The Fail Safe

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2016

  Copyright © Jack Heath 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

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  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

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  ISBN 9781925266078

  eISBN 9781952534744

  Front cover quote from Reading Time

  Cover and text design by Kirby Armstrong

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For Redvers.

  May you grow up in a peaceful world.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1 FALLOUT

  2 WETWORK

  3 RETALIATION

  4 REDACTED

  5 SUPPLY RUN

  6 ENHANCED INTERROGATION

  7 HIGH-VALUE TARGET

  8 SUGGESTED MEMORIES

  9 MUTUALLY ASSURED

  PART TWO

  10 RUN DOWN

  11 INCENDIARY ACTION

  12 INFILTRATION TACTICS

  13 COUNTERINTELLIGENCE STATE

  14 LIFT OFF

  15 UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE

  16 HUMAN CARGO

  17 CHEMICAL WARFARE

  PART THREE

  18 CHAIN REACTION

  19 MARCHING ORDERS

  20 COVERT OPERATIVE

  21 THROUGH AND THROUGH

  22 CHAOS THEORY

  23 HASTY EVAC

  24 MUTINY

  25 PUBLIC SENTIMENT

  THANKS TO:

  FALLOUT

  ‘Why are we doing this?’ Fero asked.

  ‘Because potassium iodide stops radiation from—’

  ‘From reaching the thyroid gland. You said. But won’t the shelter protect us?’

  Zuri rested the box against the handrail, adjusted her grip, and continued down the stairs. ‘The government just wants us to be safe,’ she panted. ‘Come on.’

  Fero followed her, sweating. The boxes were made of heavy, durable plastic. A pallet of them had been delivered to the apartment building this afternoon. Tamper-proof tape emblazoned with the Kamauan coat of arms covered the latches.

  He and Zuri weren’t the only people in the stairwell. Others carried bags of air filters and rolled-up mattresses. One guy had a sack of hand-held ionisation chambers, designed to detect radiation. They all tromped down the stairs in single file like ants carrying crumbs to the queen.

  ‘Besmar won’t launch their nukes,’ Fero said. His country wouldn’t murder innocent people.

  ‘We should be prepared.’ Zuri turned to look at him. ‘Are you okay, sweetie?’

  Her eyebrows knotted together in a perfect imitation of concern. It took effort for Fero to remind himself that she was only pretending to be his mother. If she realised his brainwashing was starting to unravel – he now knew he was a Besmari boy surrounded by Kamauan spies – she would kill him in his sleep.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Fero said.

  ‘I know this is scary, but—’

  ‘I’m fine, Mum.’

  ‘Keep moving,’ someone said from behind Fero.

  ‘Hey!’ Zuri pointed at the man who had spoken. ‘Give him a break. He’s just a kid – he’s nervous.’

  Fero wondered if the man worked for the Library. Thousands of intelligence operatives known as ‘Librarians’ monitored Kamau’s enemies all over the world. Perhaps this interaction had been staged to give Zuri the opportunity to defend Fero and reinforce his connection to his ‘family’.

  It wouldn’t work. Now that Fero knew who he was, his only loyalty was to Besmar. He would give anything to go home.

  ‘We’re all nervous,’ the man grumbled. That, at least, was true. Since the explosion at the Botanic Gardens four weeks ago, everyone in Kamau had been on edge.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Fero told Zuri. ‘Let’s go.’

  They kept shuffling down the stairs. They reached the basement just as the cargo lift arrived. Wilt limped out, pushing a flatbed trolley loaded with ten-litre bottles of water.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ Fero said.

  ‘Hi, Fero. Can you give me a hand?’

  Fero helped Wilt steer the trolley around the corner to where a pair of concrete blast doors stood open, one behind the other. Each door was a metre thick and hung from mighty hinges. Giant springs lined the walls inside the airlock, insulating the nuclear bunker from the outside world. Fero had been told that the structure could withstand a twenty-five-megaton explosion from a distance of three kilometres.

  He carried his box through the airlock into a large room with a low ceiling held up by thick steel pylons. Air vents studded the walls every few metres. Vinyl tiles with a fake wood pattern lined the floor. In one corner of the room was a showerhead, a drain and a toilet. A curtain rail surrounded them, but there was no curtain.

  Crates of freeze-dried vegetables were stacked against the far wall. Fero added his box of potassium iodide pills to a pile in the corner while Wilt pushed the trolley over to the other water bottles.

  ‘Cosy,’ Wilt said to Zuri.

  Fero pretended not to know what he meant. Thousands of people lived in this building. The shelter could hold perhaps a hundred. In the event of a nuclear attack, most of the occupants of the apartments above would die.

  Zuri squeezed Wilt’s shoulder. ‘Besmar won’t attack,’ she said.

  The hand on the shoulder looked forced. Since finding out that his ‘parents’ were spies, Fero had often wondered if they were really in love, or if they were only together because of him. Even before his false identity began to fade, he had thought their hugs looked self-conscious. Their conversations sometimes sounded like the dialogue in a film.

  ‘They blew up the gardens,’ Wilt said.

  ‘That was different. There were no casualties.’

  ‘No, but there could have been.’

  Fero turned back to the stack of boxes. According to the Kamauan media, Besmar had orchestrated the attack on the Botanic Gardens. The Besmari government insisted that it was the work of non-state actors. Only Fero knew that the explosion was supposed to destroy this apartment building.

  There had been three bombs in the carriages of a subterranean train, primed to destroy several major buildings across Kamau. Fero had defused two of them before he was interrupted. In desperation he had moved the last one to the gardens so it wouldn’t hurt anybody when it went off. He had barely escaped with his life – his skin was still peeling from the blast waves, as if from a bad sunburn.

  Since recovering his identity, Fero had decided that the explosion was the Library’s fault. It had to be – surely the Besmari government wouldn’t try to kill civilians. And one of the bombers had been a Librarian.

  The Library had certainly benefitted from the explosion. Anti-government protests had stopped. The Kamauan president, Nina Grigieva, was more popular than ever.

  Zuri took a look around the room as more people shuffled in behind her. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve done enough.’ />
  As they left the blast chamber, Fero wondered if it would actually stay intact in a nuclear attack.

  Perhaps it was not designed to protect people but to make them feel protected. The room might collapse as soon as the bomb went off, killing anyone inside.

  Kamauans had tortured Fero, brainwashed him and forced him to risk his life for their country. They were capable of anything.

  Fero gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. The more he tried to remember of his life as Troy Maschenov, the more the details seemed to float out of reach. He couldn’t recall much about his childhood or his real family. But he could remember a joke he had heard in basic training.

  ‘Today I learned how to tell when a Kamauan is lying,’ another soldier had told him.

  ‘How?’ Fero had asked.

  ‘His lips are moving.’

  They had both laughed.

  Fero followed Wilt and Zuri back up the stairs. The lift was still transporting cargo, so they would have to walk up all twenty-six floors. Wilt moved quickly, despite his stiff knee.

  Knowing that his parents were spies hadn’t helped Fero at all. They watched him closely in the apartment. At school, he couldn’t be sure which teachers or students were there to spy on him. The streets were monitored by CCTV cameras. He had no allies, no vehicle, no weapons. He was trapped in Kamau.

  By the time they reached the apartment, Fero’s thighs were burning. When they were inside, Wilt locked the door behind them.

  Fero went over to the kettle. ‘Anyone want a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ll make it,’ Wilt said.

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. You just relax.’

  Outside the window, the Chernov River cut a black line through the cityscape. It was after curfew, and lights were clicking off in the other buildings. Blinking radio towers were just visible over the Anti-Terrorist Protection Rampart.

  The rampart was a gigantic barrier which had started construction immediately after the explosion in the gardens. It now surrounded the whole country. Some parts were still made of chain-link fence, but the Besmari side was solid concrete topped with razor wire. The Kamauan government said the rampart was for keeping Besmari attackers out, but Fero couldn’t help feeling as though it had been built specifically to keep him in.

  He pressed his hand against the cool glass. That wall, a hundred thousand surveillance cameras, and a tremendous minefield known as the ‘Dead Zone’ stood between him and his home.

  Zuri came up behind him. ‘It’ll be okay,’ she said, and tousled his hair just like she had when he was a little boy—

  No. That was a false memory. The Library had implanted it. Right after they had erased Troy Maschenov’s identity and replaced it with a fictitious one. There was no Fero Dremovich. No peaceful childhood of home-cooked soup, bicycle rides and fishing off the Geretsk Pier. There was only Troy Maschenov. Loyal soldier of the Bank – Besmar’s elite spy network.

  Wilt’s phone rang.

  ‘Hello? Oh, hi.’ Wilt paused. ‘I doubt that. I think they just . . . Okay. If you’d rather do it that way, that suits me fine. But make sure it’s there when they arrive.’

  Wilt’s calls always sounded like that – no names, no places, no dates. Fero had never thought it was suspicious. Not until Troy Maschenov’s memories started to return. Now he recognised it as intelligence talk, scrubbed of compromising details. There was nothing on Wilt’s side of the conversation that could expose him as anything other than the loving father of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  The electric kettle boiled and clicked off.

  ‘I have to go,’ Wilt said. ‘Talk to you later.’ He ended the call and poured the tea.

  ‘Who was that?’ Fero asked casually.

  ‘Dmitri, from work,’ Wilt said. ‘Our project manager has gone on maternity leave and we need to replace her before the interstate meeting on Monday.’

  If the lie was hard to concoct, he didn’t show it. He came over to the window with two mugs of tea. The milk swirled through the black liquid like snake venom.

  Since learning the truth, Fero tried to avoid eating or drinking anything he hadn’t prepared himself. But it would look odd if he refused the tea. He took one of the mugs from Wilt.

  Every day he faced hundreds of tiny decisions which might kill him, and he had to choose without appearing to think about it. The stress was unbearable. Even if Wilt or Zuri didn’t murder him, he might die of a heart attack.

  ‘I have to send an email to Sayid,’ Zuri said, and disappeared into the study. Fero wondered if Sayid existed. Every time Zuri or Wilt left the room he worried that he had said or done the wrong thing. Maybe he had somehow revealed that he knew his real identity, and now they were calling the Library.

  Wilt watched Fero closely. ‘You okay, Fero?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Fero said. He told himself that he had done nothing suspicious. There was no reason for Wilt to poison him. He turned back to the window and brought the mug to his lips.

  And then the horizon exploded.

  WETWORK

  The water was black and cold. It won’t be like a swimming pool, Ulrick Vartaniev had warned. You will be swimming against the current. You will be carrying heavy gear. Visibility will be poor.

  All of those things were true. Troy Maschenov was eleven years old, and the backpack weighed half as much as he did. It was lumpy, too – the bricks dug painfully into his back. He wasn’t so much swimming as dragging himself along the riverbed, grit in his eyes and mud between his teeth. Pebbles and weeds kept getting trapped between his skin and the knife holstered on his belt.

  Vartaniev had called it distance freediving. The goal was to swim as far upstream as possible without surfacing for air. Troy had been practising in the barracks while the other cadets snored. He would lay in his cot, holding his breath for three minutes, four minutes, five. He had learned to conserve oxygen even with an elevated heart rate. He didn’t breathe while racing his comrades up the rock-climbing wall, and on his second round of parachute training he had made it from the helicopter to the ground on a single breath.

  But this was harder than he had expected. The cold, the darkness, the weight of the water – Troy was two minutes in and already his chest felt like a pressure cooker. Only the fear of coming last kept him going.

  Something sharp dug into his shoulder. A submerged branch. Troy pushed it aside. At least the straps of his pack hadn’t become tangled.

  But someone else hadn’t been so lucky. Troy’s hand touched something round and fuzzy. A human head.

  Troy traced down the scalp to the neck, the shoulder, the collarbone. Nothing moved. The tangled cadet was unconscious.

  The exercise had started only three minutes ago. There was still time. Troy tried to snap the branch, but the waterlogged wood bent instead of breaking. He unholstered his knife and hacked through the strap of the tangled backpack. Then he shrugged off his own pack and pulled his comrade towards the river bank.

  His head broke through the surface. Gasping and shivering, he dragged the unconscious body out of the water. It was Yuri – a big, confident boy of thirteen. Troy was surprised. Yuri was top of the class in sparring and high jump. Troy had expected him to excel at this exercise.

  Vartaniev stood a few metres away from the river, silhouetted by the rising sun. His greatcoat billowed around his long legs. A deerstalker cap covered his bald head.

  ‘He’s not breathing,’ Troy panted. He held Yuri up by his collar and thumped his back. Yuri puked up a flood of river water, but showed no sign of regaining consciousness.

  ‘Yuri!’ Troy shook him. ‘Wake up!’

  Vartaniev walked over unhurriedly, shiny boots squeaking on the mud. He pulled Yuri out of Troy’s hands and threw him back into the river.

  Troy gasped. The words what are you doing? almost escaped from his mouth. But he had learned not to say things like that. Asking questions of a superior officer was quickly punished.

  ‘You have ruined thi
s exercise,’ Vartaniev said. ‘Your decision to assist Yuri has compromised my statistics. Now I don’t know how far you can swim underwater. Nor do I know if Yuri would have been able to save himself.’

  Troy braced himself. Vartaniev had a volatile temper. A cadet had once been sent to the infirmary with a broken eye socket after interrupting a lecture about camouflage. But Troy had to speak up.

  ‘He’s drowning,’ he said. ‘Sir.’

  Vartaniev glared, but did not strike him. ‘You will not intervene.’

  A head breached the water further upstream, gulping air. It wasn’t Yuri.

  Vartaniev wasn’t looking at the river. He watched Troy, his grey eyes thoughtful, his hands in his pockets.

  Troy didn’t move. He tried not to show how frustrated he was. Yuri was dying. Troy couldn’t just stand there and do nothing.

  But nor could he act. If he was discharged from the Besmari army, he had nowhere else to go.

  The seconds ticked away. A mosquito hummed past Troy’s ear. He found himself holding his breath, putting himself through what Yuri must be experiencing.

  Another head exploded out of the water, coughing. It was Yuri, blinking like a newborn vole as he paddled towards the shore.

  ‘See?’ Vartaniev said, clapping Troy on the shoulder. ‘Have a little faith.’

  RETALIATION

  As soon as the silent flash lit up the horizon, Fero reacted. Light travelled faster than sound or debris. The shockwave would hit in less than two seconds. He did what he had been trained to do, dropping to the ground, shutting his eyes and plugging his ears with his fingers.

  Anyone close to the centre of a nuclear explosion would be vaporised. Anybody between five and ten kilometres away would be deafened, blinded and burned. Even those further away would be poisoned by radioactive particles that would linger in the air for weeks.

  But the explosion wasn’t nuclear. The dull boom was no louder than a garage door closing. When Fero opened his eyes, he saw that the window hadn’t cracked.

  Wilt had remained standing. Perhaps he hadn’t been trained as rigorously as Fero, who had reacted instinctively.

  Or perhaps he had known the explosion was coming.