Dark Rising

THIRTY-ONE

Alex’s head shot up and he raised his hand in a closed fist gesture meaning an immediate halt. He made a chopping motion left and right and the HAWCs spread to either side of him and took cover.

Something was out there; something he had never heard before. The scream was below the range of normal human hearing. It made his skin crawl. He waited for it to be repeated, but nothing came.

Alex waited a few more moments and tried to open his senses – but still nothing came. There’s something out in the dark, he thought, and a sense of unease settled in the pit of his stomach.

He shook his head and pressed his comm stud. ‘Sam, come in.’ Change of plan; he’d bring the teams together now.

When Zach and Sam had caught up with Alex and the others, the reunited team took the opportunity to share their experiences. Alex gave them a short rest stop, and Zach took his boots off. Alex saw that his toes and heels were rubbed raw, and then rubbed again. Good on the kid for not complaining, he thought.

When Alex heard the discussion turn to the details of Hex’s execution, he walked away – he didn’t want to hear it all again. The few moments of solitude gave him the opportunity to take a quick inventory of their situation. He had one man down, two injured but operational, the Iranians now alerted to their arrival and potential position, and something moving out on the desert flats that worried the shit out of him. They were still on schedule, but things were definitely not getting any easier for them. Ahh, every day above ground is a good one, he thought.

He decided they could afford to rest for twenty minutes now, and then have some longer downtime when they got to the cave mouth. The two teams had been running for several miles and he knew even his strongest HAWCs were exhausted – and he couldn’t carry them all.

Adira intercepted him as he rejoined the group. She touched his arm. ‘You’re bleeding, Captain Hunter.’

A flechette had grazed his upper arm just above the bicep, managing to part the toughened para-aramid synthetic fibres of his combat suit. Alex had patches in his kit to glue tears together to maintain the biological and thermal seal – and he wasn’t worried about his flesh.

‘It’s nothing, I heal quickly,’ he said.

‘You certainly do. Not many men can slay two Takavaran squads with their bare hands. You should be dead – not least from the viper’s bite, Captain.’

She reached up to try to check his injury again. Alex turned slightly so she wouldn’t see the wound and instead grasped her hand before she laid it on his arm. He held it for a minute and smiled into her eyes. He could see the intelligence and strength in those dark pools. As a reflex she reached up and laid her other hand over the top of his and smiled, blushing at the same time.

‘Alex,’ he said. ‘Call me Alex.’

He looked down at her small hand and for the first time noticed the tiny blue star on the skin between her thumb and forefinger. Brand of the fighter, he thought. He smiled again then moved away to talk to Sam.

*

‘Achhh, wake up,’ Adira told herself sternly. Her heart was beating in her chest and she could feel the heat in her cheeks. She had crawled into pitch-black terrorists’ tunnels and kicked down doors under enemy fire, and here she was with shaking hands because the handsome captain had smiled at her. She didn’t even know him, and perhaps never would. Still, after seeing him in battle, she couldn’t help feeling he was different from any man she had ever known.

Adira was a warrior herself; she had never married, and rarely dated. Who could ever keep up with me? was the little excuse she used to justify the lack of close relationships in her life. She rarely even saw her family these days; her closest link with them was her contact with her uncle, General Shavit, but they hardly ever spoke of personal things. She wondered now how the general had managed to have a wife and his own family while still focusing on his military career. Or perhaps it was different for a man. Adira was respected as an equal in the Israeli military, but would that equality remain in married life?

She looked at the broad form of the HAWC as he walked away.

How would Alex Hunter treat his woman? she wondered. As an equal or as some fragile being who needed his protection? She shook her head. Her job wasn’t to daydream about good-looking American soldiers; it was to discover this secret weapon the US military had developed and pass that information on to Mossad.

If you’re not the Arcadian, you should be, she thought as Alex made his way over to Sam Reid.

In all her time in the army, and now Mossad, Adira had never disobeyed an order. But the thought of submitting Alex’s name to her superiors felt like a betrayal of him… and herself. Besides, the report would be premature – what good was the end result without learning how that result had been achieved? Not yet then, she thought, not just yet.

‘And you can call me Addy,’ she said under her breath.

Alex’s powerful hearing picked up Adira’s words and he smiled back at her over his shoulder. Addy, nice name, he thought.

He slapped an adhesive patch over the tear in his suit and crouched down next to Sam and Zach.

‘Never seen anything like it, boss,’ Sam reported. ‘Those men were shrunk down to the size of five year olds, just empty bags. Even their eyes were shrivelled down to Californian raisins. And another thing – they all had these thumb-sized holes in them, but I don’t know what type of weapon could cause that.’

‘Could it have been a laser?’

‘Doubt it. No burns to the clothing or cauterisation of the flesh; just shrivelled bodies with a single small hole… oh, yeah, and a bad smell.’

Sam looked worried and Alex didn’t like it. There wasn’t much the man feared – something had rattled him.

‘Describe the smell,’ he said.

Sam’s gaze seemed to turn inwards as he took himself back to the tent for a few seconds. ‘Vinegar, sugar and almonds… musty-sweet, disgusting. Animal, but not.’ He sat quietly, deep in thought for a few seconds.

‘Uncle!’ Alex brought him back. ‘What else – any tracks?’

‘Nothing except the Iranians’ footprints. All the action occurred in the tent. There was a hole in the corner – big and deep, all the dirt pushed upwards. My guess is something came up out of the ground, ambushed them, then went back down the same way. Maybe they were shot full of some toxin that destroys blood cells. Or microwaved – I’ve heard the Chinese are refining a microwave weapon that cooks you from the inside out. But one thing’s for sure, those men hadn’t been dead for very long – their fire was still burning down when we got there.’ Sam shook his head slowly and ran his fingers up through his hair. ‘Maybe radiation poisoning, maybe a hundred things I’m just not thinking of. But I’ll tell you, boss, nothing I know of works that quickly, or does that to flesh and bone.’

Alex looked across at Zach who was sitting on the sand with his feet and legs drawn up to his chest. He anticipated Alex’s question. ‘No, not radiation. Even a mega-sievert blast wouldn’t cause that type of damage. Blistering, skin vaporisation, cell destruction and DNA mutation, yes, but not that sort of physical… desiccation. Besides, there was no secondary irradiation or any trace of lingering particles – so, no, not radiation. I think it was something biological – did you tell him about the night bugs?’

‘The what?’ Alex looked from Zach to Sam and then back again when Sam shrugged his shoulders.

‘This might be totally unrelated,’ Zach went on, ‘but I’ve smelled something like that before, when I was in a student share hostel. It was the odour of a night-bug infestation – I believe you call them bedbugs. Entomology is not my area, but night bugs give off a distinctive sweet smell from the abdominal scent glands – only detectable by humans when they’re in large numbers.’

Alex raised his eyebrows and looked at Sam. The big HAWC motioned with his hand back to Zach. The inference was clear – it’s his story, let him tell it.

‘You think bedbugs did this?’ Alex asked.

‘No, of course not. That would be crazy.’ Zach looked down at the ground and knitted his brows. ‘Crazy,’ he said again.

But not crazy enough for him to voice his concerns and be clearly affected, thought Alex. He also noticed Sam never once contradicted the kid.

‘Okay. Sam, lay out a few seismic sensors. Don’t want anything creeping up on us – man or bug.’

Alex stood up and had turned to leave when Zach spoke again. ‘One more thing – these parasites live on blood and bodily fluids. And the bodies were…’ He shrugged.

Alex looked at him silently for a few seconds, then nodded and disappeared into the dark. He tried to pick up any sign of the mysterious presence out there in the desert, but all seemed silent and still.