Black Mountain (43 page)

Greig Beck

Beneath the Dark Ice

When a plane crashes into the Antarctic ice, exposing a massive cave beneath, a rescue and research team is dispatched.

Twenty-four hours later, all contact is lost.

Captain Alex Hunter and his highly trained squad of commandos are fast tracked to the hot zone to find out what went wrong – and to follow up the detection of a vast underground reservoir. Accompanying the team is an assortment of researchers, including petrobiologist Aimee Weir. If the unidentified substance proves to be an energy source, every country in the world will want to know about it, some would even kill for it.

Once inserted into the cave system, they don’t find any survivors – not even a trace of their bodies. Primeval hieroglyphs hint at an ancient civilisation, and an ancient, terrifying danger. Within hours, one of the party will die.

Soldiers we are not alone. Prepare to go hot.

To bring his team out alive, Alex will need every one of his mysterious abilities beneath the dark ice.

Greig Beck

This Green Hell

In the jungles of Paraguay, Dr Aimee Weir and her team are in trouble.

While drilling deep into the Earth a contagion strikes, their camp is quarantined, but workers start to vanish in the night.

Is it fear of contamination – or has something far more lethal surfaced?

Alex Hunter – code name Arcadian – and his Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos are dropped in the disaster area to do whatever it takes to stem the outbreak. But for the mission to be a success, the Arcadian must learn to master his violent inner demons long enough to confront the danger that not only threatens his own immediate survival, but that of mankind.

Greig Beck

Arcadian Genesis

An aeon ago it crashed into the frozen earth. Millennia later it was removed from the icy soil, still functioning. They opened it . . . they shouldn’t have.

Alex Hunter – in the mission that turned him from a normal man into the weapon known as the Arcadian – and the elite team of soldiers known as the Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos must enter a hostile country to rescue a defected Chechen researcher from the center of a country at war.

But the HAWCs are not the only ones looking for the rogue scientist and the mysterious package he carries with him. A brutal and relentless killer and his death squad are on the trail too – and they bring a savagery with them that Hunter and his team have never witnessed before in modern warfare.

In this stunning prequel to
Beneath the Dark Ice
, the HAWC team must race the clock to rescue the scientist, prevent the package from falling into the wrong hands . . . and save the world from a horror that should never have been woken.

First published 2012 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

Copyright © Greig Beck 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the
print edition.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Beck, Greig.

Black mountain / Greig Beck.

9781742610863 (pbk.)

A823.4

EPUB format: 9781743348703

Typeset by Post Pre-Press
Cover design by Bland Design

Love talking about books?

Find Pan Macmillan Australia online to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

• Cover
  
• About Black Mountain
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-one
  
• Chapter Twenty-two
  
• Chapter Twenty-three
  
• Chapter Twenty-four
  
• Chapter Twenty-five
  
• Chapter Twenty-six
  
• Chapter Twenty-seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty-one
  
• Chapter Thirty-two
  
• Chapter Thirty-three
  
• Chapter Thirty-four
  
• Chapter Thirty-five
  
• Chapter Thirty-six
  
• Chapter Thirty-seven
  
• Chapter Thirty-eight
  
• Chapter Thirty-nine
  
• Chapter Forty
  
• Chapter Forty-one
  
• Chapter Forty-two
  
• Chapter Forty-three
  
• Chapter Forty-four
  
• Author’s Note
  
• About Greig Beck
  
• Also by Greig Beck
  
• Copyright page