The Nemesis Program

Chapter Fifty-One

At first, Ben thought they were going to drag him back to the room with the chair for another beating. He walked calmly, straight, not wanting to show pain or fear or even the slightest hint of weakness. His eye was fixed on the butt of the NCO’s pistol as it protruded from its holster just a grab away. In his mind he played out in slow-motion detail exactly how he’d go about using it to kill all five of the soldiers before drilling a neat round satisfying little 9mm hole through the middle of the NCO’s forehead. Right here. Right now. It was sorely tempting.

The cell keys were dangling from a ring on the officer’s belt. Maybe, Ben mused, just maybe there was a way … His heartbeat began to quicken. His fingers began to twitch.

But his reckless, dangerous stream of thinking was interrupted when he realised he wasn’t being taken for another dose of punishment. Rather, they were leading him back to the room where they’d first been processed on arrival at the command base.

The NCO strode ahead and pushed open the door. The first thing Ben saw inside the room was Roberta’s face, breaking into an expression of alarm and horror as she turned to see him come in.

‘What have they done to you?’ she cried out. ‘Jesus, your face …’

‘I stood on a rake,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ It hurt to speak. He looked around the room. Roberta was being guarded by half a dozen more soldiers he didn’t recognise. But someone was missing.

‘Where’s Daniel?’ he said.

‘I haven’t seen him since we were locked up,’ she replied.

They were ordered to be quiet and pressed against the wall at gunpoint. There was a tense atmosphere, as if the NCO and his men were waiting for something.

Or waiting for someone.

Another door opened, and in walked a short, trim Indonesian officer in his fifties, wearing the insignia of a colonel. The NCO snapped a salute. The soldiers stood rigidly to attention, as much as they could without taking their eyes and gunsights off Ben.

But it wasn’t the Indonesian Army colonel Ben was looking at. It was the man who’d entered the room with him. He wasn’t wearing military uniform, just a plain khaki shirt and trousers, but the soldiers all seemed to defer to him just as much as they did to an officer of high rank.

‘I don’t believe this,’ Roberta whispered, staring. ‘How can it be?’

Daniel Lund looked like a different person. The hapless, nervy aura he’d exuded before was gone. He stood straighter, even walked differently, and his ruddy features wore an expression of calm superiority that they hadn’t seen before.

In fact, he was a different person. The role play was over. They were seeing the real Daniel now.

The Swede ran his calm gaze around the room and smiled at the sight of Ben’s bruised face. ‘So, our friends roughed you up a little, did they?’ He shook his head in mock sympathy. ‘Only got yourself to blame, though. The more you struggle, the more it hurts.’

Even his accent had changed. He sounded completely American.

‘You asshole!’ Roberta hissed at him. She slapped away a rifle muzzle with a sharp ‘Get that thing out of my face’ to the soldier holding it, and stepped towards Daniel, eyes flashing in rage. The soldiers bristled and closed in around her, looking to their commandant for the order to shoot the woman. Daniel intervened, nodding to the colonel, who immediately gave a curt order to stand down.

The soldiers backed off instantly. It was clear who commanded the highest authority in the room.

Daniel turned to Roberta with an even smile. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed, Miss Ryder.’

Roberta glowered at him. ‘You mean you lied about the secret installation at Arta Beach. You lied about everything, you piece of shit. You were one of them, all along.’

Daniel shrugged, his smile broadening. ‘I didn’t quite lie about everything,’ he said. ‘The installation exists, all right. As a matter of fact, that’s the reason I had you and Major Hope here released from custody. We’re taking a little trip there right now.’

The same Aérospatiale Puma was waiting for them on the helipad when they left the building and stepped out into the blazing sun. Ben and Roberta were prodded and shoved into the back of the chopper and made to sit on the bare metal floor with half a dozen guns pointing at them. Daniel coolly took a seat up front with the officer. He seemed completely at ease and seldom threw a glance in their direction, but Ben never took his eyes off him as the helicopter lifted off and climbed high above the command base.

By Ben’s reckoning, the Puma was taking them south-west. Teeming jungles, rivers and dizzy canyons passed below. Conversation was impossible over the loud roar of the turbine and the rush of warm air coming through the open hatch. Sitting close up against him, Roberta slipped her fingers through his and held his hand tightly while resting her head against his shoulder. Ben sat perfectly still and his breathing was calm, but inside a storm was raging. He’d have done anything to take her out of this situation, make sure she was safe. As for himself, if she hadn’t been here he’d gladly have risked everything to bring the chopper down, whatever it entailed.

Thirty-five minutes in the air, and after flying over the snaking, crowded Trans-Sumatra Highway and a number of towns, the western coastline of the island came into view on the horizon. Ben watched as Daniel looked keenly down at the ground below. Soon afterwards, the helicopter began to descend.

The mysterious installation that Daniel had brought them halfway around the world to see was a far cry from the heavily-guarded hive of sinister activity he’d described to them back in Sweden. Standing a quarter of a mile or so from the nearest coastal town on the tip of a forested peninsula not much above sea level, the squat grey building looked like a deserted factory or some kind of massive bunker. Behind it, the flat blue-green ocean stretched out with just the scattered land masses of the Mentawai Archipelago dimly visible on the horizon. The calm strait between the mainland and the small islands was dotted white here and there with faraway yachts and ships, a strangely serene sight.

As the helicopter came down to land by the huge building, the obvious signs of neglect and abandonment came into view. The security fence surrounding the perimeter had long since fallen into disrepair, sections of wire missing where they’d collapsed into the long, yellowed grass or been pillaged by locals. Weeds grew tall through the cracks in the concrete around the building. There wasn’t a vehicle or a living soul in sight, let alone hordes of armed guards patrolling the place in Jeeps.

Roberta’s anxious look asked the same question that was in Ben’s mind: why are we being brought here?

The Puma touched down on the concrete near a dilapidated entrance that seemed to be the only way in or out of the building. At an order from their officer, the soldiers made Ben and Roberta climb down from the hatch and marched them across the weed-strewn ground. Daniel confidently led the way, striding along with a little half-smile on his face. The NCO deferentially walked a step behind him.

Roberta was glaring at Daniel with a mixture of contempt and hatred. ‘We should have known,’ she muttered. ‘We should never have trusted him.’

Ben said nothing. It was only then that he noticed that one of the soldiers was carrying his old green bag. He hadn’t reckoned on ever seeing it again. He began wondering why they’d brought it here.

Daniel reached the entrance, a tall double doorway of rusted, riveted steel closed off with a heavy padlock and chain. He produced a key, undid the lock and the chain fell loose. It took three soldiers to heave the steel doors open. Daniel passed through the entrance into the shadows of the building.

The rest followed. It looked as much like an old factory on the inside as it did on the outside, except that whatever industrial machinery it had once housed had all been stripped away, leaving only a cavernous, echoey shell containing only a row of brick columns that towered up to the roof girders forty feet overhead. The sound of the soldiers’ heavy boots rang off the bare walls. The floor was thick with dust, the droppings of birds nesting high up in the roof space and sand blown in from the beach. The only windows were on the ocean side of the building, little more than slots high up in the wall, their cracked panes opaque with the cobwebs of a hundred generations of spiders.

‘Not exactly what he led us to expect,’ Roberta said acidly. ‘This place has been abandoned for years.’

Daniel stopped and spoke a few quiet words to the NCO, who in turn gave an order to his men. The soldier carrying Ben’s bag handed it to Daniel and then trotted over to join his troop as the NCO led them back towards the entrance and the waiting chopper, leaving the three westerners together.