Sharksplosion

By Alex Kidman

"What do you mean the sharks are explosive?"
Secret Agent Heff thought he was living the easy life, relaxing on a beach in Barbados and soaking up the sun and booze. His world is turned upside down when a secret society unleashes a plan to destroy the world economy with remote controlled highly explosive sharks. Now Heff must travel the world, foiling the bad guys at every turn while keeping himself alive, sometimes by the skin of his teeth, and always with an eye out for what might be lurking in the nearby water.
From an oil rig in stormy seas to the French Alps, from discarded nuclear submarine bases in Italy and through the Australian landscape, secret agent Heff travels the world to foil the fishy plot. Can one man hope to survive against a tidal wave of exploding sharks?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Kidman
• Release date: Dec 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310553622

Alex Kidman

Alex Kidman is a multi-award winning technology writer, currently working for Finder. He's been a previous editor at Gizmodo Australia, CNET.com.au, PC Mag Australia, GameSpot.com.au and a frequent contributor to Lifehacker Australia, ABC Technology+Games, Techly, Virgin Australia Voyeur Magazine and many, many more.Alex is based in Australia and writes mostly technology related topics (as if you couldn't tell) but finds writing general fiction considerably more challenging and invigorating.

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Sharksplosion

Copyright 2014 Alex Kidman

Published by Alex Kidman at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: A Beach In Barbados

Chapter 2: In Transit, Glorious

Chapter 3: Oily Characters

Chapter 4: RIP, Rig & Panic

Chapter 5: Everything Bites

Chapter 6: The Doctor Is In

Chapter 7: Well Well Wells

Chapter 8: Coffee Break

Chapter 9: Arriba Arriba

Chapter 10: Damsels In Danger

Chapter 11: Mexican Standoff

Chapter 12: Mistaken Identity

Chapter 13: Flying High

Chapter 14: Call Me A Cab

Chapter 15: One Night In Bangkok

Chapter 16: Like Clockwork

Chapter 17: One Slope At A Time

Chapter 18: Cold Comfort

Chapter 19: Sub-standard

Chapter 20: Ain’t No Mountain

Chapter 21: Personal Affairs

Chapter 22: Final Accounting

Chapter 23: Bridge Of Death

Epilogue

About The Author

Connect With Alex Kidman

Acknowledgements

What you’re holding in your hands is an experiment. OK, maybe not an experiment; it’s more likely to be an eBook reader, smartphone or tablet. Or perhaps you were very naughty and you’ve pirated this in one fashion or another. I’d rather you didn’t do that; I’m not a mega-successful author (as yet), although, with a completely different hat on, I do make my living by writing.

In any case, this is still an experiment.

Sharksplosion was written as a NaNoWriMo challenge in 2011. Nanowrimo challenges authors to write 50,000 words of a novel within the month of November.

Sharksplosion was born out of an idea that was sloshing around in my head for some time. NaNoWriMo proved to be the kick to get me actually putting words down on paper.

And there it sat for a couple of years, idling away and doing very little whatsoever, until I went to a talk at the Sydney Writer’s Festival given by Neil Gaiman, where he talked at length about the fear involved in a new project, and how it can be crippling I'm going to claim it’s his fault; I’ve become inspired to release this.

So, an experiment, then. If you have paid money for this, I’d love to get your feedback at [e-mail]. If you haven’t paid money for it, I’d rather you did; I recognise that there’s a segment of the population that demands the right to try before you buy, but I’d point out that writers need to eat too…

This also gives me the chance to thank a few people. Neil Gaiman, obviously, for indirectly giving me the boot up the backside to actually do something with these words. Darren, for suggesting I listen to Blood Bros while writing it. Annalisa, for the positive feedback; Gus, for doing the tiresome and annoying work of editing it into something worth reading; and finally my lovely wife Diana, for encouraging me, and, in the darker November moments, for putting up with an over-stressed writer.

Chapter 1: A Beach In Barbados

The sun was shining, my hangover was abating and that strange fuzzy taste on the roof of my mouth was slowly fading away. I could almost, perhaps, just possibly think about ordering some kind of lunch.

A salad sandwich, or something similar. The thought of food did briefly bring to mind the fact that I'd woken up this morning and discovered a quarter of a kebab sitting idly on my vacation unit's kitchen bench. I was guessing that I'd eaten the other three quarters, but couldn't quite recall doing so. Where in Barbados do you buy a kebab in the early hours of a Thursday morning, anyway?

The thought of the congealed hummus, sweaty lettuce and dry-yet-greasy meat made my stomach churn a little, so in an effort to take my mind off things, I reached down for the newspaper that I'd purchased from Leon's shop on my way to the the beach that morning. I adjusted the angle of the paper to keep the sun out of my eyes, and started to read.

The newspaper was filled with the usual trivia of island life: this politician was being indicted for corruption, that construction site was running five months behind schedule, this person had been given the keys to the city, and so on. All safe, dull, predictable stuff, and pure bliss for someone like myself in need of a break. One particular headline caught my attention.

Mauled Shark Parts Found Again: Police Suspect Gang Initiation

That was the headline that I was assailed with as I sat on the beach in Bermuda, where, as I'd done for many years now, I was taking my summer holiday.

As far away from the service as far away from Section 17, and particularly as far away from that little green room where a different man every time -- quite how they managed that I never knew -- handed out the folders. Green for suspects they wanted tailed, yellow for those marked for kidnapping, and red for suspects who were going to suffer a mystery ailment that only I would know about.

I hated the red folders. Not because I wasn't willing to kill for my country or the principles I believed in, but simply because a red folder was a messy folder.

Typically, it was somebody who had originally been a green folder, but through either their own actions or the mistakes made by those assigned to that green folder, they'd skipped straight over yellow and onto red.

Red folders were extreme, it was recognised, in that they carried a significant risk to the operative and to the section. Many an operative had to carry a murder charge to court rather than spill the department's secrets, and while most kept their silence and were quickly freed and replaced within the system to keep the gaol quotas at the right level, there were always a few that made themselves too notorious while dealing with a red folder and had to stay there.

Not to mention that a red folder case was, obviously enough, dangerous. The rumour that went around the department from time to time was that if you received a red folder that already had the top-right corner folded down, that meant it had previously been assigned to a previous agent. The fate of the previous agent was never discussed.

I never took part in those conversations for one very simple reason. I knew they weren't rumours; they were true.

Part of not becoming sloppy was making sure that agents were properly rested, and that meant that we were granted slightly more paid holiday leave than our classification should entail. Some wit had decided many years ago that we'd be classified at Medical Officer Class 3 level. As such, everyone in the department, from the database engineers to the field operatives, were technically medicos.

Agents got twelve weeks leave per year, and as I'd done for the past decade, I was relaxing on Needham's Point Beach, reading the Barbados Advocate. Turning my thoughts away from red folders, I glanced down at the story underneath the headline.

Two youths known to be part of the notorious Slayer gang were arrested on Tuesday in possession of more than 10 kilograms of assorted fish meat, the article said.

"Upon police inspection, it was determined that the meat was shark meat from a single animal. The youths maintained that they'd found the meat washed up on shore, along with a shark skeleton at Pebbles Point, but examination by the constabulary found no evidence of a shark skeleton or any other remains. The suspects were remanded in custody, and face the full court next Tuesday.

EDITORIAL PAGE 13: DISGRACEFUL BERMUDA YOUTH -- WHAT CAN WE DO?"

OK, I thought; this was an odd one. What do you do with bits of shark, anyway? I'd heard, as most of us have, that the local chippy in Iluka, where I grew up, sometimes substituted what it called flake for shark meat when fishing stocks were low, but beyond that?

Gangs have their own strange initiation ceremonies. I figured that either the local cops would beat a confession out of them, or that getting arrested and serving some hard time was all part of the initiation process.

A quick glance at the page 13 editorial confirmed it was the usual kind of blather; plenty of what are the parents thinking, lock them all up, reintroduce national service kind of rhetoric without any practical suggestions to back it up.

I was just about to flick past page 13 and check which sports scores the Advocate carried -- little chance of the NRL, but always decent odds of seeing some cricket coverage in this part of the world -- when I spotted a man approaching me from my right side.

My hangover made me averse to staring into the sun, but something about the way he was walking caused me to tense up. The bright sunlight obscured his features. All I could discern was that he was wearing a bright linen suit that was at least fifteen years out of style. Sweat was running down his shirt in a telltale dark patch, betraying the fact that he had not dressed for a long walk down a sandy beach that day.

As he approached, a telltale bulge in his pants leg betrayed the fact that he was carrying some sort of pistol, and highly nervously, as his stiff gait betrayed. No professional this, I thought, but still I was wary. I cast my mind back to my old drill instructor.

D'ye know what the deffernce b'tween a professional and n' amateur is, Heff? he had asked me on my first day with the service.

Training, I'd cockily replied.

No, boy, no. A professional gets a job done quickly and cleanly. An amateur… they're the ones that make messes and get noticed. Never get noticed, boy. Once you're noticed you're no good to anyone in the agency -- and cocky comebacks get you noticed. Two hundred push-ups!

That conversation had stuck with me, and many years -- and three bullet scars – later, I knew exactly what he meant. I'd kept myself in the dark, or so I thought.

The man approaching me was certainly no professional. Professionals knew how to get a job done, and out here on the beach I'd be an easy sniper target. Amateurs, on the other hand, botch things, and if something was about to be botched, I wanted to make sure I wasn't the victim. A professional would swiftly dispatch me, and while my odds were better with a novice, equally other beach-goers could be hurt in the ensuing melee.

I took stock of my options as he drew closer. No sidearm, of course; the days of being able to easily carry weapons across borders had died early on September 11, 2001, and on leave I hadn't thought that I would need a firearm. A rolled-up newspaper was no good to me, and the beach lounger I was occupying was both underneath me and too solid to easily break into pieces. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a fistful of sand with my left hand, out of his sight. Sand in the eyes would only disable him for a second but that was all I would need, especially if I could somehow get the gun off the man.

Excuse me, m'sieur. May I borrow your newspaper? said the bearded and relatively heavy-set man. His French accent was in stark contrast to the lazy island accents I'd grown accustomed to over the past few weeks.

In this part of the world it was generally laid-back drawls all the way, whether they were island natives or visiting Texan tourists. He was a bulky looking man, but it appeared to be more a matter of one too many baguettes than of having spent significant time in a gym.

In some ways I felt insulted; if somebody wanted me dead, couldn't they do better than a mildly obese Frenchman?

Oh, I suppose so. It's yesterday's, I'm afraid, I said, handing it to him with my right hand. As his own right reached down stiffly and deliberately towards his hip holster, I pitched the damp sand towards his face, making him reflexively lean back and tilt his body weight away from the sludge heading towards his eyes.

That gave me the exact opening I needed. I leapt sideways, spearing into his legs and sending him tumbling backwards, his arms flailing away from his concealed firearm. In seconds I was upon him in a locking position, and within another two heartbeats he was down. He confirmed his amateur status when he offered no resistance to me reaching in and relieving him of his sidearm.

It was a Walther P38, or variant thereof my muscle memory told me. It was in very good condition. There were only two conclusions that could be drawn from this. One was that he had only just purchased the weapon, which seemed unlikely given its age and the general attitude towards firearm sales in Barbados. There were plenty of guns on the black market, to be sure, but not weapons of this type. The local drug lords preferred submachine guns and assault rifles because they thought they made them look macho.

The other conclusion was that the man didn't actually own his piece. It had been given to him by somebody else, and that somebody presumably knew a bit about weapons. This fool clearly didn't. For a start, the safety was still on, but even the sun-warmed weight of it told me that it was indeed loaded, although it wasn't hot enough to indicate that it had recently been fired.

A P38 is an antique, now, though. How very quaint. How very odd. I held him in a locked-down position, my knees drawn around his sides. His eyes betrayed a wild panic, which all but confirmed his amateur status to me, and he tried hard to free his torso and lower body from my leg lock. I knew -- and clearly he didn't -- that the more he struggled, the more pain he'd endure.

He wasn't going anywhere. I hadn't spotted any accomplices with him, and to onlookers it may have rather looked as though I was mounting the man, but then, the Barbados culture is generally forgiving of such things in public. It's one of the reasons I rather like the place; nobody asks