Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Hey, wait—”

  Tyndareus lowered his hands to the tablet computer resting on his lap and tapped the screen. Fiona heard the hiss of pressurized air, and glimpsed movement in the corner of her eye. She turned in the direction of the sound and saw that a section of the wall to her left had opened. It was not an exit however, only a small recess, like a cupboard at floor level.

  Several small beige shapes darted out, the suddenness of their movement startling Fiona. She let out a yelp and drew her legs up onto the examination table, even as the rational part of her brain realized there was no threat, or more precisely, no obvious threat. The little shapes were mice, and not nasty mutant killer mice either. Just regular little mice, like Stuart Little. There were at least half a dozen of them still in the recess. Three or four had scurried out when the door opened, scouting the room, but showing no signs of hostility.

  But she doubted Auschwitz’s Angel of Death was interested in gauging her reaction to a rodent infestation. Mice were often a disease vector. Had Tyndareus infected them with plague or Hanta virus? Was he going to watch to see how long it took her to die?

  Tyndareus’s voice filled the room again. “An associate of mine was working to create a plant-based organic bio-weapon. The field tests were rather disappointing, but the concept is promising, and as I’ve already invested substantial resources, it only seems prudent to salvage what I can.

  “There is an aerosol delivery system in the ceiling that will deliver the spores. You may feel free to take cover. In fact, I would prefer it if you did. It will provide me with a better understanding of how this organism spreads, if you are able to avoid initial infection.”

  Fiona had only just begun to digest what the old man was telling her when she saw his hand reach for the tablet again, and before she could utter a single word of protest, his finger touched the screen. A hissing sound filled the air, and Fiona felt drops of liquid, like a light mist, falling onto her exposed skin.

  32

  Roraima, Brazil

  Gazing up at the night sky, it was easy to comprehend how the ancients had looked to the stars and seen their gods. Hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization, there was no light pollution to mute the starlight. High up on a plateau above the Amazon rain forest—the locals called it a tepui, the weathered remains of a sandstone table land that had once stretched across the northern reaches of the entire continent—the sky was not merely a dome but an all-encompassing sphere, with planets and stars and galaxies scattered like gold dust on black velvet.

  I never knew there were so many of them, Gallo thought.

  They were not the stars she knew, at least not all of them, and yet they might very well have been the stars glimpsed by the ancient Greeks. Her enjoyment of this rare sight was dampened by the circumstances that had brought her here.

  She had awakened on a plane already bound for Brazil, after having been sedated and blindfolded to preserve the secret location of Cerberus’s headquarters. Judging by the length of time they had spent in the air, she guessed it was somewhere in Europe, but there was no way to know for certain. Even Kenner was not privy to that information.

  Now that she had given Kenner an exact destination, Gallo was uncertain about what he expected from her. She had been bundled onto the helicopter for the long flight to the tepui, but now that they were at the site, no one was paying attention to her. While the helicopter crew off-loaded supplies—food, gear, drums of fuel—Kenner, Rohn and the half-dozen Cerberus goons that were accompanying them had immediately gone to work rigging ropes for their descent into an enormous sinkhole, nearly two miles across, that corresponded with the coordinates Fiona had identified on the ancient map.

  The sinkholes were a common feature of the tepuis, and some of the largest contained unique biospheres, with flora and fauna living and evolving in complete isolation for untold millennia. Because the tepuis were so remote, most of these unique biospheres remained pristine, untouched by all but a few bold explorers. There was no better place in the world to hide an Amazon city, and getting to it, or at least to the place where it had once stood, would require a rappel down several hundred feet of sheer cliff. Going in would be the easy part, since gravity would do all the work. Getting back out would require climbing those same ropes. There would be some risk involved, and while Gallo was undaunted by the physical challenge, she saw the impending descent as an opportunity to stand her ground.

  She found Kenner at the edge of the sinkhole, peering down into the yawning void while the rest of the Cerberus team rigged the rappelling ropes under the glare of generator-powered work lights. His back was turned, and he was close enough to the brink that one good shove would have sent him over, but Gallo dismissed the idea as soon as it formed. It wasn’t the thought of taking a life or the psychological toll that action would have exacted that stopped her though. Killing Kenner simply wouldn’t help her situation one bit. Instead, it would make things worse, for her and for Fiona. But if he wanted her continued cooperation, Kenner was going to have to give her something in return.

  “Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait for daylight?” she called out.

  Kenner, smiling broadly, turned to face her. “I’m sure it would, but as they say, every second counts. Besides, the sun only reaches the bottom of this shaft for a few hours at midday. We’re going to need daylight to search for the Amazon city. That means we climb through the night.”

  Gallo bit her lip and took a deep breath to gather her courage. “You need to let Fiona go.”

  Kenner’s smile fell. “Augustina…”

  “I won’t take another step, and I most certainly will not climb down into that hole, until I know she’s safe. Now, I suppose you could tie me up and lower me kicking and screaming. That’s up to you. But I will not help you unless you do this for me.”

  He shook his head sadly. “If it were up to me, I would have already let her go. But it’s not. Mr. Tyndareus is running this show.”

  “Then tell him—”

  Kenner raised a hand to silence her. The gesture was so abrupt, and so out of character for him, that Gallo flinched. After a moment of tense silence, he spoke again in a low voice that was not completely unsympathetic. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Augustina, but the girl is probably already dead.”

  Gallo felt the blood leave her face. A rushing sound filled her ears and she staggered back a step.

  Kenner continued. “You must know that Mr. Tyndareus intended to kill you both as soon as you had told him what he needed to know. It’s nothing short of miraculous that I was able to convince him to spare you.”

  Some primitive part of Gallo’s brain took control of her body. She launched herself at Kenner, arms extended to shove him off the precipice or perhaps carry him along in a suicidal plunge. Neither actually happened. Instead, he side-stepped, as if anticipating this reaction, and he swept her into a bear hug from behind, pinning her arms to her sides and lifting her off the ground. She squirmed, trying to wrench free. She kicked back at his shins, but he did not relent.

  His voice hissed in her ear. “Your mistake was thinking that you still had anything left to bargain with. I don’t need your help anymore. I’m keeping you alive as a favor. Old times sake. You really ought to get down on your knees and thank me.”

  He took her wrist in his hand and tugged up her sleeve, revealing the Herculean tattoo. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed this. Your allegiance is...regrettable. I might be able to overlook it, but others might not be so willing. Now, if you want to run, be my guest.” He twisted around, away from the edge, and then set her down, expelling her from his embrace with a shove that sent her lurching forward.

  “I won’t stop you,” he continued, once more affecting a tone of commiseration. “Of course, there’s really nowhere to go. And I can’t promise that Vigor won’t hunt you down for sport. That’s rather his style, you know.”

  Gallo propped herself up on hands and knees. The reptile brain was still in control, we
ighing the primal options: fight or flight? Both were equally futile, but the third choice—surrender—never entered into the equation. If Fiona was truly dead, then no matter what Kenner promised, that would be her fate as well.

  As much as she wanted to tear the bastard’s face off, she did not want to meet her end on his terms.

  Instead, she ran.

  Kenner let out a dismayed shout, surprised that she had chosen to brave the treacherous landscape in the dark, but Gallo did not slow.

  Although she had stood in the glow of the electrical lights for only a few minutes, her night vision was badly compromised. In her peripheral vision, she could see the distant horizon’s faint outline silhouetted against the starry sky, but the ground right in front of her was uniformly black. Millions of years of wind and weather had sculpted the summit into a bizarre landscape, with natural pillars and arches that looked like melting wax. There were craters and pools of rainwater that were incredibly pure and deceptively deep. It was a deadly obstacle course, made all the more perilous by the scrubby vegetation that clung to every crevice. Gallo stumbled and crashed through the maze, ignoring the branches and rocky protrusions that caught and tore at both the fabric of her jeans and at her skin.

  A root snagged one foot, and she went sprawling again, smashing into a tangle of thin branches that scratched her face and snagged her hair. In the stunned instant that followed, she heard more shouts and the sound of footsteps, and she realized that Kenner did not intend to let her run away after all. Despite everything else, she felt a rush of satisfaction at having disappointed him, spoiling his twisted fantasy of her groveling. She knew it would be a short-lived satisfaction if she did not get moving again, so she scrambled up, half-crawling for the first few steps, and then she resumed running blindly.

  With the exception of the two crewmen unloading the helicopter, all of the Cerberus men were on the ropes already, too far away to help Kenner run her down. But he had been right about the lack of escape routes. The tepui rose from the surrounding landscape like a five-hundred-foot-tall pillar. A world class rock climber might have been able to scale the nearly sheer vertical cliffs, but climbing down them, in the dark, without any kind of ropes or equipment, was unthinkable, and that was if she was able to find the cliff without falling over.

  If Kenner goes, too, it might be worth it.

  The thought was yanked from her head when Kenner’s outstretched hand caught hold of her long black hair. Her feet flew out from under her, but this time she did not fall. Instead, she was pulled back, enfolded once more in his embrace.

  “Bitch! I’m trying to—”

  There was a loud thump and then another, as Gallo felt something smack the back of her head. Her vision flashed blue for a moment, but in that instant, Kenner’s arms fell away, and she was free again. She stumbled forward and would have done another face-plant, but a firm grip closed on her wrist, steadying her. A familiar voice reached out from the darkness. “Come with me.”

  Gallo’s thoughts were still fuzzy from being struck in the head, but there was no mistaking the clipped manner of speech and the distinctive Portuguese-flavored Brazilian accent. “Cintia?”

  “Hurry,” Dourado urged, offering no explanation, but tugging her along.

  The woman’s appearance, here at one of the remotest places on Earth, was about as unlikely as divine intervention, and it triggered an explosion of questions that threatened to trip Gallo up like the roots hidden in the darkness. Even with Kenner on her heels, she felt paralyzed by the impossibility of Dourado’s intervention.

  Only Kenner wasn’t chasing her anymore. In the dim starlight, Gallo could make out the silhouette of her savior. Dourado was holding something, a club or a tree limb. That answered one question at least. She had struck Kenner from behind, and Kenner’s cranium had cue-balled into hers.

  The realization that Dourado had bought them a narrow window of escape helped her put aside the more difficult questions. She followed blindly, trusting that Dourado’s night vision had to be better than her own. But there was one question that demanded an answer. “Where are we going?”

  “We have to hide.”

  “Hide?” Gallo said, incredulous. “That’s your plan?”

  “No, I—”

  Dourado’s answer was cut off by the harsh report of a pistol. Gallo felt something sizzle past her head, and then the world in front of her was revealed in the harsh brilliance of a high-intensity spotlight.

  “The next one will not be a warning.” It was Rohn. He did not shout, but somehow his low gravelly voice seemed as loud as the gunshot.

  33

  A blast of frigid air swirled through the hold of the aged Lockheed L100 as the cargo ramp began lowering. Cabin pressure had already been equalized to match the conditions outside, so there was no sudden suction. Still, Pierce held on tight to a hanging cargo strap as the tail end of the aircraft opened up, revealing the black emptiness of the sky above the Amazon rain forest.

  Earlier, when Lazarus had suggested the plan, Pierce had been able to depersonalize the risk, put aside his fear. Lazarus had done this dozens of times. He knew what he was doing, and Pierce knew it was the best chance they had of finding Gallo and Dourado. But now, literally standing on the brink of executing that plan, he was having second thoughts. He took several deep breaths, filling his lungs and saturating his blood with pure oxygen from the mountaineering-style respirator. Don’t think about it, he told himself.

  Lazarus lowered his ATN PVS-7 night vision goggles—‘NODs,’ short for ‘night optical devices’—into place and tapped them with a fingertip, signaling Pierce and Carter to do the same. Pierce switched his on, and the dark interior of the plane was revealed in startling clarity, albeit bathed in a creepy green glow. With their goggles, respirators and bulky thermal suits, Carter and Lazarus looked like alien hunters from a science fiction movie. The guns and knives strapped and holstered to their bodies intensified the effect.

  Lazarus had made all the arrangements while they were still over the Atlantic. His past experience as a Special Forces soldier had left him with a long list of contacts who could provide anything he needed on short notice, and a knowledge of how to procure those items without arousing the interest of the local authorities.

  Pierce was astonished, and more than a little dismayed, by the realization that there were people out there, in every city he supposed, standing ready to provide specialized military hardware at a moment’s notice. He was having difficulty believing that it was really possible for an ordinary person who knew the right people to simply make a phone call and outfit an army. Then Lazarus told him how much it would all cost. The final bill made the money Pierce had spent on the genetic sequencing equipment for Carter seem like a petty cash expenditure by comparison.

  “When I told you money was no object,” he had confessed to Lazarus, “I didn’t realize how much money that would mean. I mean, I’ll pay it, but…wow.”

  “It’s only money,” Lazarus said. “People are going to die tonight. With a little luck it will be them, not us. This equipment might mean the difference between life and death, but no amount of money is going to make it easier to pull the trigger when the time comes.”

  “Helluva pep talk,” Pierce said, but he knew the big man was right. He had faced death before, but he had never been confronted with the prospect of having to take a life.

  “Don’t personalize the enemy,” Lazarus went on. “Think of it like a game. Like one of those video games Fiona was always playing...” He trailed off, the memory evidently more painful than expected.

  Pierce knew exactly what Lazarus meant. He had watched Fiona and some of Lazarus’s former teammates spend endless hours fighting aliens and enemies—and sometimes each other—in Xbox games. Treat it like a game, treat the Cerberus men like video game villains. Don’t get psyched out.

  “We’ll jump from twenty-thousand feet,” Lazarus said. “We’ll be using static-line deployed ram-air canopies. That means they�
��ll open as soon as you jump. No free fall, no counting to fifty. The chutes will function like glider wings. The control toggles are intuitive. Pull left to go left, right to go right. Just before touchdown, pull both hard to flare…brake. I’ll talk you through all that on the way down.

  “Hook in,” Lazarus directed. Despite the wind rushing through the cabin and the throaty roar of the engines, Pierce heard him clearly, courtesy of the earbud connected to a digitally encrypted walkie-talkie clipped to the combat vest under his coveralls.

  Carter snapped a D-ring, connected to the ripcord on her parachute pack, to the cable that ran the length of their chartered plane. Lazarus checked the connection and then moved to do the same for Pierce.

  Pierce hooked in, then gave the carabiner a tug. Lazarus checked the D-ring and gave Pierce a thumbs-up before hooking his own chute to the line.

  The pilot’s voice came over their comm system. “Forty miles out.”

  “Roger,” Lazarus replied. He turned to Pierce and Carter. “Ready?”

  Pierce nodded. Despite the fact that he was about to jump out of a plane for the first time in his life, nothing short of a missile would keep him from helping the people he loved.

  They would be leaving the aircraft thirty miles out, distant enough that the Cerberus men would not hear the sound of the plane’s engines, much less suspect that an incursion was underway, but close enough for them to glide to the objective. With their ram-air chutes and about four miles of air between them and the ground, there would be plenty of time to find a good landing spot.

  Lazarus had acquired Landsat imagery of the target zone, a high plateau in the Roraima region, surrounding what appeared to be a deep sinkhole. The imagery revealed nothing about what lay at the bottom of that chasm, but Pierce felt certain it was Kenner’s true objective, which presented yet another challenge. The Cerberus force had already been in place for several hours, which meant that they were probably already inside the sinkhole. The only way to get ahead of them was to bypass the summit and drop directly into the unknown abyss. While that course was fraught with risk, the biggest concern was getting back out again.