Red Storm Horizon

By charles back

Dan Coltrane has been assigned to find out how scammers are taking so much money off Australian business investors and uncovers a vast empire of illicit business dealings primarily involved with the world wide supply of vaccines. His chase leads him to Egypt where some of the most effective vaccine ingredients come from the feared and deadly King Cobra's found around the nile pyramids. Coltrane is lured in to the citadel of Cheops in the great pyramid of the same name and while searching for the vials that contain the valuable antigents he is confronted by Chinese agents looking for the same thing. Doctor Jason Winslow from the Melbourne University of Medicine has been succonded by the Chinese to develop an effective vaccine against the Covid outbreak now sweeping the world. They need it immediately to stem the contraction rate in China which is spreading with devastating effect. Coltrane meets up with fellow agent Lin Leong and they travel to China to make a deal with the Communist government regarding the vaccine production. Coltrane meets with Elang Huan a Chinese national who assists him in negotiating a deal with the Chinese Communist government and they fall in love with each other enroute. While escaping the Communist Security police Elang Huan and Coltrane travel back to her home in the mountains amid the threat of nuclear war with America but it is too late because she has contracted the Covid virus. While they attempt to cross the mountains into safe territory Elang succumbs to the illness and Coltrane has to face the future without her. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: charles back
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798356347979

charles back

Charles was born in Liverpool England in 1945 and emigrated to Australia with his parents in 1950 aboard the steamship Asturius. He lived in Sydney for the next eleven years and then his father signed him up for twelve years in the Royal Australian Navy. Charles served three tours of duty as a code breaker during the Vietnam war and left the service in 1973. He attended university and graduated as a secondary Art and English teacher in 1978 and served in the Education Department of Western Australia for thirty one years. After his teaching career Charles went back to university and graduated as a Naturopath in 2007, and after continued studies graduated as a psychotherapist in 2010. Charles is now retired and lives by the sea in Perth Western Australia, close to his two daughters.

Book preview

Breakwater Bay.

The Game Change

Ebbtide Crosssing

The Diamond Sunrise

Red Storm Horizon

The Genoa Rendezvous

DEDICATION.

This book is dedicated to my long-time friend,

Faruk (Rocky) Mazandarani who passed away in July 2020.

Rocky I am sure you are in a better place.

My fondest memories,

Charles.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

(William Shakespeare – Macbeth.)

RED STORM

HORIZON

By

Charles Back

ONE 

A flash of lightening arced up across the distant sea horizon off Perth’s storm lashed coastline for the second time in as many minutes. It was followed by a long low thunderous growl. The lightning strike was unusually bright, and it lit up the sky like an x-ray had just been taken behind my eyes. Then an overhead boom that sounded like an atomic explosion rattled the windows of my home. Cyclonic weather patterns around these waters are not unknown, but this one was gathering strength and the sky looked ominous, a big blow was on the way. It appeared that there was more to the climate change issue than previously thought, and mother-nature was making some threatening adjustments.                ‘There’s some heavy weather coming in from the north-west tonight, Dan,’ Peter Vaughan said to me with an element of concern in his voice. ‘The forecast is for hundred and twenty kilometres an hour winds off the coast gusting to one twenty-five further south.’            ‘I don’t like the sound of that Pete; there’s going to be some storm damage for sure.’ I’d spent the last hour making sure everything that could become airborne outside was either tied down or moved indoors at my home a kilometre inland. Then Pete arrived and we were having a drink after our golf game at the Hamersley course earlier this morning. After the thunderclap we looked towards the darkening clouds and the conversation between us took an unusual turn, not unlike the weather.      ‘Have you ever been in a heavy storm Dan? A real storm I mean, one that uproots trees and tears everything to pieces, houses, buildings, the lot?’      ‘Just one, but it was a long time ago when I was a young bloke at sea, why do you ask?’      ‘I’ve got a feeling that the two cyclones gathering off the coast of Darwin are going to hit us in a couple of days and it’s going to be like that, smashing everything in their path and tearing the coastal area to pieces. The weather patterns are definitely changing.’            ‘There was one like that back in the seventies, I think it was cyclone Tracy. It hit Darwin and flattened the place in less than a day. This time it’s two together and weather reports say that they’re strengthening by the hour. Some damage is inevitable, but we’ll survive.’      ‘There’s not much we can do about it I guess,’ he said resignedly.      ‘Cyclones like Tracey only happen once in a lifetime Peter and low-pressure systems of that size hardly ever come down the coast this far,’ I said thinking about the Darwin catastrophe and the darkening sky overhead.      ‘Certainly not two together, that would be very unusual.’ Prophetic words, but the cyclonic low-pressure systems were not the only event in nature’s plan of destruction about to hit the planet. Peter and I were sitting out on the balcony of my townhouse in Perth sipping our beer and we continued to watch the unusual cloud formations developing out at sea.            I’m Dan Coltrane by the way, and I’m a government field officer on recuperation leave for a couple of weeks after a particularly harrowing Interpol investigation. A week to ten days of rest and recuperation time away from active field duty is just what I need right now. Our team wrapped up a particularly harrowing case less than two weeks ago, but it was a messy conclusion and some of the details still keep me awake at night.     Thousands of miles away in Northern Africa and unbeknown to anyone on the planet, another catastrophic event un-related to the threatening weather change was brewing. It developed as a living organism and like the variations in the weather patterns, it was about to have similar and unimaginable consequences for all of humankind. Mother Earth was preparing to defend herself on two fronts against the human parasite that was reproducing its species exponentially and destroying the planet with pollution on an unimaginable scale.       In February 2020 nature was preparing to mobilize her most effective armies against humanity in the form of changing weather patterns and a deadly organism. The foreign life-form first mutated in Egypt during the mid-nineties as a unique virus never encountered before in the history of the world, Covid Delta virus.             Peter, I could see, had something else on his mind other than the weather. He was under some pressure from a failing marriage that had recently run aground, and he wanted to talk. I was taking time out to relax on home soil again less than a kilometre from the Indian Ocean where the clouds out to sea were slowly gathering. It looked like a serious storm was brewing and the creamy streaks slashed across the fading grey sky on the horizon looked eerily threatening. Pete was right in listening to his intuition, something wasn’t sitting comfortably with me either, and I pressed the point with him.     ‘I don’t think a cyclone will come down the coast this far Peter, it hasn’t done much north of Broome in the last two or three days?’       ‘Yeah, you’re probably right Dan. I get a bit edgy sometimes because the world isn’t quite what it was back in the day. Too many things have developed beyond my control or comprehension lately and I get the feeling that I don’t quite fit in the way I once did. That virus I heard about in China and Europe is a bit of a worry too, or maybe it’s just the problems between Carley and me.’       ‘It all happens so fast these days mate, one day you’re going along like a house on fire and the next day the bloody wheels fall off and everything suddenly changes. I think they call it getting older, but we’ll pull through, we always do.’ Uncertain words from both of us, ordinary men approaching middle age and feeling that there was an impending threat developing. It wasn’t just the weather, and we were unable to clearly identify what the crux of the problem was or how we could adequately prepare for it. 

The current global information concerning atmospheric changes to the climate world-wide tipped all the past predictions involving weather patterns on their head. The experts of yester-year were no longer the authorities on abnormal weather conditions, and these were the events that affected peoples’ lives more every day.      This wasn’t just about people though; it went much deeper than that. Most earthly species were changing their habitual patterns guided by nature’s unfathomable plan, and the will of living organisms to survive. In the grand scheme of things human beings were no different to any other species. We all had our place to take in the great unknown and that came up with a whole host of problems that we sometimes just had to deal with or perish in the attempt. 

The signs of impending catastrophe were evident. The planet had been irrevocably damaged because of human irresponsibility and political inaction, but the climate wasn’t totally beyond repair. Too many opinions to the contrary had been put to air on innumerable social platforms, but few had their foundation embedded in science or reality. What the armchair experts had predicted had not eventuated in the last twenty years, but new research had produced some controversial evidence, and impending disaster was close.

Almost three thousand years before the birth of Christ in a time known as the Early Dynastic period, the pharaohs of Egypt constructed their tombs in the form of the great pyramids at Giza. Deep inside the dark stone corridors secretly built to house their burial chambers for eternity, the vital organs of the pharaoh Khufu were ceremoniously removed from his corpse before the embalming and mummification processes took place. Each individual organ including the brain, heart, lungs, and liver was carefully placed in a decorative pottery container and sealed with a wax plug. Each container was then housed for posterity high up the wall in a special alcove where they remained undisturbed for more than four thousand years.       During that four-millennium period, a variety of tectonic plate movements across the globe caused the slight cracking of the interior walls of Khufu’s burial chamber and the cracks widened over time. This resulted in the subsequent entry of bats and other small creatures including a rat infestation. Following a more severe tectonic plate movement in 1978, three vials containing Khufu’s brain, lungs and heart fell from their alcoves. They smashed on to the stone floor of the burial chamber and a feeding frenzy developed between the airborne bats and the scurrying rat population. That single event brought about the genesis of a Coronavirus later named by the medical fraternity as Covid-19, which emerged in 2019. Delta was soon to follow. 

The transfer of the infection to the human species took place en masse in an unusual change in nature’s DNA pattern almost fifty years after its conception. In 2020 the format for the transmutation was ideal and nature’s timing was impeccable. With an intelligence level far exceeding human capability or understanding, the virus mutating in Egypt developed without detection or containment. The host body was an exotic feline originally from the pyramid, now caged in a local marketplace in an overcrowded Asian city. The city was Wuhan, and the animal was the integral host involved in nature’s plan to destroy humankind.       The virus developed in the food sale yards of a city far from its origin in Egypt. The small stoneware containers housing organs of the pharaohs in the Great Egyptian Pyramid of Khufu in Cairo was the birthplace of the virus DNA, but now it was spreading across the globe. After four millennia contained in the pharaoh’s tomb the germ had attached itself to two Chinese archaeologists working in Egypt and slowly made its way across the world with them to their homeland.      The perfunctory conditions in the suburban markets in the Chinese city of their entry were purpose perfect for the virus to transfer from animals to the local population. Inside the tombs of long dead Egyptian pharaohs the virus DNA developed in ideal atmospheric conditions. Amongst wild bats that inhabited caves close to Wuhan it mutated and then became airborne.      When the virus transfer to Asia took place, the Chinese population was totally unprepared. The relatively simple peasant lifestyle and the larger city population densities were ideal pandemic conditions. In the mountainous Chinese land mass, the perfect virus conceived in Egypt was now incubating and preparing to attack.      The regular sale and consumption of fetid flesh in the local markets of Wuhan allowed the organism to rapidly spread to a variety of animals which set the stage for an unimaginable world-wide viral pandemic. A decision to eliminate the human race had been made by a superior intelligence during prior decades, and soon the process would fully develop in the way that nature intended.

In the early morning at the end of winter when human immunity was at its lowest ebb the virus loosened itself on an ill prepared and unsuspecting world. Within two months of the first outbreak in Wuhan, without exception the survival of humankind was under dire and imminent threat.

TWO 

A few weeks before the first viral outbreak I was tracking a suspected cog in a very large wheel of internet scammers working out of Sydney. I’d boarded a Qantas flight to Mauritius close on his heels two days before and followed the suspect west. We were headed for the Indian Ocean stopover so he could catch his breath and ensure that his security was still uncompromised. I remained well concealed, but it was difficult to determine whether he was aware of my presence or just overly cautious.

The final leg on the way to his operation hub according to the information Interpol had provided for me was somewhere in eastern Africa. I guessed Somalia where a number of similar operations had been detected over the last few years, or maybe Syria a little further north. I intended to follow him for two more days and confirm his final destination with my field operations support group feeding me up to date information out of Sydney. My name is Daniel Gordon Coltrane as I mentioned earlier, Dan to my friends and Coltrane or agent Coltrane to my working colleagues. 

I’m approaching forty years of age and in some sectors of field operations the consensus is that men in my position start to decline physically in their mid-thirties. Other members of the force also believe that I should be withdrawn from operational front-line field duties. By age forty, men like me should be behind a desk controlling some level of administrative decision making or retired from the service and pursuing an alternative career path.      To the chagrin of some and the disappointment of many I had done neither. There were too many hustlers in the market to just walk away and give the crime syndicates another advantage because of my retirement. With fifteen hard won years behind me and extensive experience in undercover police field operations I wasn’t ready to lie down and roll over just yet. 

I agreed to one compromise when my request to stay in the field was granted and that was to stay away from homicide cases. There was plenty of other work to do like this current chase halfway across the world I’m involved with and I’m more than satisfied with that. I’d been hit twice with nine-millimeter slugs during my stint in the front line and take it from me, stopping a 9mm Magnum is not something that you want to do on a regular basis. 

This latest case appears to be an elaborate scamming operation that has already taken more than eighteen million dollars from Australian citizens in the last twelve months. The network we’ve uncovered is a priority case and has to be dismantled. In my experience the scamming game world-wide usually involves money and not much of the physical stuff. It’s because of the scammer’s cowardly nature, but that will all change when I eventually catch up with them. I detest the way these hyenas operate and the way they select their victims is nothing short of predatory. There’s something else afoot this time, but as yet I haven’t been able to identify exactly what’s developing. It appears to involve larger amounts of ready cash from China but that still needs to be confirmed. 

I intend to bring it to a conclusion, well the Australian market at least and I’m going to introduce some butt clenching pain into the lives of the perpetrators during the process. In the rarified atmosphere that involves the top echelon of the scamming industry it will include some intense investigation from our team.

I was up against some rebel forces in Mogadishu a while back and it looked as though the gentleman I was now tailing hailed from the same part of the world. He’s an African male, mid to late twenties and well over six feet tall. He’s also lithe to a fault, athletic and very dark skinned with huge white blocks of marble for teeth. This young man was an imposing physical figure by any measure. 

Why people of his ilk turned to a predatory lifestyle stalking older Australians and others around the world was something I could not comprehend. Their ability to make a living legally was a better employment pathway for every one of them, but of course their view of the world was quite different to mine, and probably their career opportunities were as well. How relatively educated people of both sexes in Australia still failed to recognise on-line fantasies that are patently false is beyond my understanding, but the practice is lucrative for the criminal elements around the world and it’s on the increase. 

My quarry was a careful agent for the businesspeople he was working for, and I was impressed with his skills in surveillance detection. He took his journey a step at a time checking the details of each one and was much more thorough than the usual ill-educated street merchant involved in scams of this nature. Although he was careful there were some flaws in his skill level, and he was by no means a professional in the clandestine arts of hide and seek. In the world of surveillance and evasion it was the detail that made the difference. We were both involved in a cat and mouse game of camouflage and detection, and for the moment at least, I was still the front runner. 

That all changed when the connecting flight to Mogadishu was called to gate eleven and I stood up to join the boarding queue. I had seen my quarry a few minutes earlier sitting not far from the entrance to the boarding gate looking relaxed and confident. A moment later I glanced sideways and saw him standing three gates to my right as he passed through the passport check and approached the entrance of an aircraft that was destined for Cairo departing in fifteen minutes. It was a brilliant safety check flight change that he’d engineered, and it was designed to throw any pursuit off his tail.            I was momentarily undecided as to what my next action should be but checking in with Bob Hersey my Australian mainland controller was a good place to start. I made a call to Melbourne and was immediately put through to Hersey at Central Office to see if I could acquire a last-minute seat on the MCA 114 flight my quarry had just boarded. 

‘Bob its Dan Coltrane. This guy has made a switch to a flight bound for Cairo. Can you get me a seat on that flight in the next ten minutes otherwise we’re going to lose him?’ 

‘I’m on to it Dan. Go to the departure gate and your ticket will come through on your phone before boarding time expires. It’s probably going to be tourist class but that’s all we can manage at short notice’ Hersey was as good as his word, and I approached the departure gate with my passport and the authority to board listed on my phone. It was a close thing, but I made it with two minutes to spare. Most of the passengers on the flight were of African descent, but two very large European looking men dressed in suits caught my eye when I saw them taking an unusual interest in me. It appeared that my young quarry was particularly well organized and he had some security back-up with him. 

I walked along the passageway with a short queue of holiday passengers moving excitedly towards the forward entrance and instinctively ducked my head as I boarded. It was force of habit in small entrances and then I was given the usual greeting by an attractive cabin staff member. She checked my seat number and directed me down the port-side aisle to seat 38A. 

Ahead of me the scammer man was already in a window seat and looking straight ahead of him at the two European heavies who’d been taking an interest in me earlier. He showed no sign of recognition, and they were seven rows behind me, two middle row seats with one on the aisle. In a sense I was surrounded but nobody’s really going anywhere other than the john mid-flight. It was a fourteen-hour journey to Cairo, so we could all relax for a while. 

Now that there was an opposition team to consider in the days ahead, arresting my quarry would be more difficult than I first thought, despite my Interpol authority. Criminals of this ilk would not easily succumb to the limited physical action that I could mount against three, while I was working alone. At this moment, evidence of my man’s guilt was sketchy and not enough to make formal charges against him, but that would change within the week. The new flight schedule was taking us across the African continent and into Egypt, the land lost in time with sand dunes to the horizon in every direction.

I saw the pyramids out of my window fifteen minutes before we started to circle Cairo’s International Airport and the beauty of their solitude was mesmerizing. From my portside viewpoint they looked like children’s blocks that had just been thrown out of the sky and scattered on the flat sandy earth below. Silent and commanding, they dominated the desert for miles around and brought a sense of awe to my limited understanding of Egypt and its pharaohs. 

This city, settled in the Nile delta thousands of years previously, had rapidly grown into a bustling population centre. Its inhabitants now numbered almost twenty million and they toiled day and night in an oasis surrounded by an ocean of sand that still entombed many secrets from its past. 

The flight had been the same as most, other than the tenseness that pervaded the immediate vicinity inside the aircraft, and I disembarked without incident. There was no tangible danger I could detect, but the acrid smell of threat hung heavy in the air, and I remained vigilant on entering the arrivals concourse. The thronging crowd afforded me some anonymity and I approached the overcrowded baggage area ready to claim my single piece of luggage that was marked with a light blue handle for easy identification.

My travel case turned at the first corner and moved along a straight pickup line, but before it turned the next corner one of the two heavies I’d seen on the aircraft, heaved it off the conveyor belt and made for the exit gate behind him. I realized that it was a ruse to get me to follow but there was nothing in the case of value other than my clothing and toiletries. My initial reaction was to let it go but my ego is a healthy and developed reaction to threat, so I gave chase. I made my way through the crowd then followed this guy to the men’s washroom. 

The facility was empty save for one man in the shower room who was fully dressed, with his back to me and brushing down his coat. Suddenly from the second end cubicle the man mountain who took my luggage materialized, and his mate from the shower room came in and stood six feet to my left. It wasn’t looking good strategically in numbers or position, but then the guy produced my luggage and did something quite unexpected. 

‘Galbi, Vin Galbi, Detective, Interpol,’ he said flipping open a wallet to reveal his identification badge. 

‘I was on my mobile to Bob Hersey just after you made arrangements with him to switch flights in Mauritius Lieutenant Coltrane. That’s Bryant to your left, Sergeant.’ I turned to face Bryant and he gave a slight nod of greeting and said, ‘Mal, short for Malcolm,’ which was a relief because in my extensive experience sergeants didn’t come much bigger than this one. 

Galbi said, ‘We couldn’t make contact with you before take-off or midflight without alerting Gellman. He’s the guy you’re tailing, Franco Gellman, and he’s high up the list in our books too. He’s one of their senior mules and he made a courier round trip to Sydney where he picked up a microchip from the southern hemisphere controller. It’s a world-wide operation they’ve got up and running, but we don’t know what was on the chip or what their main involvement is, other than some scamming operation, but we think that’s just part of it.’ 

‘Do we know where his destination is in Egypt?’ 

‘No but Hersey said that’s what you’re going to find out for us,’ Galbi said with a knowing grin crossing his wide face. 

‘But we’ll be close by most days. We’d better get out there because he’ll be picking up his luggage soon. We organized for his bags to be one of the last out to give us some time to make contact with you, but it will be coming on to the conveyor belt about now.’ 

‘Stay in touch,’ I said in repartee, and left.

THREE.

I picked up my blue handled case delivered to me courtesy of Interpol and casually walked out of the washroom brushing down my coat as if I’d been tidying my appearance after a long flight. I walked towards the dwindling crowd in the luggage area where Franco Gellman was impatiently retrieving his oversize briefcase from the conveyor belt now mostly devoid of passenger baggage. 

Waiting for luggage for inordinate amounts of time is almost a personal insult to some people, but Gellman held his composure. He maintained his vigilance while waiting for the elusive case to appear, and seemingly disinterested, scanned the dwindling crowd for any sign of surveillance. He looked in my direction unobtrusively once or twice as he perused the baggage area, but his face remained impassive, and I felt confident with my anonymity. 

When his luggage finally appeared, Gellman was visibly relieved and strode towards the taxi rank after passing through immigration and customs. I watched him make his way to the nearest taxi rank which was uncharacteristically quiet and give the driver his accommodation address at the Cairo Hilton on the Eastern side of the River Nile. His vehicle was easy to tail in my taxi wending our way through the dense midday traffic in central Cairo and I made another call to Hersey to keep him up to date with recent developments. 

‘Bob hi there. I’m in Cairo at the Hilton. Vin Galbi and Sergeant Bryant caught up with me at the airport when we arrived, that was something else I can tell you.’ 

‘Sorry about that Dan but I couldn’t contact you before you landed. I must have been dialing you just about when you met them so there wasn’t much point in interrupting proceedings. So where are we up to?’ 

‘This guy’s name is Franco Gellman an Egyptian national involved mid-level in the operation run by some higher ups that we don’t know yet. I think he’ll be contacting them as soon as he’s convinced that no-one has taken an interest in his activities.’ 

‘We’ve been led to believe that their group is called Cobra, and Gellman would have to be involved with them at some level. He appears to be a courier although if he was carrying something as valuable as the computer chip, he picked up in Sydney he might be further up the food chain.’

‘Cobra, that’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?’ 

‘Some of it’s almost comic book Dan. They have a tattoo of a Cobra on them somewhere, mostly behind the left ear or on the back of their left hand. It’s always been a symbol of divine authority in Egyptian antiquity, so they have a high opinion of themselves. There seems to be about twelve members world-wide at the moment and they are actively seeking new ones. Get back to me if you find anything.’ 

We disconnected and I started to unpack some travel basics after checking in to the hotel and after being shown to an impressive fourth floor room by a young valet. The view towards the pyramids was uninterrupted and equally impressive, and I could see them but only just, they were barely visible through the thick Cairo smog which blanketed the city in every direction. It was like a permanent sandstorm that burnt my eyes and made breathing difficult while moving around the city.       How they ever got to this pollution level was beyond my understanding, but I guess twenty million people are going to put a lot of vehicle fumes and other burn-off waste into the atmosphere every hour of every day. The result is smog at this lung destroying level. Most large cities around the world are the same but this was one of the worst I’d