Beneath the Dark Ice (37 page)

He scanned the floor for any dissent, and licked dry, nervous lips. Hoeckler turned and smiled. Shihab felt a bead of perspiration run down beside his left ear. He drew in a deep breath, feeling his heart thump sickeningly in his chest.

“
Allahu Akbar
,” he whispered as he entered the final codes and made a single stroke on the keyboard.

An infernal shriek tore through the laboratory and permeated the thickened glass as if it were paper. In the centre of the laboratory, where the sphere had stood, there was now a blackness darker than night. At its core was a pinprick of nothingness that hurt Shihab’s eyes. He felt as if he were caught in a thick mucus that trapped his limbs. Time slowed, or perhaps stretched and a cold darkness spread out into the laboratory. It was the only thing moving; everyone else seemed frozen in time too. As Shihab watched, he realised to his horror that the growing mass of darkness was absorbing everything in its path. He watched helplessly as the bodies of his colleagues elongated and then began to tear as they were pulled towards that dark curtain of space.

His eyes briefly met those of Herr Hoeckler for a second—or perhaps it was for an eternity—before the large man was engulfed, his body stretched into a plume of flesh-coloured streamers.

We all died when I pressed that final key
, he thought,
and now we are in hell
.

From the corner of his frozen vision, Mahmud Shihab saw his friend Hakim become a long white streak as he was dragged mercilessly into the void. And then his sanity left him as he saw his own tongue and the lining of his throat distend from his body and rush towards hellish oblivion.

Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska—U.S. Military Space Command

“What the fu—” Corporal Marcs scooted his office chair across the floor of his horseshoe-shaped booth to replay what he had just seen on one of his screens. “Holy shit. Major, you gotta see this! VELA just picked up a whale of a radiation spike from the Middle East.”

Offutt Air Force Base was one of the most strategically placed and defensible military bases in the world, home to the Strategic Air Command, the 55th Wing and also the primary hub of the United States military network-centric space command. Its role was to manage the constellation of military hardware orbiting the planet and oversee the billions of bits of information received from their flock of extremely attentive high-orbit birds. Normally the command centre was a place of professional calm. Today all hell was about to break loose.

“What the hell are they doing?” Marcs went on. “This is strong gamma—just gamma—where’s the rest of the radiation package? Is this a detonation?”

Major Gerry Harris was instantly at the corporal’s shoulder. A brilliant military specialist, Harris had been heading up the space command centre for the past eighteen months. His background in physics and information
technology were the perfect credentials needed to understand and manage the complex information received by the satellites and translated by the sophisticated computer applications. But these signatures defied logic; they refused to make sense even to his analytical mind. The advanced VELA satellites used radio-frequency sensors to detect electromagnetic pulse prints and could measure the strength of high-intensity ionising radiation even from high orbit. If there was a higher than naturally occurring radiation signature across the X-ray, alpha- or beta-particle, neutron or gamma-ray spectrum, a VELA would see and taste it. But these pulses? Their sudden appearance and strength made them seem almost non-terrestrial.

“Can’t be a detonation,” Harris said. “These guys shouldn’t even have fission capability yet. And if it’s some sort of subsurface nuclear test, why aren’t there any seismic signatures—and why are we seeing this single particle in such concentrations?”

Harris paced for a moment, then started yelling commands across the floor to his technicians. “I need all our birds with digital, thermal and ground-penetrating imaging capabilities looking at these coordinates now!”

Then he reached for the phone on Corporal Marcs’ desk. “Get me General Chilton,” he said. “ASAP.”

Frank and Lorraine Beckett had been driving in stony silence for the past hour. They had left the Interstate at the Limon hub after sharing soggy, coffee-flavoured peanut butter sandwiches and disintegrating donuts—apparently Lorraine had left the top loose on the goddamn thermos, yet again.

Both in their mid-fifties and comfortably stout after years of double-portion dinners and chocolate candy in front of the TV, the Becketts were making a once-in-a-lifetime road trip, from their home in Knoxville weaving
all the way to Santa Barbara on the West Coast. It was a joint gift to each other to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but what had seemed like a magical and exciting idea when they planned it was turning out to be days on end of featureless highways, frightening-looking hitchhikers and roadside motels with orange and brown décor that should have been put out of its misery in the mid-seventies. To really ice the cake, Lorraine’s stomach was acting up again and Frank was threatening that if she let loose one more fart in the car he was going to leave her at the next bus stop.

Praise the Lord
, he thought. Just one more hour on Highway 24 and they’d be in Colorado Springs—which meant warm showers, a nap before dinner and maybe even some plain, home-style food that would help slay the dragon making war in the pit of that damn woman’s stomach.

The flat purple-grey highway cut through the dry and scrubby landscape like a new zipper down an old canvas sheet. Frank was starting to get his good mood back, and was about to break the silence by telling his wife a bad joke when the car died. Everything just stopped at once. Frank coasted the car to a halt, frantically pushing buttons and stamping on pedals.

“Did you see that, Frank?” Lorraine said, pointing through the front windscreen. “The sky seemed to shimmer slightly, like we were driving through a curtain of oil.” She touched her fingers to her face and they came away slick and bright red. “Frank, I’m bleeding.”

Frank noticed that his nose was streaming blood too. “Outta the freakin’ car!” he said. He didn’t want them soiling the beautiful leather seats with bloodstains. There would be a nasty amount to fork out on the insurance if there was even minor interior damage.

The dry prairie air assaulted their senses and made
them grimace after the Suburban’s air conditioning. Lorraine staggered and her face looked slick and waxy with shock.

As Frank went round to swing the car hood open, he spotted something lying on the road ahead. “What the hell’s that? That weren’t there before.”

“Is it a deer?” burbled Lorraine through a handful of blood-stained tissues.

The clouds were moving rapidly across the flat land all around, and as they slowly approached the mass, a long shaft of yellow sunshine illuminated the lump on the road. It looked meaty and slightly moist. Frank had to will himself to take a step forward; his animal instincts were screaming at him to get the hell out of there.

Lorraine held Frank’s arm and remained slightly behind his left shoulder as they neared the strange organic mess. “Oh my god, Frank, what is that?” she whispered.

Slight tics and squeaks emanated from the lump, and as they got closer they realised that the sounds were caused by the mass thawing in the sun—a sparkling coat of frost dripped, twinkling onto the road surface. Frank knitted his brows; the thing seemed to be sprouting up from the hard black tarmac. Not pushing up through it exactly, just . . . stuck.

“This can’t be real,” he said. “It’s some kind of sick joke.”

Half of the mass looked like a man wearing a white laboratory coat, but the other half was stretched out like elongated taffy. It looked like plastic that had been heated and then frozen solid again. The face was wet-raw, like the skin under a blister, and where the eyes should have been were just hollow, ragged sockets. The mouth was intact, and above it a blond toothbrush moustache twinkled with ice crystals. But what really made Frank’s stomach lurch was the pink organic matter that protruded between the
bared teeth like a veined, deflated bag. It had to be the guy’s lungs—pulled or blown out.

Lorraine staggered to the side of the road and vomited. “Frank, I’m bleeding inside!” she screamed. The mess of digested bread and donuts was streaked with blood.

Frank went to her, blinking rapidly to clear his stinging eyes. But it wasn’t tears running down his cheeks, it was blood. When Lorraine saw him, she started to cry.

Frank sat down heavily next to his wife. “I don’t feel well, Lainey.”

He looked over at the creature again and noticed something he hadn’t seen when he was standing above it. On the pocket of the lab coat was a small badge that was pulsing with a soft blue light.

United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM)—Nebraska

Major Jack “Hammer” Hammerson shouldered open the heavy panelled door of his office and headed straight for a hulking oak desk near the back wall. The impressive piece had once stood in front of the enormous set of double windows that dominated the room, but old warrior habits die hard and the Hammer never liked to have his back to a door or window. The desk, like most things the Hammer bumped up against, had to give way.

Major Hammerson was one of the hard men of the military. His face could never be called friendly; its deep clefts and creases hinted at too much outdoor living and quite a bit of blunt-force trauma. You didn’t need to read the major’s background files to know he could incapacitate an enemy in less than seven seconds. Hammerson headed up the elite Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos—HAWCs, for short. His uniform, except for rank, was insignia free. His only identification was a plastic card with a barcode and the lightning bolts and fisted gauntlet of the U.S. Strategic Command.

Major Hammerson and his special unit had been reassigned to USSTRATCOM eighteen months ago, and it
seemed a good fit. The United States Strategic Command was one of the ten unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense. They controlled the nuclear weapons assets of the U.S. military and were a globally focused command charged with the missions of Space Operations, Integrated Missile Defence, Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Other Special Operations. The “Other Special Operations” was where Hammer and his HAWCs came in.

Normally a blunt and brusque man, today the major was in a great mood. In just over three weeks, and for the first time in five years, he would be fly-fishing in the land of the midnight sun. He was taking two weeks off to camp out in a little place he knew up high on the Kenai River bend in Alaska, where the tides from Cook Inlet washed in the biggest king salmon found anywhere in the world. Biting cold air that made the breath fog, and water so clear you could see the pebbles on the bottom at near any depth. Hammerson sighed and rubbed his large hands together. Just a few curious grizzlies for company and the odd bald eagle watching suspiciously from overhead. He knew that a record ninety-seven-pounder had been caught in those parts, and he reckoned there was a hundred-pounder with his name on it.

The Hammer was practising long, slow casting motions across his desk when the phone rang. He hit the receive button on the console and barked a curt “Hammerson” while still jerking on an imaginary rod. When he heard the deep voice on the line, he sat forward immediately and picked up the handset.

“Sir.”

He listened with the intensity he always gave the highest-level mission briefings. His face was like stone, the only movement his eyes narrowing slightly.

“I agree, that size pulse could signify weaponability,” he said. “Yes, something a little more surgically precise would be best. We can be ready in twenty-four hours, sir.”

There was a click as the connection was severed. Hammerson held the phone in the air for a second before replacing it softly in its cradle. Time to reactivate the Arcadian.