Dark Rising

TWELVE

Ancient Arak – Middle Iranian Province of Markazi

Ahmad Al Janaddi exhaled the sweet-smelling smoke of his cigarette into the stinging dry morning air. He stood at the entrance to a camouflaged tunnel cut into the side of the mountain from where he could look out over the ancient city of Arak. Arak was an old city even at the time of Mohammed, built upon the ruins of an even earlier town called Daskerah, which in turn had been built on the settlement of Dolf Abad. The ruins of Dolf Abad were still accessible via the many ancient caves in the region; caves the excavation teams had since made good use of. The tunnel mouth Al Janaddi stood in had been carved to look like one of the hundreds of natural openings throughout the mountainous region.

One hundred and eighty miles south of Tehran and nearly 300 miles north-west of Persepolis, this region had always been considered military high ground. Rising over 5000 feet above sea level, it marked the beginning of where the dry desert turned to the bitterly cold and mountainous Markazi Province.

The ancient land was riddled with caves. Some, like the holy Shah Zand Cave, contained writing and symbols from the very first Persians. Some were even older than that – Al Janaddi had seen the carved script of the pre-Persian Elamics and Zoroastrians decorating the deeper cavern walls, as well as some inscriptions from languages older than recorded history. Legend had it they were the utterances of the very angels themselves. To this day, no scholar had been able to decipher them. Al Janaddi had stood before those words and wondered whether the men who wrote them thought they too could change the world.

The scientist’s footsteps echoed in the silent corridor as he returned to the main laboratory. The Jamshid II facility under Arak had been designed differently from the complex once hidden beneath the ruins at Persepolis. The magnificent silver sphere was still there, for blasting uranium hexafluoride gas molecules to a speed-of-light escape velocity, but the separated Uranium 235, once the objective of the enrichment process, was now a discarded waste product. The purpose of the new Jamshid facility was to explore and refine the molecule collisions themselves.

The main chamber had been stripped of all electronic monitoring and recording equipment; it was bare save for the gleaming silver sphere at its centre. All the equipment and personnel had been moved to a specially designed secondary command centre 500 feet from the sphere chamber. As there would be no residual radiation remaining after each test run, the technicians would be able to re-enter quickly and replace any lost equipment in a matter of days. The facility’s personnel should be safe this time. Only unfeeling electronic eyes and ears provided the sensory feedback. Lead-lined panelling and concrete reinforcing surrounded the room, causing a striking echo effect when even the simplest of tasks was performed there. The new equipment was more advanced – a benefit of the president’s increased budget for the project, which he was now calling a ‘divine event’. The in-lab cameras were equipped with high-speed drives and extremely sensitive media to record images at 10,000 frames per second, and sound could be analysed over the super and subsonic wavelengths. Al Janaddi was expecting there would be more data to study this time around.

He looked over to where a technician was painting a white line all the way around the sphere and shivered as he recalled his recent conversation with President Moshaddam. ‘I need you to install seating for, say, a dozen martyrs in front of your beautiful sphere,’ the president had ordered.

‘Er, you mean in the observation room, my President?’

‘No, I do not. I mean in the sphere room. Close to the device itself.’

Al Janaddi was glad the conversation was taking place over the phone so Moshaddam could not see his face. He closed his eyes for a moment as he remembered the body of Professor Shihab. He knew what proximity to the sphere could do to human tissue. He also knew what the testing of live subjects would do to any hope of international recognition for his work. He prayed that he wouldn’t be ordered to sit in one of those seats himself.

‘As you wish, my President,’ he’d replied. What else could he have said?

Now Al Janaddi wondered again about the men and women who would be chosen to behold the opening of the ‘Gateway to Allah’ as the president was now calling it. Those souls were about to be transported somewhere, be it heaven or hell. The image of the misshapen corpse of Dr Shihab leapt into his mind, and with it came the taste of bile in the back of his throat.