Dark Rising (22 page)

Alex’s rage had urged him to action before he could formulate a battle strategy, and he realised his intervention had put his other team members’ lives in danger. He needed to neutralise the agents guarding Adira and his men.

The soldier next to the two bound HAWCs had seen enough – an armour-plated giant had landed amongst his fellow Takavaran and brushed them aside like they were no more than children. To the terrified Iranian Special Forces soldier, Alex looked like an ancient Persian demon of vengeance. Mere bullets would not stop this beast from Jahannam. He decided to run, but before he fled into the desert he had one final gift for the HAWCs. He pulled a fragmentation grenade from his belt and dropped it next to the bound men.

Rocky saw the live grenade fall to the sand beside him. All he could do was groan and turn his head.

Alex also saw the grenade drop and did some quick calculations: probable high-power fragmentation device – ten-foot kill radius, thirty-foot wound radius. Flechettes – notched wire or ball-bearing fragments – and now two seconds till detonation. He dived across the fifteen feet that separated him from the deadly explosive in a single motion, grabbed the small metal globe and swung his arm faster than a normal eye could see.

The grenade flew out into the dark – and was just twenty feet from his hand when it detonated in a powerful concussive blast that dispersed flechettes in all directions. Alex, who was standing between the blast and his men, was knocked backwards to land on top of his bound HAWCs. Tiny razor-sharp metal stars thudded into his suit and raked across his helmet visor.

Adira’s captor was preparing to flee when he saw Alex knocked backwards by the blast. His blood-encrusted mouth broke open into a grin and he let Adira’s hair go so he could draw his weapon.

Alex shook his head to clear his vision, and saw the man step forward and aim his gun at his face. If he put a bullet into the weakened visor at this range Alex knew he was finished. The Takavaran’s finger started to depress the trigger when he was quickly spun around. Adira was on her feet, shredded plastic hanging loosely from her unbound hands. She stood before the open-mouthed Takavaran in blood-stained underwear, yelled something at him in Hebrew, then brought her hand up and into the man’s already swollen nose. There was no light twig-snapping sound this time, more a deeper thump as she finished the job she’d set out to do earlier. The man fell like a tree in front of her, dead before he hit the cold, dark sand.

Alex got to his feet and looked into the darkness where the remaining Takavaran had fled; there could be no witnesses. His enhanced senses allowed him to pick up the rapid footfalls of the fleeing man even though he was moving at speed and nearly a mile away.

‘No! They have already called in our capture, so we must leave the area before more Takavaran teams arrive.’ Alex heard Adira’s voice, but it sounded distant.

He faced the desert and listened to the running man getting farther away, and the voice in his head screamed at him to hunt the man down and tear him to pieces.

‘No!’ came Adira’s voice again, from right beside him.

He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. He heard the sound of waves on a beach. He inhaled through his nose and smelled sea salt, drying sand and the scent of green apples. He forced himself to relax. His breathing slowly returned to normal and the chaotic storm in his brain calmed. When the bloodlust had dissipated enough, he opened his eyes.

Adira was right: it was time to go.

He drew a shortened Ka-Bar blade and sliced through O’Riordan’s and Lagudi’s restraints. Adira noticed that Alex’s upper arm was damp with blood and went to say something to him about it, but he turned away and barked angrily to the HAWCs: ‘Rekit, soldiers. We leave in sixty seconds.’

Adira scrambled along with the HAWCs to get back into their armoured suits and recover as much of their weaponry as they could find. There were no apologies, no thanks. For now they simply needed to evacuate the area and complete their mission.

Hex’s remains had collapsed into the fire, and Alex let them burn. Hex’s soul had long left his broken body.

THIRTY

E
arly evening in the desert of Iran was a busy time for nocturnal creatures. The sand was still warm, and snakes, scorpions and spiders were out hunting lazy insects or rodents not yet in their burrows for the night. The Corsac fox silently wound through the spindly brush, its enormous bat-like ears listening for the smallest footfalls of its prey; and massive owls lifted snakes and rodents from the desert floor. By late evening, the sand would be cool and the air temperature near freezing; the desert would be silent and still.

Sam was moving carefully through the twilight. For a large man, he trod as silently as the other night predators. He stopped and turned to motion Zach to lie flat on the ground; his scope had shown him an encampment ahead, probably desert traders, but possibly an ambush. He could make out the glow of flames in the distance, but could not detect any movement or thermal signatures other than the small fire. He would have preferred to skirt the camp, but a small human-like form slumped in front of the open flap of the tent had attracted his attention.
Might be a kid
, he thought,
it’s too small to be a man
. He observed the prostrate form for three more minutes, but with no heat signature he had to assume it was dead. He would still be cautious though – it was possible the bodies were booby-trapped.

He crawled back to Zach. ‘We need to check something out, son. Could be an ambush, but I’d still feel better if you were close so I can keep an eye on you.’

Zach nodded quickly, but his eyes were round and he looked nervous.

Sam moved from cover to cover – a low bush here, a mound of sand there – alert for noise, vibrations, or anything else not in keeping with the night-time sounds of the desert. He had Zach draw his pistol to cover his back, but knew that in a firefight the scientist was only there to draw his share of the attention or make some noise so Sam could target and destroy the enemy.

There were no wires on the ground and his scope didn’t pick up any laser trip lines. Sam moved to the tent and ducked his head in – odd smell, but no movement. Three small bodies in oversized crumpled clothing. He called Zach in as he began to examine the tent further.

‘
Phew!
What’s that smell? Sort of a sweet vinegar . . .
yeech
.’ Zach held his hand over his nose as he joined Sam, who was bending over one of the small figures.

‘What do you make of this?’ Sam said, using the muzzle of his gun to turn the face towards Zach; he was taking no chances by using his hand to touch the body.

It might have been a man once, but now it was barely a humanoid shape: four feet in length with skin the colour and consistency of tanned leather. At first Sam thought the eyes had been removed, but on closer examination he could see small, shrivelled balls like dried raisins inside the collapsed sockets. He pressed his gun barrel a little harder against the skull and it collapsed inwards with a puff of dry powder.

‘What the hell could do this?’ Sam looked up at Zach, whose face was screwed up in an ‘I reserve the right to throw up’ expression.

He was about to move on when he noticed the small circular hole in the man’s chest. He went from body to body and found similar holes in all of them, either on their front or back. The only exception was a mutilated corpse with its head cleaved in two. From the excoriated remains, Sam could see that the insides of the body – all moisture, muscles and organs – had been somehow removed. Even the fluid and marrow from the bones had been extracted, leaving odd structures like brittle cobwebs. The cadavers were just empty cases.

Zach had both hands over his mouth and talked nervously through his fingers. ‘I’ve taken hundreds of biology classes on a hundred different subjects and I’ve never come across or even heard of anything that could inflict this type of damage on a human body. These men are totally devoid of all fluid. Even if it
was
a type of bleed-out virus like ebola or hanta, there would still be traces of the fluid leakage everywhere. The desert is extremely dry, but for this effect they would have needed to be in the direct sun for months.’

Sam nodded. ‘But the fire outside tells me that whatever happened here only occurred in the last few hours.’

He looked around the tent quickly and quietly, checking maps, inside boxes and turning over blankets. ‘Over here,’ he said. In the corner of the tent was a hole about three feet wide where the sand had erupted around its edges. This was the source of the smell, and it made even the battle-hardened HAWC hesitate. The hairs on the back of his neck rose slightly.

He pulled a small pencil torch from his pocket and shone the beam into the hole. It wasn’t deep and trailed away outside the tent. He moved the torch closer, leaning forward as he did. The edges of the hole were greasy and coated in a waxy substance. This close, the smell was overpowering. On his knees, he leaned closer.

‘Don’t!’ Zach’s voice was so sudden and sharp it made the large HAWC jump. When Sam looked up at him, he seemed about to faint.

Sam turned back to the hole and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Could it be some sort of tunnel – like Hamas use along the Gaza?’ After a few seconds silence, Sam answered himself. ‘I didn’t think so either.’

Zach had his thin arms wrapped around his body and refused to come any closer to the pit. ‘Night bugs,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Night bugs. When I was a first-year student I had to share temporary accommodation in a low-rent suburb with about ten other students. The beds were infested with night bugs. That smell reminds me of the stink.’

Sam had seen enough. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

It was cooler now and the creature could travel over the surface without fearing the crushing heat of the yellow sun. It felt stronger after feeding on the small fluid-filled animals; they were soft and slow, with no defensive claws, teeth or stingers. The creature could survive here; its kind could rule here.

It stood again on its powerful jointed legs, lifting two-thirds of its body from the sand and extending its shivering eyestalks. Its bulbous, chitin-covered compound eyes enabled it to see ultraviolet, infrared and polarised light, and its multinocular vision gave it almost unlimited depth perception – mandatory in its own dim and vicious world where it was the alpha predator.

It called once again to its kind, and waited. After a few barren minutes it dropped back to the sand. Its landing startled a sand viper, which struck out at the larger creature. The snake had no chance of penetrating the arthropod’s inches-thick armour plating and its strike got a defensive reaction from the creature – a lightning-quick jet of its saliva. It was the same fluid the predator injected into its prey, which liquefied organic matter so it could be easily drawn up by its feeding tube. Concentrated, however, it had another defensive use – the combination of formic and caprylic acid, mixed with dozens of other unknown enzymes, made the saliva a strong biological corrosive.

The snake fled quickly, winding its way across the cooling sand, its body already starting to dissolve and leave a trail of scales and liquefied flesh in its wake. The creature watched the small animal flee: it was too small for a meal and no threat. It tasted the air once again and continued its scrabbling movement across the dark desert sand.

THIRTY-ONE

A
lex’s head shot up and he raised his hand in a closed fist gesture meaning an immediate halt. He made a chopping motion left and right and the HAWCs spread to either side of him and took cover.

Something was out there; something he had never heard before. The scream was below the range of normal human hearing. It made his skin crawl. He waited for it to be repeated, but nothing came.

Alex waited a few more moments and tried to open his senses – but still nothing came.
There’s something out in the dark
, he thought, and a sense of unease settled in the pit of his stomach.

He shook his head and pressed his comm stud. ‘Sam, come in.’ Change of plan; he’d bring the teams together now.

When Zach and Sam had caught up with Alex and the others, the reunited team took the opportunity to share their experiences. Alex gave them a short rest stop, and Zach took his boots off. Alex saw that his toes and heels were rubbed raw, and then rubbed again.
Good on the kid for not complaining
, he thought.

When Alex heard the discussion turn to the details of Hex’s execution, he walked away – he didn’t want to hear it all again. The few moments of solitude gave him the opportunity to take a quick inventory of their situation. He had one man down, two injured but operational, the Iranians now alerted to their arrival and potential position, and something moving out on the desert flats that worried the shit out of him. They were still on schedule, but things were definitely not getting any easier for them.
Ahh
, e
very day above ground is a good one
, he thought.

He decided they could afford to rest for twenty minutes now, and then have some longer downtime when they got to the cave mouth. The two teams had been running for several miles and he knew even his strongest HAWCs were exhausted – and he couldn’t carry them all.

Adira intercepted him as he rejoined the group. She touched his arm. ‘You’re bleeding, Captain Hunter.’

A flechette had grazed his upper arm just above the bicep, managing to part the toughened para-aramid synthetic fibres of his combat suit. Alex had patches in his kit to glue tears together to maintain the biological and thermal seal – and he wasn’t worried about his flesh.

‘It’s nothing, I heal quickly,’ he said.

‘You certainly do. Not many men can slay two Takavaran squads with their bare hands. You should be dead – not least from the viper’s bite, Captain.’

She reached up to try to check his injury again. Alex turned slightly so she wouldn’t see the wound and instead grasped her hand before she laid it on his arm. He held it for a minute and smiled into her eyes. He could see the intelligence and strength in those dark pools. As a reflex she reached up and laid her other hand over the top of his and smiled, blushing at the same time.