Later that night, Blaer awakens with a crimp in his ankle and finds 
after stretching himself into various incongruous but no less 
uncomfortable positions on the bed that he cannot get back to sleep. 
He gets up without turning on the light to avoid waking the other 
men in the pod. There is a pack of cigarettes in his bag and he 
withdraws them guiltily—the Commodore cannot abide the habit and 
forbids the possession of them in the base. He puts on just his coat 
and gloves—his intention is to remain in the shelter of the barracks 
where the wind will blow away the smell of the tobacco but not chill 
him too quickly. 


When he walks outside he sees a faint glimmer of light in the 
direction of the garage—not enough for the whole building, just 
someone moving around inside with a torch. Happy to find someone 
else up he might be able to talk to, he pulls up his hood and walks 
out over the camp grounds, frozen snow crinkling under his feet. 
The door of the garage swings open at a touch and he enters. 
Keagan is there, and at first he has the bizarre idea that the British 
man is drinking petrol from a Land-Rover—he is sucking on the end 
of a piece of plastic tubing, the other end of which goes into the fuel 
tank of the vehicle. 


Then he takes his mouth off the end and releases the crimp he has 
been holding in the tubing with his good hand. Dark liquid rises into 
the tubing and down the other side—Keagan puts the end of the 
tubing in a shallow bowl and lets it puddle out. Blaer looks around 
and sees other bowls underneath the other vehicles. Most of them 
have their engine hood up and a number of anonymous pieces have 
been removed and carefully placed in a line in front of them. 


"Keagan," Blaer says carefully. "Keagan, what are you doing?" 
Keagan stands, picking up something from beside him. He doesn't 


look at Blaer, instead addressing a point somewhere on the opposite 
wall of the garage. 


"Blaer? Is that you?" 


"Yes. What is all this?" Blaer edges closer. Keagan still doesn't look 
at him. 


"You know, I'm actually quite sorry it was you. | almost wouldn't have 
minded if it had been Bones, or Teitur, or one of the others. | don't 
have any real problem with you. | want you to know that." 


"What are you talking about?" Blaer gets close enough to reach out 
and touch Keagan's shoulder. 


"| need you to tell me where the bombs are." Keagan turns around. 
There is a wrench in his hand. 


It was the practice of Commodore Schaeffer to be woken at 0630 
hours, having slept for exactly 6 hours and 30 minutes. Those who 
ventured to wake him for matters he considered insufficiently vital 
tended to find themselves assigned to the earliest details and there 
was thus an impassionated debate between the relevant parties on 
whether the crisis that now engulfed them was one on which the 
Commodore needed to be consulted, particular since as far as they 
could see there was nothing further that could be done to alleviate 
matters. It was thus 0615 before Kiartan Hallers, the responsible 
officer for B-Barracks, entered his quarters and woke him. 


"What time do you call this," Schaeffer complained groggily as 
Kiartan took him by the shoulder and shook him gently. 


"Apologies, Commodore," Kiartan said, "but a situation has arisen 
and although steps have already been taken to handle matters | 
thought it best to ensure you were notified." 


Such circuitous language from Kiartan, a man Schaeffer knew for 
directness, to the point of being blunt, was alarming enough to the 
Commodore that he sat bolt upright. 


"What is it? What's happened?" 


"There's been a fire, sir. In the supply hut, which is why there was no 
general alarm. The chef discovered it at 0515 and tried the 


extinguisher, but it had already taken hold." 


"That's it? Have Blaer fly over to Kulusuk and get some bare 
essentials, porridge oats, beans, et cetera until we can spare one of 
the trucks." 


"There is more, unfortunately. | ordered that the hose be fetched 
from the garage, where it was discovered that the vehicles appear to 
have been sabotaged." 


"Sabotaged?" 


"We haven't done a full inventory, but most of them seem to have 
parts missing. Teitur says it's the components we don't have 
replacements for. And one of the 88s is gone." 


"What about the Cessna?" 


"Working, as far as we know. Bult, sir, we found Blaer in the garage. 
He's dead." 


"Take a head-count. Now." 


"We've already done it, sir. Blaer Gunarsson and Keagan O'Neill 
were the only two unaccounted for." 


"Well, that's fairly conclusive, isn't it?" Schaeffer struggled into his 
clothes, hair and beard in disarray, and strode out into the main area 
of the tower. "Now we have to find a way of dealing with this mess." 


Kaali was standing over the controls for the radio transmitter, face 
grim. "It might not be connected, but the radio's down. Looks like 
there's no power going to the array." 


"It just keeps getting better," Schaeffer muttered as he donned his 
outer garments and walked outside. "He'll have cut the cables. Get 
Teitur to look at that as his first priority. We need to let other cells in 
the region know what's happened. We still have the bombs—the 
Project is not impeded. But Sir Malcolm needs to be informed that 
this will put us back some weeks." 


There was an awkward silence from his companion. "The bombs," 


Schaeffer repeated. "We still have the bombs, yes?" 


"No-one has yet been able to get into the munitions shed to verify 
that, sir," Kaali said quietly. "Everything has been drenched with 
petrol. We think O'Neill intended to start a fire there too. We've left it 
to air before we take an inventory." 


There was a sudden yelping from somewhere in the darkness and 
the sound of something heavy and metallic falling to the ground, 
then the sounds of people running, scattering. Schaeffer froze, 
listening, then turned. 


"Sir?" 


Shapes began to approach in the darkness, some walking, some 
limping. Most of them carried a spade or pick. 


"He's taken the bolts out of the gate to the workers’ camp. Get 
everyone into the radio tower with any dry ammunition you can find." 


At 0624, the large block of ice Keagan had placed on top of the bar 
heater in the munitions shed melted sufficiently to create a spark. At 
0624 and twenty seconds, approximately 250 STANAG magazines 
and 150 individual 9mm sidearm rounds cooked off, turning the six 
large lead-lined boxes stacked at the centre of the reinforced metal 
shed into so much confetti. 


Schaeffer and his men held the dead radio tower for four days— 
after the lights went out, after the last bullet was spent, after the last 
icicle had been cracked from the window and melted with body heat. 
At the last, he lost his faith. He climbed the ladder up to the roof and 
shouted at the sky. But his God was in Westminster—at that 
moment in fact in a meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society—and 
did not hear this final repudiation. 


Interlude II 


Elsewhere: 


Sam Deloitte had finished brushing her teeth and grabbed her court 


reporter's bag. Despite no particular effort on her part to delay 
proceedings she was already running late—she knew the early 
morning traffic meant an 8.30am start from her apartment on New 
Park Road in Brixton meant an arrival at Tower Bridge Magi Court of 
around 9.07am, with her first scheduled hearing at nine. Somehow 
over time the same routine—rise, charge phone, wash, eat breakfast 
(bowl of muesli, half English muffin with Marmite), brush teeth, get 
bag, leave, seemed to result in an increasingly late departure time. 


The first case of the day was to be a simple traffic violation—a white 
van driver accused of violating a temporary parking suspension sign 
on Pall Mall. Hardly the sort of thing that ordinarily attracted attention 
from the local press—a relatively minor offence and one that the 
defendant's solicitor had indicated he would seek have dismissed on 
the basis that the sign was out of date and had been reported as 
such to Transport for London by at least one other road user. 
However, it now appeared that the defendant had dismissed his 
counsel and would instead be contesting the charge on the basis 
that he was not travelling on 'the State's roads’ but 'the King's roads' 
and this verbal distinction (no doubt derived from a conspiracy 
theory website) allegedly conferred ancient freeman's rights 
protecting his freedom of movement. Such self-representation was 
always entertaining, though it rarely ended well for the defendant. 


As she was slipping her shoes on, her mobile started vibrating in her 
handbag, and, sighing, she bent down and rummaged through the 
stationery and other bric-a-brac within. She didn't recognise the 
number. Please be the Lambeth Times, she thought, ‘Ms Deloitte, 
after reviewing the CV you sent through we would be happy to offer 
you an interview...' 


Instead of the melodious tones of the Times' Legal Editor offering 
her a ticket out of Brixton, a crackly, poor-quality voice said "Sam D- 
itte, this is K-ag O-II". 


"Who?" She closed the apartment door again and put a finger in the 
other ear to drown out the traffic. 


"Oh for—sake, n-t this again." 


"You're on a very bad line, | can't hear you at all." 


"It's Kea-n O'Neill. | c-tacted you a couple of w- ago about the Foun- 
tion." 


"Keagan? You stood me up, as | recall. At Urbanicity." 


"Oh y-s. | se-m to recall you br-t along a couple of friends. You r- 
need to learn -w to treat informants." 


"They were just for protection. | didn't mean to scare you off. You 
were really there?" Sam put down her handbag and moved back 
inside, pulling out a notepad. 


"Yes, but | got pulled away. -k, this is probably going to seem 
cheeky, but | n-d another favour." 


"| get the distinct feeling I'm being strung along. How much is it this 
time?" 


"W-I, I've bribed a fisherman to g- me as far as Iceland, but | d- 
actually have -y money to pay him. He tak-s Paypal, if that's any 
use. Forty-six thous-nd kr-na, which | gather is around two hundred 
and fifty quid. Then I'll need a t-k-t for the Smyril Line—that's from 
G-nland to Denm-—then some kind of tr-n ticket from there to 
London. | don't—know how much that comes to, s-ry. I'll be tr-lling 
under the name ‘Martin Ball'." 


Sam burst out laughing, drawing a strange look from the man who 
lived opposite her as he shouldered past out of the door. "You're 
kidding. You get about a lot, don't you? Look, even if | believed you 
and felt inclined to pay for you to travel across Europe at my 
personal expense—'cos there's no way the Brixton Herald is 
covering this—what could you possibly have to say about the 
Foundation or anything else that would warrant me going to all that 
trouble?" 


Silence for a moment. "Look. For-t the Foundation. There's no way 
the people invol-d would let you publish that story. I've got somet-g 
else. Something that'll get you i- the national newspapers, easy. 
How does a Cab-et Minister organising a pris-n m-r sound?" 


"Wow, this line is incredibly bad. That almost sounded like you 


saying you had a story about a Cabinet Minister involved in a prison 
murder." She clicked her pen open. 


Chapter Twelve: "Foundations" 


The Cabinet Minister in question sighed deeply as he transferred 
another pile of papers over to the right hand side of his desk. Gone, 
he reflected, were the days when Minister Without Portfolio was a 
sinecure position; these days it was solid, nose-to-the-grindstone 
work, assisting the Ministry of Defence and the Home Secretary by 
taking on the worst of the mind-numbing paperwork. He had been 
offered the role alongside Kenneth Clarke as a compromise 
candidate—the Lib Dems didn't want (as they saw it) another 
thrusting, ambitious Tory in the role but the Conservatives were 
loath to give up another Cabinet place to their junior partners in 
Coalition. Who better to fill the gap than Sir Malcolm Urquhart, a 
man who had retained his seat with an increased majority in 2010 
against a dismal Labour showing but who was widely known as a 
harmless eccentric, someone without the will to go onto higher 
things? 


More fool them, of course. It was a mistake to dismiss the Chief 
Whip of the Conservative Party as a dead-end position—he was 
responsible for cajoling, bullying, threatening MPs to toe the party 
line, and was always the first port of call whenever a Member of the 
House had done something stupid and needed disaster 
management. A drunken racist remark, a dalliance with a prostitute, 
a few hundred thousand in fiddled expenses... In short, one became 
a knower of secrets—one was, of course, trusted to be discreet, 
which in the world of politics is a very shaky and fragile word. 


How he longed for word from the Project! In that moment, when 
everything his fellow parliamentarians thought they knew crumbled 
around them, he would strike. He would use them all up at once, the 
hoarded blackmail, the incriminating conversations in his office—all 
taped, of course, on the little recorder the Chief Whip kept in a little 
Japanese ceramic on his window. Even Cameron, at the last. He 
would enter his office, quietly, discreetly, and remind him about the 
little things. His personal interest in the downgrading of Ecstacy, as 


he had advised so passionately in the Select Committee Report in 
2002. Then, the real reason he failed to make the shortlist for the 
Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999 and the true extent to which 
he had supported Carlton's bid for the DTT franchise. The summer 
of '88, when a freshfaced David Cameron had graduated from 
Oxford. Then, finally, he would talk about Heatherdown and the 
class of '76. Such precocity, there, such delightful promise. 


One by one they would drop away. To the outside world it would 
look like cowardice—the born and bred politicos the red-tops so 
maligned falling back in the face of the unknown, the supernatural, 
when in fact it was the known that would terrify them most of all. 
Twenty-nine men stood between him and absolute power, and he 
had dirt on every one of them. Then the Prime Minister of the United 
Kingdom would stand on the shores of Scapa Flow and stare down 
a monster. Nothing like it seen since the days of Siddhartha 
Gautama, Jesus, Mohammad, divine right shown not merely 
asserted. And then... Tomorrow belongs to me, he thought, 
scratching his signature through some dismal wiretap order against 
a bunch of Occupy protesters who couldn't even spell that right, 
unless they thought poor literacy was 'cool'. Tomorrow belongs to 
me. He paused for a moment, unlocked his drawer, and removed a 
few sheaves of paper. On top, the latest letter from the Commodore, 
and he re-read it to strengthen his spirits. It said: 


Dear Sir Malcolm 
(So formal, dear Ronald?) 


| write to report that the Project is proceeding as 
planned, and we are ready to take receipt of the 
Verwoerd Contingency. There has been some setback to 
our timetable. 


(Though he had read it before the words fluttered in his chest with 
trepidation.) 


There has been a riot at the camp during which the 
workers have done us a great deal of damage, and we 
have buried a good man. Nevertheless | anticipate we 
will be back on schedule within the week and ready to 


complete the final boreholes. You will have your 
Mucalinda. 


Yours 
Ronald Schaeffer