Dark Rising (14 page)

Bhakazarri had ordered at least one of the infiltrators to be brought to him alive, especially if they turned out to be Americans. The humiliation of the Great Satan would be extreme if Iran could parade captured US spies to the international media.

He pushed another cake into his mouth and snorted. Although he had given the order, Bhakazarri wasn’t counting on any living captives being brought to him. His Takavaran rarely left anything behind but body parts.
Ah, well
, he thought,
you send in wolves and someone gets savaged
. It didn’t matter; the Americans would still pay to get the bodies back, no matter what their condition.

Alex and Sam were checking their weapons when Adira and Zach joined them. As standard equipment, the HAWCs used the Heckler & Koch USP45CT pistol, or CT for short. Smooth and matt black, it was a powerful sidearm made of a moulded polymer with recoil reduction and a ‘hostile environment’ nitride finish giving maximum corrosion resistance.

‘H&K,’ said Adira. ‘Big and slow, I remember. Hope your targets stay at walking pace for you tonight.’

Sam chuckled.

Alex clicked the firing mechanism into place and sighted along the barrel. He liked the feel in his hand. ‘Not anymore,’ he told Adira. ‘This CT has a variant trigger – pull and discharge in a single smooth split-second motion. Maybe not the fastest handgun, but certainly faster than a standard Israeli Barak.’ He smiled at her.

‘What makes you think these are standard, Captain? Besides, sometimes speed is determined by what’s
behind
the gun. When this is over, we’ll have to see who is faster, yes?’

Sam stifled another laugh as he finished screwing on his sound suppressor and twirled the elongated gun in his hand. Most silencers suppressed sound through muffling; the upgraded CT used frequency shifting – it didn’t so much muffle the sound as shift it beyond the range of human hearing. Sam slid the weapon into its holster, which was strapped down into a special pocket in his suit.

Alex looked at his watch: 10.45 pm. ‘Get ’em together, Uncle.’

Hex came in first. He crouched down, holding the Klystron laser across his thighs. With his grey eyes, white-blond cropped hair and futuristic weaponry, he looked like a warrior from a time still to come. Alex could tell he was itching to fire the laser and pitied Hex’s first target – he wouldn’t miss.

Rocky and Irish came in next.

Alex spoke directly to Hex. ‘We can’t allow ourselves to be trapped in those ruins. If the Iranians attempt to enter the facility in force, move into ambush positions, or engage. You are unilaterally authorised to remove any and all perimeter threats.’

Hex simply nodded.

Alex took the lead on the insertion team. He was the only member of the four-person unit who was without nightscope equipment – his own enhanced vision gave him all the light amplification he needed.

The evening was clear but moonless, making the basin floor appear impenetrable in the darkness. The air temperature was cold, just a few degrees above zero, but still dry enough to suck the moisture from their eyes and mouths. The slow going would have a dual benefit: besides drawing less attention to them, it minimised exhaustion and therefore caused fewer exhalations – which would show on any watching thermal scopes as orange mist plumes.

It was just after midnight when they reached the tent covering the entrance to the tunnels. Sam and Zach moved forward to the steel door, Sam holding a small steel device he intended to use to bypass the digital security and Zach with his radiation meter. Out on the desert floor, Alex could see the slight movement of two of the Takavaran teams. One team was near an old truck, half the men asleep underneath it. The other team was closer to the ruins, the men lying with their backs against the stone, obviously drawing on the warmth stored there during the day.

‘It’s already open,’ Sam whispered. He coiled some wires around the small device and jammed it back into its sleeve. He drew his gun and crouched beside the door.

Adira pushed the metal panel slightly and went down on one knee on the opposite side to Sam. As the door swung inwards, they both pointed their weapons into the black tunnel beyond.

Zach held up the Geiger counter to check the radiation levels. ‘All clear,’ he said, and resheathed the device and fell in behind Adira.

Alex put his hand flat against the stone wall. Suddenly he felt a stab of pain in the back of his head. It turned to agony as the pressure built and shifted in his skull, as if there were tectonic plates in there grinding against each other, adjusting to make room for something.
Not now
, he thought.
Not more change, not now
. He closed his eyes for an instant and inhaled deeply. A rippling sensation passed through his head and down his spine and the pressure unwound slightly.

His hand tingled against the stone and he realised he could sense vibration – some kind of life presence inside the ancient structure. It was a swirling, chaotic storm of emotions – the lingering remnants of human pain and suffering. The living had been rapidly extinguished here, but he couldn’t tell if it was by violent death or by some other force.

The pain behind his eyes subsided and he removed his fingers from the stone, curling his hand briefly into a fist as if it had been burnt. He turned to the group, pointed at himself with one finger, at Sam with two, then Adira with three and at Zach, four. Then he pushed open the steel door and silently disappeared into the darkness, his small team following in the order he’d indicated.

TWENTY

A
hmad Al Janaddi looked with a critical eye through the four-inch-thick lead-plated glass window at the Jamshid II facility’s main testing floor. Images from every section of the room were displayed on multiple screens, the recordings taken in a continuous loop. Sophisticated computer programs allowed him to pass much of the control of the experiment over to the electronic equipment, and the high-speed drives would capture images of the event down to the micro-millisecond. Further data on atmospheric density, thermal, infrared and other spectrum wavelengths would also be collected. Nothing would be missed this time.

The reinforced concrete chamber with its lead-lined panelling was both awe-inspiring and intimidating. The sleek and gleaming silver globe sat at its centre, surrounded by walls studded and spiked by hundreds of different sensors and lenses that would observe the creation of a perforation into the very matter of the universe. It could have been a small spaceship that had landed and was preparing to disgorge creatures from another planet.

A thick white line circled the floor around the unearthly shimmering sphere. This was where the president’s ‘volunteers’ would stand during the event – the ‘opening of Allah’s Gateway’ as he liked to call it. Al Janaddi remembered the screams of anguish that had shrieked from the speakers the last time the sphere had been activated.
These men and women may as well be stepping into a furnace
, he thought. He just hoped the waist-high black steel cylinders covered in lenses and sensitive recording equipment that also stood on the line would be able to withstand whatever occurred; at least then they would obtain a basic understanding of how, when and where the subjects went. The sooner they knew that, the less likely the president would demand that more people ‘volunteer’.

With the current design, the experiment could be repeated as many times as they wished. But it took time: the concrete had to dry, the lead panelling had to be moulded into place and the sphere repositioned. The president was growing more impatient by the day, and it was not uncommon for Al Janaddi to receive calls in the morning and the evening to discuss progress.

He looked up as the volunteers were led in – eight villagers, a few local clerics, and a young couple, a man and a woman, who looked out of place amongst the elderly group. This small gathering was the ‘lucky’ pious – men and women who had begged to be given the opportunity to stand before their God.

Al Janaddi studied the youthful couple for a moment. They both wore the uniform of the young conservative: he, a cheaply cut blue suit with stiff white shirt and no tie; and the girl, a black manteau – the heavy overcoat that buttoned from the collar to below the knee. Her only personal touch – whether as a small sign of individuality or rebellion – was her scarf, which was royal blue with small golden tulips and intricate crimson scrolling reminiscent of Persian calligraphy. It framed her beautiful face with its perfect milk and honey complexion.

The couple turned to each other, their hands clasped in prayer, just the tips of their small fingers touching.
What are they doing here?
Al Janaddi thought as he watched the attending technicians prepare them for the event.

The head-to-toe, fully lead-impregnated protective suits, each weighing around one hundred pounds, were finished with regular sunglasses. The president had suggested that each martyr should have an automated homing beacon with global satellite positioning implanted under the skin, which would act like a mini black box device. As he had said to Al Janaddi: ‘As long as we get one of the boxes back, then the surrounding flesh doesn’t matter.’

Once the volunteers were in place, one of the clerics led them in prayer. The haunting sound stretched and bounced around the enormous chamber and it was hard not to feel touched by the melodious chanting. The cleric explained that some of them would be martyred, that they would stand before God to be judged and, if they were pure, would be exalted and given eternal sanctuary in Jannah for themselves and all their relatives.

The young couple looked at each other and their hands met. She took hold of his fingertips and smiled shyly. Al Janaddi looked down at his slightly scuffed shoes and wondered what it was like to have such an unwavering faith. Perhaps if these poor, brave, foolish souls knew they had little chance of surviving, they may have prayed for something very different.

He gave the order for all the technicians to exit the chamber, then, over the speaker, bade the volunteers to go with God. He noticed a puddle of urine at the feet of one of the older villagers and felt a pang of sympathy for the ragged little carpet weaver – perhaps not all of them expected to find heaven after all.
Allah keep you all safe
, he thought.

He turned to his command centre, where every scientist and technician was hunched over the banks of monitoring equipment. He raised his voice slightly: ‘Green light in sixty seconds.’ He was greeted by an array of thumbs ups and a few
Allahu Akbar
s.

‘Countdown in ten seconds,’ he said. His heart sped up in anticipation and he continued the count: ‘Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .’ He switched on the homing beacons and initiated the particle acceleration lasers. The lights dimmed.

They were all returning now. Al Janaddi thought it like a conjuror’s trick – one minute the international grid screen showed all twelve of the beacons clustered around the sphere in the Arak facility, then in the next moment they disappeared. Then, almost magically, they began to reappear on the grid, scattered all over the globe – some high in mountains or below the ground, some deep beneath the oceans. Al Janaddi counted:
Five . . . eight . . . eleven . . . one short
.

Many of the beacons faded quickly, perhaps crushed by deep-sea pressure or melted by volcanic flow beneath a mountain range. But a few continued to deliver their electronic signal loud and clear. Now Al Janaddi needed to retrieve those bodies before anyone else.

He reached for the phone and spoke quickly to Commander Bhakazarri, who would mobilise the recovery forces, retrieval teams for the bodies still in the Middle East and using agents or local sympathisers when the ‘packages’ were in less accessible countries.

While Al Janaddi was providing the exact longitude and latitude locations of the homing beacons, his eyes widened. One of the beacons was on the move – slowly, but definitely shifting from where it had first arrived.

One of the test subjects had returned alive.

TWENTY-ONE

T
he darkness was thick and absolute; and the smell of fresh-cut rock was sharp in the dry atmosphere. Normal human night vision was poor in near total darkness, but the changes to Alex’s brain had increased the level of rhodopsin in the rods of his eyes, giving him vision more like that of a hunting animal or nocturnal bird of prey. But even his amplified vision picked up little more than shapes and angles in a tunnel devoid of even the faintest starlight.

Luckily, Alex had more than night vision to rely on. His rewired brain was able to receive temperature differentials that delivered thermal images – and, recently, other senses had been opening to him as well. He was able to perceive an impression of living things – literally, to sense the proximity of another life force. The ability was growing, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before those impressions turned to shapes, then to an exact mental picture. It was these new senses he relied on as he led his team forward in the blackness of the Persepolis catacombs.

A slight whistling came from Zach’s nostrils as they moved silently down the tunnel and Alex was tempted to turn around and pinch the scientist’s nose.

After a few seconds, they came to a pool of absolute blackness in the gloom – the empty elevator shaft down to the main facility. Alex looked back over his shoulder and could just make out a line of single bulbs strung along the ceiling.
No juice left here
, he thought. He stared down into the dark pit – he couldn’t detect any form of electronic hum or power at all.
Good, no juice down there either
. Presumably that meant the electronic locks had disengaged to ensure personnel weren’t trapped inside by generator failures.

The shaft was deep and the cage was at the bottom. Whoever had last entered had never left.
Persepolis is hanging onto its ghosts
, he thought.

He put one leg over the edge of the pit, and Sam and Adira lined up behind him.