”—the soldier’s hand swept over the plateau—“and the best communications men in the world, all here just so you and I can make a ten-second call.”

“Maybe the Russians know about this. Maybe they’ll try to knock you out, for the sake of confusion. What about spetsnaz activity?”

Arkle laughed. “Son, you’re talking to Task Force One Sixty here, from Fort Bragg, Carolina. You want to know about behind-the-lines activity? Ask us, we wrote the book. The nearest Russians are a hundred and forty miles away in Mexico City and we got them monitored. We’re a full brigade, with the blessing of the Mexican Government who are proving highly co-operative on account of they object to being vaporized.”

The Sun flickered briefly, and Webb felt a sudden down-draught. A helicopter whispered overhead and lowered itself into a clear space a few hundred yards away.

“You see that, son? That is a McDonnell-Douglas MH Sixty Pave Hawk. Quiet as a mouse on account of it’s for infiltration. It has all-weather vision, seven-point-six-millimetre machine guns and two-point-seven-five-inch rockets. It can do a hundred and eighty-five miles an hour and fly to Mexico City and back twice without refuelling. We got two of them too.”

“General Arkle, you seem to have two of everything.”

“Believe it. Anything you need?” The general looked appraisingly at Webb, then produced a large cigar and proceeded to light up. About a hundred yards over his shoulder Judy was having the intricacies of a diesel power generator explained to her by about a dozen GIs.

“I’d like to get back. Can I commandeer a jeep?”

“Sure, and a driver. Tell ’em I said so.”

“There’s an old joke, General Arkle. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are now flying in the first fully automated aircraft. There is no need to worry as nothing can go wrong nothing can go wrong nothing can go wrong… ’ ”

The soldier laughed again, and blew a smoke ring. “Boy, you sure are a worrier.”

* * *

Low, dark clouds overtook the jeep on the way back, blotting out the hot sun. Noordhof had stayed put, still having business with Arkle, and Webb had finally prised Judy away from her enthusiastic technical instructors before commandeering the little fat driver to take them back. The landscape, already primeval, took on a dull, alien look, as if it belonged to another planet. Out here, the brooding atmosphere was almost tangible.

The driver put on his headlights and assured them that Jesus begging your pardon ma’am we’re in for Sumthin that’s for Shore. He pulled over and stopped, the brakes squealing. The humidity was terrific and his short thick neck glistened with sweat. The silence was unnatural. He began to haul at the tarpaulin hurriedly, as if anxious to get away. Webb jumped out to help just as the first hailstone clanged noisily off the bonnet of the jeep, and they barely had time to scramble back in before an avalanche of hail poured down from the sky.

The first flickering blue etched a brilliant Christmas tree on Webb’s retina, and a deep electrical crackle rumbled round and round the mountains. Judy cried with delight, and after that the powerful echoing Boom! of one thunderclap after another merged with the solid roar of hailstones on the jeep, while wind tore at the canopy and lightning strobed the landscape so that it looked as if they were part of a jerky old movie. Conversation was futile, but the driver managed a steady stream of profanity.

Once the bouncing and mud-sliding got out of hand; the driver had mistaken the road. He put on the brakes but the jeep started to slither and they found themselves in a terrifying, out-of-control slide taking them sideways down towards a gorge. They were about to jump for their lives when the jeep hit a rock about three feet from the edge and stopped with a bump. Webb had a nose-down view of a surging, yellow river forty feet below them, and a fallen tree wedged between black rocks.

Judy and Webb jumped out and heaved on the jeep while the driver, white-faced and shaking, reversed slowly on to the real road. Arcs of mud flew up from the spinning wheels and they all turned a sodden, yellowish brown and their fear released itself in hysterical laughter.

They eventually reached the real road, where the driver pushed his nose up to the windscreen and called up some Special Reserve language which took them safely back to Oaxtepec.

Judy stopped Webb as he was about to enter his room, mud and water forming spreading pools around them. She spoke softly. “That was not an accident, Oliver.”

Webb stared. “Come on, Judy, the driver misjudged the road.”

“Warning posts had been pulled up. Recently. The sockets were still filling with water. The posts were probably thrown in the river. And there were footprints in the mud. Not ours.”

“How can that be? Nobody overtook us on the way back.”

Judy wiped water from her eyes. “The helicopter could have.”

“The helicopter? Do you know what that implies?”

She put a finger to her mouth. “Not so loud. We must talk.”

“Not in this state. Later.”

Webb had a shower, feeling badly rattled. It was too humid for comfort and he wrapped a towel around himself. He lay under a sheet, watching the rain pour down the French windows and listening to it hissing down on the grass, while the sky beyond crackled and flickered.

He fell into an exhausted, nightmarish sleep. When he awoke it was dark. He dressed quickly and walked hurriedly along to the reception area. Apart from the lady at the desk, the big ranch-like place was deserted. Rain drummed down on its roof. She had taut curves and black hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a white frilly blouse with a low cleavage guarded by a golden crucifix. The receptionist smiled as Webb approached.

“Ah, Señor, there is a message for you. It came before the storm.” She handed over a fax:

WHEN IS A CUSTARD PIE NOT A CUSTARD PIE?

UNCLE WILLY LUMPARN.

The address was c/o a newsagent in Coolidge, Arizona.

“I’d like to make an international call, to London.”

“But the lines, they are all down.”

“Mexico City, then?” The woman picked up the receiver, listened and shrugged.

“Does this happen a lot?”

“Always, when we have thunder.”

“When will they be open again?”

“When the thunder is gone. Maybe.” Webb nodded and strolled thoughtfully on to the covered cloister.

Between Oaxtepec and Mexico City, there was only one road, and General Arkin’s enthusiastic little story about the awesome gunships suddenly made a lot of sense. Suddenly everything was beginning to make sense.

Between two hundred million and a billion lives, he thought, depended on his making a telephone call. But he was isolated, in remote bandit country, and hemmed in by an elite task force.

And no way would they let him make that call.

Tinker Air Force Base, T-9 Hours

Vice-President Adam McCulloch settled himself into the front left seat of the passenger capsule and looked at his watch, which he had not adjusted since leaving Washington DC in order to avoid troublesome subtractions. It was 22:15. A two-hour flight to Andrews, from where, he thought, he would board Nightwatch and disappear into the blue yonder. His head still reeling from the Presidential Counsellor’s briefing, he wondered where Nightwatch could go to be safe from the blast from this flying mountain thing. Or maybe they would bundle him into the Presidential helicopter and take him to some subterranean command post.

Through the little oval window he watched the generals and the military specialists climbing the steps into the converted C-130, each man an inky black shadow rimmed with floodlight from a battery of harsh lamps. Admiral Tozer and his aide settled themselves down in the seats across the passageway. Tozer nodded amiably across at the Vice-President, who was beginning to think about the hip flask which his assistant carried for him in the Vice-Presidential briefcase.

The door below was closed, the big lever turned by a stocky man in Air Force uniform. A light came on overhead and the Vice-President clicked on his safety belt. A man was down below, waving from the runway. It was General Cannon. McCulloch unbuckled, got up quickly, climbed the three steps to the cockpit door and hauled it open. He tapped the co-pilot on the shoulder. “Hold the plane. And get the door open.”

The door was pulled open and McCulloch shouted down over the roar of the giant engines. “Ain’t you s’pposed to be coming with us?”

The general cupped his hands over his mouth. “I’m going on ahead. Things to do. Got a jet waiting as soon as you take off.”

McCulloch put his thumbs up and went back inside. He put his jacket into the overhead hold, buckled up again, and the door was again secured. One of the propellers started to race, and the transport swivelled around. Then all four engines revved up and the massive aircraft lumbered towards the runway, its wings vibrating as it moved.

* * *

Cannon watched dispassionately as the transport aircraft, lights strobing the dark, aligned itself on the runway. Then the sound of the four engines rose in a powerful crescendo, the huge propellers spun up to a grey blur, and the aircraft started forward. “Goodbye, McCulloch,” Cannon said, as if to himself. Then he turned to his aide. “Right, Sprott, let’s get up there.”

* * *

The control tower personnel watched the Hercules transport hurtling along the runway and rising past them into the air, carrying the Vice-President, six generals, four admirals and a couple of dozen aides and experts. Fifteen minutes earlier two Cessna security planes, loaded with night vision and radar detectors, had probed a corridor fifty miles east-north-east of the base and reported in. It was a routine precaution against the possibility of terrorists with missiles. Now the Cessnas were circling the airstrip, waiting to land, red lights flashing from their underbellies; otherwise the airspace was quiet. It was just a case of giving Cannon’s jet the signal for takeoff.

McCulloch watched the control tower, an oasis of light in the black, pass below him, and then there was the flat panorama of rural Oklahoma, barely visible in the moonlight, sprinkled with lights from farms.

While the huge aircraft climbed, the Presidential Counsellor climbed up the steeply tilted passageway, leaning into the acceleration and holding a maroon briefcase. He tapped the Vice-President on the shoulder. McCulloch nodded and indicated the seat next to him, and the man virtually fell into it.

The Vice-President was looking puzzled. “Bozo, maybe you cain tell me somethin’. If this hyar mountain from space hits us, what in hell’s name am ah s’pposed to do about it?”

* * *

“Balls Niner, you are cleared for takeoff.”

“Balls Niner. Roger.” The pilot pushed forward the throttle and the aircraft whined quickly along the runway, climbed nimbly into the air and went into a shallow, banking turn. The pilot took it steeply up to forty thousand feet and levelled out.

* * *

McCulloch looked up from the briefing paper the Counsellor was explaining to him. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and glanced out of the window. A solitary car was moving along some solitary road. “That’s strange,” he said.

“Sir?”

“You got ahs, Bozo, take a look. We’re kinda near the ground.”

The Counsellor glanced out and smiled indulgently. “I don’t think so, sir.”

* * *

The pilot exchanged some comments with the tower. He glanced back, looking worried, at General Cannon. “Sir, there may be a problem.” Cannon moved up to the vacant co-pilot’s seat.

The pilot said, “Eagle Five aren’t responding to Tinker.”

Cannon put headphones on. The pilot leaned over and pressed a switch. “Who am I speaking to?”

“General Cannon?” a young voice replied anxiously. “We can’t raise the Vice-President’s plane.”

“Explain, that, please.”

Another voice came on, older, carrying an edge of authority. “General Cannon, Lieutenant Commander Watson here. Tower asked Eagle Five for their position three minutes ago. They gave us their ETA for Washington and a stand-by for present position, then, nothing. We’ve patched in a civil radar. They’re on course and due to pass into Missouri at fifteen thousand feet in four minutes. But they’re at twelve now and losing altitude. Make that eleven.”

“Have they given a mayday?”

“No sir, that’s the problem. We’re getting nothing. But at this rate they’ll soon be in the grass.”

“Give us a vector and we’ll head over.”

* * *

The Vice-President was staring intently out of the window. The Counsellor looked across the passageway. Admiral Tozer was reading a report and his aide was asleep, mouth open. The Counsellor leaned over McCulloch. The aircraft was ploughing solidly on, the huge propellers, illuminated by an underbelly light, were spinning reassuringly, and the muted roar of the engines was rock steady. But the light from the scattered farms below seemed brighter, and the C-13 had a definite backwards tilt. Quietly, he unbuckled and climbed the three steps to the cockpit door.

The first thing which the Counsellor noted was the sheer size of the cockpit, which looked not so much like a cockpit as the bridge of a ship. An array of multi-coloured lights moderated the gloom.

The second thing he noted was that the flight crew were either unconscious or dead. They were slumped forwards or sideways, held in their places by the safety harnesses.

The third thing to impinge on the Counsellor’s senses, as he turned to shout, was a brief, overwhelming dizziness as he breathed the poisoned air, followed by a tremendous spasm in his carotid artery, and the sensation of floating down towards the cabin floor.

An automatic mechanism in the tail of the Hercules detected the nose-up configuration of the aircraft and applied a correction. In fact it overcorrected and the plane, manned by lifeless pilots, began to head towards the ground two miles below. The mechanism, detecting this, pulled the plane back up, and the cycle was repeated, more steeply this time. It was on a downward cycle when, pushing aside the corpses of the Counsellor, an Air Force captain and his own aide, Admiral Tozer took his turn in the poisoned air. The port wing of the aircraft touched a steeple, sending a spray of stonework and a thirty-foot fragment of wing spiralling over the town of Carthage, Missouri. He pulled on the joystick, his lungs bursting, and there was a moment of blackness. He seemed to be floating towards the cockpit ceiling. A cluster of orange lights approached rapidly from the sky above. Disoriented, it was a second before he recognized them as the lights of a town. The lights shot over his head and then there was more blackness.

* * *

Fox One circled the fierce orange fireball at a safe height. Cars were beginning to stream out of Carthage towards the flames just beyond the town.

Cannon looked down without emotion at the fiercely blazing remains of the aircraft he had been scheduled to fly in. “I’ve got a schedule to keep. Carry on to Andrews. And ask Tinker to patch me through to the White House. We’d better let them know the Vice-President has just met with a tragic accident.”

The Whirlpool

Webb walked along the covered walkway, tingling with nerves. To his left a small waterfall poured off the roof.

The call to his old friend had converted ninety-nine per cent certainty to one hundred per cent. Nemesis was a deception and a fraud. It was a monstrous conspiracy.

He thought he knew why, and the answer terrified him.

Webb’s door was unlocked and the light was on. The sound of churning water came from within. Adjoining the bedroom was a long washroom with a vanity unit and a whirlpool tub. Judy was up to her chin in soap suds.

“Hi Oliver!” she waved a soapy hand as the astronomer passed.

Noordhof was straddling a heavy chair in the middle of the bedroom. His arms were folded on the back of the chair.

Webb kicked off his shoes and sat on the bed, at the pillow end, with his back to the ornate wooden headboard.

The churning stopped.

The colonel moved to the telephone, lifted the receiver and dialled. “A-okay here. Ten minutes.” He returned to his chair, and folded his arms again on the back, only this time he was holding an ivory-handled Colt revolver.

“What happens in ten minutes?” Webb asked, his mouth dry.

Judy emerged from the bathroom in a white dressing gown, her blonde hair wrapped in a towel. She sat down at a dressing table and started doing something to her eyelashes.

Noordhof said, “There’s nothing personal about this, Oliver. I like you. You’re just a little man way out of your depth. But before the squad turns up, I want to know how much you know. Do you know anything?”

“I know that Nemesis doesn’t exist.” Webb kept his eyes on Noordhof; but he sensed that Judy, at the dressing table, had suddenly frozen.

Noordhof showed surprise, then a flicker of admiration. “How in Hell’s name did you work that out, Doc?”

“Gut instinct.”

“Was that all?”

“Leclerc’s death was the first real thing. I think André got there before me. He came to me worried but didn’t live long enough to say why. I believe he’d worked out that the Russian deep space programme has a history incompatible with the multiple visits that would have been needed for a high-precision deflection. I also guessed that in the hours when he went missing, before he died, he realized it was a setup and he cleared out of Eagle Peak.”

“He tried. You were all under constant surveillance from the woods, Oliver. My people saw André, he saw them and took off in the cable car. Considering it had to look like an accident, I thought they showed real initiative at short notice.”

The soldier waved the pistol encouragingly, and Webb continued. “Item Two was Vincenzo’s manuscript. Quite a coincidence that I was translating it just before I was dragooned into your team.”

“You were slow on the uptake, Oliver. We thought we were going to have to ram the book down your throat.”

“I couldn’t understand why, if Phaenomenis had real information in it, the Russians would draw attention to it by stealing it from under my nose. What was it with these thefts? I began to suspect that I was meant to get hold of Vincenzo’s book, meant to identify Nemesis from it.”

Judy had finished with her eyelashes; she moved her chair next to Noordhof’s.

The Colonel scratched his head thoughtfully with the barrel of the revolver. “Good thinking, Oliver.”

“But a couple of things really got the alarm bells ringing.”

Noordhof waited politely.

“Karibisha. It’s too big. As a killing machine, it’s over-enthusiastic. At a million megatons it would set the whole world alight. The fireball would poison the atmosphere with nitric oxide. The Russians would have suffered tremendous damage along with the rest of the planet. They have first class people in this business and they would know that a Karibisha impact is global suicide.”

Noordhof tried to sound casual. “So did you share your suspicions?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Judy said, “I doubt it. He wouldn’t know who he could trust. Anyway, I believe he was out here before his suspicions crystallized.”

Webb kept talking. “I knew I was being manipulated. I went along with it because I had to know who, and why. Somebody wanted me to get that book, wanted me to find an asteroid in it. Now who would want that, and why? I thought long and hard about that.”

“Is that it?” Noordhof asked.

“There were other things. No way could Karibisha have been seen that close to the sun with the claimed precision. The NASA report you showed me yesterday had to be a lie. After that, things have been falling into place quickly.”

The Colonel shrugged. “Yeah, the NASA report was a rush job. You threw us by asking for it. All those phoney US Naval Observatory observations, Goldstone radar data and so on. What the heck, you gave us less than a day.”

“Why me, Mark? Why choose me for your team?”

“We chose you with care, Oliver. We knew you were set on finding some comet in old star charts. So we supplied you with an asteroid instead. We got rid of all copies of Vincenzo but one to raise its profile in your thick head and to make sure you didn’t go making comparisons. You were supposed to be a pushover but you turn out to be a giant headache. I knew you were trouble when I saw you checking the switching circuit in the wheelhouse. You weren’t supposed to do that, Ollie. And your damn robot telescope had us in a real panic. I had to stall you for a full day while we got a team to rig the circuitry. And still you saw through it.”

Judy had unwound the towel from her head and was rubbing her hair with it.

“I’m glad I was a pain but you still had me fooled up to a point. I thought you were trying to stop me identifying the asteroid. It was some time before it dawned on me what you were really about, that you were actually trying to stop me finding that there is no asteroid.”

Noordhof said, “The manuscript thing was CIA false flag recruitment at its best. They used a real artist, the best Renaissance document forger in the business. Even the nib of the pen was right for the period in case somebody thought to use neutron activation analysis on the ink. Vincenzo’s book, of course, was the genuine article. All this guy had to do was add the moving star. It had to match the orbit of a real Earth-grazer, it had to be good enough to fool the manuscript experts, and like you say we had to get rid of every copy except the one with the insert in case anyone thought to make comparisons.”

“I suppose he had an unfortunate accident?”

“The forger? Yeah, he swallowed hydrochloric acid, can you imagine?” Noordhof shook his head sorrowfully. “Don’t worry, Ollie, I’ll be more humane. And you’ve still got five minutes.”

“I’m curious about one thing,” Webb said, to keep the conversation going. “Where did my so-called assassin come into it?”

Noordhof looked glum. “A sideshow that went wrong. I fixed it so you would have to buy the lousy manuscript. Uncle Sam was supposed to pay a couple of million bucks for it; half for me, half for my Italian counterpart — not that he’d have lived to collect it. But the guy gets greedy. He guesses the manuscript might be worth a lot more so he sells you a story about a contract on you and tries to jack up the payment for himself.”

A thunderclap shook the room and the light flickered briefly. Webb asked, “What’s the story when I don’t report in at T equals Zero?”

“Another accident, of course.”

“You expect to get away with that?”

Noordhof’s eyes glinted. “Ollie, we expect to get off with a nuclear strike.”

Webb let it sink in slowly. “I was afraid of that.”

“Yeah, and with a few thousand nukes pouring into the Evil Empire, who’s going to notice some Brit going missing in Mexican bandit country?” The soldier glanced at his watch. “By the way, you’ve got four minutes. How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.”

Now Judy was patting her legs dry with the towel. She looked around and dragged over a coffee table with a box of paper handkerchiefs and a heavy marble ashtray.

“Is the President in on this?” Webb asked.

“Poor Ollie, still on planet Mars. Things don’t work that way, friend. If the Chief knew about it, how could he deny it? We’re protecting him. Nemesis is the nuclear button, but if it’s going to work the Chief has got to believe in it.”

“I think I can see how it works,” said Webb. “The nonexistent asteroid grazes the atmosphere. An electromagnetic pulse shorts out your electronic systems and you lose all contact with the White House. So the President thinks the non-existent asteroid has hit, the shock wave is on the way in and America is on the way out. So he gets the nukes away while he can.”

“Got it in one,” Noordhof said with genuine admiration. “We will have total control over everything coming into the President’s War Room, wherever it is. There will be a perfect simulation of an asteroid strike, and when the smoke clears, it turns out it was all a grazing encounter like you say but tears of joy and ring out the bells, America is still with us and the Bear is dead.”

“And Karibisha?”

“We were going to shift perigee into the Gulf at the last minute but in this weather ain’t nobody going to see it here, so why bother.”

“Post-encounter?”

“The Earth has deflected it back into the sunlight.”

“But the EMP! You can’t fake that over the whole of America.”

“No but while we’re zapping Russia a couple of our nukes will go off prematurely and give us the real thing. Who’s going to tell the difference?”

“And Russia just lets it all happen.”

“BMDO tell us they can handle the response. Provided we get in an overwhelming first strike, our losses will be acceptable. And if a couple of their nukes get through, we have even more EMP to add to the confusion.”

“Acceptable losses,” Webb said thoughtfully. “I have one question.”

“Sure.” Noordhof waved the Colt invitingly. “You still have three minutes.”

“Why? Zhirinovsky, right?”

“Zhirinovsky, right. We have an overwhelming nuclear advantage now. But he’s catching up fast. In a few years we’ll be back to the old parity only this time we’ll be facing a raving lunatic and it’s only a matter of time before he decides to zap us except that on account of some of us love our country we’re trying to do something positive about that.”

“The guy is just bombast. And he probably won’t survive the next Russian election.”

“Thank you, Oliver, you’re full of surprises, I didn’t know you included political analysis amongst your talents.”

Noordhof leaned forward to say more, waving the gun at Webb. There was a crackle and a tremendous bang, and the lights went out. Webb froze in the pitch black. When they came on a second later Noordhof’s eyes were wide and he was holding the Colt at arm’s length, and it was pointing straight at Webb’s chest. The soldier re-folded his arms.

Webb glanced at Judy, but her eyes betrayed nothing. “One last question.” He suppressed an urge to panic. “What about the New Mexico scorpion here?”

Judy gave a cold smile.

“We needed an ear in the team. A scientist to make sure things went smoothly, to make sure y’all got the right ideas at the right times and nobody started getting any wrong ideas. Doctor Whaler came on the personal recommendation of right-thinking people at the highest level in the National Security program.”

“After all, Oliver, my job is to preserve peace through revolutionary and visionary means,” Judy said.

“Revolutionary? I don’t think so. Nemesis is a hoary old ploy, a border incident created to justify war.”

She continued. “But what a wonderful challenge! And morally justifiable, contrary to what you seem to think. What’s the point of a short-lived peace if it’s just an interlude before annihilation? What we’re facing is a Ghengis Khan with nukes. The threat posed by his weapons of mass destruction is just too great. Surely Mark’s philosophy is right? Seize the moment, and settle the issue for all time.”

“Skipping the tedious legalities,” Webb suggested. A thunderclap shook the French windows.

The Colonel said, “You know the old saying, Ollie. My country, right or wrong.”

“Respect for the tedious legalities is what separates men from monkeys. And you from me.”

The soldier faked a smile. “Negative, Oliver. The vital difference between us is that I’m holding the gun.” He glanced again at his watch. “Anything else you want to know?”

“You’re not going to shoot me.”

Noordhof raised an eyebrow.

Webb took a deep breath. He could hardly speak. “I have protection.”

“Sure you have. I can’t wait to hear about it.”

“A couple of hours ago I was sent a fax. ‘When is a custard pie not a custard pie?’ The desk will confirm it.”

“He’s right,” Judy said.

“Yeah, we know. It got us puzzled. It should have been intercepted but the stoopid girl…”

“It’s signed by my Uncle Willy Lumparn, who doesn’t exist,” Webb said, trying to put a confident edge into his voice. “But look up Lumparn in an atlas. Check it out. It’s a circular lake a few miles across in Aaland, which is a Baltic island, property of Finland.”

“Maybe you should get to the point quickly, Ollie. Your time’s up.” Noordhof raised his gun, pointing it at Webb’s chest. Uncertainty was flickering across the soldier’s face.

The dark nozzle of the gun was filling Webb’s universe. “I’ll keep it simple, Mark. Lumparn is an old impact crater. Custard pies get thrown as in Laurel and Hardy movies. The fax is asking me whether we’re in a custard pie situation. They’re asking me whether an asteroid is being thrown, whether Nemesis is real. I’m here to find out. You surely don’t think I kept my suspicions to myself? And if I don’t give the right coded reply at the right time, Project Nemesis blows up in your face, your President doesn’t launch and you try to find some part of the world where you can hide from the Mongoose squad, say like the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You’re coming apart at the seams, Mark, you and your insane plot.”

Noordhof stood up, his composure gone. He paced up and down the room, glaring uncertainly at Webb. Then he kicked the chair aside and marched up to the astronomer, and pointed the Colt at his head, and Webb felt himself yielding to terror. Noordhof spoke harshly over his shoulder. “You know this guy, Judy. What about it? Is he bluffing?”

She stood up and stretched, and gazed speculatively at Webb. “Who sent the fax, Oliver?”

“Willy Shafer.”

Judy’s smile broadened, while Noordhof gasped with relief before throwing back his head with laughter. “I guess you haven’t been reading the news, Oliver. Willy’s beach house finally slid over the cliff, with poor Willy inside it. Oh man, either he sent the fax two days after we killed him or you sent it to yourself after you got here, for insurance. Great try, man, you had me scared to death!” And he laughed some more, but not enough to make the gun waver. Webb felt his face going white.

Judy yawned and approached the head of the bed. “I’m truly sorry. It’s not the way I’d have wanted it. But when you consider what’s at stake there’s really nothing else we can do. Mark, I’m tired and ready for sleep. Why wait for your death squad? When the next thunderclap comes, pull the trigger. Goodbye, Ollie.”

The Situation Room, T-1h30m

The telephone at the side of the President’s bed in the First Lady’s Bedroom never rang before 07:30, at which time a White House operator would wish him a good morning. The Nemesis emergency necessitated an earlier call, which had been arranged for 03:15.

But it was ringing now, an hour early, at 02:15.

“Mister President.”

It was Billy Quinn, the White House Chief of Staff.

Something in his voice. Grant, drugged with sleep, struggled up to a sitting position.

“Billy? I thought we were moving to Site R at four o’clock.”

“Sir, leave the residence immediately.”

“What?”

“Please don’t argue. You may be in danger. Leave now, quickly.”

The line went dead.

Grant threw back the blankets and headed quickly through the President’s Bedroom — in fact a study with a deep red decor — to the shower room. He dressed rapidly, dispensing with jacket and tie. Back through the red room. Toby, a mongrel saved by his children from death row many years ago, watched from the foot of the bed, ears pricked up. The President looked at his sleeping wife uncertainly, then left her alone. Toby followed him into the kitchen and climbed back into his basket with a sigh, and Grant headed out across the hall.

The elevator door was open. Jim Greenfield, his personal assistant, was waiting. They went down into the corridor where they were joined by a bleary-eyed Quinn. The three men marched without conversation along the corridor towards the Oval Office, Greenfield slightly ahead of the other two. They carried on past it, Greenfield, still leading the way, crossed over to the Executive Building and down some stairs. Light was shining under a door. It opened and a Secret Service man, his face lined with tension, seized the President by the arm and pulled him in, looking out before closing the door again. Hallam, Cresak and an army officer were standing at the head of the bowling alley. Hallam came over quickly.

“Thank God,” he said emotionally.

“What the hell?” Grant asked.

“Sir, Vice-President McCulloch is dead. We got the news only ten minutes ago.”

“How?”

“A plane crash near Carthage, Missouri. He was on his way here from Tinker. Mister President, it may not have been an accident.”

Grant tried to assimilate the information. “Not an accident? Is this Zhirinovsky?”

“No sir, your own people.”

The President felt a dull pain developing in his chest.

The army officer said, “Sir, there’s a conspiracy to remove you.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Colonel Wallis. I’m in charge of the DCO Unit.”

“The new man. I’ve seen you around.”

“Mister President, General Hooper and Secretary Bellarmine see you as failing in your duty on the retaliation issue. They intend to remove you from office when the asteroid hits, unless you immediately order a counterstrike against the Russians.”

“Who else is involved in this?”

“I have no hard information on that.”

“Want to speculate?”

“It may involve all three service chiefs. There may be CIA involvement, probably going up to the Director.”

“Heilbron? Never.” Grant’s voice was grim.

Quinn said, “Chief, they’ve isolated you. With McCulloch out of the way…”

“I carry the final authority.”

Quinn continued: “They could have sold Wallis the wrong story as insurance in case he crossed them. I just don’t know what their real tactics are.”

The President turned again to Wallis. “When did you learn about this?”

“When they asked me to join them. A month ago.”

“You’ve been sitting on this for a month?”

“I said I’d join them.”

“You played them along?”

“No, sir. I thought they were doing the right thing.”

“But you had a last-minute change of heart.”

“Yes, sir. I think maybe I should be shot.”

Grant surprised Wallis: “Don’t worry about it, son.” He turned to his National Security Adviser, whose mouth had developed a nervous twitch. “Arnold, you got something to say?”

“Only that you can’t risk going back to your quarters.”

Grant rubbed his face with his hands. “Billy, in the last resort it may come down to firepower. Have some standing by discreetly. Arnold, get over to the Sit Room and keep your mouth shut.” Grant looked at his watch. He picked up a bowling ball and took aim at the distant pins.

Hallam said, “Sir, Nemesis arrives in five hours.”

The President sent the ball skimming along the wooden alley. “Hey, didn’t Francis Drake do this before the Spanish Armada?”

* * *

Bellarmine was pacing agitatedly up and down in the corridor just outside the Situation Room as Grant approached. His face was white and he was unconsciously tensing his mouth. He closed his eyes with relief when the President appeared.

“Jesus Christ, sir, where have you been? We turned the Cottage inside out looking for you. Vice-President McCulloch was killed in an air crash an hour and a half ago.”

“I know. What about his replacement?”

“Caroline Craig’s on her way in from Seattle, sir. They’re briefing her in-flight, but she won’t get here in time.”

“Okay, brief me. And Nathan, this is a good time to keep calm.”

A soldier emerged smartly from the Situation Room, carrying a wad of paper. “Mister President, we have reports of further tank and troop movements into Slovakia. They’re massing on the Czech side of the Black Forest.”

“Okay.”

Another aide approached. “Sir.”

“Well?” said Grant roughly.

“The Pentagon say the hotline is dead. They can’t get through to the Kremlin.”

“Watch your feet, sir,” a technician warned as President Grant picked his way over a mass of cables. Technicians bustled around, none of them paying much attention to the entry of the Chief. Foggy Wallis approached. The two men exchanged looks.

“This way, Mister President. Your team’s all here. Watch your head.” The President ducked his head and they went through an open door, following the route of more cables stretching across the floor like long shiny black snakes. The room was brilliantly lit with studio lights. About a dozen men, some in uniform, were seated around the big central table. They stood up as the President entered.

Grant’s place at the table had two telephones, red and black, and two books, one red and one black. He stared dully at the books, and sat down in the chair with as much enthusiasm as a man about to be electrocuted. The curtains had been pulled back from the end wall and the large screen was exposed, with speakers at either side of it. The walnut panelling had been removed from the walls to reveal banks of television screens. Desks and terminals had been crammed into the little room since he had last used it two days ago, and it now looked like a miniaturized version of a Star Trek set. About a dozen men and women, some in uniform, stared at television screens. Two men, shirt sleeves rolled up, stood in a far corner of the room, one with a video camera, the other holding a boom with a microphone, recording for whatever posterity there was going to be.

The room was cramped and stuffy. It was also claustrophobic.

“How long to impact?” Grant asked.

“Ninety-five minutes,” said Hooper. “Mister President, where have you been?”

The President sat down. He turned to Hooper. “Silo activity?”

“We wouldn’t expect to see anything until their missiles take off,” said Hooper. “We got a couple of Cobras out from Shemya to look at the Kamchatka area an hour ago. The pilots report they’ve been blinded with laser beams. We’re trying to talk them back in.”

Grant turned to Cresak. “What’s the diplomatic situation?”

“The Security Council are calling an emergency meeting in a couple of hours. Ambassador Thorp went into the Kremlin three hours ago and we haven’t heard from him since.”

“What does Kolkov have to say?”

Cresak shot Hooper a baleful look. “He’s upstairs now. He accuses us of gearing up for a first strike. He says his people are just positioning themselves for defence.”

“This from the men who gave us Nemesis,” Bellarmine said. “The creep, the hypocritical creep.”

A woman in Air Force uniform approached the President. Grant looked at her. “Falcon are downgrading the GPS’s, Mister President.”

The global positioning satellites could be used by an enemy in a precision attack on American targets. The standing plan was to downgrade them in the event of a threat. Thousands of Jumbo jets, aloft at any one time, depended on them for navigation. But around the world, the last Jumbo jets were now landing; nothing would take to the air until Karibisha had come and gone. The downgrading, however, would send an unmistakably dangerous message to the other side.

Grant nodded.

“Mister President, Silk Purse is airborne in Europe. We need the British Prime Minister’s permission to use our F-111s at the English bases. Their Minister of Defence is stalling us. Sir, we’re running out of time for a decision. We have to release the permissive action links.”

“No way.”

“Sir.” Hooper opened a handbook at a book-marked page. He was attempting a matter-of-fact, legalistic tone. “I refer you to JSOP/81-N. Our destruction is imminent, and you must now therefore proceed to State Scarlet. If our B-2s are going to beat the blast from the asteroid they have to get out over the polar cap now.”

“Past their failsafes? Sam, the decision to nuke stays with me, not with a bunch of one-star generals. We don’t even know if the asteroid will hit.”

“We do, however, know that the use of Nemesis as a weapon is an act of war. It is our right and duty to respond to that act of war. Mister President, I want some cold logic on this. Our duty is to serve the interests of the American people. If we’re hit, we’ll be too shattered to defend ourselves against any subsequent hostilities. American interests are best served by destroying future potential enemies while we can. That’s why we gave you only the Grand Slam targeting option.”

“So much for flexible response, Sam.”

“Grand Slam is the only option that preserves some sort of future for our children.”

The President turned to Wallis. “Colonel, give me a rundown on our communication links.”

“We have three independent links from the ground station at the Xochicalco epicentre. One by satellite, one by short-wave radio, one a direct cable link. The cable link we had to patch in to the Mexican commercial land lines. We’ve got some of the best communications men in the army on site. The whole thing is protected by Special Operations Command. A couple of MH6 gunships in case of any monkey business.”

“Sir,” a soldier interrupted, “the Carl Vincent has reached its co-ordinates. They’re getting Phantoms aloft now.”

Wallis said, “Apart from Xochicalco, sir, we have the Navy about a thousand kilometres off the Atlantic sea-board. The asteroid will be coming from sunward but it’s pre-dawn out there and the Naval Observatory tell us a visual sighting should be possible and the thing should pass right over their heads. There’s an Atlantic storm out there, lots of low cloud and rain. Xochicalco’s washed out but communications aren’t affected.”

“I must know on the instant if we have a hit or a miss.”

“A French Spot satellite will be over central Mexico at the critical moment. If Nemesis hits we’ll see plenty. The pictures are being relayed in from Goddard and we’ll see them as they arrive.”

“Where do I press the button?” the President asked calmly.

“The helicopter is standing by. You’ll be at Raven Rock in less than fifteen minutes. MYSTIC is activated. It just needs your word.”

“Nothing from the Kremlin?” Grant asked Wallis.

The soldier shook his head.

“Okay, let’s head for the Rock.”

The Hacienda

Webb was shaking so much he could not put his feet in his shoes. Judy had slipped back to her room to dress, and Noordhof was raising himself to his knees, groaning, holding his ear while bright pink blood oozed between his fingers. The marble ashtray lay on the floor, split in two after Judy’s powerful blow. The gun was on the bed beside Webb, within arm’s length.

Noordhof struggled up to a sitting position on the bed. He was clearly dazed and in great pain.

The net curtain billowed briefly as Judy came back, dressed in black trousers and sweater. She slid the glass door closed. She looked dispassionately at Noordhof and said “Kill him.”

The lights failed again. A sharp cry of pain, male or female, came from the pitch black. Webb cursed and flopped down on the bed, groping for the gun. There was a crash of glass at the instant he felt its cold metal barrel. Wind and rain were suddenly gusting in the room. He sprinted towards the window and collided bodily with Judy. She fell back with a gasp and then he was running over broken glass in his socks. A flash of lightning, a brilliant celestial tree momentarily implanting on his retina; a vision of Noordhof frantically trying to shake off a net curtain. Webb rushed forwards, firing into the darkness. He had never used a gun and the first round jerked his wrist painfully. In the weapon’s flashes Noordhof appeared as a series of stills, snapshots of a man weaving and turning. Then the soldier had fallen face down about fifty yards ahead, and the gun was clicking empty, and there was only rain, and wind, and blackness.

“Oliver!”

“Over here! I think I’ve killed him.”

“Noordhof’s squad is on the way. We must run.”

Webb sprinted back into the room. “I need a telephone!” he shouted, forcing his bleeding feet into shoes.

“A telephone? Where?”

“In the hacienda. At the reception desk.”

“You madman!” Judy shouted in reply. A flicker of light threw her face into harsh relief, revealing wild eyes and water streaming down her sodden hair: a witch from Macbeth.

“I have no choice.”

“They’ll cut you off with bullets.”

“No time to discuss it. Look, we’ll go on a wide circle round the back and approach the ranch from the front. That way we don’t bump into the squad. Do you know cars?”

“I’ve been around them since I was fourteen.”

“So steal one. Bring it round to the front.”

“Ollie, enter the hacienda and you’re dead.”

“I have to try. Go!”

They sprinted across the sodden ground, away from the ranch, and took a wide curve towards the front, risking exposure from a single flash of light; but for the moment there was only a distant flickering on the horizon. They made for the dark, squat outline of a small building. It turned out to be a football shelter and they arrived, gasping, just as a thunderbolt lit up the landscape and hammered on the ground. They stood at the back, puffing, and looked out through a waterfall streaming down from the corrugated roof. A dull glow came from the hacienda entrance.

“I don’t think we were seen,” Judy said breathlessly.

“Two red lights, about thirty yards to the left of the entrance.”

“Soldiers smoking. I think I see a jeep.”

“Don’t even think about it. It’s hardly twenty yards from them.”

“There are three wires behind the steering column. Two must be joined together. When you touch them with the third, the engine starts.” The sky flashed blue and there was an instantaneous glimpse of three caped soldiers huddled under a clump of trees. Three jeeps were parked not far from them. But the thunderbolt had shown something new, a tableau of four soldiers striding purposefully along the covered verandah, in the direction of the rooms.

“Oliver,” she said quietly, “your death squad.”

Webb felt the old scrotum contraction, and this time his scalp shrank with it. He said, “A jeep, front entrance, ninety seconds,” and ran into the dark. At the hacienda, he strolled casually out of the shadows, an eccentric foreigner walking in the rain, sodden. Dice were clattering on the hard wooden floor. Half a dozen GIs were shouting incantations and exchanging paper money. At the far end, Arkle and a few officers were lounging in armchairs, drinking coffee. Arkle looked up startled, but recovered quickly and gave Webb a wave. He returned it, casually, wiping wet hair back from his eyes. A long-faced, weary corporal at the desk was reading Playboy.

“Are the lines open yet?” Webb asked.

“Sure. Where do you want?”

It would be the early hours in London. Webb gave him the Astronomer Royal’s ex-directory number. The corporal started to dial. The squat, bullet-headed sergeant left the game and wandered over.

“Hi Doc,” he said, with exaggerated casualness. “Problem?”

“Not really.” Don’t give him a handle. Arkle had left the officers and was striding over. Webb was light-headed and sweating, and Arkle’s face told him what he had feared: that he would never make the call.

“Ringing for you, sir,” the corporal said, holding out the receiver.

Arkle reached them. The sergeant stayed within arm’s length.

“Hi Doc, you’re up early,” the general said.

Webb took the receiver. “Couldn’t sleep with all the noise.”

The Astronomer Royal, sounding tired, said: “Waterstone-Clarke.”

Arkle killed the connection, a chubby finger going down on the button. “Can’t let you make the call, Doc. Security.”

“Security?”

“That’s right. Security.”

The sergeant sensed an atmosphere, stepped back nervously.

“First I’ve heard of it, General. I need to speak to my London contact.”

“This is an open line, son. We don’t know who could be listening in. London contacts are out until Nemesis has passed.”

Webb nodded, mentally setting a new priority: Get out of this alive.

“By the way,” Arkle added, “Colonel Noordhof’s been looking for you.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Webb said, moving towards the stairs.

“He’ll be along. Join us for coffee.”

“Thanks, but I need to dry out. I’ll just get to my room.”

“I insist,” said Arkle.

“Okay.” Moving to the stairs. “Join you in a minute.”

“I reckon you’re not hearing too good, son. Join us now.”

“Sure. I’ll join you now in a moment.”

Games with words. The sergeant glances uncertainly between them, his lips twitching. A few yards away the GIs play their own esoteric word game as the dice clatter along the floor: don’t come, baby’s new socks, it’s a natural. Arkle stands, baffled and tightlipped. Slowly up the wooden stairs. Slowly along the short stretch to the door. Almost there. Don’t run, for God’s sake don’t run. Slowly open the door. Turn to Arkle: a final wave. Casual, unhurried. Don’t blow it now; don’t run.

On to the verandah. Rain teeming down. Somebody shouting. A jeep without lights roaring up. From behind, Webb senses the ranch door opening. Shadowy figures rushing along the verandah, boots clattering on stone flagons. Another shout, this time from Arkle. The loud assertiveness of command.

“Stop them!”

Webb takes a running jump into the vehicle. Somebody seizes him by the collar. Webb punches him hard on the nose and cries out with the unexpected pain in his knuckles, but the sergeant staggers back, covering his face with his hands.

“Hit the boards!” Webb yells.

She hits them.

* * *

The pilot sprinted the hundred yards from the Portakabin to the helicopter, splashing through puddles and bent double against the rain. He quickly climbed in, threw off his baseball cap, put on his headphones and went through the check routine at superhuman speed. As the rotor started to chop he checked the radar; the other ship was ten miles to the south, six hundred feet above ground and following the pre-arranged perimeter patrol. There was a brief exchange on the radio. The pilot pulled on the collective and the gunship rose above the pyramids and the paraboloids. From above, the whole complex was lit up like some bizarre Alcatraz. He did a hard banking turn over the ancient city, switched on the thermal imager and followed the road north.

Ten minutes later he picked up the lights of Xochicalco, every detail of the ranch complex visible, pale and ghostly, like a snowscene tinged with green. The roof of the main building glowed as if aflame. He drifted over the complex and picked out Noordhof’s bungalow. A man was standing outside it and the pilot switched on the Night Sun as he descended, to be seen.

Noordhof ran unsteadily towards the gunship, like a drunk man. He was holding the side of his head. The pilot leaned over and opened the side door. The Colonel buckled himself in; blood was oozing out of a three-inch gash in front of his ear.

“You should get that seen to, sir.”

“The road to Mexico City. They’ve got a jeep.”

The gunship soared rapidly into the air.

“How much of a start, sir?”

“Christ knows.” Noordhof’s words were coming out strained; maybe concussion, the pilot thought, or maybe pain, or maybe the giant bruise at the side of the soldier’s jaw made speech difficult. “I was out maybe ten minutes. It took you ten to get here. I guess they have a twenty-minute start.”

“No problem, sir. All we have to do is follow the road. We’ll have them in five.”

* * *

“We have to get off the road!” Webb yelled above the screaming engine. Judy, hunched forward like a shortsighted old woman, ignored him. Swathes of rain streamed across the cone of the headlights. The jeep’s speedometer was hovering at around eighty miles an hour independently of the curves in the stormswept road. He tried again, putting his wet face close to hers and holding grimly on to the dashboard. “The helicopter at Oaxtepec — it has thermal imaging. All he has to do is follow the road. Can you hear me, you crazy witch? Even if you switch off your lights the heat from your exhaust will show up like a whore in church.”

“You have a map, stupid? Where do we leave the road?”

“Another ten minutes on it and we’re dead. Watch that corner. Oh my God. Why did you wait until the last second to move on Noordhof? You had me worried.”

“A New Mexico scorpion, am I? Anyway, how did you know I wasn’t on Noordhof’s side?”

Another glistening corner rushed up and Webb grabbed her arm to stay on. Arcs of mud and water shot past his head. The jeep hammered into a deep pothole and he was momentarily in free-fall. “That slide into the gorge. If you were in with them you wouldn’t have told me it was a murder attempt. Anyway, if God had meant you to fool me he’d have given you brains.”

“And the pigs thought I was expendable,” she shouted furiously.

“They recruited you and…”

“… and I went along with them to see how deep it went. Like you, Oliver, I didn’t know who I could trust.”

“Get off the road in five minutes or we’re dead…”

“The pigs, the lying, treacherous pigs!”

“… and half the planet with us!”

Mexico, the Last Hour

They flew six hundred feet high in pitch black, the machine bucketing in the wind, but in the infrared the road below was easily traced even through the torrential rain.

A brilliant green spot appeared at the top of the HUD and drifted slowly down. The pilot grunted in satisfaction. “Contact. Two miles ahead.”

Noordhof peered through the driving rain into the blackness ahead. He thought he saw a hazy light but it disappeared. In a second it reappeared, more strongly now, at first seeming to move unphysically fast over the ground before it resolved itself into the reflection of headlights sweeping from side to side as the driver manoeuvred round corners.

“I see them,” said Noordhof. Then: “Take them out.”

“Sir?”

“You having problems with your hearing, Mister?”

“Sir, is that an authorized order? This is Mexican territory. We’re not at war with Mexico, sir.”

“Ay-ffirmative it’s legal,” Noordhof lied. “Ay-ffirmative you’re in Mexico. And if you question my orders again ayffirmative I’ll stick your head up your ass.”

The pilot pulled the collective up and the gunship soared into the clouds, stabilizing at two thousand feet. The storm played with the machine like a child with a rattle. They flew blind, the infrared increasingly useless against the water and the pilot increasingly nervous about mountains. Finally he lost his nerve and dropped the machine below the cloud base. Noordhof looked behind; they were well past the headlights.

The pilot took the machine on for a minute and then turned it round, pushing the stick forward to decrease the lift, and settled gently down to the road, facing back towards a corner. He loaded a single rocket, pressed a key to arm it, and put his thumb over the fire button, with his free hand ready to switch on the searchlight when the jeep appeared. At this range there would be no need for a guidance mode: it was just switch on, take a second to line up and then, fried gringo.

Light scattered off a stony field. The pilot tensed. The headlights came into view about three hundred yards away. He began to press his thumb against the firing button, switched on the searchlight, and the wet bodywork of a melon truck glistened brilliantly in the beam. With a single curse the pilot switched off the light and soared away, leaving the driver standing on the brakes and frantically crossing himself.

They flew on for another five minutes, following the curving road.

“Okay,” Noordhof finally said. “So they’re cute. They’ve left the road.”

“Where, sir? It’s all mountains.”

“They ain’t on the road. So they must be off it.”

“I’ll go back and do a to-and-fro sweep, sir.”

“Just don’t hit any mountains.”

It seemed incredible, but the weather was getting worse, the sheer mass of water cutting down transmission through the normally optically thin infrared window and degrading the imager’s range. The radar was a mass of snow. He pulled the stick to the left, veering off the road, and began to fly low, in narrowly spaced sweeps about five miles wide. He began to wonder if maybe they weren’t so crazy after all.

* * *

Webb sat awkwardly on a melon and put his back up against a thin metal girder entwined with ropes, spreading his legs wide to maximize lateral stability. He could see Judy in silhouette, jammed in a corner, knees almost round her ears.

He looked at his watch, and could just make out 4:59 a.m. on the luminous dial. It might take the pilot half an hour to find the empty jeep and check out the surrounding countryside before he cottoned on. It might be more, and it might be less.

Judy and the driver had talked in Spanish and Webb understood there was a village with a telephone which they said worked quite often. If Julio’s lazy son had done a proper job on the carburettor they would be there in maybe half an hour, otherwise who could say? From there we could phone a garage for a repair. He could recommend his cousin Miguel, who would not object to being wakened for gringo business.

But if the rain stops, Webb thought, the pilot’s IR range will expand and he’ll find the jeep in minutes. The hammering of the rain on the tarpaulin was deafening and brought joy to Webb’s heart; the occasional faltering of the engine, however, was having the opposite effect.

* * *

He hadn’t expected it would be at the bottom of a gorge and he almost missed the faint, fuzzy blob on the imager. He dropped to a hundred metres above the ground, hovering over the spot. He switched on the Night Sun and a cone of driving rain swept through the brilliant beam.

The jeep was lying on its side, three quarters immersed in black surging water. The gorge was about thirty feet deep and the ground on either side sloped steeply upwards. He lowered the gunship as far as he dared, the blades whipping the water below into a spray.

“No sir!” he shouted but it was too late, Noordhof had opened a door and leapt into space. The Colonel disappeared under the water with a splash and immediately reappeared, drifting rapidly towards the jeep. He grabbed at it in passing and held on firmly with both hands, his face more under the water than above it. Then he vanished. The pilot, alarmed, took the gunship down until the runners were almost touching the water. The blades were hardly a foot from either side of the gorge. In the confined space, the roar from the quiet gunship was painful.

Noordhof re-emerged, gasping, and went under again. He stayed under. Unthinkingly, the pilot began to hold his breath. He was almost panicking when Noordhof appeared once again, his hands reaching up for a runner. The Colonel missed and the current immediately swept him downriver, into the blackness beyond the light. The pilot took the machine along, picked up a bobbing head and dipped the runner into the water, moving with the stream. Noordhof grabbed the runner and this time heaved himself on to it. The pilot took the machine out of the gorge and lowered it on to flat ground. Noordhof, water pouring off him, heaved himself into the gunship.

“The melon truck!”

Angrily, the pilot jerked open the throttle, tilted the machine and flew along the line of the road.

Impact

Around five fifteen the hammering of the rain on the canvas roof began to ease, and by five forty-five the storm had passed. The sky was still black except to the east where, looking through a cut in the tarpaulin, Webb could see the horizon outlined against the sky. The countryside was flatter here, and there were houses dotted around amongst the fields. Once or twice they passed by a cluster of adobe houses, and once a couple of trucks roared past, going in the opposite direction. At this latitude, Webb reckoned, it would be light in another ten or fifteen minutes.

The engine faltered, picked up for a few hundred yards, and then died. The truck slowed down and bumped to a halt, its brakes squealing. The driver, his elderly face decorated with a grey moustache, tapped at the glass and shouted something derogatory about his son-in-law Julio. Judy struggled over melons and there was a noisy exchange of conversation in Spanish. She clambered back. “This happens after a lot of wet. The ignition goes. He says to wait until the engine heat dries out the electrics.”

Webb pulled the canvas aside and they jumped out. The driver stepped down from his cab and lit a cigarette, leaning against the door.

They were in rough, open terrain, strewn with boulders and cacti. There were no habitations.

“Oliver, there is no place to hide.”

Webb looked at his watch. He said, quietly, “The time for hiding is over, Judy. Either I make contact and expose Nemesis as a fraud, or the Americans start launching nuclear weapons.”

“God in Heaven. How much time have we left?”

“Twenty-four minutes.”

“I’ll say a little prayer. But Oliver…”

“Yes?”

“What if the pilot has found the jeep?”

“We did the best we could.”

Judy stepped smartly over to the driver and engaged in a short conversation. She came back and said, “There’s a little town ahead, about twenty minutes’ drive. The driver will finish his cigarette and try the engine.”

“Do you have any money?”

“I’ll speak nicely to him.” There was more animated chatter and Judy returned with a handful of coins. Webb waved his thanks to the driver, who nodded cheerfully, threw away his stub and pulled himself into his cab. Webb and Judy climbed back in. The driver left the cab again, stretched and lit another cigarette. Then he relieved himself noisily at the roadside, into a puddle. Then he climbed aboard once more. Then he tried to find a radio channel, muttering loudly as he scanned the airwaves. Then he gave up, and tried the ignition.

* * *

Luck was smiling on the pilot. As the rain eased, the range of his imager extended. He increased altitude. To the right, flecks of red were appearing on the horizon; in a few minutes it would be light. He sensed that the chase was nearing its climax. He kept up the full throttle, tilting the machine forwards for maximum speed.

* * *

“Can’t you get him to go any faster?”

“This is Mexico. If I ask him, he’ll stop to talk about it. We’re only minutes away.”

Webb scrabbled to the back of the truck and pulled the flapping tarpaulin aside. The sky was grey, with lurid red and black stripes to the east. Already the air was warm. He leaned out and looked in the direction of motion of the truck. They were passing between a few houses; and there was a town, about two miles ahead.

“There’s a town about four minutes ahead. We could just make it.” Webb paused, suddenly aware that the lady’s attention was elsewhere.

“Oliver, behind you.”

* * *

The pilot switched off the imager. The occasional house, large cacti, even brushwood could all be made out.

He saw the dust trail before he saw the truck itself. It was the same truck; the same grey, the same flapping tarpaulin cover. It was about two miles from a small town, dead ahead. He smiled primly, made a small course correction with the rudder, and pushed the stick forward in its collective mode. He began to lose altitude, moving directly towards the lumbering vehicle.

* * *

“When the driver slows, jump and run for cover.”

“He’ll kill you, Oliver. You will die.”

“The light’s not perfect. I’m hoping he’ll hit the truck,” Webb said. The helicopter was a mile away, cruising slowly in; the pilot, no longer in a hurry, was savouring the moment.

“But the old man…”

“… has had it. I need my phone call.”

The melon truck began to slow. Webb looked round. Narrow crossroads ahead. A row of adobe houses, brightly painted. A green-painted cantina, shuttered, at the corner. Thirty yards from it, the entrance to a street.

The truck slowed to thirty-five miles an hour… thirty… twenty-five…

“What are you doing?” Webb shouted. “You have to jump!” But she stood, legs askance, scowling.

“Judy, come on. I have to go!”

“Then go! I’ll distract the pilot and make him think we are still inside. Jump, Oliver, jump! You’ll remember me?”

Webb left her to die. He leapt out of the truck, fell with a thump and rolled breathlessly on compacted earth, clutching the money. He jumped up, his ribs in pain, and dashed for the street. He sprinted round the corner and along the road. It was lined with small shops, closed and shuttered. There was no telephone booth. He hurled himself along the street.

He felt the wind from the rotor before he heard its whispering chop-chop. He glanced behind and dived to the ground as the dark gunship swooped past. He got up and ran the way he had just come. The machine tilted and flew backwards. Its rear rotor scythed the ground to and fro, whipping up dust. Terrified, Webb weaved and dived flat. The whirling vertical blades passed inches from his skull. The force of the wind was like a blow on the face, and then there was unbelievable pain, a frightful slash in his thigh and blood spurting from a ripped trouser leg. He saw a narrow lane, crawled underneath the machine and staggered towards it, trying not to faint. There was a tremendous bang and a wave of heat, and he was floating through the air, and then a pile of polythene bags and boxes was rushing up from the ground and he was rolling and tumbling amongst kitchen rubbish. Dazed, he hauled himself up. The street he had just left was a mass of fierce yellow flame. He felt as if his face was in an oven. There was a fearful pain in the back of his head.

He ran limping along the lane and took off along another one, mercifully away from the heat, and then another: he was in a warren of narrow streets, cluttered with tables and chairs, with washing strung overhead. A thin mongrel barked excitedly at him as he passed. A pall of black smoke was drifting over the rooftops. His watch said three minutes to Nemesis and only will power lay between him and a faint. His leg was warm and sticky but he didn’t dare to look at it.

The lane ended and there was a wide open square. A few people were running towards the source of the smoke. There was a white church, and a cantina, and outside it a telephone booth. He looked at the sky. There was no sign of the gunship. He ran across the square to the phone booth. He grabbed the receiver, not knowing what sounds to expect; he stared stupidly at the coins, trying to match them with the slots, dropped them, picked them up, shoved in a few which seemed to fit, and started to dial the international number with violently trembling hands.

The black gunship appeared over the rooftops. There was a little dust storm as the pilot lowered himself into the square. Webb wondered if he would use the machine guns or the rockets. A telephone was ringing, a familiar sound, a final reminder of home in this distant and alien land.

The pilot was hovering now, about thirty yards away and six feet above the road, in the middle of the ochre dust. He was lining up in leisurely fashion, chewing gum. Noordhof, alive and well, seemed to be urging him on. Webb sensed that the pilot would use a rocket and wondered what his death would be like.

“Northumberland House,” said a well-bred female voice. The melon truck shot into view. The pilot, startled, tried to rise up, but the roof of the truck caught one of the runners and the gunship flipped over on to its back. Shreds of tarpaulin and melon showered into the sky.

“Ah, Tods Murray, please. This is Oliver Webb calling from Mexico.” Webb watched hypnotized as a melon approached from nowhere. It smashed into a corner of the phone booth, turning into a red mushy pulp and spraying shards of glass into Webb’s face. A helicopter blade was boomeranging high, high in the air. Its course was erratic and Webb saw it turn lazily and start to fall towards the phone booth. The truck stopped. Judy was out and running for her life, hair streaming behind her.

“Trying to connect you.”

There was a sudden Whoosh! and a ball of flame enveloped the truck; the blade had turned over and was picking up speed, plunging directly towards the booth. Webb dived out just as the blade sliced through it. Something sliced deep into his already injured thigh and he found himself lying on the dusty ground crying with pain. There was the smell of burning fuel and a pool of flame was spreading around from the remains of the gunship. Globules of blazing plastic were dripping down to the ground and the cockpit was filling with black smoke. The pilot seemed to be unconscious; Noordhof was upside down in his goldfish bowl, kicking desperately at a door with both feet.

The phone booth was a mangled wreck of glass and plastic, but the receiver was on the ground.

It still had its wire. Was it possible?

There was a surge of flame and heat, too hot to endure; one of Webb’s eyes was closing up with blood; machine gun bullets were beginning to bang like firecrackers; a pool of blue flame was spreading out from the machine. Webb crawled towards the receiver, willing himself not to faint. He put his ear to it. Big red ants were scurrying along in the dust, fleeing from the approaching flames. The telephone receiver was crackling. From the gunship came the ferocious roar of a missile exhaust rising in an unpredictable crescendo.

“Webb! Where the hell have you been? And what’s that noise? Are you at a carnival or something?”

* * *

In a bunker deep under a granite mountain, a handful of ordinary men were deciding the fate and future of life on the planet, in conditions of buckling emotional stress which guaranteed preconception, information overload, group-think, hallucination, delusion, cognitive distortion and old-fashioned stupidity.

The Secretary of Defense stood up. “Everybody stand away from the door,” he said loudly. “Mister President, gentlemen.” There was a stupefied silence, as if someone had pulled the pin of a grenade. Admiral Mitchell rose angrily but Grant waved him back down. Only Bellarmine and Grant remained standing, facing each other across the table.

“Mister President, sir. You are respectfully relieved of your post as Chief Executive and as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States of America. This action is taken by myself and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As of this moment General Hooper will direct military operations with myself as acting President. We have the gold codes.”

Grant’s face was grey. “The fairies run away with your brain, Nathan?”

“THREE MINUTES,” came from the next room.

“A detachment will be along to escort you from here in a few moments, sir. Meantime the Rock and the Communications Personnel are under our control, and we have a lot to do.”

“You’re under arrest, Bellarmine. Sit down.”

The National Security Adviser rose, white-faced and trembling. He virtually snarled: “If I had a gun I would shoot you. What is your authority for this outrage?”

A telephone near the back of the room rang and kept on ringing, cutting into the hush which had gradually blanketed the room as a stunned awareness of what was happening had spread. Someone lifted the phone and was talking urgently into it. Then the corporal was saying “Ah, it’s the Carl Vincent.”

“TWO MINUTES.”

“I’ll take it,” snapped Bellarmine.

“No. Put it through to the table,” said the President grimly. The corporal froze, as suddenly and completely as if he had turned to stone.

“Your authority?” Cresak barked.

“The Twenty-fifth. The President is refusing to defend this country when under mortal attack. He is failing to fulfil his Oath of Office and has therefore disqualified himself from holding that office.”

“You can’t make that judgement,” the Admiral snapped. “This is plain treason.”

“We’re zapped in two minutes and you want to assemble the Senate?”

“The Carl Vincent!” the corporal said, his voice coming out in a strangulated croak.

“I said give it here,” said Bellarmine, sweating. There was the brief, angry chatter of a gun. A cry of pain came from the other side of the door. Then there was a thump, and the sound of someone slithering down it.

“You heard me, soldier,” Grant snapped. “Through to the table, now!”

“ONE MINUTE.”

The corporal, breathing air in big gulps, turned to Wallis. “What’ll I do, sir?” he begged.

Hooper snapped, “Cut out the snivelling, boy. You heard. The President has been relieved of his command. You take your orders from…”

“Ignore that,” Wallis cut in. “Your supreme commander is the President. This is an attempted coup devoid of legal authority.”

“You treacherous bastard,” Bellarmine snarled.

The corporal, eyes rolling in his head, moaned, “Oh Holy Mother of God!”

“We’re losing Xochicalco!” Fanciulli shouted. “There’s a whole lot of static.”

A red light flashed over the oak door.

“Stay where you are,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. He strode to the door and flung it open. He recoiled in horror as the inert body of a Secret Service man fell back against his legs, a round, ruddy face staring upwards, prim round mouth half open, with a white shirt stained by a row of red patches. A young marine, breathing heavily, blood trickling down the side of his head, stepped over the body into the room and saluted the President.

“What’s going on here?” the President asked.

Hallam followed the marine in. His cheek was grazed and swollen. “We’re more or less on top of it, Sam. Somebody’s monkeyed with the switchboards but we’re working on it.”

“Oh Christ,” said Hooper. Bellarmine looked as if he was about to faint. He sank into his chair, burying his face in his hands.

“Sir!” Wallis shouted, leaning over a screen. “The Back-fires are twelve minutes from Canadian airspace. Eighteen still on a Kansas azimuth, two have broken away for Alaska, the Purdhoe Bay area.”

“Sir!” a soldier shouted, “We may have an intruder in Californian airspace, flying low north of Pendleton. Nothing on radar.”

“The sneaky bastards. While we watch the Kola build-up they send Stealths on ahead from the Urals,” said Hooper. “We’re out of time as of now.”

“The Carl Vincent,” the President shouted, “on the blower, NOW.”

“Sir,” the corporal whooped, “I’ve been trying to tell you. We lost her twenty seconds ago. All I’m getting is static.” The speaker on the table crackled into life. There was a voice, hidden under layers of static, distorted beyond the possibility of decipherment.

“Does anyone understand this?” Grant shouted.

“It’s the asteroid,” Bellarmine said in exasperation. “It’s hit. Don’t you see we have to hit back?”

“Sir!” a soldier shouted, “NORAD say another eighty Backfires have taken off from Kola.” He pointed to a television screen.

There was a tiny strip of runway, and a desolate snowy landscape, and a clutter of buildings. Little black moths were gliding along the runway or strung out in black moving silhouettes against the snow. Grant said, “Oh please God, not that.”

Hooper said, “What does it take, Sam? The blast is on the way in now!”

The black girl waved and pointed. “Mister President, we have the picture from Goddard. On the screen.”

“Sergeant, Hooper and Bellarmine are under arrest. Anyone who reaches for the red phone is to be shot. No warnings, just shoot.”

“Yes sir.” The picture was a shimmering, irresolute haze.

“What the futz is this?” Grant snapped. “Has it hit or not?”

“They’re doing a maximum entropy, sir.”

“A what?”

“They’re trying to sharpen it up.”

“Wallis, what gives with Xochicalco?”

“The channels are full of static, sir. We’re getting nothing.”

“Mister President,” said Hooper, “whatever the legalities of our action, we’ll be scattered to the winds any time now. Whatever your reasons for inaction, you can’t hold off any longer. America is under attack now. Get our missiles away now. We only have seconds.”

“Mister President, I beg you on my knees, launch!” Bellarmine implored.

“So it’s hit?”

“Sir,” said a man in naval uniform, “it could just have grazed the upper atmosphere. That would give us EMP but no impact.”

“Where’s the frigging Kremlin?”

Wallis said, “Sir, every damn channel to the Kremlin seems to be out. We’re going to try a straight commercial phone line.”

“Why isn’t Goddard delivering?”

“Sir, they say the picture needs to be processed.”

“How long, woman?” the President shouted at the top of his voice.

She shrank visibly and spoke quickly into the phone. “Five minutes, sir.”

“Five what?” Grant yelled, and the girl crumpled, tears welling up.

Wallis said, “Sir, if you want an effective response you’re down to maybe a minute, maybe less.”

“Get them away, Grant!” Hooper bellowed, his fist raised. He half-rose from his chair, as if he was about to lunge for the telephone. The marine, a look of pure terror on his face, raised his rifle towards the General. Hooper lurched back and smashed his fist repeatedly on the table.

The President raised his arms like an old-fashioned preacher. The room fell silent. Someone next door began to recite an ancient prayer, in a calm Southern accent:

Our Father which art in Heaven

He picks his way over the cables and stares at the video camera following him. It stares back indifferently. He stands at the flag, hanging by the door. The black girl next to him is sobbing quietly. He puts his hand on her shoulder. The flag begins to blur and to his surprise Grant realizes that he too is weeping.

He looks around, unashamed, the tears trickling down his chin. He is no longer in a command post deep under the ground: he is in a wax museum. And somehow the museum is also a sea, an ocean of faces stretching around the globe, faces born and unborn, all awaiting the decision of this one man, this country boy from Wyoming. Insects crawl under his skin. They have tearing forceps for jaws. A crab in his stomach is tearing its way out, devouring his intestines as it does. Acid trickles down his throat, burning his gullet. The dull pain in his chest has long since grown to a tight grip.

Of course it’s obvious. Has been all along.

A voice whispers, “Mister President, we have maybe thirty to sixty seconds before the blast hits us.”

“Hell of a decision for a Wyoming ploughboy, Nathan.”

The voice whispers again, “Sir, we need your word.”

“I don’t know how we got into this state — maybe it’s beyond human control. Maybe the world goes in cycles and it’s my luck to be in the hot seat when the time comes to crash out. You didn’t need your rebellion, Mister, I was getting around to my planet of ashes. So goodbye, my children, and hail to the mutants.”

Deliver us from the Evil One

“Wallis, get on with it. Hooper, proceed with Grand Slam. Mitchell, fire your Tridents.” The soldiers quickly move to terminal screens and begin to speak into telephones. Grant reaches out for the red phone. Wallis breaks open a sealed envelope.

For Thine is the Kingdom…

Someone, a woman, says nervously, “Mister President, it’s the British Prime Minister.” Her voice is lost in the immensity.

The Power and the Glory…

“Can’t someone stop this?” another woman asks. “I have children.”

Forever. Amen.

Wallis sits down at a desk, near the back of the protected room. A camera swivels round to follow him. He starts to read numbers into a telephone, one at a time, in a clear, decisive voice. The President picks up a red phone, and the camera quickly swings back towards him. But Grant’s vision is blurred, and his hand is shaking. He tries to talk but words won’t come. Bellarmine’s eyes are staring, willing the President on. Hallam stands in the midst of it, hand over his eyes like a child keeping out some fearful monster. Hooper’s jaw is clenched to the point where he can hardly speak.

An ancient telex machine, a comedy thing, a museum piece amongst the Silicon Valley technology, bursts into life, chattering. “Oh sweet Jesus oh sweet Jesus. Sir, it’s President Zhirinovsky.”

Simultaneously, the British Prime Minister’s voice comes over the speaker, as clearly as if he is calling from the next room. “Ah, good morning, Mister President. Have I called at a bad moment?”

Sonora Desert

The meteor comes in high over the Sonora desert, trailing a long, luminous wake and throwing moving shadows on the ground far below. Near the end of its flight it flares up, splits in two and then it is gone from the star-laden sky.

“Did you see that?” Judy asked, appearing from around the porch of the house.

“A sporadic, I think,” said Webb. “There are no showers at this time of year.” In the starlight, Webb could just make out that she was wearing the same crocheted shawl he had seen her in at Oaxtepec, and the same crocheted bikini; and she had the same elegant bodywork. She was carefully carrying two tumblers filled to the brim with a liquid which seemed to glow orange-red. She handed him a drink and sat cross-legged on a rug laid out next to the tub. To Webb she looked like a satisfied Buddha.

He shifted his leg. The hospital nurse had finally removed the swathes of bandage. Judy had left her Pontiac Firebird for him with a map and he had gurgled the big psychedelic car along the I-10 through Tucson and then along Gates Pass before turning north into a narrow road cutting through the Saguaro National Park. The six-inch gash in his thigh still ached from the journey, but the warm water of the big whirlpool tub was beginning to ease the pain. Big Saguaro cacti stood around them in dark outline, like silent sentinels, or triffids.

She sipped at the drink. “How’s the leg?”

“Better, Judy. Thanks for the invitation, by the way. I’m impressed.” He waved his hand to encompass the Sonoran desert, the cacti, the dark, snow-tipped mountains and the huge celestial dome which dwarfed it all. Out here in the desert, the stars were a lot brighter. Here and there the lights of houses were scattered, like candles in a dark cathedral.

“Well, you were told to rest. This is a good place to do it. I call it Oljato, which is Navajo for the Place of Moonlight Water.”

“Although the company is boring.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Be careful, Oliver. There are rattlesnakes out there.”

Webb sipped at the drink. It was chilled, and had a distinctive flavour which he associated with Mexico but couldn’t otherwise place. “So what does your Fort Meade mole say?”

“The investigation’s still under way. It seems the operation was planned by a small group of clever people in the NSA. It was a sort of Cyberwars in reverse.”

“Cyberwars?”

“Information warfare. Look at the damage single hackers have done when they penetrated a system’s computers. Now think of a planned attack by hundreds of them, based in some hostile country, penetrating thousands of computers. They could build up undetectable back doors over a long period of time and then strike all at once. They could crash planes, erase files from businesses and laboratories, penetrate rail networks, cause financial chaos, destroy the command and control of weapons systems, all from the safety of their own country and using nothing more than computer terminals.”

“But surely that’s a recognized problem,” said Webb.

Judy nodded. “But what people had in mind was an external enemy. Nobody thought there might be an enemy within.”

“And because they protect the systems, they know about them,” Webb suggested. “And they know all there is to know about information warfare.”

“Which knowledge was used by a small group within the National Security Agency against the American leadership. The Chiefs of Staff, the President, the Secretary of Defense, they fooled everybody.”

“The old problem,” Webb said. “Who protects us from our protectors?”

“These people weren’t traitors, Ollie. They were patriots. They had a clear-headed view that the country had to protect itself against a perceived future attack by taking pre-emptive action. That action could not be taken by an administration proclaiming peaceful co-existence.”

“And the CIA was in on it too?”

“Again, my mole thinks only a small clique within the organization. They only needed a few guys. The upper echelons were taken in just like everybody else.”

Webb leaned back and sank up to his neck in the warm water. “I like the way they’re trying to handle the aftermath. Actually selling the conspirators’ story to the public. A straightforward near-miss asteroid, the Naval Observatory observations a mistake etcetera. They’ll never get away with that.”

“Don’t be so sure, Ollie. Nemesis has supposedly rushed back into the blind zone, deflected by Earth’s gravity.”

“Forget it.”

Judy drew the shawl closer around her shoulders. “The Enquirer said it was a CIA plot to make the President zap the Russians, did you see?”

Webb grinned. “And not a soul believes them. What’s the line on the palace revolution?”

“In the Kremlin? The analysts don’t know. My guess is the Russian Army decided Zhirinovsky was just too dangerous to have around.”

“It was close. I’m glad the driver’s ignition worked.”

“But now they’ve pulled out of Slovakia, and they’re getting back to some semblance of democracy. We’ll see what the elections bring.”

Webb’s eyes were now fully dark-adapted. A little lemon tree, almost next to the whirlpool tub, glowed gently. At this latitude his old winter friend Orion the Hunter was high in the sky; Sirius, a white-hot A star, lit up the desert from nine light years away; the Milky Way soared overhead, bisecting the sky. And Mars beckoned from the zodiac, unwinking and red. A strange feeling came over him, the same one he had experienced in a little church in a cobbled lane in Rome a million years ago. It was unsettling, a one-ness with something; he didn’t understand it. The desert at night, Webb felt, was a spiritual experience.

“The world’s getting dangerous, Judy. Some day we’ll build a Noah’s Ark and move out. A little seedling, the first of many, to scatter our civilization and our genes around the stars. Once we’re spread around a bit nothing can extinguish us.”

She was smiling. “I guess I overdid the tequila. But I can’t make up my mind about you, Oliver. Are you a visionary or a screwball?”

“I’m just a quiet academic who wants to get on with his research.”

She put her drink on the ground, stretched and yawned like a cat. “What about your people?”

Webb said, “I heard the Minister on the World Service, speaking to the House. Our diligent watchers of the skies etcetera. What a blatant old hypocrite! He’s been freeloading on the American asteroid search effort for years.” He finished the tequila sunrise. His head was spinning a little, but the sensation was pleasant. “So how did you get involved in this business, Judy?”

“One merry evening with Clive — that’s my boss, now under suspension — I got the feeling I was being probed for my politics. I thought at first he was just curious. Then I thought maybe there’s some question over my loyalty. It carried on over a few days. Nothing obvious, you understand, just the odd remark. I could easily have missed it. I began to think there’s something strange going on here and so the more he probed the more outrageous the opinions I expressed. At the end I looked so right wing they must have reckoned I thought J. Edgar Hoover was a communist. Then one warm evening in La Fuente, with soft lights, sweet mariachi music and Bar-B-Que ribs, Clive introduces me to Mark Noordhof. The whole plot was spelled out on a what-if basis. I must have made the right noises, because at that point Mark tells me the Eagle Peak team has to include someone who knows their way around nukes, and would I like to join them to make sure you all stayed on track. I agreed.”

“But you kept all this to yourself.”

“I was trying to find out how high it went,” Judy said. “Like you, I didn’t know whom I could trust. But enough about me, Ollie. You’ve resigned from your Institute.”

“Broken free, is the way I’d put it. I never did fit in with the groupthink.”

“It’s getting cold.” She stood up, dropped her shawl and climbed into the tub, making waves. “What will you do?” she asked, slipping off her bikini under the water.

Webb thought, Is this really happening to me? He said, “They’ve fixed me up with a scholarship at Arizona University.”

“It’s the least they could do.”

“This is a wonderful place. How often do you come here?”

“To Oljato? Whenever I can. Most weekends. In New Mexico I have a small downtown apartment.”

Webb screwed up his courage, and said it. “I was wondering if I might rent this place from you. It’s only half an hour from the University.”

Judy laughed delightedly.

“Ollie!”

“A strictly platonic arrangement, Judy. You’re basically uninteresting.”

Judy’s mouth opened wide. She splashed water at him. “What gives with these insults?”

“I’m trying out a new technique. I got it from the master of a charm school, an old friend who calls himself Judge Dredd. It’s supposed to dazzle women. First you ignore them, and then you insult them. And after that, so Judge Dredd assures me, they’re eating out of your hand. Is it working?”

“Brilliantly.”

Once again, he thought, Webb the Rational is baffled. If I’m a blind machine in a pointless Universe, how can I feel these emotions? Can computer software feel pain? Could an assembly of wires fall in love?

He suddenly realized that of all the mysteries he had explored, the most baffling was here beside him, her blonde hair backscattering the starlight, her toe casually exploring, her very presence dissolving him.

Judy reached over the side of the whirlpool tub to a switch. He caught a glimpse of breast. The water began to swirl powerfully. They sat back awhile, letting the warm jets pummel their bodies. In the near-dark he could just make out her expression; she seemed amused by something. Her toe explored some more. He lifted it aside but it came back.

Now she was half-swimming towards him.

She lifted a bar of soap and straddled him. Her breasts were glistening wet and her nipples were standing out, dark circles against white, round flesh. “Your chest or mine, Ollie? Strictly platonic, of course.”

* * *

“Teresa, Teresa, what are you doing out here?” Vincenzo asked, scolding.

In the starlight he could just make out that his woman was wearing a cotton cloak over her nightwear, but her white hair was uncovered and the air was chilly.

“When are you coming in, Vincenzo?” she asked, handing him a glass of hot mulled wine.

“Soon.”

“When will you start coming to bed at a reasonable hour? You’re not a young man any more.”

“Mind your own business, woman. Now get yourself out of this cold.”

Vincenzo heard the woman’s footsteps retreating along the gravel path. He put the glass down at the side of the flickering candle, enjoying the momentary warmth of the flame near his hand. He returned to the eyepiece of the little telescope, mounted on a tripod which sat on a marble bird table. He glanced along the brass tube, took his bearings from Aldebaran in the Hyades cluster, and moved his telescope towards a faint star to the left of the Bull’s Eye. The faint, fuzzy star was still there, barely visible through the eyepiece of his instrument. It had moved, a full degree since last night. It had no tail but otherwise looked cometary.

The eleventh, secret volume of his notebook was almost full, and it was opened at a page near the back. He always found it hard to judge the sizes of the stars; indeed, they even seemed to vary from night to night. But he estimated the position of the fuzzy star. He labelled it “A,” and drew a line to another star which he labelled “B.” Underneath, he wrote a few lines of explanatory text in Latin.

A voice came out of the dark: “Vincenzo. You will die of cold. Either come to bed now or I will lock you out for the night.”

Vincenzo Vincenzi sighed. The ways of God are mysterious, he thought, and none more so than when they manifest themselves through a woman.

He snuffed out the candle and took a sip at the spicy wine. The old man closed the notebook, the last volume of his life’s work, and shuffled along the broad gravel path, through the garden scattered with cypress and myrtle trees, statues and tinkling fountains. Orion the Hunter guided his path; Sirius glittered over the roof of the villa; the Milky Way soared overhead, bisecting the Italian sky. A shooting star came and went. He wondered if men would ever reach the stars. Cardano of Pavia had said that Leonardo the Florentine had tried to fly, but had failed. Momentarily, the reality of his own insignificance overwhelmed him; he felt crushed by infinity.

Near the door, his woman was holding a lantern. She took him by the arm and looked at him as if tolerating a foolish child. Vincenzo smiled. Why fear the infinite? Is God’s love not equally boundless?

And perhaps, Vincenzo thought, I am a foolish child. Nobody will ever care about my feeble attempts to chart the timeless wonders of the sky, or the wanderings of the little comets.

Will they?

Fixa A distabat ad Aldebaran 37 semidiametres: in eadem linea sequebatur alia fixa B, quae etiam precedenti nocte observata fuit.

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