Black Mountain

SEVENTEEN

Alex’s body seemed to switch to a different physical plane. His heartbeat sped up and waves of natural steroids and adrenalines flooded his system, combining with the synthetic chemicals already embedded in the flesh and bones of his body. People screamed and rushed about, but to Alex it was as if they were moving through an atmosphere as thickly viscous as honey.

He sensed the pressure exerted on the trigger of the gun pressed into his forehead, and was out of the way of the muzzle flash before the bullet had even exited the barrel. He grabbed the gunman’s wrist, twisting the gun from his grasp, then flung him towards the large window at the front of the apartment. As the man smashed through the glass and sailed out into the air, Alex emptied the gun of its bullets — into the crowded packets of explosive circling the man’s waist. The effect was devastating.

Adira could hear sirens in the distance. She couldn’t wait any longer; she had to go in now. She drew in a slow breath, and spoke a small prayer to calm herself.

As she was about to leave cover for the foyer, both handguns up and ready, there was a crash from above. She looked up at the hotel’s third floor and saw a body falling from the window. Immediately two shots rang out and the figure detonated in midair, obliterated by an orange and red bloom. The head sailed through the air towards the beach.

Guess that’s my signal, Adira thought, and pressed herself back around the corner to avoid the debris of the explosion. She wondered if whoever was up on the third floor had been prepared for the shrapnel that blew back through the balcony windows.

She sprinted to the hotel’s front doors and didn’t pause as she entered the foyer. As she’d hoped, the lookout had ventured out from behind the desk to investigate the explosion. Perhaps it had come earlier than he’d expected… or he hadn’t expected it at all. His head jerked around towards Adira and his eyes widened. She knew her outfit — a bikini and the two handguns — was distracting. By the time he’d pulled his gaze away from her firm breasts and taut belly, the twin muzzles of the small black pistols were pointed at his face.

The hostages in the room were already low on the ground and in no danger from the C4 blast wave. Alex dived to the ground himself as the wave began to move outwards, but only two of the three remaining terrorists had the reflexes to do the same. The standing man only had time to throw up an arm before a dark swarm of hot metal hornets had flung him backwards and shredded his frame. His black and white keffiyeh rapidly turned a dark red, and his body left a wet streak on the wall as he slid down it.

Alex looked over at the hostages — most were frozen in shock, but they would be okay for now.

He turned to deal with the remaining terrorists. One had sprinted from the room into the corridor, and Alex heard his footsteps change as he entered the stairwell. The other made a lunge for the upturned weapons table and the bomb detonators strewn on the floor, then lifted his gun to fire indiscriminately into the group of hostages.

Alex screamed in rage as he heard bullets hit the soft flesh of the women and children. He launched himself at the man and drove him into the wall with his shoulder, and felt his ribs break. When he lifted him, he saw that he’d brought his gun around, but not to shoot at Alex. Instead, he was aiming at the belt of explosives circling his waist.

Alex grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted it hard; the splintering bone could be heard throughout the room. Alex drew back his fist and delivered a blow to the man’s head that shattered his eye socket and depressed his cheekbone. As he drew back for a second punch, he heard a child wailing behind him. He turned briefly to see the little girl who had been so fearful for his own safety now crying in horror at his ferocious behaviour. Alex’s eyes locked on the girl’s face and his fingers loosened to let the man drop.

A voice stopped him. Its words were indistinct, but he recognised it somehow, even though he didn’t know where from. His grip on the man tightened again and he frowned. The voice came again, this time clearer and more urgent.

He’ll kill them all if you let him go.

As he hesitated, a furious scream sounded in his mind. Kill him!

He turned away from the girl and dragged the semiconscious man out through the door. In the hallway, he held his limp body against the wall, set his teeth and drew his fist back. This time, the final blow landed, causing plaster to rain down on the hostages inside the room.

Adira heard an amplified calm Egyptian voice floating up from the street outside. The police had arrived and had immediately commenced their negotiations. Meanwhile, their snipers were undoubtedly in position. She avoided the lift in case it had been booby-trapped and headed for the stairs, now armed with only one gun. It still had a full clip. She went lightly up two floors before freezing. Rushed steps came from above, a single heavy body coming down fast. She tucked the Beretta into her swimsuit and waited. If it was an escaped guest, she’d stay out of their way. If not… She balanced on her toes and waited.

The barrel of his gun came first, then the flapping keffiyeh framing wide panicked eyes. Hezar-Jihadi.

Adira flicked out a hand and jerked the barrel of his machine gun upwards, immediately following with a flat-handed strike up under his chin that knocked him backwards. He hit the ground hard and she moved quickly to stand over him, disgust and loathing written all over her face. So many of her people had been shot in the back, blown up or had their throats slit in the night by these creatures. She pulled her gun free, smiled grimly and pointed at her chest. ‘Israeli,’ she told him in Arabic. She knew he saw the small blue star tattooed on the skin between the thumb and forefinger of her gun hand.

He quickly pulled free his own handgun, but she was far faster. She fired without even blinking. The bullet shattered both the bones in his forearm, causing him to drop his weapon. She stepped over him, indifferent to his agony, and leaned towards his face. ‘How many are you?’

He swore at her, calling her a whore, cursing her family, her country and anything else that came to his pain-filled mind.

Her response was another bullet, this one in his left thigh, skilfully avoiding the femoral artery but puncturing the large quadriceps muscle. She asked again and received the same response. She repeated her own response, but in his other thigh.

She put her bare foot on the new wound and pressed down. ‘I have plenty more bullets,’ she said with a deadly smile. This time she aimed at his groin.

Alex heard the shots, and leaped down the flight of steps, his feet hardly touching the floor. He found Adira standing over the corpse of the last terrorist. The man’s body was riddled with bullet wounds, including one in the centre of his forehead. He knew now that Adira was a soldier, but her brutality surprised him. Perhaps this was the real Adira Senesh.

‘Find out anything?’ he asked.

She shook her head, and Alex wondered if she’d even tried.

He listened for a moment, blocking out the police negotiators and sirens outside. Except for the struggling of the hostages upstairs, the hotel was silent. For Adira to have got this far, the man in the foyer must already be dead. The terrorist at their feet was the last.

‘Time to go,’ he said.

Adira nodded, and dropped the Beretta on top of the corpse.

The ground floor of the hotel was suddenly boiling with activity as police, forensics and Egyptian SWAT teams examined every inch of the building. The hostages were brought down from the third floor and escorted out of the hotel with towels draped over their heads to protect them from the media’s relentless gaze. This suited Adira and Alex perfectly. Towels over their heads, they mixed in with the crowd of battered and scared people stumbling into the glare of the local television news station’s halogen lamps.

Adira pulled her towel a little lower over her face; the sunlight coupled with the artificial lighting was almost blinding. She tensed as one of the policemen lifted Alex’s towel to look at him briefly. The police were alert to any surviving terrorists attempting to slip out with the freed captives. Alex’s face was still bruised and his upper body coated in dried blood, just like many of the male hostages. His grey-green eyes were enough to clear him of suspicion, but Adira cursed inwardly nonetheless. She hoped the momentary exposure of Alex’s face hadn’t been picked up by any of the cameras focused on them. As soon as the policeman waved them on, she grabbed Alex’s arm and pulled him past the medical teams, not letting go until they were back at their safe house.

They’d waited long enough. They’d go directly to the black-market forgers for their documents and be out of Egypt within the next few hours.

General Meir Shavit listened in silence as Salamon called in the incident. A terrorist attack at an Egyptian Red Sea hotel, which had been thwarted by one of the hotel’s patrons. Impossible. Unless…

‘Some of the hostages thought the man was a guest,’ Salamon said. ‘They heard him speak French. But others believed he was American. And there’s something you should see — it should be coming through now.’

Shavit grunted as his computer pinged. The news clip was attached to an email with the subject line: Observe from minute 00:02:35. He opened it, skipped forward to the recommended time, then let it play. He paused the film when a police officer lifted the towel from the face of a man accompanied by a brown-skinned, athletic-looking young woman. It was almost impossible to see the man’s face without digital enhancing, but Shavit didn’t need to.

‘They are your targets. Where are you now, Salamon?’

‘We’re already on our way.’

‘Good, good. They will need documentation so talk to the local forgers. Be as insistent as you need to be — I want this resolved quickly.’

‘We’ll be there within the hour.’

Shavit hung up, and looked at the large map of the Middle East that dominated one wall. His eyes ranged across Egypt’s borders — the Mediterranean to the north; Saudi Arabia; Libya; Sudan. The sub-Saharan countries were not safe by any means, but their airlines carried out very little screening of passengers, and their officials were amenable to corruption.

Still too many options, he thought.

He turned back to his computer and played the clip again from the beginning, this time listening intently to the hostages’ descriptions of the carnage the lone man had wrought upon the terrorists — ‘a madman’, ‘insanely powerful’. ‘He had a monster inside him,’ said a small girl with a tear-streaked face.

Shavit rubbed his forehead. ‘What have you got yourself into, Addy?’ He sat back and closed his weary eyes. Good luck, Salamon, he thought.

News of the thwarted terrorist attack was beamed into millions of living rooms and workplaces around the world. Most viewed the report with mild indifference. Such attacks were so commonplace that only the most savage held the general public’s attention for more than a few moments.

But there were other eyes that watched, eyes that missed nothing as they scanned thousands of images per second, looking for signs, patterns, faces… anything that might be of interest to their employers. The towel had been lifted from Alex’s face for only a second, but it was enough for his features to be digitised, matched and identified.

A notification signature was sent out. The Arcadian had been found.

‘That sonofabitch. I knew it.’

Captain Robert Graham leaned back from the surveillance loop he was watching in the empty lab office and thought for a minute. He had personally requested that the Arcadian subject be placed on the global watch list — he hadn’t known why; it was just a gut feeling. After all, Alex Hunter was dead.

Now he remembered the soldier’s amazing physiology and recuperative powers… and Jack Hammerson’s close bond with the man. There was no way the HAWC commander would have incinerated his best soldier without trying everything in his power to save him. Graham could see now that Hammerson had written Hunter off too easily.

He jabbed the intercom button. ‘I need someone tracked. I don’t care if it’s across the Red Sea, Berlin or the moon — just don’t let him out of your sight.’

Colonel Jack Hammerson stood at his office window looking down at the unarmed combat classes taking place on the field of the USSTRATCOM compound. Sloppy, he thought, and shook his head.

Hammerson had run the HAWCs, the elite Special Forces teams, for five years now. Though he’d succeeded in raising the bar every year when it came to the quality and lethality of his new team members, he couldn’t help comparing them to the greatest operative he or his other HAWCs had ever seen… even though that man was now gone.

He watched the class a little longer, and ground his teeth. Sloppy, damned sloppy. He’d send this group home. Better to remain a big fish in their former special ops groups than be an anonymous dead HAWC on some shitty battlefield in some remote area somewhere on the planet.

Hammerson was a tough commander — he had to be. His force was the hardest in the world to join, and even harder to stay in. Like him, the men and women he trained came from either the SEALS, Rangers, Green Berets or Alpha Force, and all needed to be the best at what they did before they were even considered as a candidate for the HAWCs. They also had to have a specialisation that Hammerson deemed useful. After the initial assessment and training, only about half were offered a permanent place. Hammerson’s people didn’t just have to be good; they had to be outstanding. Their missions were always deadly and often classified as high terminal probability — suicidal to most other groups. The HAWCs excelled at missions that others had failed at, or couldn’t even contemplate attempting.

Hammerson’s computer pinged softly behind him, immediately followed by a buzzing from his back pocket and then again from his breast pocket — the alert was obviously of high importance. He turned to see his whole screen flaring red with a single code word: Lazarus. His mind didn’t comprehend its meaning for a few seconds, even though he had programmed the coded alert himself. Then shock travelled through his entire system.

Freakingodamnhell…

Hammerson pulled the phone from its cradle. ‘Get me Sam Reid, Priority-1.’

He wouldn’t have to wait long. Priority-1 was reserved for the most critical of events: Commander in Chief on deck; base infiltration; or, at its worst, the breakout of war. With a P-1, Hammerson’s assistant had the authority to break in on any communications system anytime anywhere in the world to find the personnel he needed. First Lieutenant Sam Reid was on leave, but that didn’t matter.

After a few seconds, Sam Reid’s laidback voice came on the line. ‘Reid. Go ahead, boss.’

‘Report in,’ ordered Hammerson, not bothering with courtesies. ‘I have a proximity alert for the Arcadian.’

There was the sound of glass breaking at Sam Reid’s end of the line.