Dark Rising

FIVE

Tel Aviv University, Israel – Astrophysics Department

Zachariah Shomron’s hands shook so much he nearly spilled his cup of hot chocolate on the new oxide crystal radiation unit – OCRU for short – that the department had just acquired. It was a delicate and beautiful machine – a blend of sci-fi aesthetics and high-tech pragmatics. Gleaming silver-steel casing and glass domes held rosettes of gadolinium silicate-oxide crystals – the best option for detecting gamma rays and high-energy X-rays. The OCRU displayed the invisible heavy particles as light pulses within the vacuum domes – the more brilliant the glow, the greater the strength of the radiation and its proximity. The visual display was accompanied by a computer application that translated the light pulses into radiation sievert strength, and also calculated distance and direction. Ohhh yeeessss, Zachariah mouthed as he ran his long fingers over the glass domes. This was a work of art with a scientific purpose. And it was his paper on geo-astrophysical gamma ray bursts that had swayed the university budgeting committee to pass the funding for the purchase of the expensive Swiss precision device.

Zachariah began the software load into the OCRU, watching the lines of code scroll up the screen. Gamma rays had a well-deserved deadly reputation, but their power and prevalence throughout the universe meant that the first to harness their cosmic muscle would have access to an energy source that was infinite in quantity and strength. Perhaps he could be the first to design some sort of stellar mining project – now that would be really cool.

Zachariah, or Zach to his friends, was what was affectionately known as a university ‘drop-in’. He was a brilliant young man who, with doctorates in gravitational astrophysics, particle physics and pure mathematics, and a specialisation in black holes and cosmic dark matter, could have had his choice of any number of advisory or teaching positions at Tel Aviv University or any other place of higher learning around the world. Problem was, Zach didn’t want to do anything in the real world. How could he? There was so much more to learn and never enough time. As soon as he finished one degree, he enrolled in another, and another; he had been the same since his first senior class at the age of thirteen – always moving forward and expanding his encyclopaedic knowledge of the cosmos and its strange forces.

After his parents were killed in a bomb attack, school had become his shelter and books his friends. They were always there for him, faithful and factual, and had nothing to do with war. Not like his parents, who had both been victims of this war that seemed without end. His father had died when he wrestled to the ground a man who carried a live grenade. His mother had died shielding her young son from the full force of the blast. When Uncle Mosh and Aunt Dodah had taken Zach in, they had worried about his withdrawal into a world of reading. But it soon became clear that it was just his way of dealing with his personal tragedy.

Tall and skinny, with long bony hands on the end of even longer bony arms, Zachariah was a man in perpetual motion. He always had something to do and rushed about, knuckles cracking, feet tapping, hands flying over computer keyboards or drawing things in the air for others. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles completed the image of the stereotypical uber-nerd.

Zach slurped the last drops of his chocolate, threw his mug onto the bench and switched the device on. With the OCRU, he would soon be able to detect anything from a normal daily pulse of gamma right up to a mega blast. The Earth had encountered mega-range blasts before. A prehistoric far-galaxy short burst of gamma rays had once been suggested as a possible reason for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Luckily, those types of events happened about once every 500 million years. Even luckier for Earth was that no gamma bursts had ever occurred in its galaxy. And just as well, Zach thought; a single ten-second burst from a source just 6000 light years away would strip the planet of its atmosphere and burn all life from the surface.

The computer screens flared to life, showing graphs and charts with unexpected intensities, and the crystals glowed strongly, bathing Zach and his laboratory in blue light. This can’t be right, he thought.

He typed in a few commands, muttered a brief, ‘Impossible,’ turned the device off and gave it thirty seconds. When he powered it back up, the result was the same. ‘Impossible,’ he said again and picked up the phone to call his current professor, Dafyyd Burstein.

‘Shalom, Dafyyd, you’re not going to believe this – I’ve just picked up a terrestrial nanosecond gamma-ray burst. And that’s not all. I believe the pulse came from the Middle East… from the central Iranian desert.’

*

General Meir Shavit was the head of Metsada, the Special Operations Division of Mossad. Short and grizzle-haired, he had served his country for over fifty years in both military theatres and dedicated intelligence services. He could even boast an apprenticeship under the fearsome Ariel Sharon in the infamous Unit 101 – Israel’s very first Special Forces command.

From its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Mossad oversaw a staff of around 2000 personnel. It was one of the most structured and professional intelligence services in the world, and also one of the deadliest. It consisted of eight different specialised departments – one of which was General Shavit’s Metsada, responsible for assassinations, paramilitary operations, sabotage and psychological warfare. If the army was the spear and shield of Israel, then Metsada was its secret dagger dipped in poison.

General Shavit’s assistant opened the door and showed in the young woman who had been seated in the large comfortable waiting room outside the general’s office.

‘Boker tov, Captain Senesh,’ Shavit greeted her.

‘Shalom, General.’

Adira Senesh stood stock-still at attention until the assistant departed and the door closed, then her face broke into a wide grin and she moved quickly to embrace the general, who was slowly getting to his feet.

‘You look well, Addy.’

‘I feel better for seeing you, Uncle.’

Adira was Shavit’s favourite niece. Her name meant ‘mighty’ in ancient Hebrew, and it suited her. She was related to the famous Chana Senesh, who was sent by the Kibbutz Sdot Yam to save Jews in the Nazi-occupied countries and was betrayed to the Nazi regime. Severely tortured, she never informed on her friends and was sentenced to death by firing squad in 1944. Her bravery was exemplified by her refusal to be blindfolded so she could look the soldiers in the eye as they pulled their triggers. The general knew that the brave Senesh blood also flowed strongly through the veins of his handsome niece.

Adira was above average height and had to bend slightly to kiss the general’s cheek. With a smooth olive complexion and dark eyes like pools of oil, she could have passed for any normal young woman who liked to spend her time perusing the shopping arcades of downtown Tel Aviv. However, when shaking her hand one felt the calluses and raw strength of a soldier trained in unarmed and armed combat. Adira Senesh was a captain in the Metsada and acknowledged as one of the best trained operatives in the field. She was responsible for single-handedly entering a Hamas terrorist tunnel network and rescuing a captured twenty-two-year-old border guard. No terrorists had survived.

Her courage and skills were never questioned, but it was her mind that set her apart from the other Metsada professionals. She was a Middle East specialist, and had spent many years studying the present and past cultures, politics and military capabilities of Iran, Syria and Lebanon. She could speak and read Farsi, as well as many ancient Persian dialects. She made General Meir Shavit proud as an Israeli and an old soldier, but even more so as her uncle.

‘Come sit down with me, Addy, I need to speak with you.’

The general waved her to a hard leather couch and poured each of them a small cup of strong black coffee from a silver urn. Then he sat opposite her and took a sip of his coffee. ‘We have problems with our friends in the east. Yesterday, our Iranian monitoring department picked up an enormous radiation signal emanating from about thirty miles north-east of Shiraz – probably at or under the Persepolis ruins.’

Adira lowered her cup. ‘What type of radiation? What strength?’

‘Mainly gamma and some minor X-ray. The gamma sievert intensity was off the scale, and though it only flared for less than a second, it was at least blast strength.’

Adira sat forward and put down her small china cup. The general watched her face carefully. He knew that current intelligence predicted the Iranians were not expected to have any real capability for nuclear fission for many years. The thought of them conducting tests with a potential working model was sickening for any Israeli. The Iranian president was a fanatic who believed he spoke with the authority of God. Many times he had called for Israel to be burned from the pages of history – most recently just days after he had boasted of Iran achieving nuclear fuel purification capability, when he had claimed that the ‘Zionist regime’ would soon be eliminated. The only thing that held the madman back was the knowledge of Israel’s military might. Though Iran was many times larger than Israel, it didn’t yet have the military technology, or the muscle and steel, to go head to head.

The general was not alone in his view that if the Iranians gained weapons of mass destruction, the usual deterrent of MAD would not apply. The Mutually Assured Destruction principle only worked when a nation actually feared destruction; it was meaningless to a leader who believed that vaporising his people in a fiery conflict with Israel would make martyrs of them all. It was common knowledge that the new president of Iran, Mahmoud Moshaddam, was a deeply religious man who frequently quoted from Qur’anic scripture in his speeches.

‘Captain Senesh,’ the general continued, his use of her rank indicating the importance of what he was about to say, ‘I do not believe we can afford to take a wait-and-see position on this. I will be mobilising our network in Iran to gather information. If the Iranians have detonation capability, we would be taking a huge risk by sending in a strike – just a single Iranian nuclear blast over Israel would mean millions dead, and could perhaps lead to another world war. We will take that risk if we have to, but first we must try other options.’

Adira held his gaze, a question in her dark eyes.

The general breathed out slowly and a look of pain crossed his face. ‘We need to go in, Captain, but not alone this time. We need our muscular friends from across the water. The Americans are bound to go in, and when they do, we will be with them.’ General Meir Shavit paused and looked deep into his niece’s eyes. ‘Addy, Iran cannot have this terrible power, now or ever. You must bring it down around them; leave nothing standing, leave no one to remember anything.’

Adira nodded once, her face like stone.

‘There is one more thing.’ The general handed Adira a sealed folder. The red cross on the front signified its secrecy. ‘The Americans have developed a new form of warfare, like nothing we have ever seen before. Our best agents have been able to obtain little more than a codename: Arcadian. We hope to have more information soon, but for now…’ He shrugged as he indicated the slimness of the file. ‘They will probably use this weapon on the mission, Addy. Seek it out, and bring it or the seeds of its creation back to us. It may be Israel’s only hope in the coming storm.’