This Green Hell

THIRTY-EIGHT

Casey Franks crashed into a tree, and wrapped her arms around it to stay upright. The heat and humidity were exhausting her despite her physical capabilities. She wiped her face; it was wet with perspiration and blood, and crisscrossed with scratches from her charge through the dense green jungle.

With hands shaking from fatigue, she pulled the small GPS device from her pocket. She checked her positioning. Not far now: two of the dots had grown closer — hers and the chopper’s. But the third …

‘Ah, what? Fuck!’

Alex was still way too far west, and hadn’t moved much since she’d last checked over an hour ago. A moment of indecision washed over her as she considered changing course.

‘Fuck, fuck!’ she yelled into the dark, momentarily silencing the surrounding wildlife.

She took a swing at a large leaf, and looked again at the GPS. It was too far to make it to Alex and then get back to the rendezvous site — her heart would simply explode.

She pulled the last foil-covered pellet from her pouch, broke it under her nose and shuddered as the chemicals punched her up another level.

‘Orders, fucking, unchanged.’

She ran on.

Hammerson sat in his office watching his computer screen. Arcadian had been en route to the rendezvous but had diverted — something had changed. A short while ago his communication device had ceased working. Sam Reid and Franks were still in go mode, but their signals were a long way apart.

What the hell is going on?

He pinched his lower lip and looked at a small timer in the corner of his screen — just a little more under-the-table information courtesy of MUSE. The timer ticked down in hundredths of a second; he checked it against his watch — sixty minutes to detonation, and just forty-five minutes until rendezvous. Franks should make it, but Alex and Sam? They needed to leave now.

He sent another pulse to Sam’s comm pellet and waited. In the field, even in the thick of combat, HAWCs were able to acknowledge a message with a single returned pulse … but nothing.

Hammerson sucked at his teeth, then slammed his hand down on the large desk. ‘Come on, boys, going to be a red hot dawn today.’

He ran both hands up through his cropped hair, then tried Sam again. Still nothing. Now all he could do was wait. And, God, how he hated waiting.

There was a commotion outside his door; the next instant, it flew open and he saw Adira Senesh standing there. His assistant, Margaret, was right next to her, her hand on the captain’s arm. Senesh looked down at the hand and Margaret took a step back from the ferocity of the woman’s glare. She gave Hammerson a look that said both I’m sorry and she frightens me.

Hammerson nodded to his assistant, who backed out of the office and pulled the door closed.

‘Not a good time, Captain,’ Hammerson said.

Adira strode towards him, pointing a finger like a gun directly at his face. Hammerson noticed the knuckles on her hand were abraded. He’d read the report on the two HAWC recruits she’d injured: one left severely incapacitated, the other still on life support. Both out-thought and out-fought; he’d be rejecting both of them as HAWCs following that performance. He sat back and folded his arms, keeping his face expressionless. Senesh was becoming a problem — a clever, highly trained and explosive one. He needed to be smart and careful.

‘Will Arcadian be free from the blast radius?’ she spat.

Hammerson groaned inwardly. Damn Mossad’s information networks — probably better than our own. He didn’t respond, just looked slightly bored.

Adira’s hand curled into a fist and she leaned forward on it over his desk. ‘If the best soldier your country has ever produced is vaporised in the next few minutes, will you be rewarded for that? I think not.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Billions of dollars spent on the so-called Arcadian Project, all for it to be destroyed in minutes.’

So, there it was. She did know about the Arcadian, he mused. Hammerson had known from the outset that there was a double mission thrust in Captain Senesh’s secondment to him and the HAWCs. He knew the Israelis; and he knew his old friend Meir Shavit too well to think he did anything without an ulterior motive. Damn shame really, the woman was skilled. He’d immediately recognised her potential and had tried to turn her, but her resolve was iron hard and her subterfuge skills world-class. In the end he’d simply quarantined her from the frontline and she had taken it as a personal affront. She’d also been getting way too nosey.

He smiled grimly at her, leaned forward himself and keyed a few commands into his computer. He turned the screen around so she could see it and pressed a key.

A night-time CCTV loop commenced. A figure in black, moving low to the ground, climbed up and over an eight-feet concrete wall like a dark and silent spider. The face was black-masked and a single lens jutted out from the head. Somehow the intruder managed to deactivate the electronic countermeasures, then entered an upper silo of Deep Storage, one of the access vents to the most secure military storehouse facilities in the United States. The film switched to the inside of the complex, but only for an instant before it was blacked out by the infiltrator.

Hammerson sat back and folded his arms again. ‘We’ll get ’em next time. And no need for rendition here; we’ll grind the information out of them, then throw what’s left into the chemical furnace.’

He stared into the woman’s face, his eyes like twin lasers, and watched with satisfaction as her jaw tightened aggressively. Both her fists balled and he readied himself. Adira picked up an old tank shell he kept on his desk as a paperweight and threw it with enough force to smash through the plaster wall. He felt the impact under his feet.

Hammerson’s office door immediately opened and Margaret stood there with a small-calibre handgun by her side. He held up his hand to her and she paused in the doorway, keeping her eyes on the Israeli woman.

Adira spoke through gritted teeth. ‘I could have had a jump jet down there by now — Hunter would be already on his way back. My country hasn’t burnt its bridges in South America like yours has.’

Hammerson kept his gaze flat. ‘Not your problem, Captain.’ He motioned sharply with his head to the door.

She glared at him for a few seconds, looking as if she was going to say something else, but then spun and went out, her shoulders hunched in fury, Hebrew curses filling the air around her.

Hammerson raised his eyebrows at Margaret. She looked over her shoulder, then back to him and nodded — she was gone.

‘Thanks, Margie. And have security double-sweep my office again — it’s getting a little crowded in here.’

Adira stood on the landing of the military office block and sucked in a few deep breaths to calm her pounding blood.

It is my problem … and I am not finished yet, you bastard goyim, she thought.

She stood like stone, staring off into the distance as she listened to the small pellet inside her ear. Then she glanced up at the building where Hammerson’s office was located; there was an almost imperceptible black dot on the outside of his windowsill.

And sweep inside your office as much as you like, old man.