Greig Beck - Dark Rising

‘Lieutenant, get in there,’ Graham ordered.

Marshall had a look of incredulity on his face. ‘You want me to go in there with just a syringe? Are you shitting me? I’m not going in there with anything less than an elephant gun.’

‘For Chrissake, I need you to buy me some time,’ Graham snapped. ‘I don’t know how, Lieutenant – sing to him if you have to – just get in there. That’s an order.’

Captain Robert Graham picked up the phone and, without taking his eyes off the carnage behind the glass, spoke just four words.

‘Get me Hammerson, now.’

Tel Aviv University, Israel – Astrophysics Department

Zachariah Shomron’s hands shook so much he nearly spilled his cup of hot chocolate on the new oxide crystal radiation unit – OCRU for short – that the department had just acquired. It was a delicate and beautiful machine – a blend of sci-fi aesthetics and high-tech pragmatics. Gleaming silver-steel casing and glass domes held rosettes of gadolinium silicate-oxide crystals – the best option for detecting gamma rays and high-energy X-rays. The OCRU displayed the invisible heavy particles as light pulses within the vacuum domes – the more brilliant the glow, the greater the strength of the radiation and its proximity. The visual display was accompanied by a computer application that translated the light pulses into radiation sievert strength, and also calculated distance and direction. Ohhh yeeessss, Zachariah mouthed as he ran his long fingers over the glass domes. This was a work of art with a scientific purpose. And it was his paper on geo-astrophysical gamma ray bursts that had swayed the university budgeting committee to pass the funding for the purchase of the expensive Swiss precision device.

Zachariah began the software load into the OCRU, watching the lines of code scroll up the screen. Gamma rays had a well-deserved deadly reputation, but their power and prevalence throughout the universe meant that the first to harness their cosmic muscle would have access to an energy source that was infinite in quantity and strength. Perhaps he could be the first to design some sort of stellar mining project – now that would be really cool.

Zachariah, or Zach to his friends, was what was affectionately known as a university ‘drop-in’. He was a brilliant young man who, with doctorates in gravitational astrophysics, particle physics and pure mathematics, and a specialisation in black holes and cosmic dark matter, could have had his choice of any number of advisory or teaching positions at Tel Aviv University or any other place of higher learning around the world. Problem was, Zach didn’t want to do anything in the real world. How could he? There was so much more to learn and never enough time. As soon as he finished one degree, he enrolled in another, and another; he had been the same since his first senior class at the age of thirteen – always moving forward and expanding his encyclopaedic knowledge of the cosmos and its strange forces.

After his parents were killed in a bomb attack, school had become his shelter and books his friends. They were always there for him, faithful and factual, and had nothing to do with war. Not like his parents, who had both been victims of this war that seemed without end. His father had died when he wrestled to the ground a man who carried a live grenade. His mother had died shielding her young son from the full force of the blast. When Uncle Mosh and Aunt Dodah had taken Zach in, they had worried about his withdrawal into a world of reading. But it soon became clear that it was just his way of dealing with his personal tragedy.

Tall and skinny, with long bony hands on the end of even longer bony arms, Zachariah was a man in perpetual motion. He always had something to do and rushed about, knuckles cracking, feet tapping, hands flying over computer keyboards or drawing things in the air for others. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles completed the image of the stereotypical uber-nerd.

Zach slurped the last drops of his chocolate, threw his mug onto the bench and switched the device on. With the OCRU, he would soon be able to detect anything from a normal daily pulse of gamma right up to a mega blast. The Earth had encountered mega-range blasts before. A prehistoric far-galaxy short burst of gamma rays had once been suggested as a possible reason for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Luckily, those types of events happened about once every 500 million years. Even luckier for Earth was that no gamma bursts had ever occurred in its galaxy. And just as well, Zach thought; a single ten-second burst from a source just 6000 light years away would strip the planet of its atmosphere and burn all life from the surface.

The computer screens flared to life, showing graphs and charts with unexpected intensities, and the crystals glowed strongly, bathing Zach and his laboratory in blue light. This can’t be right, he thought.

He typed in a few commands, muttered a brief, ‘Impossible,’ turned the device off and gave it thirty seconds. When he powered it back up, the result was the same. ‘Impossible,’ he said again and picked up the phone to call his current professor, Dafyyd Burstein.

‘Shalom, Dafyyd, you’re not going to believe this – I’ve just picked up a terrestrial nanosecond gamma-ray burst. And that’s not all. I believe the pulse came from the Middle East… from the central Iranian desert.’

*

General Meir Shavit was the head of Metsada, the Special Operations Division of Mossad. Short and grizzle-haired, he had served his country for over fifty years in both military theatres and dedicated intelligence services. He could even boast an apprenticeship under the fearsome Ariel Sharon in the infamous Unit 101 – Israel’s very first Special Forces command.

From its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Mossad oversaw a staff of around 2000 personnel. It was one of the most structured and professional intelligence services in the world, and also one of the deadliest. It consisted of eight different specialised departments – one of which was General Shavit’s Metsada, responsible for assassinations, paramilitary operations, sabotage and psychological warfare. If the army was the spear and shield of Israel, then Metsada was its secret dagger dipped in poison.

General Shavit’s assistant opened the door and showed in the young woman who had been seated in the large comfortable waiting room outside the general’s office.

‘Boker tov, Captain Senesh,’ Shavit greeted her.

‘Shalom, General.’

Adira Senesh stood stock-still at attention until the assistant departed and the door closed, then her face broke into a wide grin and she moved quickly to embrace the general, who was slowly getting to his feet.

‘You look well, Addy.’

‘I feel better for seeing you, Uncle.’

Adira was Shavit’s favourite niece. Her name meant ‘mighty’ in ancient Hebrew, and it suited her. She was related to the famous Chana Senesh, who was sent by the Kibbutz Sdot Yam to save Jews in the Nazi-occupied countries and was betrayed to the Nazi regime. Severely tortured, she never informed on her friends and was sentenced to death by firing squad in 1944. Her bravery was exemplified by her refusal to be blindfolded so she could look the soldiers in the eye as they pulled their triggers. The general knew that the brave Senesh blood also flowed strongly through the veins of his handsome niece.

Adira was above average height and had to bend slightly to kiss the general’s cheek. With a smooth olive complexion and dark eyes like pools of oil, she could have passed for any normal young woman who liked to spend her time perusing the shopping arcades of downtown Tel Aviv. However, when shaking her hand one felt the calluses and raw strength of a soldier trained in unarmed and armed combat. Adira Senesh was a captain in the Metsada and acknowledged as one of the best trained operatives in the field. She was responsible for single-handedly entering a Hamas terrorist tunnel network and rescuing a captured twenty-two-year-old border guard. No terrorists had survived.