Checking for load and safety, the lino now slick with blood and stinking of cordite and burnt circuitry, Mac took two deep breaths and turned, firing at the mezzanine window with the Heckler. Panes of glass splintered and the bullets peppered the walls around it. But Dozsa was gone.
Keying the radio, Mac saw it was not responding in the sealed room. Outside, the gunfight raged on, getting closer now.
Looking at his watch, he saw it was 4.42 pm — in eight minutes the real control room in North Korea would lock in its final settings, giving telemetry commands to several hundred different aspects of a ballistic missile launch. At ten minutes before launch, the general in charge of the program would turn his key and the mission controller would turn his, and the final countdown to ignition and firing would begin.
In this case, however, the final countdown wouldn’t commence on North Korea’s terms — it would prepare to launch according to the override coming from this control room. The systems in the North Korean control room wouldn’t register the change; their system would be simply operating in a vacuum while Dozsa’s control room gave the real commands. The North Koreans would be unable to change the launch until they looked out the window and saw their T2 missile arcing due west towards China rather than east, into the Pacific.
Standing, Mac looked at the map on the big screen. Waving at it, he tried to tell the Koreans to change the target but the two surviving technicians were hiding, not wanting to come out.
Checking the upstairs window and the door for signs of Dozsa or his soldiers, Mac pulled the C4 charges from his backpack and eyed the framework on which the mainframes and junction boxes were built. Crawling under the frames — essentially heavy-duty Meccano scaffolds — Mac planted a charge on the side of the server stacks and set the timer for five minutes.
Turning, he crawled back to the control room, noticing a hollow clap under his knees as he passed over, and slapped the other charge on a metal upright and set the timer for five minutes. Standing as he picked up the Heckler, he saw a commotion at the door.
Levelling the rifle, he readied to fight it out — whatever happened from here, Mac wanted those charges detonating.
Lance stumbled in, wide-eyed, and Mac lowered his rifle.
‘Lance,’ said Mac, thinking there was now some hope of finding the file before he blew the control room. He was going to blow it regardless, but he’d like to tell Canberra that he’d retrieved the file.
Lance stumbled forwards, holding his arm awkwardly, and Dozsa slithered in behind him, blood running down from a cut on his tanned bald head.
‘McQueen, drop the gun and listen to me,’ said Dozsa, pointing his rifle at the back of Lance’s head. ‘That missile can’t land in Beijing.’
‘You’re telling me,’ said Mac, letting his rifle slip to the floor.
‘Yes, you, McQueen. You brought that crazy American in here.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Mac.
‘Chan,’ said Dozsa, locking the door behind him. ‘You don’t know who he is?’
‘DIA or Agency,’ said Mac. ‘Ex-Marines forecon.’
‘Emphasis on “ex”,’ said Dozsa, moving to the Korean technicians while he covered Mac and Lance.
Barking orders in Korean, Dozsa kept his eyes on Mac while the small white cross was changed again, this time to Tokyo.
Dozsa stole a quick look at his watch and Mac looked at the screen: in forty-five seconds the North Koreans would lock the Taepodong-2 into its ten-minute launch sequence, not knowing where it was really heading.
‘Why emphasis on ex?’ said Mac, noticing blood dripping from Lance’s crippled arm.
‘Sammy’s private,’ said Dozsa. ‘He’s as official as I am, but he’s sanctioned.’
‘By whom?’ said Mac, calculating whether to tell Dozsa about the charges or try an escape.
‘Heard of the Syracuse Unit?’ said Dozsa. ‘Bunch of Pentagon brass, intel parasites and defence contractors who met in Sicily in the late nineties.’
‘I’ve heard conspiracy wackos talk about these guys,’ said Mac, glancing at his watch — three minutes till the charges blew.
‘It’s not a theory,’ said Dozsa. ‘With the impending election of George W Bush, they met to discuss how the defence and intelligence budgets could be kept at Cold War levels under George W, and they decided that North Asia tearing itself apart was the logical choice.’
‘Sounds like Mossad bullshit to me, Joel — no offence,’ said Mac. ‘Sounds like the kind of thing your secret service keeps telling the politicians so everyone seems worse than the Mossad.’
‘We were inside,’ said Dozsa, smiling. ‘We had eyes.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Mac. ‘Grimshaw is old school — a true believer. He’s ex-Phoenix, for Christ’s sake.’
Dozsa gestured for Lance to approach. ‘Not Grimshaw, he’s been stalking me for two years. He wants my head on a plate.’
‘So?’
‘So, Sammy Chan — planted by the Syracuse Unit — has been courting me while pretending to work for Grimshaw.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Why d’you think Sammy went running down that hill and tried to assassinate Geraldine McHugh that night?’
‘He said he was stopping her being debriefed by Canberra — blamed it on Grimshaw.’
‘And now it is you bullshitting, McQueen,’ said Dozsa, dark eyes glinting like a shark’s. ‘Sammy was cleaning up the mess: Phil, then McHugh — they knew too much, and people knowing too much disturbs the Syracuse gang.’
‘What?’ asked Mac.
‘They tried to turn me, McQueen,’ said Dozsa, reaching for a keyboard. ‘When I wouldn’t, they had to wipe the slate before they took over my little operation.’
‘Phil?’ said Mac, head roaring. ‘What’re you talking about?’
‘That night on the docks in Phnom Penh, you see where the RPG came from?’
‘You,’ said Mac.
‘Think again, my Aussie friend,’ said Dozsa, mouth hardening. ‘It came from the river. My guy on the boat was shot and then there’s an RPG sailing over our heads into that truck.’
‘You’re grasping, Dozsa,’ said Mac.
‘I’m winning, not grasping,’ said Dozsa, in that irritating Hungarian accent. ‘Phil had been with Sammy when they tried to turn me — he knew too much, so Sammy killed him in a way that was plausible to Grimshaw.’
Shaking his head, Mac watched Lance being lured to the PC below the screen banks.
‘Run a test on the HARPAC file,’ said Dozsa to Lance, but not taking his eyes off Mac. ‘I want to make sure we don’t lose comms at the crucial point.’
Lance was stiff with fear, his face white with shock and blood loss. The youngster wasn’t going to be much good in the next ninety seconds.
‘And don’t screw around with it, okay, boy?’ Dozsa held the barrel of his rifle to Lance’s temple.
A faint beeping sound started in the control room, and looking up at the display monitors Mac could see a red panel blinking in the top right-hand corner of each monitor. ‘That’s the ignition phase,’ said Dozsa. The North Korean missile launch was locked in.
Watching Lance’s shaking hand go to the PC, Mac winced. He had only one way to go, and that was to make a run for it — which meant leaving Lance.
The PC screen opened what looked like thousands of lines of code and Lance’s fingers danced lightly over the keyboard.
‘What?’ said Dozsa, distracted by something on the screen. ‘What the hell are you doing?!’
The PC screen was scrolling up at a hundred miles an hour, a box flashing over the data. Mac couldn’t see what the box said, but it blinked yellow. Shit — was Lance deleting the HARPAC file?
Pushing Lance from the PC, Dozsa moved to the keyboard and Lance lunged at the Israeli, pulling the rifle around in Dozsa’s grip and pushing it upwards.