Michael Dobbs - The Touch of Innocents

To the memory of my mother,Who had to fight harder than most .

Cover

Title Page MICHAEL DOBBS The Touch of Innocents

Dedication DEDICATION Dedication One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Acknowledgements About the Author Praise Also by the Author Copyright About the Publisher To the memory of my mother,Who had to fight harder than most .

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Her eyes were distracted, dazzled. One moment the country lane had appeared anonymous and empty in the swirling night rain, the next it was a blaze of incoherent light which screamed of danger.

The brain responded immediately, but inadequately. It could not tell that the fool on the tractor, suddenly aware he was blocking the path of an oncoming car, had panicked and switched on all the headlights; there was only that state of alarm that sends the senses cartwheeling, freezing the mind, where instinct rather than intellect takes control.

Isadora Dean would never remember what happened next, the confusion and sense of fear as the source of light came closer, the clarity of understanding that ahead lay disaster, the struggle with rubber and brakes which seemed to adopt a logic of their own as they danced and pirouetted amidst the leaf-strewn mud of an English autumn, the numbing slide away from light into darkness and the unknown, a feeling of weightlessness, of being in space, spinning off into another world, eternity.

Eternity. Death. Her death. Damn, what a waste.

She had already crossed into the underworld, it seemed. The car had left the road and was carving a tunnel of light through the tangle of wood that pressed around. Skeletal, leaf-stripped branches leapt out from the darkness to snatch at her, to drag her to disaster as a kaleidoscope of images flashed past faster than the eye could capture or brain decode.

Fear began only as her mind turned to the children. Benjamin. Little Bella. She released the breath caught in her lungs long enough to begin a strangulated cry. ‘Hold tight!’ How absurd. The boy was still soundly asleep, comprehending nothing, and how could a six-month-old baby hold tight to anything other than a mother’s breast?

She saw the bole of the gnarled oak but barely; it could have been a rock-face, a bolted door, the bottom of the deepest well. But she knew it was Immovable Object. Disaster. The End. Izzy felt nothing, not as her body began to lift from the seat and tear against the restraining belt, not when the inertia lock snatched back at the belt and threatened to carve her in two, not even when her head hit the roof of the hire Renault as it began to roll and the windscreen exploded into a thousand pieces of razor-tipped stardust.

And she would remember nothing. For as the point of her head just behind her hairline came into contact with the pressed-steel frame of the car, a shock wave like that of an earthquake passed through her brain, shaking it, stretching it, causing the cells to vibrate and become microscopically displaced. The damage was at first subtle, but decisive. As the cells twisted away from each other the chemical balance of the brain was disturbed, turning the neurological pathways from a running track into a synaptic slough, tangling and entrapping the electrical messages which perform the brain’s work.

She lost consciousness and when, in a while, she came round, she would still lack coherence and focus because many of the higher functions of the mind remained lost in what had become the ensnaring tar pit of her brain. She was unable to assist the terrified and penitent farmer who ran to drag her and her children free from the wreckage, found it impossible to respond to the concerns of the paramedics who tended her, didn’t notice the shrugs of the firemen who arrived too late to save anything from the burning metal carcass.

Yet there was still worse. Even as her body gave the impression of making some revival from the initial assault, the bruised and insulted brain was swelling.

And would continue to swell.

A small vein inside the inner brain had burst, spilling blood, creating pressure under which the nearby brain cells and their surrounding nerves would no longer operate, so reversing that original revival and pressing down her senses ever more deeply into the pit of tar.

The eyes opened but did not see, the ears heard but could not comprehend, the senses drifted away on a moonbeam until all coherent memory of the scene would be gone.

Of the crash.

Of the fire which brought terror to half the night life in that usually tranquil Dorsetshire woodland, and of the sirens and flashing lights which did for the rest.

Of her arrival at the Weschester General on a desperately busy night in A&E with its confusion and barely controllable clamour after some drunk had pulled a fire alarm.

And of the rush to get her to the intensive therapy unit as the medical staff began to realize that, instead of recovery, something with their patient was going devastatingly wrong.

Sunrise in San Francisco. A tantalizing purple and pink cast stretched across the horizon, the mist obscuring where parched hills stretched up to kiss the Californian sky, with only the lights of Oakland flickering their daily welcome from across the water to indicate where earth met heaven.

The first Boeings of the day stood out like angry fireflies against the still-dark clouds while two endless lines of automobile traffic swarmed across the Bay Bridge, mimicking the relentless march of worker ants; another half hour and the march would be but an agonizing crawl.

He stood by the open window, a salt-brushed breeze snatching at the smoke from his cigarette as night gave way to the lighter, noisier tones of day and the dawn chorus of streetcars called for their first passengers.

It was like no other city on earth, he thought; at the very frontiers of paradise. So relaxed, so uninhibited, so unlike the bureaucratic jungle of DC where the women didn’t even wait until winter to freeze.

Over the Bay the early-morning flights were beginning to stack up; he’d be catching one back in a few hours’ time. It brought him yet again to pondering how long it would be before his own baby was up there with them. The MPAA. Conceived by computer, gestated in committee, and about to be delivered unto Congress. The lightweight Multi-Purpose Attack Aircraft, the state-of-the-art fly-by-wire variable-geometry radar-reflective Mach-3 aerial acronym that only required a pilot, so they said, to tell it when to go home. The collaborative brainchild of trans-Atlantic aerospace firms which was supposed to solve most of NATO’s and all of his own problems for the next twenty years. Project Sure Hit, as it had originally and less than tactfully been known. Project Shit, as it had been immediately redubbed.

So the President, angered by the sniggers of a sceptical press conference and eager as ever to shower himself in righteousness rather than ridicule, had on the spot rechristened it Project Dust. ‘And Thine enemies shall lick the dust,’ he had thundered, not textually entirely accurately. But who amongst the reptiles of the White House Press Corps would ever know?

So, the Duster was expensive, but what did they expect of the most technologically innovative piece of military hardware in a generation? So it was already a Cold War cowpat, a weapons system in search of an enemy, a huge and wasteful distraction in a world where the term superpower rang like a ghostly echo through the lengthening dole queues, bread lines and back-street abortion clinics of Middle America. But, after years of recessionary compromise and Congressional gutlessness, it was the last chance, the very last chance, to glue back together the design teams and production lines that had saved the West a hundred times over when the liberal pedlars of compassion had prematurely announced ‘peace in our time.’