The cables had been installed entirely by robots, designed to crawl through the narrow, flooded confines. Matt’s machine was following their tracks . . . but considerably more quickly. Servo was a metre-long, vaguely snake-like construct, made from three tubular sections linked by universal joints: a flexible torpedo able to bend and twist through narrow underwater spaces. The rearmost segment housed the propeller and steering vanes, the middle one the battery pack, while the front section contained cameras, lights and a folded manipulator arm.
Matt glanced at the other laptop, which displayed a graphic of the pipeline system overlaid on a plan of the United Nations. A blinking cursor showed Servo’s position, not far from the outline of the Secretariat Building. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.
‘Eight oh four,’ Karima told him.
‘Christ, we’ve only got ten minutes to high tide. Pick up the pace, Servo!’ he told the screen as he thumbed the throttle wheel on one joystick. The fibre-optic spool turned faster.
Eddie reached the IHA offices. ‘Working late, Lola?’ he said in what he hoped was a casual tone. There were still a few staff around even this late; the IHA was full of people who could lose all track of time poring over some piece of ancient junk, his own wife one of the worst offenders. He couldn’t go to the vault until his friends completed their work, so this was the least suspicious place to wait.
‘Yes, just finishing some paperwork,’ Lola replied; then she lowered her voice. ‘I used Nina’s security code to give you access to the lockers. Just use your own ID when you get down there - it’s all in the system. As far as the guards will know, Nina’s given you authorisation to open them.’
‘They won’t check and find that she’s not here?’
‘But she is here,’ said Lola with exaggerated innocence as she tapped her keyboard. ‘The computer says she’s had one of the conference rooms booked all day. And computers are never wrong, right?’
Eddie grinned. ‘Thanks, Lola.’ Still carrying the heavy case, he went into Nina’s office.
He checked his watch. 8.10. Come on, Matt!
Karima watched the map intently as the cursor crept across it, painfully slowly. Servo was now beneath the Secretariat Building, but the old pipeline system branched and turned as it progressed inland, the ROV needing to follow a convoluted route to its destination.
She looked at the view on the other laptop. The pipe divided ahead, one leg continuing straight on while the other made a ninety-degree turn. ‘Which way?’ Matt asked.
‘Left,’ she told him. ‘About twenty metres ahead there’s another junction. Turn right, and up.’
The pipe beyond the next intersection ascended at a forty-five degree angle. ‘Go left at the top,’ said Rad. ‘Then it’s a straight line to the junction box.’
‘Time?’ asked Matt as he piloted the robot towards the final turn.
‘Eight twelve,’ said Karima.
‘Two minutes to high tide . . . Christ.’ Another turn of the throttle.
The robot reached the top of the shaft. Alarmingly, it was instantly clear that the new pipeline was not completely full of water - a shimmering line sliced across its top.
The surface. The tide was at its highest. And it might not be high enough.
Matt shoved the throttle to full. On the screen, the conduit rushed past like something from a video game. ‘How far?’
‘Twenty metres,’ said Rad, staring at the map. ‘Fifteen . . .’
‘Watch out!’ Karima cried as something flashed into view ahead. An unidentifiable hunk of flotsam carried there by tidal currents blocked the way—
Servo couldn’t stop in time. The image spun crazily as the robot hit the obstacle . . .
And stopped.
‘Shit. Shit!’ Matt gasped. The view swayed dizzily as Servo reeled from side to side, but couldn’t pull free. He worked the joysticks, trying to make the robot squirm past the obstruction.
The water’s surface churned as backwash from the propeller created ripples - but even through the distortion Karima saw it was lower than before. ‘Matt! The water’s dropping!’
8.15. The tide was inexorably retreating.
Matt frantically jerked the controls. ‘Come on, Servo, you can do it! Come on!’
Still at full power. But still not moving.
‘Come on!’ Another twist, the camera rasping against the wall—
The view suddenly tumbled, the ROV corkscrewing down the pipe as it finally kicked free. Matt struggled to regain control. ‘How far, how far?’
‘Ten metres,’ said Rad.
The water level was still falling. The camera breached the surface, rivulets streaming down the lens.
Another few seconds, and the robot submarine would run aground . . .
‘Almost there!’ Rad cried. ‘Three metres, two—’
The pipe widened out. The ROV had reached an access shaft, a rusting ladder rising upwards. Matt reversed the propeller. Servo skidded to a stop on the bottom of the pipe, kicking up a bow wave.
‘Bloody hell,’ the Australian said, blowing out a long breath. ‘That was way too close.’
Karima examined the screen, seeing nothing but the pipeline disappearing into the distance. ‘Where’s the junction box?’
‘Above, in the shaft.’ He switched to a second set of controls to operate the ROV’s manipulator arm. It had a camera of its own mounted on its ‘wrist’; the view changed to an even more fish-eyed angle as the arm unfolded. The bottom of the image was dominated by a pointed probe: a cutter. ‘Let’s have a dekko . . .’
The camera tilted upwards, an LED spotlight flicking on to illuminate the shaft. The small lens made it hard to judge scale, the ladder seeming to have been made for giants, but the manhole cover at the top was probably less than three metres above. Far nearer was their objective - a fibre-optic junction box fixed to the shaft’s side. The main cable trunk ran through it, but another thick line emerged from its top and ran upwards, connecting the UN’s underground data centre to the rest of the digital world.
‘That’s it,’ said Rad, relieved. He indicated a lock on the box’s front panel. ‘Can you cut through that?’
‘No worries,’ Matt told him, guiding the arm closer. He flicked a switch; in seconds, the cutter’s tip glowed red hot. Carefully tweaking the controls, he touched the tool to the panel and moved it in a circle round the lock. The junction box’s casing was anodised aluminium, watertight and protected against corrosion, but the sheet metal was only thin. Molten droplets fell into the water as the cutter sliced through it.
In less than a minute, the entire lock dropped out of the panel. Matt switched off the cutter and retracted it, a robotic claw swinging up to take its place. It took hold of the edge of the burned hole and tugged until the panel opened. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now what?’
Rad examined a schematic. ‘My source said that the diagnostic port is . . . this one.’ He indicated one of several sockets on the printout. Matt moved the arm to give them a better look at its real-life counterpart. ‘Second row, the bottom one.’
Matt pulled the arm back, tipping it down to look at Servo’s equipment bay. Inside was a length of fibre-optic cable, plug connectors on each end. ‘It’ll take me a few minutes to hook up the data link through Servo. You sure this program of yours’ll work?’