Midnight Zone: a Cade Rearden Thriller

by JK Franks

  “At first light, Israeli jets located the ship and began firing on it. It had virtually no weapons, nearly defenseless, so couldn’t fight back. The flags were flying and the captain kept radioing that they were American, but it didn’t matter. The U.S. would learn that day about the grave mistake of poking a hornet’s nest. Once the fire order was issued, Israeli defense forces unleashed utter hell on the tiny ship.

  “Despite near constant radio jamming, the Liberty managed to call in air support which was, in fact, nearby, but the fleet admiral recalled them each time. Torpedo boats raced in from the port of Ashdod, and they finally crippled the ship, which somehow refused to go down even with a forty-foot hole in its side. In the end, nearly 200 American soldiers were injured or dead at the hands of our closest ally.”

  “That’s not exactly the account I remember our history teacher reading to us,” Cade said.

  She nodded, “The story was whitewashed by Washington. The sailors who survived were all given different assignments, some disappeared entirely. No congressional inquiry, no retaliation. Those in power would do their best to erase the actual event from our collective knowledge.”

  “So, Israel held on to the data, the Saraph?”

  “Like I said, it gets muddy,” the director continued. Mainly, because of who actually came to the aid of the crippled ship. Some reports indicate that another warship, one designated Destroyer 626/4 pulled up alongside to offer aid and then protected the ship from further attacks. The unusual part of that story is Destroyer 626/4 was a Soviet vessel. That ship supposedly stayed on station for sixteen hours until American forces finally made it back aboard.”

  “Holy shit! This story just keeps getting weirder. So, the Soviet’s got the Project Saraph research?” Cade asked.

  “That would have been my guess as well, but apparently, no. They obviously had hoped to. Someone had leaked the mission objectives. Everyone seemed to know what was going on with Saraph except the people on the Liberty. Now that I know what we were after, I can confidently say Project Saraph disappeared from the face of the earth that day. At least as far as anyone that mattered knew.

  “The truth was, it became a mystery. Doris has combed through every digitized record in the archives of Russia, Israel, and our own with no luck. We’d nearly gone to war to secure perhaps the greatest biological breakthrough in the world, yet who actually had it, if anyone, was a complete unknown. Israel claimed that no backups survived, and none of the original scientists were ever seen again. The lab floundered for another dozen years without success, and then was eventually shuttered.”

  The director went on, “So, the question is, how did Thrall eventually get it? Turns out that one of the operatives who was sent into Tel Aviv was a former major in U.S. Army Intelligence. A man named Ishel Golette.”

  “Golette is the name you gave us in the original briefing,” Cade interjected.

  The director replied, “Yes, I was supplied that intel by the president. I’ve read his dossier, a very capable spy. His dark complexion and Jewish ancestry made him an easy choice. He also spoke Arabic and Yiddish, which was another requirement. Although badly wounded, he was the only one of the operatives who made it back to the Liberty alive. He was supposed to put the materials in waterproof cases and take a small boat out to meet a nearby U.S. submarine, the Amberjack, to deliver the goods. Only thing is, he was unconscious at that point in the infirmary aboard the doomed ship. American intelligence assumed the mission had failed, and the operative’s cover was blown, so they wrote him off.

  “When the Israelis started to retaliate against the Liberty, the powers that be on both sides elected to simply let it happen. What happens next is more guesswork than anything. But I believe Golette awoke during the first wave of attacks and somehow met up with another survivor who got himself, Golette, and the material off the ship and into the water. They may have used some of the dive equipment onboard to swim to safety. Both men were likely horrified by what their own country had done, as well as the so-called allies. I think it is safe to say, it probably took them both some time to get back to America through back channels. Golette was a talented spy, he knew how to evade, how to cross borders without raising suspicion, and he knew how to stay in the dark.”

  “Golette’s friend, the sailor from the Liberty, who was he? What happened to him?” Cade asked.

  “Funny you should ask. We just filled in that missing clue. The other man was Seaman First Class, Peter Thrall from Walnut Creek, California.”

  Cade couldn’t believe this was part of a conspiracy stretching back to the Cold War. “Should I ask where you got all this from?”

  Margaret just smiled. “We both have our secrets, Captain.” She rose, placed her empty cup in the receptacle, and turned, extending a hand. “Good hunting, Nomad, see you back at the base.”

  I hope so, Director, he thought.

  67

  Kalypso

  Ivan Thrall paced the outer ring of the giant ship. So much was riding on the next few days, and he knew he couldn’t afford any mistakes. Neither he nor his partners would tolerate any slip-ups of any kind. Even though he was officially in-charge of onboard operations, that was always subject to Ruan’s will. Pax was the wealthiest among them, not that it would mean anything in a few more days, but he was also the most dangerous. Thrall stopped in front of one of the giant cupola windows.

  The single piece window looked like glass, but he knew it was much closer in molecular composition to diamond. Just one of the many gifts of Project Saraph. Ordinary materials would fail well above the depths they were at. Leaning close to the slightly curved window and looking up, he could see no sign of daylight above. It was just as dark one way as the other. Far below, he saw several of the glowing Saraphs circling. These would be the last of that series. Being so far away, they looked so small, like any other of the miraculous bioluminescent sea life of the Midnight Zone.

  Thrall’s thoughts turned to the others in the group. They would have to ascend to retrieve the last of the Founders, or the ‘Chaos Kings,’ as Richard sometimes called them. Richard himself would be the last to board, that had always been the plan. Certain things needed his direct attention until the very end.

  “Second thoughts?”

  The voice startled him; it was so easy to get lost in his thoughts in this magical place. “No,” he said. The hint of a laugh echoed softly in his voice. Her arm wrapped inside of his, and she pulled him close. Their lips met, and the fire flared inside him. She was too young, too hungry, and too irresistible. She made him feel things his late wife never had. “Ruslana, we need to…”

  “I know, I know, we need to keep ‘us’ all business, at least until it’s over.” Her Slavic accent brutalized the words, but Thrall thought she was as magical as the scene outside. “Any last minute problems? Or are we still on schedule?” she asked.

  Thrall liked the fact she could switch from pleasure to business without missing a stride. The soft glow of ambient lighting cast a blue halo around her head. She looked angelic and so damn fuckable…but business first. “Not really, nothing we hadn’t planned for.”

  “But the team at the Delphi, they went into the Sanctuary. Richard’s security, they were not so good, no?”

  “Others have found the caves, and they have always been dealt with,” Thrall answered. “That is the benefit of having the fortunes. The Founders have been on track for nearly a century now. All of it leading up to this point.” She was right, though; the security failing was one of the most egregious in the group’s history. The current establishment of the Founders had preceded the incident in Israel by nearly thirty years. His landing in the current lead role had been less about lineage and more about skills. While his father had been opportunistic in securing the materials aboard the Liberty, he and Golette had known nothing about the bigger picture—the Founders had helped fund multiple excursions around the world and even pushed to include sending the Israeli scientists to Antarctica in the forties. The
y’d not been pleased when the lab at Tel Aviv had been robbed. They were even more frustrated when they had motivated a high-ranking soviet official to use his Navy to intervene, only to board the Liberty and find Ivan’s father had already vanished with the prize.

  Ruslana touched his arm, then gently let her lithe fingers move down the length of his chest and slowly to his groin where she felt him. She squeezed him. “Where did you go?”

  “S…sorry,” he stammered, now distracted even more. He dared not tell her he had been thinking about his father. “Just a lot going on, much to keep track of.” As if on cue, the light from one of the creatures blasted in from just outside.

  “My God, it’s gotten enormous,” Ruslana said, momentarily breaking character as the seductress.

  “It is. Doctor Otera believes it has found a food source out there. Something it can digest and metabolize.”

  “So, it won’t still need to come here to feed? Won’t that mean you no longer have control?”

  “It’s troubling, yes. Especially when everything we’ve been told indicates their biology is so foreign that nothing other than the blocks of chemical chum we created would keep them alive. Perhaps they aren’t such fragile monsters after all.” He glanced out at the impressive Saraph as it swam off, chasing some other nearby prey. It was time to go check on their successor, and they still had to do something with the captives.

  Thera’s face might have been interpreted as fear, but it was simply anger. Growing up in her neighborhood, you got tough in a hurry, but she’d also learned to control it…usually. From a purely academic standpoint, she had to confess that the work she’d been forced to do for these bastards was thrilling. Never in all her years would she have assumed any of this was even theoretically possible. Now, she was running cloning labs for creatures Earth had never known, editing genes with a device that put the CRISPR protocols she’d used back at her university to shame. Then there were the organisms themselves. The Saraphs were fascinating. Of course, they weren’t all the same, but collectively, they were still known by the general term. She was currently working on the Saraph Series-4, or SS4 for short. This was the first of the creatures that was not strictly a marine animal.

  “Doctor Otera.”

  The very sound of the man’s voice sent chills down her body. While maybe not as outwardly creepy as the Asian man, this one seemed even deadlier. She stiffened, but turned slightly as Thrall entered the main lab.

  “Have you made progress—is the DNA ready to access?”

  “No, sir,” she answered truthfully. “The encoding structure of the cells is still blocking our attempts.”

  “Are you sure you are completely up to speed on your predecessor’s procedure?”

  The late predecessor, she said to herself. She’d uncovered a video file of his last fatal encounter with the SS3 creature. A monstrously hideous thing that looked like the ones she’d seen swimming meters away outside the hull. “Yes, the neural bridge uploaded all of the late doctor’s findings.” She still did not understand how the instant learning machine worked, but she’d only been here a week, and after a few sessions with the device, she knew everything related to the project that had come before. “The procedure is not the problem,” Thera continued. “This creature is more intelligent than the others. I believe it has to develop to a point where it can consciously allow us to unlock the molecular data store.

  So, it has to allow us to access it. I mean, we have the basic encryption key from the last of the SS3s. We should be able to unlock it but…well, we can’t. Not yet anyway.”

  Thrall shook his head and offered a disingenuous smile as he walked up and touched her cheek lightly with his hand. “Thera, my dear, you wouldn’t be…oh, I don’t know, stalling, would you?”

  He removed the hand and stepped back, looking down into the oversized bathtub-shaped holding cage where the new creation was laying. “I mean, we’ve never encountered an obstacle like that before.”

  Thera bit her lip, choking off the reply she wanted to make. “It is what it is. I can’t change what I don’t understand. The prior versions were not sentient, they are more instinctual. This one apparently has a level of consciousness beyond that.”

  “So, this thing…” Thrall pointed down at the dog-sized creature. Scales covered much of the body, all of which shimmered with a deep iridescence that seemed to reflect a differing color range from one moment to the next. “This thing is judging us, determining if we are worthy to know what it is carrying.”

  “I didn’t say that, sir, I simply believe it has some control. Unlike the others, it isn’t broadcasting its messages when it feeds or attacks.”

  “Has it attacked?”

  “Um, no…sir. That was a poor choice of words, it has shown no aggression so far.” Still, she knew the thing was capable. It’s row of cold dark eyes never moved, but still followed her wherever in the lab she went.

  “Doctor, I suggest you find a way to unlock this animal’s secrets and do it soon. Believe me, I have other ways of motivating you. Ways you will find most unpleasant.”

  He’d barely made it out of the room before Thera released the breath she’d been holding. “Bastard,” she said so low that no one other than the creature could hear. The SS4 raised its head slightly and swiveled its neck to face her. All five eyes were focused squarely on her as the usually expressionless face seemed to be smiling. A single image shone through the maelstrom of thoughts suddenly in her head. Kissa. Dear, sweet Kissa, she thought. She missed him more than he would ever know, but right now, she hoped he never found out about her role in creating these abominations.

  68

  The Cove

  “Thank you for picking me up, Isabella.”

  “Margaret, what’s up? Not like you to pull me out of my lab to meet you at the airport. You know I have little to do with your operations,” Izzy said sounding concerned.

  Dr. Isabella Feist was one of the most senior scientists at The Cove Project, and maybe more important at this moment, she was one of Margaret’s most trusted friends. “Izzy, I need to ask you a favor, a very personal one.” Stansfield studied the farmland and forest passing by outside. “It’s not going to be pleasant for you, and I am sorry.”

  “You have my attention, Director. What’s on your mind?”

  “Izzy, I need to know everything you can possibly tell me about Ivan Thrall.”

  Isabella continued to drive even as she gripped the wheel tighter. The tears began welling up, blurring her vision. The SUV’s autonomous mode took over driving as soon as it noticed her emotional state. Several minutes later, she had regained a small measure of her composure. “What can I tell you that you don’t know, Margaret? We…we’ve discussed my time there many times. I was stupid; I was drowning in student loans, and I made a bad choice in joining Cryptus.”

  Margaret was very familiar with the facts surrounding her friend's time with one of the most infamous failures in Silicon Valley. All the headlines, news trucks, and reporters camped out in front of the impressive tech giant’s campus-style headquarters outside San Francisco made sure that everyone knew. “Izzy, I don’t want to discuss what happened to you. Not to be cruel, dear, but I need to know what you can tell me about Thrall.”

  Margaret watched as Izzy searched her pockets for something, probably a piece of candy. She’d always claimed a chemical imbalance or low blood sugar, so Doris had created a MedPatch specifically for that. Now, they all knew the sugar cravings were just some kind of stress response in the woman. “It’s important, you read the updates. He’s still alive, and he’s planning something big. I have to get to the bottom of it before it's too late. People’s lives are at stake, including many of our own. Anything you can offer might help.”

  “Why not talk to Nancy? Her husband worked there, too.”

  Margaret replied, “I have talked with her several times, but Jim didn’t talk about work at home. He was on the military side of things and knew the consequences of talking abou
t the work except in the broadest possible terms. Besides, he was in systems design, rarely met with the boss. You were senior management. You were there in some of the company’s busiest days.”

  The silver SUV pulled into the lot beneath the twin dish radio telescopes. Margaret guided Izzy down to the edge of the nearby river where they sat on a picnic table the staff sometimes used. She knew not to press her friend. Izzy wasn’t fragile, but those days had damaged her in ways she never wanted to relive. Cryptus haunted her professionally and emotionally. Someone from the company had even tried to kill her years later outside a technical symposium. Margaret just looked out over the river; it was a beautiful spring afternoon. Despite all that was riding on her finding the truth, she could wait; she would wait as long as her friend needed.

  “Ivan was brilliant, idealistic, and, I don’t know, just had a charisma that few could ignore. In those early days, he was always panicked over funding, he hated having to go and beg for grants or make pitches to new investors, but that was part of it. I think the company had around thirty people when I joined. Most were in software development, machine learning, neurolinguistics, and such.”

  “Where did the early funding come from?” the director asked.

  Izzy shrugged and crossed her arms. “Angel investors, VC funds, and then after about one year, maybe eighteen months, money issues disappeared, and we began to really grow. By year two, we had doubled in size and were looking for larger offices. It was odd, I mean, we hadn’t brought anything to market yet, but salaries got better, the talent level really improved. In my mind, I always thought it was because of the DARPA contracts, but that’s not quite right, they actually came after.”

  “So, Thrall got money from somewhere or someone, a new investor?” Margaret asked as she pulled up an image on her phone. “Do you ever recall seeing this guy around?” The image of an unpleasant looking Asian man stared back. It wasn’t a good image, maybe from a passport photo.