Black Mountain

FOUR

‘Fuck it all to hell!’ Captain Robert Graham threw the clipboard across the room, making Marshal and several of the scientific assistants duck for cover. ‘And clean that stinking mess out of there before the general decides to pay us a surprise visit.’

Graham turned back to the screen and hit a button that caused the glass cell’s window to become opaque so he could no longer see the screaming man raking the flesh from his blinded skull.

Lieutenant Alan Marshal turned to the assistants who were still taking notes. ‘Batch ARC-044 — gross psychosis, physical manifestations of self-harm. Significant display of strength and resistance to pain — unfortunately, both turned against subjects’ own selves.’

Captain Graham rested on his knuckles at a long bench, grinding his teeth. ‘More than sixty dead, comatose, insane or exploded test subjects,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘At this churn rate, we’ll end up with more soldiers in body bags than at fucking Pearl Harbor.’

He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose for a second, before staring down at his hands. They shook slightly. He slowly lifted his head to look along the remaining row of cell windows.

Years, he thought darkly, his frustration at the constant failure festering inside him. Only one success, one enhanced soldier, after countless millions spent… and we weren’t ready for him. It was an accident, an aberration, a one-in-a-million shot that was never expected to succeed. He snorted sourly. Blinded by the hubris of success, he had released the man back to duty, fully expecting that the results would be easily replicated, that the primary subject would be the first of thousands. But reality had kicked him in the teeth.

Human biology is the same… and different. Identical twins brought up in different environments were subjected to a thousand differing variables that could significantly alter the direction of their physiology and psychology. Whatever Hammerson’s soldier had had inside him to begin with had enabled the full absorption, fusion and utilisation of the Arcadian treatment. But what the fuck had it been?

Years, he thought again, grinding his molars.

He heard the sound of the pressurised dart-gun in the shuttered room as the latest mutilated soul was brought down like a maddened rhino. The man’s last days would be spent in an induced coma, until a euthanasia order was approved. Then his brain would be dissected and whatever clues remained would be teased from the corrupted tissue. Even hours after the subjects had been terminated, their flesh was still hot to the touch. It was as if their bodies acted like overheating reactors, causing a total physiological meltdown. Their skin was covered in blistering sores and their internal organs were little more than soup by the time he got to open them up. It was always the same… except for that one success.

He cursed again as he recalled how fucking Jack Hammerson had sent the man out into the mission meat grinder. He crushed his eyes shut, his knuckles turning white where they pressed onto the bench top.

Graham knew that impatience was his enemy now. He leaned back and drew in a deep breath. It had taken Jonas Salk seven years to perfect his first polio vaccine, and the man had worked with 220,000 volunteers and 20,000 physicians. Opening his eyes, he looked again along the rows of test rooms. There were just three more cubicles to examine.

He spoke with a deep feeling of lassitude. ‘Is Batch Forty ready — the one where you introduced significant levels of cortisol directly into the brain prior to introduction of the Arcadian treatment?’

Marshal came and stood next to his superior officer, holding a clipboard in front of his chest like a shield. ‘That’s correct, sir — cortisol introduced into the cerebellum in the hypothalamus and thalamus junction. We figured that even though we’d already tried physically traumatising the brain, maybe the actual destruction wasn’t the key. Maybe it was only the chemical effects of the destruction, and as cortisol floods the brain following significant trauma…’

Graham nodded and sucked in a deep breath. He knew that his superiors wouldn’t be patient forever, and without the original Arcadian subject to hand they had to resort to a more heuristic approach — trial and error. Or rather, trial and fail, and fail, and fail again.

Fuck that Hammerson for burning the only successful subject’s body, he thought.

Then he stood straighter and pressed a button beside the next large window. The darkened glass immediately cleared.

Graham’s mouth dropped open. ‘Oh, thank you, God.’

The young man in the cubicle sat on the edge of the bed talking to one of the huge male nurses.

Graham rushed to the next window, and then the next. He smiled and lowered his head to shut his eyes for a moment, before glancing up again quickly, as if to make sure his tired brain wasn’t playing tricks on him.

A small blush of a rash on the men’s cheeks, but they were fine — sane looking, normal. He turned to Lieutenant Marshal, a glow of gratification on his face. ‘Ready them for the next round of testing.’

General Meir Shavit wrinkled his nose at the sight before him. Doctor Moeshe Weisz chuckled softly at the look on his face and turned back to the man on the bed. His body was coated head to foot in an oyster-coloured, jelly-like substance that had also stained the pillow and sheets he lay upon — it was a ghastly sight.

‘He’s physically intact, but lapsing in and out of consciousness,’ Weisz told the general. ‘Don’t be too concerned by the way he looks; his body’s still expelling the bacterial residue. Stinks like gasoline and old fish, doesn’t it? We also found this when we did a full body scan.’ He held up a test tube with a small flesh-coloured pellet inside. ‘It’s quite sophisticated miniaturised electronics — tracking device, I’d say.’

Shavit’s eyes narrowed.

Weisz nodded. ‘Seems someone wanted to keep an eye on him. We disabled it, of course.’

Shavit turned his attention back to the man on the bed. ‘Turn it back on, and have it dropped out in the centre of the Negev.’

Weisz had no intention of heading out into the Negev Desert himself. He opened his mouth to tell the general he needed to delegate the task to someone more appropriate, but the general’s cold stare spoke of authority and a ruthlessness beyond anything Weisz could summon. Weisz swallowed the words he’d been about to say and simply nodded.

He cleared his throat and read from his clipboard. ‘This is the most interesting case I’ve ever worked on. The microorganism that infected him has a pathogenesis like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life.’ He motioned towards the form on the bed. ‘This man should be dead a hundred times over, but his extraordinary physiology and the compounds he was being treated with have made him a unique specimen — a unique and valuable specimen.’

Shavit lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the air, making Weisz wince at the breach of the laboratory’s sterile conditions. ‘Will he live?’

Weisz paused for a few seconds to consider the question. ‘Yes.’

Shavit grunted. ‘Good. Send me the file.’

General Shavit sat alone in his office. He drew deeply on his cigarette, let the smoke escape through tight lips and tried hard to stifle the wet cough that squeezed up from lungs congested from decades of smoking. He lifted the folder on his desk and smiled grimly at the Hebrew characters on the cover: Project Golem — his little joke, or perhaps his wish. All Jews knew the legend of the golem — an ancient mythological figure moulded from the clay of the Vltava River by the holiest of rabbis, Judah Loew ben Bezalel. The powerful man-like creature had defended the Jews in their time of need. Unfortunately, the story didn’t have a happy ending — the creature that had at first been their saviour had become increasingly violent, until the rabbi returned it to an inert state.

A golem berserker — maybe that is what we now have in our possession, Shavit thought, and his laugh deteriorated into a wheezy cough.

He opened the folder to the report’s latest pages and read silently for a few seconds, his brows knitted. Every report produced by the scientific team charged with investigating the American Special Forces soldier both astonished and frustrated him. Every time they learned a little more about Alex Hunter, known as the Arcadian subject, it turned out that they actually understood less.

Colonel Jack Hammerson, commander of the secretive HAWCs division within the US Special Forces, had worked with Mossad, Israel’s intelligence and covert operations organisation, to get Hunter out of the country before his own medical teams could claim the soldier’s near lifeless body for experimentation and dissection. Hammerson had taken a huge gamble by handing Hunter over to a foreign power — both in terms of the man’s life and his own career. Hammerson’s own agency believed the Arcadian subject was now nothing more than powdered ash in the bottom of one of their powerful military furnaces.

Yes, Hammerson had gambled, but so had Shavit. He had authorised his niece, a Mossad operative, to retrieve the man, even though his body was riddled with a disease that everyone thought would turn it to mush, and which could have devastated Shavit’s entire country. But Shavit knew he had no choice: the possible rewards were too great to ignore. Hunter had been brought to the Israeli military’s secure laboratory beneath the Negev Desert, where Weisz’s team had succeeded not only in eradicating the lethal microorganism but also in reviving the man.

Shavit felt he had won that round, but knew he was still in a race — to unlock the Arcadian’s secrets before the man self-destructed. And it was one he fully intended to win; the future of Israel depended on it. The Americans would eventually succeed in reproducing their experimental soldier, but although they were magnificent at creating outstanding advancements, they were terrible at hanging on to them. Within a few years, the Russians and Chinese would have stolen everything they needed to create their own Arcadian soldiers, and then their proxies across the Middle East would soon follow.

The general flipped to the report’s next page and started reading the section headed ‘Cellular Repair and Revivification’. Analysis of Captain Alex Hunter’s DNA showed that the ends of his chromosomes, his telomeres, had stopped fraying. A side note from Weisz explained the significance of this to the layman: a telomere was a biological capstone, like the plastic tip on a shoelace, and its role was to stop the chromosome deteriorating, or fraying. Most cells had an ability to divide about fifty times before they started to deteriorate and shorten, and therefore begin aging. Scientists could read the length of a cell’s telomeres and provide an accurate picture of the cell’s age and how many more times it would replicate. But Alex Hunter’s DNA strands had ceased fraying — in fact, the telomere tips were almost totally intact. Weisz hypothesised that this could be why the man had such enormous potential for rapid cellular repair. It also meant that Alex Hunter might stop aging; or, at the other extreme, his entire system could turn malignant, as the only other cells known to have no finite chronological barrier were cancer cells. Like most of the analysis in these reports, it ended with a brief notation stating that more time and work was needed.

Shavit shook his head. ‘Always more work needed. Never anything we can use now.’

He lit another cigarette, and screwed an eye shut as the smoke curled up one side of his face. He turned to the section on neuro-architectural analysis, skipping paragraphs of dense jargon and stopping when he came to several topographical images of Alex Hunter’s brain side by side with a normal brain. The normal brain looked like an average-sized pink and grey cauliflower with its folds, bulges and coils. By comparison, Hunter’s brain had hundreds more folds. The known sulcus folds were labelled, but other arrows indicated numerous newly identified folds. As with the cellular repair data, however, the notations below the images stated Uses Unknown time and time again. Shavit swore.

‘Useless,’ he said to the empty room.

He frowned as he noticed a paragraph at the bottom of the page stating that the latest neuro-mapping had found no trace of the metallic object that had been embedded deep in Hunter’s cortical mass when he came to them. This was puzzling, as all reports on the Arcadian subject had clearly shown that the bullet lodged deep within his cerebellum had been the initial genesis of his condition. How could it suddenly be gone?

Shavit had read of cases where sharp objects had worked their way through people’s bodies. There was an old woman in Tel Aviv in 1985 who’d fallen on one of her knitting needles; the tip had broken off in her heart. At the time, surgery was determined to be too high risk an option and so they’d kept the woman in hospital for a number of weeks. While there, she had developed a cough — a cough that had eventually brought up the broken tip of the knitting needle.

Maybe, he thought.

He read on. More notes and diagrams and arrows… strangely, there was something still remaining in Hunter’s brain, or perhaps something totally new — a whitish trauma zone with a solid central mass that showed up in the CAT and MRI scans and X-rays. At first, the scientists had thought it was a blood clot, but then found indications that it had a dense biological core. Further scanning had suggested that there was some form of electrical activity taking place within what the report now described as a synaptic bundle — it was as though the small mass was firing off its own electrical impulses.

Shavit raised his eyebrows and glanced at the section on further data collection options. Neurosurgical needle biopsy… hmm — he took another deep drag on his cigarette — maybe, but not yet. His niece would not react well if the man she had risked everything to retrieve was sent back to her with holes drilled into his skull. Weisz might end up needing surgery of his own. Shavit laughed dryly, and flipped to the last page to review the progress of the recent test subjects. He sighed and scratched his forehead. As with the previous week, the week before that and every week since Hunter’s recovery, they had been trying to replicate the process that had led to his condition. But every time they had failed.

Shavit ground out his cigarette in disgust as he read through the new list of names, treatment variations and the familiar, dismal results: Patient Comatose; Patient Psychologically Disordered; Patient Emergency Termination. He would love to know how the Americans were approaching the problems his team kept encountering. After several months, they still had nothing.

He sat back and placed one gnarled hand behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Almost nothing. They still had control of the original Arcadian. Alex Hunter himself was the key: locked away in his memory — if it were still intact — were the events that had led to his superior physical and mental condition. If the information could be extracted… or, better yet, if he could be encouraged to tell them… Perhaps the man needed something to jog his memory, such as being with something he remembered or someone he trusted. A friend.

General Shavit lit another cigarette, then lifted his pen and made some notes. When his niece finished her current mission, he’d organise for her to pay Captain Alex Hunter a visit. Maybe even spend some prolonged time with him.

As he signed the order, a sound came from deep in his chest that could have been the beginning of a cough or a rumbling laugh. He liked to gamble, and he liked to win.