The Armageddon Protocol

FORTY-ONE

Leo Hilton weaved through the bustling crowd on the South Bank, his eyes transfixed on the London Eye. Either side of him were Zoey Conway and Maja Eklund, two women he had only known minutes but both more than capable of watching his back.

As they drew nearer, the Eye glowed a ghostly blue in the powerful spotlights. Everywhere he looked he saw excited people holding hands and pointing into the sky. Some were drinking and all were smiling. They thought tonight was just about fun, but Leo knew otherwise.

As he pounded along the Queen’s Walk, he saw two boats from the Met’s Marine Policing Unit closing in fast, moving upstream from Waterloo Bridge. They knew about the threat and were blocking off any potential escape routes along the water.

At the base of the Eye now, Leo flashed his ID at two policewomen and they waved him through.

“That’s Karhu right there!” Zoey said, pointing at a tall man in the crowd. “Dressed like security.”

Leo followed her arm and saw a man among a small group of riggers. He was standing around the cabin containing the pyrotechnic firing system on the embankment not far from the base of the Ferris wheel. “Jesus… Harry could have told me I’d be fighting a professional wrestler.”

Leo approached the security team and flashed his old MI5 badge. “We need to cut the power to the display that’s going to be launched from the Eye.”

The man gave a weary sigh. “We can’t just cut the power, mate. These took days to set up. You sure that ID’s up to date?”

Leo ignored the second question. “And the WMD up there will take seconds to kill millions.”

The guard’s eyes widened. “WMD? Is this a hoax?”

Maja now showed him her Swedish NTF ID. “No hoax. This is an international operation. You want it to fall apart because of you?”

“Cut the power!” he yelled.

One of the men in the cabin cut the power as Leo and the others walked closer to the Eye, but then Maja pointed up on the London Eye where a figure in black was climbing up its rim toward the top.

“Karhu!” Zoey said.

“But what’s he doing?” said Maja.

Leo frowned. “He’s obviously trying to launch it manually now the power’s been cut. I’m going up.”

As the police tried to contain the bustling crowd, Leo climbed up in pursuit of Aleksi. It was harder than he thought, and when he reached the top he found the Finn kneeling and struggling with something at the base of one of the passenger capsules. Each of the thirty-two capsules weighed ten tonnes and it looked like Aleksi had singled this one out to use as the launch site.

“Drop it!” Leo yelled.

Aleksi said nothing, but moved like lightning. In the confusion of the noise and flashing lights all around them, he spun around and threw the puukko knife hard and fast at Leo.

Leo dived for cover as the savage blade slashed past him and struck the next capsule along. It clattered into the support rigging and fell out of sight, but Leo’s attempt to evade the speeding blade had knocked him off-balance and now he was stumbling sideways over the edge of the Eye’s outer rim.

“Hold on, Leo!” Zoey yelled up through the chaos of the crowd. She ran toward the Eye but then slipped out of his sightline.

After a few desperate seconds flailing in the wind, he slipped over the edge and started to fall. The world turned into a dizzying mess — the partying masses below, the orange lights around the Palace of Westminster, the noise of the boats on the Thames — but as his upper body fell toward the river he reached out and grabbed one of the support beams that made up the outer rim.

His chest slammed into the metal and the trauma to his solar plexus knocked the wind out of him. As he gasped and strained to heave the air back into his lungs and then crawl back up over the side of the rim, he looked up to see the enormous Finn padding over to him, hands curled into fists at his sides.

Before his enemy got to him, Leo clambered back up, lashed out with his arm and tried to land a punch on Aleksi’s face, but the Finn dodged the blow and the Englishman’s fist smashed into one of the structure’s steel tubes and broke three of his knuckles.

Leo screamed out in pain but was stopped when the enormous Finn caught the right side of his head in a bear-swipe and smashed it into the same steel tube. Leo fought hard to maintain consciousness as his world began to swim all around him with the tremendous impact of the blow.

He knew he had to hold onto the structure for his life — there was a drop of over four hundred feet below him and nothing to stop his fall until the cold brown water of the River Thames. Hitting the surface of the water from this height would be not a whole lot different from landing on concrete, and that wasn’t something he intended to do.

But the Finn had other ideas, and wasn’t prepared to give up the advantage his punch had given him. Now, he was drawing his left hand back behind his head as he readied for a second, and this time fatal, blow. He wanted to knock Leo clean off the structure and send him to his death in the water below.

Leo saw it coming, and this time dodged the blow. Instead of hitting the steel tubing behind Leo’s head, Aleksi missed altogether but the momentum of dodging the failed strike pulled Leo too far to the side and made him lose his balance. He slipped away from the side of the capsule and tumbled back-first toward the Thames far below. He flicked his hand out to his side just in time to grab hold of the outer rim of the Eye and stop his fall.

He was back where he started — hanging off the rim and his opponent had the advantage once again and was now padding over to him. The Ministry man said nothing as he pulled his leg back and prepared to boot Leo in the face. Both men knew such a blow would knock him out and down he would go, next stop the freezing River Thames and certain death.

Leo watched the grinning man launch his boot toward his face, but as he moved to dodge the blow the boot stopped halfway, and then Aleksi slammed it down into the support struts to regain his balance. He brought his confused eyes downward and searched his body for what was causing the pain, but he saw nothing. Then he brought his hands up around to his back and Leo saw his eyes widen as he realized his fate.

Aleksi Karhu tumbled over the edge of the London Eye with his own puukko knife buried in his back, and standing ten feet behind him was Zoey Conway. She gave Leo a wink and blew him a kiss.

“Good job!” he said.

“You owe me a date now, right?”

“How the hell…”

She walked over to him and helped pull him up to safety. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was a knife thrower in the County Fair circus?”

“Funnily enough, no,” Leo said. “You are full of surprises.”

“I’m the original Mystery Girl, didn’t you know?”

“Well… thanks Mystery Girl. Now we just have to get the damned canister down.”

They walked over to where Aleksi had been struggling in the shadows. Leo saw he must have been fiddling with one of the pyro holders that were attached to the inside rim of the London Eye.

He looked closer and realized that the firing module near where the Finn had been working looked much larger than the others. He rubbed his eyes and checked them again to be sure — he counted over fifty firing modules around the Eye and each one was connected to the cabin via the thick black data cables snaking down from the structure like tentacles.

What Leo Hilton knew about a pyrotechnic display he could write on the back of his cigarette packet, but he knew enough to know there had been some serious volts flowing through those black cables. He also knew they had cut the power to them moments earlier, so what exactly was Aleksi doing clambering up here?

And then he realized that when he had ordered the team to cut the power and break the signal from the cabin to the firing module containing the nanodust canister, the Finnish Ministry man had initiated Plan B and set up a launch timer on the base of the canister. Now they watched its tiny digital timer as it counted down to annihilation.

One…

The Great Bell on the clock at the northern end of the Palace of Westminster, better known as Big Ben, began to chime as the countdown for New Year’s Eve finally began. As the first chime sounded out in the night, the darkness above London was illuminated for miles with the first wave of fireworks launched from the barges in the river and off the south bank.

“But we cut the power!” Zoey yelled, her face lit blue and red and green by the fireworks launching all around her.

“It’s no good,” Leo said. “It’s not powered by the mains like all the other fireworks — Karhu connected it to its own power supply and set a timer on it. You can see from the readout it’s timed to go off on the final chime.”

Two…

“So what the hell are we going to do?” Zoey said.

“I don’t know, but when that bell chimes twelve this thing’s going to launch a techno plague over the whole city!”

“We have to hurry!” Zoey said.

Three…

“Yes, I had worked that all for myself.”

“This is too wild even for me, Slim Jim.”

Leo stared at the tiny chrome canister and the hideous timing device Aleksi Karhu had fitted around its base. The small digital readout told him he had only nine seconds to save millions of lives.