by Greig Beck
Alex groaned as Sam helped him up. He opened his eyes. ‘Grenade?’
‘Yep, incendiary, and I’m betting you just ate the lot of it.’
Sam held the canteen to Alex’s lips. He pushed it away. ‘DK?’
‘Gone.’ Sam kept his hand on Alex’s back, feeling the strange heat the man generated. He knew that Alex’s metabolism burned hotter than normal; more so, when fury took him – then he became like a furnace.
Alex nodded, and held his head, groaning again. ‘Borshov got away?’
‘For now.’ Sam took his hand away. ‘We took down four Spetsnaz, but two of them and Borshov are gone. You need medical –’
‘No, just wrap me up, and let’s get the hell out of here. This party’s gonna attract attention and we need to be ghosts.’ He grabbed Sam’s arm, and hauled himself slowly to his feet. ‘Besides, I doubt it was me that frightened Magera away. We don’t want to be here when night falls.’
Franks and Jackson appeared at Sam’s shoulder. The big SAS man took a look at Alex’s face and whistled. ‘Nasty. There goes the modeling gig.’
Alex turned to Jackson, smoke or steam still lifting from his battered shoulders. As he stared at the SAS man, the missing patch of skin on his forehead seemed to sizzle for a second, then the ragged flesh at its edges crept across the wound.
‘Holy fuck, did you see that?’ Jackson’s mouth hung open as he turned to Franks.
She just smiled, ignoring him.
‘No, we didn’t,’ Sam said.
He plastered some HAWC field patches over Alex’s wounds, then wrapped his head and face in bandages, leaving just his eyes and mouth clear. The arm break was clean across the ulna and radius. Sam splinted it, and wrapped it as well.
‘But his head just started to …’ Jackson’s eyes were wide. ‘He was still fucking burning.’
‘Leave it, soldier,’ Sam said, and put his arm under Alex’s shoulder.
Alex gritted his teeth and sucked in a deep breath. ‘Let’s move.’
Jackson snorted and shook his head. ‘You are a freak. And now you look like a fucking mummy.’
Alex turned his bloodshot gaze on the big man. ‘And you look like a pack mule – so you get to carry DK until we find a place to bury him.’
‘More like a jackass,’ Franks said. Then she turned to Alex, her face grim. ‘We’re winning.’
Alex nodded. ‘We always do. Now, let’s go. We need to call this in – Borshov engaged, we’re one down, and Magera has disappeared. And I get the feeling not for good.’
*
The HAWCs jogged into morning sunshine. The temperature was already close to ninety degrees and rising steadily, but was still bearable because of the near total lack of humidity. However, Jackson, carrying DK’s body, was struggling.
About fifteen miles from Izmir, Alex called a halt. He pointed to a patch of ground. ‘I want that man at least three feet down, and the area above raked so smooth not even Sherlock Holmes could find him.’
‘Aw, fuck.’
Alex rounded on Jackson and brought his face in close. ‘I am not in a good mood, soldier.’
Jackson nodded quickly. ‘I get it … boss.’
Alex turned away, and looked down at his splinted arm, flexing his fingers. He unwrapped the bandage, made a fist, then grunted. ‘Sam, with me. The rest of you, take some rest.’ He glared at Jackson. ‘Not you. Start digging.’
Jackson’s jaw clenched in anger, but he kept his lips clamped shut.
Alex and Sam walked a few dozen paces away, and sat on some exposed boulders.
Sam swigged from his canteen. ‘Borshov used a cranial probe on DK.’
Alex nodded. ‘Don’t know how much time he had, but we proceed on the assumption that Borshov knows what we’re doing and where we’re going next.’ He drank from his own canteen. ‘That big bastard killed DK, and I let him get away.’
Sam blew air, dismissing the statement. ‘He dropped a grenade on you. You won this round – you lived; he ran. You’ll get him next time.’
Alex stared out into the desert. ‘Next time.’ He sucked in a breath. ‘Now to give the Hammer the good news.’
He clipped an enhancer over the communication pill already in his ear. It immediately uplinked him to the satellite, signal jumping to confuse anyone trying to intercept the data sent and received.
The colonel was waiting. ‘Go, Arcadian.’
‘We encountered Magera five miles outside of Turgutlu. Also Borshov. We … lost DK,’ Alex said slowly. ‘We took down four, but Borshov and two others got away.’
‘He lost four, you lost one – that tell you anything?’ Hammerson’s voice had an edge. ‘This is the business we’re in. Now tell me about Magera.’
‘It was weird,’ Alex said. ‘I was right in front of it, then the sun came up and it just vanished.’
‘You confronted it and it vanished?’
‘No. I get the feeling I had nothing to do with it. I think the sun struck it and it disassembled, turned to powder or something. But it was still there, not dead, just … I don’t know … waiting.’ Alex’s brow furrowed as he remembered. ‘Have any of the attacks been during daylight hours?’
He heard Hammerson moving at his desk, and imagined him pulling data up onto his screen. He snorted softly. ‘No.’
‘Then maybe this thing doesn’t like light. We might be able to use that.’
‘Good. I’ll get onto R&D, and also see if Kearns or Ms. Watchorn know anything about intolerance to sunlight from the legends.’
‘Okay.’ Alex’s face was itching under the bandages. ‘There’s something else. Borshov probed DK before he died. Give Thompson a heads-up in case they get company.’
‘You got it.’ Hammerson paused for a second or two. ‘You okay, son?’
Alex reached up to scratch his face, before violently ripping the bandages away. He tossed the bloody shreds onto the sand. ‘I’ll be better after I tear Borshov’s head off.’
‘Works for me,’ Hammerson said evenly. ‘Listen, just one thing – before you grind him into the dirt, ask him about Captain Graham. And make him answer. Graham’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch and I want him back.’
Alex remembered how Graham, head of the military’s medical division, had sent three automatons after him, wanting to reel Alex in so he could cut him up and see how the Arcadian treatment was a success with him, but a failure with others.
‘Do I want him back?’ he wondered aloud.
‘No one messes with our people,’ Hammerson responded. ‘I’ll deal with Graham.’
Alex shrugged. ‘Okay. We’re heading into Izmir. Let me know if Kearns finds anything we can use. Over.’
‘Over and out.’
*
‘Lasithi Plateau,’ Matt said as he looked out of the plane window at the mountains rising up around them and forming a massive horseshoe shape around the valley of Selakano. They were thickly forested with pines. ‘Home of the Caves of Zeus – where we hope the pieces of the puzzle come together.’
Rebecca grinned. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this place. There might be some clues in the relics taken from the caves during the first excavations. Some were found in areas that are inaccessible today, though.’ She looked across to Thompson. ‘We might need to make them accessible.’
‘And that’s where I come in,’ Thompson said evenly.
Matt nodded, continuing to look down at the landscape. ‘There was once an underground river in the caves, but it was sealed off. At the very lowest level, several hundred feet down, there are still pools, some quite deep in places – and that’s where the relics were located.’
‘Cave diving and potential demolition work in a site of national and cultural significance.’ Thompson grinned. ‘And I thought you guys were supposed to be the nice ones.’ He snorted softly and glanced out the window. ‘We’re rising again – more mountains coming up.’
Matt pointed to a plateau. ‘Where we’re going has been desc
ribed as the Machu Picchu of the Minoan civilization. That plateau area was the last stronghold of the race – a final sanctuary. After the fall of Knossos, the Minoans’ political and cultural center, a fragment of the Minoan race survived there for another 400 years.’
‘Then they simply vanished,’ Rebecca added, ‘and no one really knows why or how. This place is home to a myriad of myths and legends – the caves where Zeus was born, where Perseus fought with the Medusa, where Theseus battled the Minotaur … We need to consider how all these things interrelate and overlap.’
‘The Minotaur – the bull-headed beast? What’s that got to do with Magera?’ Thompson asked.
‘Maybe nothing,’ Matt said. ‘But as a kid did you ever play that game where you sit in a circle and someone writes a phrase down on a piece of paper? The first kid reads it and whispers the phrase into the next kid’s ear, then the next kid whispers it into the following kid’s ear and so on and so on. At the end, you compare the final phrase with what was written, and guess what? It’s different. Maybe only a word or two, but it’s a perfect example of how things can alter over time. Now, imagine a myth or legend being told and retold for hundreds or thousands of years. It can end up vastly different from the original telling, or several versions might develop, depending on the district or subculture. The tale of the Minotaur is like that. Something terrible might have lived in those caves once, but what exactly?’
‘You think it might have been the Magera?’ the SAS man asked.
Matt shrugged. ‘There are no signs that Knossos was ever a military site – for example, it didn’t have fortifications or places to store weapons – but it was the local center of power of its time. In Greek mythology, King Minos lived in a palace at Knossos, and had a labyrinth built to hold his son, the Minotaur. But other variations of the story say the labyrinth existed before the kingdom – that the palace was built over an existing system of caves, with something already living in their dark depths. Another variation has the early Minoans finding something down there, and then controlling it. Who knows – perhaps it was their secret weapon.’
Thompson shook his head. ‘Still don’t get how the bull Minotaur has anything to do with the Gorgons.’
‘The Greek myth says that Theseus, a prince from Athens, was forced to fight a terrible creature called the Minotaur,’ Rebecca said. ‘But, as Matt mentioned, there are other variations of the story, recovered from pottery shards and wall tiles, that are markedly different. They don’t refer to a bull-headed beast at all; a Knossos tablet written partly in Mycenaean Greek refers to the creature in the caves as the “Mistress of the Labyrinth”. People who were sent down into the caves became “frozen with fear” when they saw what lived there.’
Thompson exhaled and sat back. ‘A lot of theories – bloody old theories.’
Matt grinned, and opened his computer. ‘Better to have a lot than none.’ He scrolled through some images and turned his screen to show them. ‘And I’m still going to be including this one until it’s proven wrong. What does this look like?’
Rebecca groaned when she saw the screen. Thompson frowned.
‘Well, what does it remind you of?’ Matt asked with raised eyebrows.
The ancient image showed two tall figures surrounded by smaller bipeds. One figure’s head was a mass of coiling tendrils; the other’s was encased in a familiar round shape with a sort of open visor over the face.
Thompson snorted. ‘You have got to be kidding me. A freakin’ space helmet?’
Rebecca put her hands over her face. ‘Oh, for god’s sake.’
Matt nodded. ‘‘Remember the priest in the codex referred to Caelestis, and then pointed skyward?’ He snapped his computer closed. ‘Weird stuff – and I don’t know how it helps yet. But in the absence of evidence, all information is useful.’
Thompson sighed. ‘Sounds like you’ve got too much information, too many theories.’
‘Perish the thought,’ Matt said, and grinned. ‘We scientists expect historical anomalies. But given what we’re seeing in Turkey, they suddenly mean a helluva lot more.’
Thompson looked from Matt to Rebecca. ‘There are masses of caves in Crete, right? How do we know we’ve got the right ones?’
‘Good question,’ Rebecca said. ‘A lot of the caves were blasted open in the 1920s, but heavy rains caused silt to pour into them and many of the networks were destroyed or closed. Remember the story of the Minotaur – it lived in a labyrinth. The geology here is primarily carbonate – you combine that with heavy rainfall and you get significant tunnel systems. Maybe it all used to be a single massive network down there, but it’s been blocked over time and become a series of individual caves. So they might all be the right cave – we just need to find the right way in.’
‘So, what are we looking for?’ Thompson said. ‘First off, I mean.’
‘First we need to go to Heraklion on the coast. It’s the capital of the island, and where most of the artifacts from the caves ended up. It’s also where we’ll need to beg, borrow or steal any supplies we might need. Hammerson can’t help us any more – the ground, sea, and air borders are closed.’
Thompson nodded. ‘Sounds like a plan.’ He jerked forward, and put a hand to his ear, concentrating, then turned to Matt. ‘Hammerson wants to talk to you.’
Matt fumbled in his pocket, extracted a small flesh-colored pellet and jammed it into his ear.
‘Go, Jack.’
‘Professor Kearns, Matt, events are moving quickly, but we have news that I thought you needed to hear.’ The older soldier paused, and Matt concentrated as he continued. ‘Alex Hunter has engaged with Magera, or whatever the thing is out there. Just like during Baykal’s interaction, it seems impervious to any physical assault, but there was something new. Alex said that when the sun came up, and touched the creature, it just seemed to melt away, or fall apart. Could have been the light, or warmth, he wasn’t sure. But here’s the thing, we checked, all the previous attacks occurred at night or underground.’ He exhaled. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
‘The sunlight.’ Matt tried to remember any reference to a Gorgon being affected like this. ‘Hmm, I don’t think it was the warmth,’ he said at last.
‘Me either,’ Hammerson said. ‘Matt, Alex also said that even though the thing seemed to vanish, he could still sense it – might mean it’s there, and you just don’t know it … waiting for the dark.’
‘Okay.’ Matt sat back frowning. ‘Anything else?’
‘That’s it,’ Hammerson said. ‘But be advised that Alex and his team are heading to you now. Until he arrives, be on guard … and stay in contact, you hear?’
‘Great, Jack, you got it.’ Matt disconnected, and sat staring into the cabin.
‘Well?’ Rebecca said. ‘What is it?’
‘Interesting,’ Matt murmured, his mind working furiously as he tried to assemble all the facts.
Thompson leaned forward. ‘Give it up, buddy.’
‘Alex and the team are en route to meet us now,’ Matt said. ‘They just encountered Magera outside of Turgutlu, but according to Alex, the sun came up and it just seemed to melt away, or rather disassemble. But …’ He frowned. ‘He thought it was still there somehow, he could sense its presence.’
‘Well, that sounds like crap – what the hell does it mean?’ Thompson said.
Matt shook his head. ‘If Alex said he still sensed it, then it was definitely there.’
Rebecca frowned. ‘Melted away, or sort of disassembled? Like it deliberately vanished?’
Matt shrugged. ‘Don’t know. But I can’t see the heat of the sun causing it. The Turkish used thermobarics on Magera – 1000 degrees – and it walked right through them.’ He continued to stare at the cabin wall. ‘Maybe the light, the sun’s rays, or the energy …’ He sighed. ‘Or something we don’t know about yet.’
‘The sunlight,’ Rebecca said, musing. ‘You know, that kind of makes sense. When Perseus killed Medusa, he had to enter her subterran
ean lair. Perhaps it needs the dark to survive.’
‘No, not survive … I don’t think the sun killed it. But maybe the sun’s rays … change it.’ He looked at her. ‘And you’re right, the Gorgons lived underground. Maybe we can use it.’
CHAPTER 25
NATO Base, Izmir, Turkey
Alex and his team were waved through the checkpoint and escorted directly to the command center. Mid-level brass from several nations sat around a long table as Alex and Sam pushed through the doors. The rest of the HAWCs sprawled in chairs in the corridor, more than happy to let Alex and Sam do the political work.
Alex looked along the table – four men sitting, and one large, bearded older man, his face grim, standing with his hands clasped behind his back. He was first to speak.
‘Alex Hunter.’ It wasn’t a question.
Alex recognized the rank and came to attention. ‘General.’
‘General Aykut Bozlak Erdamir. At ease, Captain.’
Alex stood at ease with his big second-in-command behind him. The general pointed to some chairs, and the two HAWCs sat.
‘I understand you had the same success as we did at stopping Magera,’ Erdamir said. ‘And now it has disappeared.’
Alex nodded. ‘The sun came up, and it vanished. But it’s not gone – I could still sense it.’
‘Sense it?’ One of the soldiers in a blue uniform, his accent clipped British, frowned with disbelief. ‘Can you sense it now?’
Alex looked at the man, his own gaze flat and indifferent. The British officer reminded him of his own Captain Robert Graham, both from the physical appearance and also the way he carried the same sense of self-importance.
‘No.’ Alex turned away; he didn’t feel the need to explain.
The general placed a hand on the British man’s shoulder. ‘Major Mallory Butler, British Armed Forces.’ He indicated the men along the table. ‘Colonel Frank Harper, US Armed Forces; Major Thierry Galloen, French Armed Forces; and Colonel Abdullah Yilmaz, Turkish Defense Forces.’ Erdamir folded his arms and glared down at the British major. ‘And we all need to hear anything new that may assist us against this strange and formidable force that is fast approaching.’