Dark Rising

FIFTY

The black hole had ceased to exist. It had evaporated, taking with it the entire Jamshid II facility and a large chunk of the mountain. Dr Zach Shomron had done his job.

Hammerson was screaming at someone in Israel to be put through to General Shavit. The Hammer and most of the US military leaders had been summoned to the Mole Hole, and the president was on his way. Strategic Air Command had picked up the heat signature of the Israeli missile as it was warming to countdown. If the missile was fired, there would be retaliation. There would be war.

Hammerson tilted his coffee cup to his lips and realised he had finished it ages ago. He looked at his screen again. From space, the crater was a perfect circle – three miles wide and one and a half miles deep. He reread the underlying data: in summary, a furious vertical burst of radiation, and then nothing. The hidden laboratory had ceased to exist; it had disintegrated, been digested, or, as the young Israeli scientist had theorised, perhaps been transported elsewhere.

Another screen on Hammerson’s desk showed a white bloom spewing from the hidden missile silo. A white nose-cone slowly lifted free from the billowing smoke. The Jericho was on its way.

‘Shit!’ Hammerson threw his cup across the room.

He was about to scream again at the calm young man on the phone when he was finally put through.

‘I’m sorry, my friend. Israel has decided that we must risk war today to avoid total destruction tomorrow,’ General Meir Shavit said.

The general sounded miserable. Hammerson knew that Shavit, like himself, hated war – but if he thought his country was being threatened, he would fight to the death, no quarter given.

Hammerson wasn’t authorised to send secret data, even to allies, but he encrypted the Arak images and sent them high priority to the general. ‘Arak is already gone,’ he said. ‘Look at the images being sent. I repeat, look at the images. There is no need for a strike.’ He was pacing as he watched the glowing white spear catch the sunlight and pick up speed on its deadly mission. It was almost beautiful.

‘I think it is too late, my friend.’

‘You can abort, you know-’ But the phone had gone dead.

Hammerson sat down and rubbed his face for a few minutes before typing a brief message to Alex’s SFPDA. Once again the failure message came up. He took the headset off and gathered some folders from his desk. Before he left, he looked one last time at the red circle on his screen. ‘I hope you’re well away from there, son – it’s about to get real hot.’

Then he headed for the secure bunker, where the president and his top-level military would observe the expected blowback from the Israeli first strike.

In Tel Aviv, General Meir Shavit looked at the images Major Hammerson had sent through. He compared them to his own satellite data and field reports from the Markazi desert, then reached for his phone.

Thirty-three seconds later, a fireball erupted in the sky over western Iraq. There would be no need for a retrieval mission as nothing larger than a baseball would fall to the ground.

Instantly, the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs made contact with her counterpart in Iraq. It seemed there had been a misfire of an obsolete armament. Compensation for any clean-up was available on request.