This Green Hell

THREE

Colonel Jack Hammerson sat behind an oak desk the size of a small Buick and lifted the progress report on Captain Alex Hunter. He pinched his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger as he read the details.

Newly promoted to the rank of colonel, after fighting against it for months, Hammerson — or the Hammer as he was known friends and colleagues — was beginning to enjoy the new pay grade and larger office now that it was confirmed he would still have direct line of command over his beloved HAWCs. Colonel Hammerson had been in the military all his life. His rise to his current position had been largely due to a mix of intelligence, competence and ferocity in various Special Forces operations — first as a participant, then as a leader. The Hammer now headed up one of the most lethal and covert teams in the world: the elite Hotzone All-forces Warfare Commandos, or HAWCs for short — a select few drawn from the ranks of the Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Special Forces Alpha and the Rangers. When the HAWCs were deployed, the job got done, no matter how bloody or brutal. It was a tough unit, and there were very few functioning old HAWCs — Hammerson being an exception. Most lasted fewer than five years — usually rotated out before psychological burnout, or their good luck came to a sudden end and they finished up as an unidentified corpse in a bloody hotspot somewhere on the globe.

Hammerson’s eyes travelled back and forth over the charts, images and small print of the report and gave a half-smile. Its subject, Captain Alex Hunter, was one of his most experienced HAWCs and by far the most mystifying. The young man hadn’t so much been born for the job as manufactured for it by circumstances. Alex Hunter had been changed, and Hammerson had authorised it personally. The genesis had been an assassin’s bullet; comatose, with the bullet buried in an inoperable position in the centre of his skull, Hunter looked to be heading for an existence dependent on artificial respirators and feeding tubes, immobile and unresponsive, until his once giant frame transformed to a living cadaver before their eyes. Hammerson owed his life a hundred times over to taking risks, and he had taken one with Alex Hunter. The secretive USSTRATCOM Medical Division, or UMD, had been testing a new treatment that was years away from human trials. A chemical restorative that had the potential to get soldiers back on their feet and able to keep fighting while they were literally being blown to pieces. The new batch had been ready for testing, but no one expected it to work.

Hammerson had hoped it would at least give Alex some sort of life; perhaps assist in a basic form of recuperation. But within weeks of the treatment starting, he got a call: Alex Hunter was awake. But there was more: he was awake … and well.

Preliminary scans had shown that his brain had dealt with the trauma by enfolding the bullet and rerouting blood to sections of his brain that science categorised as unused or unknown. Over time, the changes had become more significant. Hunter’s brain had begun to increase its neocortical mass by refolding along both sides of his interhemispheric fissures. His body changed too: normal cells acted more like stem cells; and his chemical engine room went off the scale, producing natural steroids, adrenalin and interferons on demand. His system was like a biological powerplant.

Alex Hunter had been returned to life — but as a different kind of being. He had been wounded and broken a hundred times, and each time he emerged stronger, more powerful, than ever. Captain Hunter was now a project; a secret file codenamed ‘the Arcadian’.

The treatments had continued even after Alex’s recovery from the initial trauma; UMD had convinced Hammerson that stopping would risk a total regression to his former vegetative state. But with further treatment came further change. Alex developed new abilities — some, perhaps, that evolution had allowed to dull in mankind through its immersion in modern life. Others that may never have been meant to become apparent for another millennium.

At first, Hammerson had been delighted by the strength, speed and enhanced mental acuity his young HAWC had displayed. However, the more Alex changed, the more Hammerson became aware that the UMD regretted returning him to the HAWCs. Attempts to create another Arcadian subject had failed. After several years, Alex was looking more like an accident — a perfect collision of physical change caused by the bullet trauma and biological enhancement through the treatments. Individually, either may have resulted in nothing but coma or death; together, they had turned a dying man into something unbelievable.

Jack Hammerson had been around long enough to save a few hides and develop a circle of friends in very high places. Through bullying and bargaining, he had been able to keep Alex in the field. But the deal was not infinite, and UMD were impatient for their prize. Hammerson had been told Hunter had one more year until he was to be … retired.

Bastards, Hammerson thought as he flipped another page of the report. Trying to engineer reasons to pull him in early, aren’t you, you sons of bitches.

He ran his eyes down the diagnostics on Alex’s alpha, beta and delta waves, and the summary that was included below. He rubbed his brow and compressed his lips for a second; there were those words again: ‘lethal instability’. It seemed that Alex Hunter’s heightened brain activity had a price: the cyclone of electrical impulses occasionally triggered hurricanes of rage that were physically terrifying. Alex had learnt to master the rages through psychological conditioning, using his conscious strength to contain and even focus his furious impulses. But deep down within the man, there was no control. When that subconscious boiled up and ran free, Alex Hunter became potentially lethal. Another phrase caught the Hammer’s eye: ‘psychopathic potential’.

Not everything goes to plan, he thought as he exhaled and closed the report, asking the empty room: ‘Who will win, Alex? You or the furies?’

He rubbed his eyes hard with a thumb and finger. He couldn’t keep lying to the soldier forever, and damned if he was going to let them cut him up in some military lab.

He blinked a couple of times to refocus, and picked up the next folder. It was titled ‘Operation Green Shield — Eyes Only’, dated and time-stamped just hours ago. He took out a small disc and pushed it into the sleek computer on his desk. The image on the screen — the lightning bolts and fisted gauntlet of the US Strategic Command — dissolved as the hard drive accessed the information, and the menu for the operation dropped down. Hammerson selected the overview to read.

Seemed the friendly government in Paraguay had discovered an enormous gas field with a potential 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a few miles below its surface. It would make the small country one of the region’s energy superpowers. They were planning to extract the resource and pipe it to the coast, where it could be sold into a fuel-hungry world economy. Good news for America, as the friendly relationship meant trading would be open, honest and long term. Good news for America, but obviously bad news for some of the less friendly neighbours, like Venezuela, Bolivia and a half dozen others that had tried to claim that the gas bed extended under their own country’s borders. When this was proved false in the international courts, a different kind of pressure was exerted. Bandits had been disrupting drilling, and when the bodies began to pile up, Paraguay had asked for help — firstly from a team of energy experts to assist with the identification and rapid extraction of the gas, and then recently for something a little more covert and muscular.

It was a typical political — military skirmish situation. The rebels could strike and run; if they retreated across the border into a neighbouring country, then the Paraguayan troops couldn’t follow. The USA had regular army bases down in South America, but for domestic political purposes it couldn’t be seen in any way to be governing, co-opting or even influencing the gas-bed economics. Worse would be to deploy an active ground troop operation within another foreign country — even if requested. Still way too much baggage after the Middle East for that. So the classified decision had been to deploy a small six-man unit of highly skilled Green Berets. Should have been more than enough to deal with a small rebel interaction … but that’s where things got real strange.

Hammerson clicked on some audio transcripts from a Captain Michaels out in the field and turned up the volume. At first he thought he was hearing white noise, then recognised the sounds of the jungle — the hum of millions of insects and animals going about their hectic, crowded lives. And then, oddly, total silence, as if the jungle had held its breath. Hammerson frowned and turned up the volume, only to turn it back down quickly when the automatic gunfire rang out. After a few more seconds there was heavy breathing — either exertion or fear. The jungle slowly began its buzz again, before a man’s voice could be heard — a barely coherent, hurried staccato. ‘It’s out there … it’s coming back … we can’t stop it.’

More gunfire, and a roar that immediately hushed all the noises of the jungle. Only the sound of the captain’s swallowing and rapid breathing remained. Hammerson narrowed his eyes and listened intently. In those small sounds, he could sense the man’s abject fear — the juddering breath, the slight wetness of the inhalations, as if his nose was running. He knew adrenalin was coursing through that body — fight or flight. Come on, soldier, this is what you trained for, he thought, willing the young man to pull himself together.

There was a tearing sound, then a thump that could have been a tree falling, and then a roar so loud that it made Jack Hammerson sit up in his seat. It was close, and followed by the panicked yell of the young captain. ‘Anybody, if you’re there — they’re all dead. Come in … please, come in.’ There was a pause and then what could have been sobbing.

Hammerson wished he was there. He knew battlefield panic — without someone taking immediate control, things would quickly go to shit. The sobbing stopped only to turn into a shout — ‘This goddamn green hell!’ — and then more gunfire. There was another roar, a grunt of pain and the sound of cloth or something soft being ripped, then nothing but the real white noise of severed communications.

The recording stopped and the menu reappeared. Hammerson’s brow furrowed and he said angrily to the screen, ‘What the fuck was that?’

The final menu item displayed was titled ‘Current Operational Status’. Hammerson read it quickly; it was a brief information squirt from command: All contact severed. Green team 1 assumed neutralised.

An advanced VELA satellite had been redirected and, although it was partially blinded by the thick growth of the jungle, it had used its thermal, motion and energy signal scans to confirm no movement and no intact human heat signatures from the potential skirmish zone.

Thankfully, the local and American scientists and advisors were well away from the hotzone, but they would eventually need to enter it to continue drilling. Hammerson ran his eyes down the list of names and came to one he immediately recognised: Dr Aimee Weir — Independent Petrobiological Consultancy.

‘Ohh, shit.’

The Hammer knew what was coming. When a squad like the Green Berets were taken out, you didn’t just send in more GBs. Instead, you changed the extent or category of force. There were three options: one, send in about a hundred regular army with heavy ground support; two, burn the entire zone from 10,000 feet; or three, send in the HAWCs.

Hammerson also knew that once Alex Hunter found out Aimee was in a hotzone, nothing would stop him going in, with or without authorisation. And if anything happened to Aimee down there, burning from 10,000 feet would have looked like the soft option.

He picked up the phone. He didn’t need to dial, and the call was answered immediately. He spoke slowly, not taking his eyes off his computer screen. ‘Find Captain Alex Hunter and get him in here, immediately.’