by Greig Beck
The bird eased back a few knots, but remained so silent and stable it barely felt as though they were moving at all. Alex drew in a deep breath through his nose. He held the roof railing with one hand; the other was a fist that drummed a slow beat against his leg. He felt the explosive energy coursing through him — he was a thousand pounds of dynamite packed into a human shell, a warhead waiting to explode.
The cabin went black — the third light went on.
* * *
Major Jack Hammerson sat at his desk and linked his fingers behind his big square head. The Hammer, so named because of his uncompromising personality, fists like iron, and a head that looked to have corners… an impression not helped by his iron-gray crew cut.
On his computer screen a small digital clock had just started to count down from 24:00:00 hours — the mission was in motion.
He hadn’t been in the field for years, but every time a mission started, he wished he was with them. The hardest part was letting go and acknowledging that the people he sent were the best in the world at what they did. That was why he had chosen them.
His teams, his HAWCs, would enter a red zone like a hot spike, burn a small hole to their target, and then withdraw, leaving little more than a cauterized wound. Unfortunately there were a lot of bones around the world that belonged to his people. Every one of them was his responsibility — not everyone came home — but that was just a fact of life in the HAWCs.
Hammerson leaned forward and clicked to a screen showing six boxes covered in graphs, peaks, troughs and pulsing dots — the life signs of the team members — all optimal with normal adrenalin and oxygen spikes in line with terrain touchdown. The team was spec’d up on weaponry and as armored as all hell. They’d get the job done, or die trying.
Hammerson looked at Alex Hunter’s readout: slightly elevated endorphins. The man was probably pushing himself to be out in front. He was a natural competitor. Hunter would be given his first team soon. He’d watch him and get a report from Bronson when they returned.
Hammerson paused, thought for a second and then shook his head. The guy was so much like his dad, and would never know it. Hammerson had known Alex’s father, Jim Hunter — he’d been a special ops sniper in the Rangers with Hammerson. Six confirmed takedowns, unparalleled hand-to-hand skills and competitive as all hell. The only thing he feared was that his young son would find out he killed for a living. No matter how many times Hammerson told him he saved lives, rather than took them, there was always a seed of doubt, that little something inside him that burnt every time he pulled the trigger… and burnt even hotter at the thought of his son pointing at him one day, and saying: murderer!
Jim had confronted Hammerson before his final mission — perhaps he’d had a premonition of what was coming. It was strange; most special ops soldiers believe they’re indestructible. But every now and then, a day comes when something whispers to them in the night: tomorrow will be your last. Some men and women resign immediately, others try to deny it. Jim was a fatalist.
He had grabbed Hammerson’s forearm and stared into his face before they mission dropped. Promise you’ll look out for Alex, he had asked. And never tell him.
Perhaps when Alex was old enough he would have shared what he did. Who knows now?
Talk about fate playing its hand. From a distance Hammerson had watched the kid go from the schoolyard to the military in the blink of an eye. Always pushing himself harder, never surrendering to pain or fatigue. He had moved on to advanced training and had been selected for the SEALs. There he had excelled, distinguishing himself with his drive and aggression, until his skills were impossible for Hammerson to ignore. It was as if karma had played a crazy joke on all of them. Hammerson snorted — we all become our fathers sooner or later.
Hammerson could never have promised Jim Hunter he could keep Alex alive, or safe, or even always be able to bring him home. But he could look out for him. That was one promise he would damn well keep.
He grabbed one of the folders from his in-tray, leaned back and looked up at the brass sign on his wall: God, Guns and Guts it read in heavy copperplate lettering. He drummed his fingers on the folder’s hard cover — when traveling to hell, you needed all three.
He flipped open the folder. On the first page were three large words in red: Classified — Arcadian Project. Hammerson groaned. He liked Captain Graham; the military doctor was brilliant, and his team had patched Hammerson and his people up a hundred times using new techniques others only dreamt of. But it seemed these days, the man’s interest had turned to yet another super-soldier project.
Hammerson flicked through the report, looking over the theoretical projections for physical improvement, tissue regeneration and stamina enhancement. He snorted — when were these guys gonna learn? Battle superiority came from training, internal fortitude, advanced weaponry and a certain type of psychology — fearless, determined, and maybe a little psychotic as well.
He paused on the last page, nodding in agreement. Hmm, ready for human trials by year’s end. I suppose, if the eggheads could give my HAWCs an extra ounce of speed, strength or stamina, I’d support ’em. He looked at the data on animal test subjects — twenty-five percent catatonia, thirty percent motor neuron disorder, stroke, embolism, and all the rest… dead.
He’d heard the Chinese were working with reanimation — soldiers that didn’t feel pain or fatigue… because they were already fucking dead. Only problem was, they fell apart after a week.
Hammerson went to throw the folder into his out-tray, then changed his mind and tossed it back onto his in-tray with a shrug.
‘I doubt it’ll be in our lifetime, Graham.’ He went back to watching the screen.
CHAPTER 5
Dr. Gennady Millinov tugged at the tufts of hair on each side of his head as he paced. That bastard Khamid was gone, the disk was gone, and now something was leaking from inside the capsule. Although leaking wasn’t really the right term for what he was witnessing. Things that looked like big blobs of mucus were slipping from the split in the cylinder onto the floor. Some remained stuck to the gleaming skin of the capsule, quivering slightly, like a mound of jelly or grub-like insects in a larval stage, waiting to emerge for a first flight.
‘Please be some sort of fuel or coolant leakage. Please be condensation, hydraulic fluid, or. . or anything else. Please be anything else.’
He repeated the mantra over and over, but he knew better — reality kept breaking through. They moved — he was sure of it. Every now and then one of the shapeless blobs would slide one way or the other — just a fraction, but enough to draw his attention… and scare the hell out of him.
He swore loudly in the empty laboratory. Only hours after he had trumpeted his breakthrough to the president, he had lost his prize. Volkov was due to call for a full briefing, and this was happening now? It was a fucking nightmare.
He tugged briefly at his hair again. He shouldn’t have left him alone with the disk. Volkov would shoot him. But it wasn’t his fault. That bastard Khamid must have been working for the Americans or the English. Yes, he had checked his references, but he didn’t fully security screen the man; that was the Security Services’ job. Let the Little Wolf snarl and spit at them.
He leaned down and looked at the screen relay from within the isolation chamber. Another of the mucus blobs slid down the side of the capsule and plopped onto the floor.
What else could go wrong?
* * *
Millinov talked quickly into the phone. He was babbling, he knew it, but he couldn’t stop if he tried. His heart beat so hard he could feel its pulse in the back of his throat.
‘Shut up.’ The president spoke with enough venom to make the scientist’s voice catch in his throat. His jaw snapped shut.
‘So, maybe not a probe after all, hmm, doctor? Have you taken a sample?’
‘A sample?’ Millinov swallowed. ‘No, no, not yet, Mr. President.’ He looked at the room on the screen, the strange new markings on its to
ughened steel floor — like weld marks — left behind as the revolting things moved aimlessly across the isolation room. They were either melting or digesting the minerals in the flooring. His fears over whether the things were alive or not had been manifestly answered.
He cleared his throat. ‘We now think that the capsule either picked up some microbiological spores from space or else it’s some type of incubator, with the disk inside acting as a combination of coolant and dry cell. The contents — or passengers — were being held in stasis by the extreme cold. But now?’ He looked at the screen image of the room’s slimy inhabitants. ‘Mr. President, I’m not sure it is a good idea to go in there just yet. Perhaps some more study before —’
Volkov cut him off. ‘Send someone in, or go in yourself. The next time we speak, I want to know what it is you have in my laboratory, Dr. Millinov.’
Millinov sputtered before words formed. ‘But Dr. Khamid is —’
‘Leave Khamid to me.’
CHAPTER 6
Town of Urus-Martan, Chechen countryside
Denichen Khamid looked at his watch for the tenth time. The Americans were coming; they said they would, they knew where he was. He rubbed his temples. Now, he guessed, came the hard part — staying sane. He needed to try to remain calm and be patient. He looked at his watch again.
He started at the sound of the floorboards creaking, and turned so quickly he made his neck crick.
‘No, thank you.’ He shook his head, now with some pain, as the steaming cup of sweet black tea was offered to him. He rubbed his neck. His stomach was in too much turmoil for him to consider eating or drinking anything. He smiled up at Zezag: a good woman, he thought, just like his wife.
Laila! He still felt the agony inside. From the laboratory he had fled to Katyr-Yurt, laying field flowers on the spot where his mother’s house once stood. The town had been rebuilt, and he had recognized nothing in the streets of new concrete and fresh wood. All that was left of the centuries-old town was a layer of ash below the cold bitumen and new pine floorboards.
He lived on the run now, directed by the Chechen underground. Each day, he was moved from house to house, a new family taking turns to secrete him for twelve hours, putting themselves at risk for him — a Chechen fleeing from Russians would always find a bed in the Chechnya villages. Tonight it had been the Saidullay family. He tried his warmest smile on their small boy, who clung to Zezag’s leg and stared at him as if he had just dropped from the sky. It didn’t work and the child slid a little farther behind Zezag’s ample bottom.
Khamid looked at his watch again. Must stop doing that, he thought. They would come soon, surely, before his luck ran out. The Russians would find him eventually, and if they got him back to the Ministry of Security, he fully expected to spend his last few miserable days being pulled apart — psychologically and physically. His remains would eventually be fed to squealing pigs in some remote farm on the outskirts of Moscow.
Doubts, doubts, doubts — I did the right thing… didn’t I? He wished he had prepared more, and thought again of the package he had risked everything for — only the size of a large button, but its shielded container weighed as much as a large dog. He had carried it for many hours, and his shoulders had been rubbed raw. He rolled them; they felt better now the thing was off his back. If he had needed to move quickly, it would have been his undoing. An odd tingling remained; he hoped it was just from muscle strain, and not from the strange radiation the object gave off.
He cheered himself by imagining the look on Dr. Gennady Millinov’s face when he returned to discover the disk gone… straight after he contacted the president. Serves them right, he thought. He hated them all. They had vaporized his family and the entire village a decade and a half ago, and he had always dreamt of an opportunity to make them pay — to rob them of something as they had robbed him.
He wondered if they had worked out who he really was yet. In a way, the Russians’ ability to make people and places disappear without a trace had worked in his favor.
Like most Chechens, he had two identities. His Russian one, paid for on the black market and cultivated over the years. This allowed him the ability to work and travel in and out of Russia. And his real one — his birth one, which was hidden from all except family and friends. For all Russia knew, he had died with Amiina, Laila and Timur and like them was now nothing but scattered ash beneath the Katyr-Yurt soil.
There would always be some record, perhaps buried in one of the Ministry of Security Service’s databases, but for a science bureaucrat like Millinov, Khamid would be of pure Russian origin and anything else would be hidden from his superficial analysis. He doubted anyone would know of his links to the obliterated town, his destroyed family or why he would have such a volcanic hatred.
‘Zezag, I will take my tea now.’ The small boy’s face half appeared from behind the door. Khamid smiled again; this time the boy’s lips curled a fraction.
His original plan had been to use his physics expertise to create some sort of dirty bomb and detonate it outside the Kremlin, or at least as close as he could get to a large military base. He was glad he hadn’t gone through with it. Time has a way of cooling hot blood. If he had killed a single innocent while blowing a hole in the corrupt beast, he would be no better than the president who ordered the release of the vacuum bombs over Katyr-Yurt. Besides, it may also have caused another crackdown on his people — they were stoic, but they couldn’t endure much more.
But what he could not do, would not do, was allow a great power to fall into the hands of people who had proved that they could not properly manage such a responsibility. Using his scientific network, he had managed to get a message to a colleague in Turkey, who had passed it on to the NATO base in Incirlik, and then on to the Pentagon.
They would help — of course they would. He wasn’t vain enough to think they valued him, but they would come for the power cell. And if the Americans turned out to be no better than the Russians? He groaned and rubbed his spine on the back of the chair, trying to relieve the itching tingle. The boy smiled a little wider at his antics. Khamid shrugged.
‘We all have to trust someone, sometime, right?’
Khamid’s small cell phone pinged quickly three times. Three: his heart pounded in his throat — they’d found him!
* * *
The night-black hunters moved silently through the village. With their single-lens night-vision goggles and exoskeletal armor, they resembled a horde of alien creatures, hunting for prey in the dark.
From time to time they stopped to listen to the instructions that flowed directly into their small earpieces, or simply to pause to examine their surroundings. Members of the Spetsnaz Vympel death squads, this group were the Wolverines — a creature from the weasel family, known for its frightening ferocity and strength. The name suited these men perfectly.
The Wolverines were the most feared of all, simply because of who led them — a brutal assassin renowned for stopping at nothing in the pursuit of his objective — Uli Borshov. The black-bearded giant stood well over six and a half feet tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. The man was a psychopath, but a useful one, let loose by the Russian Federal Security Services on jobs that needed doing by any means.
The area around the town and surrounding forest was alive with standard Russian military forces. But they would keep their distance once they realized Spetsnaz GRU were in the area. More so if it were the Vympel, rumored to think nothing of putting a bullet into the brain of any overenthusiastic soldier who got in their way.
At a signal the men darted forward another hundred feet and melted back into the shadows. Their goal was simple: find a man — just one, but one important enough to have a mission launched in person by the president.
Care had to be taken. The people of Chechnya hated everyone and everything of Russian origin, and Russia had given them good reason. As long as the mainly Muslim country was disorganized and fragmented, it was less of a threat — Russia
expended significant and brutal effort keeping it that way.
The Spetsnaz sprinted another hundred feet. They didn’t know or care what the man they sought had done. The president wanted him, dead or alive. Borshov was leading the infiltration and search, and Borshov preferred him dead.
The giant pressed one large blunt finger into his ear as he listened to the updated information — an address was received. He nodded, and then changed frequencies to talk to his team.
The net pulled a little tighter as the killers closed in.
* * *
Millinov walked slowly around his two assistants. Doctors Yelena Mutko and Anatoly Lavrov were dressed in thick, polymer contamination suits. The hermetically sealed outfits were extremely tough but lightweight, and their perspex face shields gave them good, but not unrestricted vision.
They both looked pale and nervous. Good, he thought — keep them sharp. He ran his hand over Yelena’s back, feeling the huge metallic lump beneath the plasticized material. Each suit had its own oxygen supply, so they were effectively quarantined from gas, liquid splatter, radioactive dust, and even some spectrums of rays for a period of time. However, they traded mobility for safety in the cumbersome suits.
Satisfied with the seals, Millinov patted Anatoly on the shoulder, and rested his hand on the access panel that would open the outer door to the isolation chamber. Nodding at them, he pressed the recessed button. The door slid back with the small sigh of sucking air — the negative air pressure was designed to draw anything in, rather than allow anything to float out.
Yelena hugged a large glass jar to her chest and Anatoly held a pair of large forceps. Millinov rushed back to the viewing screen and watched as the inner door to the chamber opened and his two assistants stepped in. They paused. He knew what they were experiencing; it was an unsettling sight — the things now infested the inside of the chamber. Ceiling, floor, walls, the capsule — everything was covered in the mucoid blobs. Some areas of the chamber looked polished, as though they had been scoured with an industrial solvent.