The Rock

by Robert Doherty

  The Rock

  Robert Doherty

  In Australia… a U.S. Air Force computer operator receives a terrifying radio transmission out of Ayers Rock that knocks out the world's communications.

  In New Mexico… a boozy college engineering professor is suddenly escorted into a waiting car by two armed military men.

  In New York… a tall, slender woman leaves her husband a note on the refrigerator saying that she's leaving — but can't tell him where she's going.

  In Colombia… a Special Forces officer breaks into a drug kinpin's bedroom and puts a bullet into a woman's brain before running to a waiting helicopter.

  And in England… a beautiful twenty-three-year-old mathematician prepares for a journey that will change her life forever.

  The team assembles in Australia on a mission that can save the world. But first, they must figure out who is the message coming from? What are they trying to tell mankind? And can it be deciphered in time before Armageddon overtakes the world?

  It’s about a bomb, it’s about a world about to be shattered. It’s about the last few days they have to save us all.

  Robert Doherty

  Psychic Warrior

  About the Author

  NY Times bestselling author Bob Mayer has over 50 books published. He has sold over four million books and is in demand as a team-building, life-change, and leadership speaker and consultant. Bob graduated from West Point and served in the military as a Special Forces A-Team leader and a teacher at the JFK Special Warfare Center & School. He teaches novel writing and improving the author via his Write It Forward program. He is the Co-Creator of Who Dares Wins Publishing.

  Prologue

  The chamber contained enough energy to destroy the planet five times over. More than two kilometers in diameter, one kilometer from floor to ceiling, and three times that depth under the planet's surface, it echoed with the crackle of directed power beams, all focused on a black sphere dancing in the center, just above the metal floor. The sphere was fifty meters in diameter and did not appear to be made of any solid substance, but rather contracted and expanded in a rhythmic pattern.

  Halfway up the far wall, a half-kilometer from the sphere, a recessed window slid open, revealing a control room lined with consoles. Three figures dressed in long black flowing robes stood. Wires flowed from the back of the hoods to the glowing screen in front of them on which the thoughts each wished to express were displayed in a manner all could understand. "It is time for run four-five," the figure on the left communicated.

  "Proceed," the one in the center ordered.

  The power beams shifted across the color spectrum as the levels were increased. The sphere slowly began to change its own shade, the pitch-black gradually changing to gray then fading away until an image appeared, incongruous among the technology and power of the cave: an aircraft hangar, the edges abruptly cut off where they met the edge of the power of the sphere. Inside the hangar, an old man in a military style uniform waited patiently.

  "What is the location?" The figure in the center asked.

  "Coordinates two-three-five-eight dash four-eight-three-four. A town called Leesburg, in the state of Virginia, in the country called United States."

  "Local date, time group?"

  "Nineteen ninety-one. The twenty-second day of the sixth month. Two forty-seven local time."

  "Continue tracking."

  A military truck suddenly appeared in the sphere, bumper first, the entire vehicle filling out as it entered the power frame. A man jumped off the truck, wearing unmarked black fatigues and carrying a weapon. He greeted the general with a handshake. "It's good to be back, sir."

  The general slapped him on the shoulder. "Good to have you back, Captain Hawkins. I've got the transcript of your in-flight debriefing and the President is very satisfied with the results of your mission."

  The man nodded wearily and watched as his three men threw their rucksacks onto the floor of the hangar and secured their weapons with the unit armorer. "I'd like to give the men some time off, sir."

  The general nodded. "Take a week and then give me a call. I'll put Richman's team on standby alert."

  "Thanks, sir."

  "Damn good job, man." With a slap on the back the general was gone, walking out of the range the sphere could see. The captain gave his men the good news and the figures dispersed one by one until only he was left standing there. He finally moved out himself, heading toward the hangar door that glimmered in the light of the sphere.

  * * *

  The figure on the right gave the facts. "Hawkins, Robert D. An officer in the military. Commander of a special-operations team. Program seven-one-three-two. Probability seven-six. Terminal impact projected six-three."

  "He's the object. Track him," the figure in the center ordered. Around the hub of the chamber, the machinery hastened to follow the command in an intricately organized dance of power and technology.

  * * *

  The sphere flickered slightly, the image going out of focus, then Hawkins reappeared in the parking lot outside the hangar, walking toward a pickup truck, a young woman leaning against the front bumper. A smile blossomed across her face as she spotted Hawkins and she ran to him, throwing herself into his arms.

  "I'm so glad you're back!"

  Hawkins held the woman in his arms for almost thirty seconds. Finally, he stepped back and looked at her. "I missed you, Mary."

  "Well, you're back and you don't have to miss me for a while," she replied, sliding her arm through his and pulling him toward the pickup. "Let's go home. I've got something special planned for you."

  "Time line?" the center figure inquired.

  "Three minutes, thirteen seconds," the figure on the right answered.

  "Keep us on line."

  With Hawkins at the wheel, the pickup truck rolled out of the parking lot.

  "Keep tracking!"

  The power being fed to the sphere surged as the automated machinery struggled to maintain pace with the truck. The vehicle appeared to be stationary, caught in the center of the sphere, the two-lane road sliding beneath its wheels, the countryside suddenly appearing at one end of the sphere and flickering by to disappear at the other end.

  The entire chamber shuddered, ever so slightly. The center figure's hood twitched upward toward the metal-reinforced ceiling. "Report?"

  There was a slight pause and then the figure on the left spoke. "A strike on the fourth perimeter. Magnitude three point three. Security is holding at level eight. Risk factor up to one-three. We are secure."

  Attention returned to the sphere. Every few seconds the image would fade and then regain its sharpness as the technicians struggled to keep track of the vehicle.

  "Time line?"

  "One minute, ten seconds."

  "Maintain."

  The pickup truck turned onto a two-lane highway.

  Mary Hawkins leaned across the front seat and nuzzled up to her husband's right side. White teeth flashed as she nipped his earlobe.

  "Hey, that's not fair." Hawkins laughed.

  "Thirty seconds."

  Hawkins let go of the stick shift and wrapped his right arm around his wife, pulling her tight against his body.

  "Ten seconds," the pickup truck was rounding a curve in the sphere, the road appearing to the watchers as it did to the man behind the wheel.

  Hawkins reacted, slamming his foot on the brake and twisting the steering wheel with his left hand. The right front end of the pickup truck smashed into the rear of the stalled tractor-trailer rig with an explosion of glass and metal. Hawkins was thrown forward against the seat belt and just as abruptly slammed back against the seat in recoil. Mary Hawkins was ripped out of the desperate grip of her husband's right hand and her head thrust into the windshield,
forming a flower of cracked glass as her chest crumbled against the unyielding plastic of the dashboard.

  "Call an ambulance!" Hawkins screamed as he slowly pulled Mary back and laid her down on the seat. She was unconscious, her breathing coming in labored gasps. Hawkins gently slipped his hand around her head and cringed as he felt the blood slowly flowing out. He carefully pressed his hand up against the wound and held her head still.

  The tableau appeared frozen in the sphere. The figure in the center finally spoke. "End four-five. Proceed with four-six."

  The image of Hawkins holding his wife in his arms faded as the sphere turned black and the power shifted.

  INITIATION

  Vredefort Dome, South Africa

  17 DECEMBER 1995, 0315 LOCAL

  17 DECEMBER 1995, 0115 ZULU

  With each mile traversed Tommy Meduba felt the death force rise up in him. Lona leaned over and crooned his name and whispered of warriors and revenge as the sweat slowly dripped down his body, splashing unseen onto the floor of the truck. Blood pounded in his temples, the sound of the truck's engine faint in his ears.

  Lona had searched him out and found him in the gutter yesterday, covered with dirt, sweat, and blood. His brother was dead and there was no family left to him, so he'd bought eight cartons of Bantu beer and tried to obliterate reality. Lona and Nabaktu had offered him another way-a warrior's way- that would strike back at the killers of his brother.

  The drugs she'd given him had done something to his body. He'd never felt like this before. He could barely feel the bumps as the truck negotiated the thin road leading to the back entrance to the mine, but he could acutely feel Lona's hand on his arm. He wanted to avoid her dark eyes staring intently at him and not hear the words she mouthed. He ran his eyes around the enclosed interior, taking in the large crate squatting in the center, but again his eyes flickered back up to hers and his ears listened as if he had no control.

  "Soon you will be the greatest warrior. Your name will be spoken of across the land with the deepest respect. You are a man-not an animal. You must die a man's death, not lie in the street like a dog. You must avenge your brother."

  A small part of Tommy's brain wanted to think, but it would require too much energy. The truck came to a halt with a squeal of brakes. The tarp covering the tailgate was thrown back and a large figure dressed in traditional robes appeared, silhouetted against the night sky. "It is time to go." Lona leaned over and placed something in front of Tommy's face. He snorted reflexively and felt the power kick in.

  Tommy looked from Lona to Nabaktu. Their eyes were locked on him, willing for him to move. He stood and stepped out of the truck.

  Security was oriented inward at the entrance and that was logical. The powers-that-be were concerned with what could be taken out of the mine, not with what could be taken in. The long line of dust-covered workers emerging like moles from their twelve-hour shift below the surface was subjected to strip searches by guards with cold hands and blank eyes. At random, a few men were having their bodily cavities invaded by gloved fingers, probing and searching. Behind the initial row of security, personnel looking for the gold were other guards watching the searchers. And above the second rank were video cameras, overseeing the watchers. And all that redundancy was logical, too, as this toothless opening less than eighty miles southwest of Johannesburg led to great coiled intestines of gold and uranium-laced rock.

  Tommy had been working here for eight years, six days a week, in twelve-hour shifts-long enough that any other existence before the mine was forgotten. He smothered his hatred and tried to avoid looking at the guards as he went past. That most of them were black also didn't matter. Some of these same guards had beaten his brother to death two days ago after finding a piece of rock in his pant cuff. No matter that it could have gotten there by accident. No matter that it contained no gold. The rule was that nothing came out that hadn't come in. When done they'd thrown his brother's body into the putrid shaft of an abandoned mine where all the other bodies had been dumped over the years. That the guards who had beaten his brother to death were Xhosa did matter very much to Tommy-they were the favorite of the ANC and the change in power had brought little change to the mines-and the Sothos, of which Tommy was a member, migrant workers from Lesotho, still suffered at the hands of the overseers.

  Night or day mattered naught in the black holes of the mines. The caged electric lights strung along the rock roof cast a dingy glow on the dark, perspiring bodies below as the line of arrivals trudged forward. Their shift started at three, but they weren't paid for the time spent getting there-only the toil of their hands started the clock.

  Tommy Meduba was pouring sweat also as he drove the small electric cart at a walking pace down the right side of the double set of rails. He was on the ground level leading to the massive elevator that would carry the cart and forty workers down into the depths. Tommy was sweating not so much from the thick air and scorching heat, though. Large beads of perspiration beaded his skin, forming rivers that gravity dragged down his body, because this was to be his last night alive and he hadn't assimilated that concept.

  No guard spared him or his cart more than a glance as he rumbled onto the wrought-iron floor of the elevator. With a slight start, and then a steady stuttering, the platform descended. Dank rock walls on four sides guided them straight down. For twenty-four minutes, at a steady pace of more than four hundred and seventy feet per minute, they went down. They had to switch elevators twice and use horizontal tunnels that pushed them more to the southwest. More than two and a quarter miles into the earth. Straight to the heart of the richest vein of gold and uranium in the world: the Red Streak, a treasure trove that angles under the mystifying geological feature known as Vredefort Dome, so many kilometers directly above.

  Never before had a mine been dug so deep and so directly under the Dome itself. But the upper regions had been plundered for more than a hundred years, forcing the engineers to probe and invade the earth farther down into the dark nether regions in search of their mineral gods. The Red Streak had been touched less than three years previously and had already produced two thousand tons of gold bullion and a classified amount of uranium.

  Gold and uranium were the fuel that ran the South African economy, and Tommy was the cutting edge of a plan bent on stopping that engine and gaining the notice of the ruling ANC. He glanced over his shoulder with deadened eyes at the bulky metal container perched on the small flatbed. The casing was stenciled with English, Bantu, and Afrikaaner words indicating: DRILLING EQUIPMENT.

  It was so easy that even Tommy's drug-infused brain felt a certain euphoria at having gotten in. Nabaktu had said it would be easy. Dear, sweet Lona had whispered it in his ear as she took his body and mind. And they had been right.

  As the platform came to a final halt, Tommy fought the hysterical urge to laugh at the dulled men on either side of him as he slipped the cart's stick shift into drive and slowly rolled off the platform. A rock foyer beckoned with three dark openings less than twenty meters away. Wealth that would make most Third World nations weep with envy slithered back out of those holes and up the cables to the surface every day.

  Tommy stopped the cart as the other workers disappeared into the various tunnels. He walked around to the rear of the vehicle and flipped open a panel. Nabaktu had made it as simple as possible, but still Tommy hesitated. A worm of fear pierced the core of his being as his hand hovered over the red button. Through the drugs and the scent of sex a part of his mind rebelled.

  * * *

  Twelve miles away, on the slope leading to the edge of the Witwatersrand Basin, Kamil Nabaktu swiveled his pitch-black irises from the fluorescent dial of a cheap Mickey Mouse wristwatch to Lona. "He's down by now."

  The two were crouched in a thicket of scraggly, stunted trees that had never known enough water, just as Nabaktu's people had never known enough freedom since April 1652, when the first white men had set foot to stay on the southern end of the Dark Continent. The
y had hoped it would change in April and May of 1994, when the whites had amazingly given up power, but from their perspective, huddled in the shacks among the other tribal minorities, little had changed. In reality, the fact that the face now in charge in Pretoria was black made it all so much more galling.

  "He is a weak man," Lona said. "You should have let me take it."

  "No women in the mines," Nabaktu replied patiently. They'd had the argument hundreds of times. He checked his watch again. At the very least he hoped Tommy had gone down. If not, things were going to get very ugly, very soon.

  Twenty men had died sneaking gold out to pay for the bomb-Tommy's brother one of them. It had taken them a year to accumulate enough. This was the end result of that blood.

  "Thirty seconds."

  * * *

  Tommy looked back to the elevator, his mind scurrying through various options. He took his hand away from the red button and breathed a sigh of desperate relief. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog demons that were scampering about, dulling his brain. His eyeballs felt as if they were going to pop out of his head as he considered his position. He knew he was dead regardless. He couldn't go up. The guards would want to know why he wasn't on his shift. He couldn't go into one of the tunnels and take his normal place, because sooner or later someone would wonder what was on board the abandoned vehicle, and when they looked, there would be hell to pay.

  A soft click caught his attention and Tommy glanced down. His eyes widened even more as he watched the red button slide down of its own accord into the metal plate.

  Tommy never saw the plastic reach the bottom as he became a small patch of molecules vaporized by the nuclear blast that flashed into the rock around, which in turn dissolved and flowed.

  * * *

  The earth burped, Nabaktu looked at Lona and then out into the dark night again. He'd expected more. Still, it was more than two miles down.