Dark Rising (5 page)

‘In a month or two, Graham. Just give him back in one piece.’

Graham was silent for a moment, then spoke with a lowered voice. ‘Don’t forget our agreement, Jack. He’s yours until he’s killed or incapacitated. Then
we
own him.’ The scientist’s eyes went again to the bone saw.

SEVEN

‘B
ut there was no thermal energy release – there was nothing on the seismographic sensors, not a single tremor. I know it was subsurface, and I bet they had concrete and lead shielding, but that gamma flash must have gone straight through it – a controlled nuclear test blast should have been better contained. The radiation signature reads like something non-terrestrial.’

Zachariah Shomron was arguing furiously with his professor; or rather, with himself, using his professor as an audience.

Professor Dafyyd Burstein clasped his pudgy hands together above a stomach that was straining over a thin belt and raised his eyebrows in a look that he reserved for his best students, those who raised brilliant questions and probably already knew the answers. ‘Are you saying a stellar mass somehow fell to earth in the Iranian desert, Zachariah?’

‘Yes, no, of course not . . . maybe. It’s just that the pulse had all the characteristics of a cosmic gamma burst, but it’s impossible that it originated from Earth. Though it only flashed for microseconds, it gave off thousands of sieverts. A nuclear blast only delivers about 300 sieverts per hour downwind, but it also throws out neutrons, alpha and beta particles and X-rays. The only thing that saved Iran from being incinerated was the flash’s micro duration . . . and then, it just turned off. It’s impossible! This is so weird – it’s getting into dark matter territory.’

‘
Yoish!
’ exclaimed Burstein. ‘Okay, okay, we can discuss all this later. I came up to tell you that there’s a large and serious-looking government type waiting to talk to you in the foyer. Have you been late paying your bills again, Zachariah?’

Burstein took Zachariah by one of his bony elbows and led him towards the door, nodding as the younger man kept up a stream of near impenetrable musings on obscure gamma-wave effects.

Zach stopped mid-sentence when he saw the man in the foyer. He was the most perfectly square human being Zach had ever seen, all hard edges that looked machine-cut, starting from his flat-top crew cut and broad shoulders, and continuing down to column-thick legs stuffed into charcoal suit pants. The man took a step forward and Zach automatically took one back.

‘
Boker tov
, Zachariah Shomron.’

Zach saw the man quickly check a photograph he held in his hand as if to validate he had the right person.

‘
Shalom
,’ Zachariah said and tentatively held out his hand for the other man to shake.

Instead, the man pressed a letter into Zach’s hand. It had a distinctive stamp on the front – a blue, seven-candled menorah, the seal of Mossad. There was also an inscription in Hebrew: ‘Where there is no guidance the people fall, but with an abundance of counsellors there is victory’.
Good advice about ‘good advice’
, Zach thought.

The man spoke as if reading from a script: ‘Zachariah Shomron, you are aware that national military service is mandatory for all Jewish men and women. You have the thanks of the State of Israel for completing your assigned service. Though you elected to resume a normal working life, you remain an inactive reservist until you are forty years of age. At the discretion of the State of Israel, in the event of war or extreme national risk you may be reactivated.’ He paused and stared into Zach’s eyes. ‘That risk now exists and you have been reactivated. Sir, your instructions are all in the letter.’

Zach looked quickly at the envelope and furrowed his brow. ‘What? I’ve been reactivated? No, I can’t fight –’

The man cut him off. ‘Your assistant will meet you at the airport.
Elokim Yerachem Eretz Yisrael
.’ He saluted and turned to leave.

‘Er, yes,’ Zach replied, confused by why the man should salute him. ‘God bless Israel . . . Wait, wait – I have an assistant?’

‘It’s all in the letter, sir.’

Zach stood with his mouth open, watching the man disappear down the corridor.
Why now?
he thought, then,
oh God, no
, as he remembered the short article he’d written years ago for the university newspaper complaining about the restrictions Israel placed on Palestinian scientists. He’d known at the time it was going too far, but hadn’t expected anyone important to read a university publication. Seems he’d been wrong.
Mossad
, he thought, and pushed his glasses back up his nose.
And an assistant
. . .

Major Hammerson pushed his chair back and walked towards the large windows. He stood at ease with his hands clasped behind his back and watched Captain Alex Hunter walk across the clipped grass of the parade grounds. Hammerson had just spent an hour with his HAWC team leader, primarily bringing him up to speed on the new Middle Eastern project. His brief to Alex was simple: negate Iran’s ability to organise and deliver a nuclear weapon of mass destruction. He had explained to Alex about the size of the gamma pulse and its unnatural characteristics. It meant the Iranians had either developed an enormous nuclear capability, or something else just as lethal. Either way, America had to act.

After the briefing, Alex had asked again about his test results; he always did after one of his medical visits. Hammerson hated having to be evasive or deceive him, but he had his orders. Regardless, he didn’t think Alex was ready to hear all the information on his condition just yet. And Hammerson was damn sure he wasn’t ready to give it.

Alex Hunter was probably the closest thing Hammerson had to a son. Truth was, he was proud of him. In effect, Hammerson had been responsible for his very creation, bringing him back to the US after the accident and handing him over to the medical men. Afterwards, Hammerson had taken the young man under his wing and moulded him into the soldier he was now. And shielded him, sometimes from his own military command.

Unfortunately for Alex, his lethal skills combined with his amazing new capabilities meant he had become something more than just another elite soldier.
A subject that exceeded expectations
, the scientists had said. There were some who didn’t want just one Alex Hunter in the elite forces; they wanted 10,000 of them.

While Alex succeeded in missions that others couldn’t even contemplate, he was a high-value asset. But the first time he failed, the first time he stayed down or didn’t regain consciousness, then he would be wheeled into one of the military’s covert science labs and probably never return. Hammerson wondered how many months or years Alex had until that happened.

‘Sometimes I can feel myself changing – and it doesn’t feel good, Jack,’ Alex had said during the briefing. All Hammerson could offer was some slick response about such change being fairly normal, just the legacy of a serious trauma. Truth was, it looked to be the price of Alex’s life.

Hammerson sucked in a deep breath and exhaled through his nose.
It was always my decision, son. I can’t yet know if it was the right one
. All Hammerson did know was that he would do everything in his power to keep Alex out of the labs.

EIGHT

A
lex felt good today; a slight headache behind his eyes, but that was normal following one of his visits to the medical unit. He was looking forward to being back out in the field – he found it difficult to sleep well unless his body was being subjected to the physical demands and stress of a dangerous and complex mission. To compensate he had been spending half his days either in the gymnasium or on the track carrying hundred-pound weight discs in a backpack. Without the energy burn, his mind wouldn’t shut down properly and nighttimes were the worst. He was slowly learning to control his body while he was awake, but at night, in the dark, he couldn’t govern which doors in his mind were opened or the emotions that were unleashed. Night-time was the danger time, when he sometimes destroyed his room in his sleep.

It was the night rages that had finished off his relationship with Aimee, sending her fleeing from their room in fear for her safety; that and his dangerous assignments all around the world. Alex and Aimee had travelled to the depths of the Antarctic together, seen wonders hidden for a thousand millennia, lost friends, colleagues and good soldiers, and barely survived being pursued by an ancient monster beneath the ice. Afterwards, they had tried real hard to make it work, but in the end Aimee had left him.

Alex remembered all too well the night, a year or so ago, when he and Aimee had gone for a pre-dinner drink at a little bar in Milwaukee. A football team on a stag night had been in the bar too, and when Alex returned from the restroom he had seen Aimee slap the face of one large brute as he tried to squeeze her breast. Fifteen minutes later, Aimee had called Major Hammerson requesting urgent assistance – for the footballers. A lot of big men had got badly hurt that night, some permanently. It had cost the military a lot in hush money, and the guilt still hung over Alex’s head like a dark thundercloud.

The problem was that Alex had enjoyed the destruction – once he started, he couldn’t stop. He’d wanted to hurt those guys; more, he’d wanted to kill them. And the release had felt good.

He still thought of Aimee, her dark hair and fair skin, the quick temper that made her blue eyes go hard as ice chips, then soften and darken to a deep ocean blue when she kissed him. He wondered whether she was fully recovered from the Antarctic expedition and her own nightmares. He also wondered whether she still thought about him, whether she was really over their time together. He didn’t blame her for leaving. It was the best thing she could have done for both of them. He couldn’t contemplate what he would have inflicted on himself if he had ever hurt her.

He remembered her face after the fight in the bar – the look of horror and disbelief on those beautiful features. She was terrified – not of the men who had assaulted her, but of him. ‘Jack Hammerson’s Frankenstein monster’ she had called him in a moment of anguish and confusion. She had tried to laugh about it later, but from then on, deep in her eyes, he’d seen tension and wariness.

She was right: he was a monster. A monster created by an accident on a battlefield on the other side of the planet. She had begged him to seek medical opinions from specialists outside of the military, but he couldn’t even do that for her. Hammerson had said no. Aimee had exploded when Alex tried to explain. She didn’t believe his reasons and wouldn’t listen to him after that.

Alex trusted Jack Hammerson; the major had looked out for him, always got him home safe, and Alex owed him his life a hundred times over. He would die for the Hammer, and he would also kill for him. He just wished he hadn’t had to lose Aimee.

Alex walked slowly towards the small group of men Hammerson had put together for this mission. The HAWC recruitment pool was drawn from the ranks of the Green Berets, the Navy SEALS, Special Forces Alpha, and Hammerson’s old stomping ground, the Rangers. Hammerson’s job was to select the best of the best – soldiers with outstanding skills in various forms of physical or technological combat techniques. Each man or woman in this unit was a controlled killer; a force of nature unleashed by the Hammer as and when necessary. Now it was Alex’s job to test them for final preparation and mission readiness.

Alex looked analytically at each of the four men. Two he’d worked with before and two were ‘potentials’. The new men both looked to be in their thirties – battle-hardened professionals. Alex needed to get inside their heads – give them some scenarios and ask how they would resolve them; talk to them about their successes and how they’d achieved that success; about their failures and what would they do differently next time.

Alex enjoyed testing the recruits. They nearly all believed they were made of iron, world-beaters, and in their own units they probably were. But in the HAWCs they were among peers; they joined a small team of men and women as good as or better than they were. Sometimes it took a little while for them to adjust, sometimes they needed a ‘push’, and the part Alex liked best was when someone pushed back.

He looked at the four faces watching him; all had an even expression except for a mean-looking guy with red hair who was barely concealing his irritation.
My money’s on you for the push-back
, Alex thought.

He acknowledged the two men he knew first; each nodded once in return – Second Lieutenant Hex Winter and First Lieutenant Samuel Reid. Both had been HAWCs for a while now. Hex Winter, at just thirty, was the youngest HAWC Alex had vetted and had also come from Alpha. Hex stood about six feet four inches and only weighed in at around 190 pounds – he looked a bit like a scarecrow with a coat hanger stuck down the back of his shirt. His nose had been broken several times, his hair was white-blond, and his eyes were the pale grey of a North Atlantic storm swell – the name ‘Winter’ was appropriate indeed. When Alex had first met Hex, the thing that caught his eye was the multiple knives the lieutenant carried on one hip – unusual in an age of guns. Alex had been able to identify the standard US long-bladed Ka-Bar – his own pick due to the blade’s low chromium steel mixture, which kept a razor edge in combat. In the field you could dry shave with it. Or open a man’s throat from ear to ear before he even knew he’d been touched. But the other two were less familiar. One was a German Kampfmesser 2000, the standard knife of the elite Bundeswehr and the strike forces of the German Army. It was a beautiful weapon, a laser-cut seven-inch stainless steel alloy tanto blade with a distinctive forty-five-degree chisel-shaped end – balanced and deadly. The third was a new version Kampfmesser, the KM3000, with a spear-point blade instead of the 2000’s tanto point – not as tough, but better balance and weight for throwing.

Alex had asked for a demonstration of it in action, pointing to a crossing of beams in the waist-high fence running around the edge of the oval, more than fifty feet from where they stood. Without hesitation, Hex Winter had spun the knife in a back-handed motion at the fence. Alex’s enhanced vision had seen that the knife was going to find its mark, dead centre, before the blade had even travelled half its distance.