Dark Rising

TWENTY-SEVEN

The sun was sinking towards the Markazi Mountains and the temperature had dropped to a pleasant seventy degrees. Zach was leaning up against a warm rock, dozing. He held a slim water canteen loosely in his hand, and a long string of dribble created a glistening river from his slightly open mouth and down his shoulder. His glasses had slid to the end of his nose.

A tall shadow fell across him and a hand grasped his shoulder.

‘Whaa-?’ Zach opened his eyes; then had to blink twice and push his glasses back up before he could speak. ‘Yoish! You’re alive… I mean awake.’

‘You’re losing water; cap your canteen,’ Alex said.

Zach blinked once more and looked up at the HAWC captain. The man’s hair was damp from perspiration, the snakebite wound was now just a couple of small pink marks on his neck, already healing over. ‘Uh, how do you feel?’ Zach asked.

Alex ran his hand through his hair. ‘Like I’m hungover and thirsty as hell. What’s our status?’

‘Ahh…’ Zach looked around, not exactly sure what to tell him.

‘I’ll take that one,’ Sam said, walking up behind Zach and handing Alex a water canteen. While Alex drank, Sam looked at the wound on his neck and nodded. ‘Looking good.’

Zach stood to take a closer look at the near-healed wound. ‘So the snake didn’t inject you with all its venom, after all?’

Alex turned away and said over his shoulder, ‘I was lucky this time. Sam?’

Zach could have sworn Sam was wearing the hint of a smile as he began his report.

Hex’s team had made good progress to the Arak Jamshid II facility – they were over two hours ahead and expected to rendezvous with Mossad agents for a briefing before entering the city. They’d encountered no Takavaran, nor had there been any signs of pursuit.

Alex nodded. ‘Good. I need something to eat, then we go. Two minutes – be ready, gentlemen.’

*

Adira held the HAWC monoscope to her eye and looked into the high areas of the Markazi Mountains. The scope was a matt black tube with a rubber cap on the end for fitting snugly over the eye. It sat in the fist comfortably and its image enhancers magnified thirty times with an infinite range. She pulled the device away from her face and looked at it admiringly. Better than anything back home – think I’ll keep it.

She replaced the scope in its pouch and breathed in the desert air. She felt strangely flat and shook her head at a creeping thought: He’s probably already dead by now. It was perhaps a good thing. Alex Hunter was becoming a distraction from her primary mission. And if he was the secret Arcadian, or part of that project, she now felt free to give a full briefing about him when she returned. Yes, his death was probably a good thing.

She took another breath; the hollowness in her stomach was still there… and maybe something else. ‘Achhh, stop haunting me, Alex Hunter,’ she said softly as she looked towards the city of Arak.

Ice-capped peaks to the west framed the ancient settlement; everywhere else it was surrounded by vast arid plains that looked barely hospitable. Adira knew the city had a large lake at its edge. This was the Nemisham Lake – beautiful but its inviting waters were a cauldron of toxic chemicals that steamed with skin-stripping acids. Like the country itself, she thought, alluring and dangerous in equal measures.

A Mossad agent appeared out of the desert like a wraith, spoke in hurried Hebrew to her, then vanished just as quickly in the wavering heat haze. This was what Adira had been waiting for. She stood looking at Arak for a further moment, then returned to the HAWCs.

‘The laboratory is hidden on the outskirts of the city, in a labyrinth of ancient caves,’ she told them. ‘They’ve been posing as archaeologists carrying out significant restoration work on the Sassanid Dynasty statues deep inside the caves. They’ve been digging for years; there’s no telling how deep they are. We can’t take them head on or covertly. The place is heavily fortified and guarded by the regular Iranian Army. Worse, my men tell me there are many squads of Takavaran Zolfaghar now in and around the facility.’

Irish blew air through his lips in disdain. ‘Yeah, those guys were real tough,’ he sneered.

Adira tried to ignore him but there was something about the man’s attitude that made her want to lash out. ‘I think you were lucky Hex was back there for you, Lieutenant O’Riordan, or you would be just another dead animal drying in the desert.’

‘Fuck you,’ Irish spat.

Adira smiled and went on. ‘There may be another option – another way into the Jamshid II facility that is unknown to the Takavaran. There is a cave opening high within the Markazi Mountains; the locals avoid it because they believe it is filled with demons. My people believe it’s not guarded so we may be able to use it to break into the facility.’

‘May be able to? Possibly unguarded? That’s all we got to go with?’ Irish said scornfully. ‘We don’t have a lotta time to invest in maybes right now. Pretty soon they’re gonna know we’re here. We get our backs to the wall in a freakin’ cave and we’re dead meat.’

Adira and O’Riordan took a step towards each other and Hex moved in between them. Adira suspected O’Riordan was a man who didn’t like any opinion other than his own. She looked at him steadily around Hex, holding back the Hebrew curse and keeping her voice calm and even.

‘That’s right, Lieutenant O’Riordan. Best intel we’ve got. The alternative is a direct assault – go head to head with an unknown number of Iranian Special Ops. We could be bogged down for days… and the only reinforcements arriving will be theirs. How much time did you say you wanted to spend here, Lieutenant?’

O’Riordan locked eyes with her, then spat onto the sand and walked off, swearing under his breath. She smiled; she’d made her point.

Adira gave the cave coordinates to Hex and a description of the entrance. It was distinctive because of its guardian: a ten foot tall decaying statue of a long dead king.

Hex nodded and turned to the HAWCs. ‘Rocky, send a squirt to the Blue team. Irish, we move in three minutes for the cave.’

Though the team had direct communication via their helmets, from now on they would use coded information squirts, especially in open terrain. If there were Iranian Special Forces close by, they might be able to pinpoint a foreign signal coming from the desert – with or without the frequency jumpers. The ‘squirt’ was almost instantaneous and technologically invisible. Rocky simply used a text-based messaging format in his SFPDA, which, when sending, was coded and compressed and bounced off any local satellite it could find. He sent Alex information on the Takavaran, the cave system and its entrance, and their operational status. Within minutes, the message was received and acknowledged: they were good to proceed.

Hex checked the ground-based radar strapped to his forearm while Adira scanned the near horizons with her scope. They looked at each other and Adira raised her eyebrows. Hex mouthed okay back to her – no movement or metallic readings in a two-mile radius. Good as it’s going to get, time to move, Adira thought.

It would be a ten-mile jog to the cave in this dry heat and they needed to remain alert at all times. She was tired already, pissed off with the redheaded HAWC, and they hadn’t even got to their objective zone yet. She sucked in a deep breath and began to run.

Zach saw Alex receive the information squirt. The HAWC read for a few seconds, then turned to him and Sam and spoke briefly about the potential force of opposition, their destination, and the cave system they would use to try to enter the Jamshid II complex. Zach was intensely interested in the further gamma-pulse readings emanating from a live Jamshid site and couldn’t wait to actually see what technology the Iranians were using. But he was tired, his elbows throbbed from the jump from the train, and his stomach still ached from the buffeting he’d taken strapped to Sam for the HALO jump.

‘Uh, how do we get there?’ he asked, spinning around as though expecting to find a taxi to hail.

Alex looked at Sam and smiled. ‘Speed formation. Uncle, you’ll be taking us out. And you, Dr Shomron, suck in some air and take a big swill of water – you’ll need it.’

Sam quickly checked for any loose equipment on his suit and lowered his visor. Alex grabbed Zach by the elbow and checked his suit for loose equipment too.

‘The speed formation is the optimum way to cross hostile terrain on foot,’ he explained. ‘We run in single file, and each man takes a turn in the lead to absorb the wind resistance and allow the man behind to “rest” in his lee. The rest only saves a minuscule amount of energy each time, but over many miles it makes a difference. It’s all we’ve got, and we don’t have a lot of time.’

Many miles was all Zach heard. ‘I… ah… I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up, Captain Hunter.’

Alex put both his hands on the tall, skinny scientist’s shoulders and looked him in the face. ‘You’d be surprised what you can do if you try, Zachariah. I remember a young man who probably didn’t think he could jump out of a plane at 35,000 feet or climb down into a pitch black elevator shaft a while back.’

Zach knew Alex was waiting for him to make some sort of positive response, but there was no way he could speak as his voice would betray the lack of confidence he felt.

After a few more seconds, Alex nodded in understanding. ‘It’s okay, I’ll take your shift out in front. I’ll carry you if I have to, but I’d prefer you give it all you’ve got, all right?’

Zach nodded, still unable to speak. Alex slapped him on the shoulder then pulled down his visor. Zach sucked in a huge breath and slowly slid his visor down as well.

*

Dozens of miles apart, two small camouflaged teams, looking like sand-coloured cyborgs, ran across the dry and spindly Markazi landscape.

A little over two miles from the Blue team’s position, a small four-man Takavaran team monitored their surveillance equipment. They were on a two-on, two-off shift rotation so they had eyes and ears on the desert for an unbroken twenty-four hours. They had with them a traditional nomads’ tent constructed of sun-bleached canvas and animal hides, to give them the appearance of a small band of traders resting before entering the city for a day’s commerce. Inside the tent, the antiquated gave way to high tech, with guns, explosives and ammunition lined up for quick access next to surveillance, communication and monitoring equipment. An electronic eye kept watch on their surface surroundings: day or night, nothing would cross the desert within a mile of their patch without them knowing.

Or so they thought.

A hundred feet from the men, the dry, dusty surface of a hump of earth broke open. A sharp proboscis lifted in the air and fine, boneless tendrils protruded, waving back and forth as they tasted their surroundings. Anyone watching might have mistaken them for the petals of a colourless fan-like flower gently waving in the breeze.

The creature had detected the slight footfalls of the men and the hum of their electronics from many miles away, but it was their body fluids that had been an irresistible magnet. The creature’s hunger flared – it sensed two of the organic beings were sleeping and decided to approach these first. The pale fan folded and the proboscis withdrew below the ground. The earth lifted slightly as the mound moved towards the tent and disappeared under its edge.

Abu Tayib woke to an intense pain in his shoulder. When he went to sit up, he couldn’t. He could open his eyes and his mouth, but his limbs weighed a ton, as if he were drugged. He concentrated all his strength on his arm and managed to raise it a little – just enough for him to catch sight of… But this arm couldn’t belong to him – his arm was burly and covered in shiny, black curls of hair, while this limb was shrunken and withered. The pain intensified and he tried to scream, but all that escaped his cracked lips was a feeble mewling.

From under the sand, the creature had inserted its feeding spike up into the sleeping animal and injected it with a natural sedative designed to immobilise it. It also injected a substance to liquefy the organic matter it found within the soft outer casing. The absence of a hard exoskeleton meant the creature was quickly able to penetrate the body and soften the muscle, cartilage and even most of the bone. Abu Tayib was literally being liquefied and drawn down the feeding spike into the belly of the monster below the sand.

Yusuf Ayyub and Tawbah Siluf entered the tent to wake their sleeping Takavaran brothers. After a long boring shift they were looking forward to taking their turn on the sleeping rolls. At first, they didn’t comprehend what they were seeing. Abu Tayib seemed smaller somehow.

Yusuf pulled back the bedroll covering and blinked; it looked like a shrivelled monkey had been placed inside his comrade’s robes – stick-like arms and legs attached to a mottled, collapsing diaphragm. Yusuf nudged the thing with his foot and the head slowly turned towards him. A withered black tongue came out of its mouth – the thing was still alive and trying to speak to him.

‘Al-Muhaimin.’ Yusuf spoke one of Allah’s secret names as the Protector of Men, and stuck his knuckles in his mouth. He had seen men blown to pieces, or tortured in ways that would cause normal men to loosen their bowels from fright. But this was something else, so horrifying that it tore at his consciousness.

Tawbah pulled back the covers on the second bedroll and found the other agent in a worse state. He was even more desiccated if possible, just a small sack of bones and tendons. Even the orbs of his eyes had been drained of all their fluids.

Both men were about to flee when Abu Tayib’s collapsed body was thrown to the side. What rose from the ground froze the two soldiers in terror. Yusuf thought perhaps they were already dead and had been cast into Jahannam, for this was surely one of the foul beasts of the pit sent to torment the souls of the unbelievers.

In a sinuous motion, the creature lifted itself from the hole below Abu’s bedroll and stood on powerful, segmented legs bristling with insectoid hairs. A rain of sand fell from it as its cuticular exoskeleton front flared open, exposing many smaller legs. It was far quicker than a creature of its size and bulk should have been, and immediately enveloped Yusuf. While holding him close to its body with its many legs, it shot out a long curved claw to cleave the head of Tawbah.

The creature lowered itself and its struggling prey to the ground, its eyestalks swivelling around to fix black, glass-like bulbs on the terrified man. Its pointed head broke open at the front and its gristly mandible apparatus spread wide to allow the feeding spike to extend slowly into Yusuf’s chest. The Takavaran vomited as he realised what had happened to the sleeping men – and what was about to happen to him.