As the last moments slid by Viper was well in his comfort zone, watching the other man’s face and judging how to present his big idea. The other man was chief of a business in India that lined up beautifully with what Viper wanted, which was a new, slick way to market his Circles cluster of corporations involved in precycling and recycling. The other man pushed his chair back.
“Coffee, Mr Viper?” He used his name with no sense of irony or indication that it was unusual, Viper noted.
“Thanks, shall we go into the street? I’d like to take a look around and make the most of the time I’m here.”
The two stood and Viper stretched briefly, starting to relax. He had a large and diverse group of ethical businesses that were waiting for an investor to launch a set of standards, ads, and the infrastructure to take ecologically responsible commerce into the mainstream. His mind danced over the details of the deal and found everything was in place. He picked up his tablet in his left hand and tossed it up briefly so that it fell into the accustomed sweet spot in his left hand, just as the floor of the room began to shake.
A distant sound, a boom like many jets breaking the sound barrier, rumbled into the room over the sound of traffic. Viper found his feet did not want to move, as he tried and failed to make sense of the sound and movement. Viper’s business contact, a man who did not look as though he was prone to panic, was moving surprisingly quickly for quite a big man.
“I’m getting under the desk,” he shouted over the noise.
The desk, steel with a thick wooden top, looked almost large enough for two. Viper instantly decided, on the grounds that he had no idea what was going on that if it was good enough for this man to abandon his dignity it was good enough for him.
He fell to his knees and scrambled in beside his contact, close enough to feel the man’s arm pressing against his own shirtsleeve. Viper was searching for a joke when the windows blew in and bricks crashed down, one bouncing off the top of the desk. The bricks fell in clusters, and thick dust blasted through the room with a whining power, as though there was a full force cyclone outside.
Viper closed his eyes and cowered with his head in his hands. The floor swayed and tipped, as the the front facade of the old building fell slowly and very audibly apart. A steel beam crashed across the top of the desk. Heat and light burst into the space, red against Viper’s closed eyes. The explosion seemed to go on and on. Viper’s business contact was muttering curses in Indian. The floor was on an acute angle, but the desk, splintered and bent, stayed pinned.
Viper never knew how much time went past before the pair, feeling their way in the dust clouds, carefully eased out of what was left of the building. In the avenue a car was virtually covered by bricks from the fallen facade. A group of three office workers stood in a cluster, their arms around each other, one with blood running down her face. The two men found a way down the debris piles. The air filled with the smell of burning.
Without a word, his companion ran into the dust cloud marking the area where a shop once stood. Viper looked down. One shoe missing. He looked back. Somewhere in that mess was his shoe. He started an uneven walk down the street, past people pouring out of the tall commercial buildings, people dazed, people screaming, people begging for help.
He averted his eyes from a body, clearly dead, and nearly covered with debris. He stopped to give his shirt to people trying to help a man with a seriously injured arm and found he was still holding his tablet in his left hand. He watched as a thin kid in a T shirt instantly stopped the blood flow, wrenching tight a bandage made of Viper’s once clean white shirt. Viper stood there, automatically checking his newsfeed as he did several times a day. No internet access. That reality finally cut through his shock. This meant disrupted electronics.
Within seconds, world changing seconds, there had been an answer for him, an answer he did not want to believe. The explosion must have been nuclear to have taken out electronic communications. He stood still and whispered the words over and over. They still didn’t make sense to him.
Bomb, nuclear bomb. Viper started to run. Where was safety? Where was safety in this horror city of devastated buildings. He stopped by a woman standing in the centre of the footpath. Her eyes were blank with shock, her bright green sari torn, her hair turned grey with the dust.
“Nuke,” he shouted. “Get off the street.”
Her eyes focused, and he could see that she understood. She ran into his arms, and he pushed her away, grasped her shoulder and dragged her in a winding path around the piles of bricks, steel, and jagged wood, towards the gaping front of a high rise building. The huge glass doors were heaped in pieces on the concrete, but inside the building looked intact. He saw stairs, stairs to the underground carpark that was sure to be there. His ears filled with the rushing sound of fireballs and toxic wind, or maybe it was his breathing, which was laboured but almost overwhelmed by the sensation of his heart pumping as it had never done before.
In hospital, Viper had a lot of time to find out what had happened. A bomb had been set inside the border of India by a group of Kashmir based nationalists who were making their last stand against the certainty of capture. It rolled a cloud of destruction across the city of Ahmadabad just after noon on July 23, 2019. It showed that the best surveillance and the lethal high firepower robots were toys against one single nuclear weapon, a cut down missile warhead originally from Russia.
It was a relatively small one, but it did huge damage. The commentators laboriously ran through the international initiatives that had seen the terrorists of Islamic State contained if not defeated, and described the continuing efforts to contain the nuclear threat around the world. This detonation was a nightmare scenario, a tiny, barely documented group of fanatics who had managed to sidestep the checks and guards, and not only obtain a nuclear weapon but been able to use it. Viper’s research continued as he underwent intensive treatment for radiation sickness.
Apparently, he was lucky to be alive, lucky that something, the desk, the steel beam, had protected him from the worst effects of the bomb. Then he’d escaped quickly to an underground carpark where the air feed had been disrupted. It was several days before he and his companion had been found, both of them confused and fearful. They’d been living off water and snacks found in people’s cars. The woman, Ojal, had been reunited with her husband and children, and he hoped she was doing well. Viper’s medical treatment was to be a long term program.
The Australian embassy had pushed for special treatment for James “Viper” Black as an Australian citizen. He had been airlifted to Oxford in the United Kingdom, and once there was enrolled in a study trialling an integrated therapy for radiation sickness that included stem cell replacement. Viper was aware of the thousands of casualties in the ruined Indian city.
It had been nearly a week, and Viper sat in an upright chair covered in a nobbly green fabric and looked out the window at the grey building opposite, a patch of cloudy sky casting a glare over the orderly hospital environment. He understood for the first time, that he had been saved. There was going to be a future for him, but now the sickness in his head, just as real as the physical symptoms, was starting to make him wonder whether the saving had been worth it.
It seemed the bombing was to be followed by years of reliving the horror, anger and grief churning together in his belly. He could not cope with the savagery of terrorists who had set out to make the screams of women and children echo around the world. He could not accept that it was deliberate, even celebrated. How was he going to stop the howling in his mind that he was constantly afraid would burst out of his mouth?
His parents had flown in to see him, but he could only look silently at them, knowing they were barely holding back tears at the change in him, but unable to do any better. Maybe there were ways out, like prayer, or work. Viper chose work. He would accept the daily struggle with his memories, and then he would work, coldly and capably, until he was exhausted.
He discovered the bomb was not an initiative of the Pakistani Government, but a freelance effort designed to force Pakistan to confront India once and for all over the Kashmir territories, by making it look as though Pakistan had attacked India. India, seen as a contemptible, weak democracy, was thought to be likely to absorb the blow without nuclear retaliation, and the brinksmanship which had caused so many deaths over decades would be over.
That was the plan that had been introduced in calculated steps to a tight knit group of Islamic terrorists. They were all young men, coached to endlessly relive atrocities suffered by their people in Kashmir under India’s military rule until they believed the only way forward was vengeance. Viper realised he now had an insight into the minds of terrorists. Obsession had taken them over, they were barely human because their compassion, insight and rational mind was gone, replaced by a torrent of primal rage.
This was maintained by an addictive repetition of religious dogma. Viper had recently skirted around that particular pit of mindless rage himself, and he knew now that he could never be like them. He discovered the terrorists welcomed the prospect of a glorious death, and that they were sustained by the voice of a leader, whose toxic messages they listened to every day. On his instructions, they’d sourced the warhead from a shipyard in Russia, quiet under spring clouds, where rows of decommissioned nuclear submarines stood tethered. Five Pakistanis travelled to Russia under cover of a liquor wholesale business.
They were legitimate merchants, although ex-army. Their mission was a suicide mission however it went. If they were successful and hijacked a sub, they would receive lethal doses of radiation as they removed the components needed to create a bomb, the warhead and the uranium that was needed to provide the damaging radioactive residue.
Viper couldn’t understand who would volunteer for such a mission. The answer, he found, was that no-one had volunteered. Through social media and his own extensive list of contacts, he learned the terrorists had kidnapped the men’s families, started to torture them, and then had guaranteed their safety once the bomb was delivered. Videos of the threats had been posted online. A deal had also been struck with a group of Russian gangsters.
Local gang members had killed the sentries guarding the shipyard and towed a nuclear sub away under cover of darkness and a few bribes to the regional military. The failed Russian economy had created an environment where people would do anything for money, a profoundly dangerous situation where many weapons were stockpiled and their guards were few. Further down the coast, more of the Russian gang and the former Pakistani engineers, in a large leased craft, met the submarine.
It was lurching, barely visible, behind a tugboat. The job was almost over. Several Russians went off to prepare a railway container they had ordered for the goods. Through the night, four of the five Pakistanis laboured on the submarine, which was rafted up to their large boat. In a medium swell, the job was risky and difficult, but they managed to remove the components they needed, and constructed the bomb as the fifth man briefed the watchful remaining gang members. All up, their lethal package weighed only about 70 kilos. They delivered it to the boat and sealed it in a steel container. The radioactive material was temporarily safe. With thirty seconds of semiautomatic gunfire on deck, the Pakistanis were dead.
The Russians returned their bodies to the submarine, and sank it offshore in the low light of dawn. The package was put into the railway container which now also contained a consignment of premium liquor, and was sent on its long journey by rail and ship. It arrived at the port of Rozi Jamnagar in the province of Gujarat.
Too easy, thought Viper. The container was sent on by rail to Ahmadabad. The whole operation was probably not even expensive. It wasn’t too difficult for the young terrorists to unpack and then detonate the bomb. The explosion levelled the inner city, but the radiation contamination rolled with the monsoon winds across the north of India. Viper found the whole world was recoiling from the horror of the event, the unstoppable progress of it, the desperate attempt to evacuate millions of people, and the insanity of actions that had rendered huge swathes of the country unliveable for generations. Financial markets across the world had dived as regional panic took hold.
Temples, mosques, churches, and every place of worship were now packed as people stopped buying and working, and prayed. Viper was interested to find a new sense of global community: preachers were mostly reading off the same pages: love, redemption, and world community. Viper considered the situation. It seemed the nuclear bomb might be a dealbreaker. There were calls for change from nearly every country, and it seemed to him as though people online were so interconnected that they saw the attack on India as an attack on themselves.
At this moment, it seemed as though there might be an opportunity for a better way of running the world to emerge. Viper’s business, Circle, had a global reach, and he had been inundated with messages of support. To him, it seemed people were waking from a passive acceptance of terrible events, and with it possibly their governments’ relentless progress down the old road of economic growth and more and more defence spending on all the conflicts in the world. Viper considered his own personal network, and saw a role for himself in delivering something that could help to fan this spark into a flame, to stand as a memorial to his anger at the senseless bombing.
He knew the internet had developed as it was designed to do, introducing people across the world to unfettered information. But after the rise of prodemocracy movements, the old regimes had fought back, picking off the leaders, ramping up their security services, passing repressive laws under the guise of preventing terrorism, and pulling their people back into line.
In many democracies, a national apparatus of filtered information and national security laws was actioned in the shadows. It was a subtle, underground war that was not well analysed by the public. Many people didn’t understand why change did not filter down to the street from the national leadership, despite continued demonstrations.
Viper’s friends called the situation manipulated democracies. It was time, he thought, for the real owners of the internet to take their territory back, to protect the democratic process and the people who were speaking out for change. He would galvanise his existing network and call it the guardians. As it would essentially operate in a grey area of anonymity in cyberspace, he’d call it the grey guardians.
Viper leaned back on his pillows as the medication drip ran into his arm and smiled, possibly for the first time since the bomb.