Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller
( Chess Team Adventure - 5 )
Jeremy Robinson
Kane Gilmour
Jack Sigler, call sign “King,” field leader for a black ops organization known as Endgame, is accustomed to feeling capable of handling most any situation. It is a confidence forged in the fires of battle against both monsters and madmen. But the introduction of Asya, a sister he never knew existed, and the kidnapping of his parents has him reeling. Using Endgame’s resources, King and his Chess Team (Queen, Rook, Bishop, and Knight) scour the planet for his parents, tracking a man known to the world as Alexander Diotrephes, but known to King by another name. A masked man walks past their secret headquarters’ defenses, sits himself down in the director’s chair, and waits. He’s Richard Ridley, the team’s oldest and most dangerous enemy, who is supposed to be dead. But he isn’t Ridley. He is a clone in search of his master, the real Ridley, who yet lives and is being held captive by the same man that is holding King’s parents.
Jeremy Robinson, Kane Gilmour
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller
For all the Jack Sigler fans who find us on Facebook. Thanks for the never ending encouragement, comradery and excitement. You know who you are.
THE STORY SO FAR
Richard Ridley was a megalomaniac with twin dreams: immortality and ultimate power. His multi-billion dollar genetics company, Manifold, was poised to give him both, when he discovered the historic resting place of the Lernaean Hydra — on the Nazca plains of Peru. Combining Hydra DNA with humans, Ridley hoped to create invincible regenerating soldiers and to gain his much-coveted eternity.
A crack squad of Delta operators, known as Chess Team — King, Queen, Bishop, Rook and Knight — orchestrated by the US President, defeated Ridley, his security forces and the unintentionally resurrected Hydra in a desperate battle. Along the way, the team had help from a mysterious man named Alexander Diotrephes — the legendary Hercules, alive, well and immortal. But in the chaos of the battle, Richard Ridley escaped.
A year later, nearly the entire population of the Siletz reservation in Oregon was exterminated. The only survivor, 13-year old Fiona Lane, the last living speaker of her native language, ended up in the custody of Jack Sigler, callsign: King, field leader of Chess Team.
The following year, King’s parents unexpectedly revealed they had led a secret life as former Russian spies. Then Richard Ridley returned, murdering the last living speakers of the world’s most ancient languages and deciphering the mother tongue—an ancient protolanguage, otherwise known as “the language of God,” which bestowed its user the ability to animate inanimate objects. With help from Alexander, Chess Team kept Fiona safe and defeated Ridley once again. But when the smoke had cleared, King’s parents were missing and presumed on the run back to Russia. Ridley was presumed dead, but had, in fact, become the prisoner of a man who had no qualms about torture.
Attempting to take some time off, King went repeatedly toe-to-toe and wits-to-wits with a criminal mastermind named Graham Brown, aka Brainstorm, and in their final battle, he stopped a black hole forming in the Louvre from destroying all of Paris. He fought side-by-side, once again, with Alexander. Unseen by King, Alexander pocketed a small round piece of rubble in the aftermath.
Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, discovered an old Manifold facility and faced off against Richard Ridley’s brother, Darius Ridley. In Norway, Stan Tremblay, callsign: Rook, took some unauthorized time off that led to him discovering a former Nazi laboratory. Erik Somers, callsign: Bishop, was horribly experimented upon by Ridley in their initial clash. Although cured, he still bears the emotional scars. Shin-dae Jung, callsign: Knight, faced the horror of the resurrected Hydra alone in the team’s first fight against Ridley. Hoping for some of his own down-time, he wound up facing another genetic monstrosity in an abandoned city in China. Also in the aftermath of the mother-tongue skirmish with Ridley, Tom Duncan stepped down from the US presidency to assume his Chess Team duties as callsign: Deep Blue, full time, running the team from a captured Manifold facility in New Hampshire, and rechristening the expanded Chess Team organization as Endgame.
Most recently, the team faced a world-wide threat of annihilation that resulted in a frantic battle in Norway and the capture of otherworldly technology capable of opening portals to different dimensions. Rook’s Russian ally, Asya Machtchenko, turned out to be King’s sibling — the result of his parents’ double lives in the mother country. Asya claimed their parents had been abducted, and she asked the team to help find them.
At the end of the fight in Norway, when the team returned to New Hampshire, a laptop containing the designs for the dimensional technology was mysteriously lifted from their headquarters, and a note was left behind explaining that Alexander needed the designs and that he was holding King’s parents hostage. King was warned to stay out of the way, but instead, he vowed to take the fight directly to the legendary immortal — and if necessary, to the death.
EPIGRAPH
“Only when the clock stops, does time come to life.”
— William Faulkner
“Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new…but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?”
— Paracelsus
“Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.”
— Charles Caleb Colton
PROLOGUE
Rhodes, Greece, 226 BC
The rocky slope shuddered. Two isolated jolts. Then the ground really started to move. Acastus Vassos clutched the large white boulder he had been sitting on while eating his bread.
He enjoyed hiking up into the green hills each day to eat. The sound of his sandaled feet on stone were like music as he climbed the low rises. When he was high enough, he turned around and admired the bustling harbor laid out before him. He would eat, absorbing the view and the gusting breezes off the blue Aegean Sea. The thick air in town was often stagnant because of the buildings, the throngs of merchants and the unwashed sailors. But up on the hill, the air was fresh, and the temperature in the summer felt cooler on his skin.
Vassos had been climbing the rocky incline to his normal perch for years, but he had never seen the small white pebbles on the ground hop and jump as they did now. A devout man, he quickly reminded himself of the last time he had made devotions to the gods, at the temples near the Acropolis. The rumble grew louder and louder, until Vassos pulled his hands from the boulder — no longer afraid of falling down the hill — and slammed them against his ears to stop the now deafening thrumming and grinding noise. He began to shout to Zeus for mercy, as his body slid down off the white rock to the ground a few feet below. The soil bounced and juddered just as the boulder had done. The ground squirmed. A living thing.
Only when his eyes turned toward the view of the harbor, did he cease worrying for his own safety. What he saw in the distance made him forget about himself.
Rhodes was renowned throughout the world for its one major tourist attraction. Across the view of the town lay the busy harbor. At the end of two stone jetties, stood the Colossus. A giant bronze statue of the sun god Helios, over three hundred feet in height, the statue stood even taller on the pedestals below its feet. The bronze guardian stood astride the twin jetties, and all the world’s ship traffic passed below the arch of its legs.
Vassos’s father, Cletus, had watched the construction of the statue for the twelve years it took, and he wo
uld frequently tell the tale before his death of how architects and builders had scoffed at the notion of building a statue astride the entrance to the port. The bronze was too soft and would never support the weight of such a creature, they had said. But, as Cletus had explained to his son, the genius designer, a man named Chares, from nearby Lindos, had an idea. He used several long iron rods inside the structure in a crossing X pattern, pulling the upper left of the statue to the lower right, and vice versa. The crossing iron bars would also add support to the statue’s limbs and head. The result was a statue strong enough to stand with legs apart, even at its immense size.
Vassos had heard many stories of the assembling of the Colossus as a child. After the twelve years of its construction, peoples from leagues and leagues away would come to Rhodes to see its magnificence, as the sun glinted off the polished metal.
Vassos had known the statue all his life. It had stood at the entrance to the harbor for fifty-six years — twenty years more than Vassos had been alive. It was a comfortable friend, and like most of his fellow townspeople, he felt innate pride when he thought of the giant harbor sentry. It was, after all, a constant reminder that the people of Rhodes had thwarted the invasion forces of Antigones the One-Eyed.
The statue was a part of daily life for all of the Rhodian citizens now. But daily life had never included the ground shaking like a caught fish in its death throes. Now, as Vassos looked out over the town to the harbor, he beheld the strangest sight of his life: the Colossus was moving!
The buildings in the town swayed violently. Some collapsed. Boats were tossed over the waters like toys. Three fires erupted around the town. But the Colossus was what held Vassos’s gaze. One leg had broken loose from a pedestal, and the other had twisted. The loose leg swung out over the sea, then came back in to the jetty, where the other leg remained. It looked to Vassos like a soldier turning about 180 degrees. Where previously the visage of Helios had faced outward toward the sea, both a welcoming beacon for merchants and sailors, and also a reminder of the fortitude of Rhodes, now the statue faced the trembling city and the sloshing waters of the harbor.
Vassos’s mind was already in a panic, but what he saw next made his mouth fall open, and all reasonable thoughts shut down.
The Colossus took a step.
The long, gigantic bronze leg swept along the jetty toward the town, and the foot planted itself down. Then the left leg lifted up off its pedestal and slid up and ahead of the right. The statue looked for all the world like it was walking toward the city and the distant hill where Vassos gawked in horror.
The rumbling continued, and Vassos thought the ground might buckle and launch him into the sky. Then he saw the ground rupture in several spots along the hillside, gaping gouges in soil and rock. He suddenly worried less about flight and the Colossus, and more about being sucked down into the fiery bowels of Hades. He shut his eyes and squeezed them tightly, hoping the disorientation and nausea from the shaking world would go away.
Then it did. All at once, everything stopped.
His eyes snapped open. The rumble was gone. In the distance he could hear screams on the wind. The Colossus had moved even further toward the town, and now it faced out toward the West, its back to the town again, but it was leaning backward and looking up. Toward the sky.
Then Vassos understood. No. It isn’t looking up.
It was falling over.
Vassos scrambled to his feet and watched as the giant statue fell backward, slamming into the city and crushing homes under its back and limbs. The impact sent up a fluttering wave of dust and debris. A second later came the thundering echo, like the crashing boom of Zeus’s own lightning, and a wind that pushed hard against Vassos’s skin.
When the breeze off the water finally cleared the dirt from the air, Vassos saw the statue’s torso had come loose from the legs. One arm snapped and rolled, crushing more small houses and buildings. The head had broken off and came to rest on its side. Helios’s once proud visage was now shamefully wounded.
Vassos stood shocked for just a moment as his mind took in everything his eyes were showing him. Then something in him snapped, and he understood the need of every able-bodied man to assist in the rescue of those that might have been injured. He ran down the rocky hillside, leaping wide dark ruts in the ground, where the world had been torn asunder. When he reached the congested city, the damage was far worse than he had expected. The quaking Earth had caused more death and destruction than the fall of the statue had, but Vassos knew it would be the statue’s collapse that people would remember — that, and its walking performance. He assisted struggling men and sweaty soldiers for hours, helping bleeding old women, children with broken bones, and even lost and frightened animals wandering aimlessly and scared in the marketplace.
When he finally made his way closer to the harbor and saw the fallen remains of the giant bronze statue, his heart was heavy. Crowds of onlookers simply stood and stared at the fallen idol, now that most of the injured had been tended to and the dead had been carried away. People spoke of the statue’s fall in hushed whispers. Vassos listened, but he quickly realized that very few of the onlookers had seen the statue walk, as he had.
He began to question his own sanity as the days went on and people talked of the devastating earthquake. He wisely kept his impression of the statue walking, as if of its own free will, to himself. Very few folks had been up in the hills to see the entire event as he had, so the stories of how the bronze giant had made it so far from its original stance astride the harbor varied wildly.
But Vassos knew the truth. The mighty image of Helios had walked. He felt certain of one other thing too, and on this point he was in agreement with all of Rhodes. They would rebuild the statue, and it would be mightier than before.
But Vassos and the rest were wrong.
* * *
The statue’s ruins would remain on the ground throughout Vassos’s lifetime and for hundreds of lifetimes more. Then, centuries later, a man came with almost one thousand camels, which he traded for the ruins. He had workers slice the ruins apart and load them on several boats over the course of many days. The Colossus of Rhodes left the island in pieces and was never seen again. Rumors abounded of what the man would do with the cut up statue. Some said it was melted down, the bronze refashioned into coins. Others said the swarthy man took the statue to a distant land and had it reassembled. Others still said it was rebuilt only to be toppled again. But the rumors and theories soon abated when the land was attacked once again by invaders — this time from the Arab world. People had other worries now.
The last evidence of the statue, its plaque, which the buyer had callously left behind, disappeared some time during the invasion. But its inscription was remembered in the words of poets and men of letters:
To you, o Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus, when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence. For to the descendants of Herakles belongs dominion over sea and land.
INITIATIVE
ONE
Somewhere Deep Underground, 2013
The pain was everything.
Bound in darkness, the man’s confinement was absolute. If the man’s eyes were open or closed, he couldn’t tell. He perceived no visual difference between the two states. He longed to speak, to use the words, to free himself from the never-ending agony. But his tongue was swollen and dry in his mouth. The dry heat of the room confining him had long ago sucked all moisture from his flesh.
His body — a modern miracle of his own scientific genius — would keep him alive, struggling against the damage caused by incessant heat and dry air. He was given the most meager amount of water daily. It was really just enough to keep him alive. Without the genetic tinkering to his DNA, he would have died long ago.
His body was a marvel, but there was only so much
it could do. He needed to use his voice to escape his present confinement, but that ability was denied to him. Each day when the small, slow stream of liquid dribbled into his open and waiting mouth, he quickly swished it around his swollen tongue, hoping to moisten his mouth enough that he might speak the words. But while his mouth and tongue could make the movements, the breath needed to vocalize the sounds never came to him. In the end, he would swallow the tiny portion of water, never feeling it hit his stomach, and the days would go on and on.
His last visit from his abusive captor had been, by his own reckoning, at least seven months ago. It was hard to keep track of the days, but he forced himself to do it anyway. Besides the daily struggle to speak, and his thoughts of the ways he would get revenge, maintaining a mental log of the days was the only thing to keep his mind off the pain.
His nervous system fired wave after wave of angry buzzing sensations into his brain, and the pain never stopped. He guessed he had not slept in close to a year — the pain was simply too much to endure. His mind could never rest enough to summon the elusive slumber.
Consciousness was both a blessing and a curse. At first, the agony was so much he thought he would lose his mind completely. But his body’s miraculous healing abilities helped to keep him on the edge of sanity. He wondered whether his captor would know that. He wondered a lot of things about his tormentor.
Despite the constant pain, the man was sometimes able to focus his thoughts with a tremendous effort of will, blocking out the stimuli, allowing him to think and plan. These sessions were of varying duration, although in the dark and deep underground, he was never quite sure of elapsed time on a minute by minute or hourly basis. The one thing he knew without question was that the duration would be short, and afterward the waves of unending suffering would return. The surge of pain, when his willpower was finally exhausted, would be overwhelming, and he would silently scream for what he imagined was the rest of the day.
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