by Greig Beck
As the water deepened, they passed bright orange crabs the size of dinner plates hugging the rocks, and he could make out a few crayfish feelers sticking out from crevices and tiny caves.
Large-lipped cod gaped as they swum by, but without sunlight everything was in shadows or seemed to be muted greens, browns and deeper reds, broken only by the flaring orange of the crabs.
The bottom quickly fell away to about twenty feet and huge boulders littered the bottom where they had obviously broken from the cliff face hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of years ago.
“There.” Maddock swum ahead and then dived deeper.
Matt saw he flicked on his flashlight and the strong beam cut through the shadowy water.
“Down we go,” Matt said and also dived. On his wrist hung his flashlight and he grabbed it and flicked it on. Lana did the same.
There was a cave mouth; weeds billowing softly like ragged teeth in the wave action against the cliff face.
“This is it.” He looked to Lana who swam closer and added her light.
“Let’s see if anyone’s home.” Maddock entered the cave.
Matt looked to Lana. “Please don’t let there be little flying lizards in there.” He laughed softly.
“Or anything at all with teeth,” Lana added.
Matt cautiously entered. He was curious as hell, but truth was he wasn’t looking forward to entering the dark hole. Inside it was inky black, and their three beams moved over the interior of the small sunken cavern.
Huge flat streamers of kelp rose from the bottom, masking much of the cave, and Matt floated at the center of the void, arms out. He turned slowly with a few soft flicks of his fins.
“They were here,” he said softly.
Lana screamed, and Matt spun in the water.
The kelp had parted and looming over Lana was an enormous creature. Maddock was already beside her, and had her by the waist. But with their collective light beams, they could see it was a statue, twelve feet high and rearing up in an attack pose.
“It’s just an idol,” Maddock said with relief.
“It’s no idol, it was their enemy,” Matt replied.
The likeness was of a giant beetle-like creature, eight arms, enormously powerful-looking, and flanked by two human warriors holding spears as they did battle. Its style could have could have been Roman or Greek, but where those two great civilizations depicted their champions fighting bears or tigers, this race had real monsters to deal with.
“They grew huge,” Lana said. “This is what will happen now, unless we can stop them.”
“The Aztlanteans must have won,” Maddock said. “Or we wouldn’t be here.” He pointed at the stone monstrosity. “They would.”
“Let’s keep looking,” Matt said. He swiveled in the dark water and saw there were columns set into the wall, and smaller alcoves that might have held urns, or burning torches.
“It must have been like a chapel, or place of worship to their gods,” Lana said.
“Or a place of learning,” Matt replied. “Where they brought young scholars to be educated about the monstrous things that boiled up from the center of the Earth.”
“Professor.” Maddock was along the far wall, holding clumps of tough brown weed aside. “This look familiar?” He let himself float backwards out of the way.
Matt and Lana glided closer. Matt lifted his light. There, on a large flat wall, were marks of a size that would fit the two missing tablets of stone. One was cleanly excavated, and the other broken away.
“The age difference of the exposed stone, one more raw than the other; it all fits.” Matt said. “Hitler was rumored to have obtained his stone from an 18th century whaling captain’s descendents. Perhaps the stone broke off washed out after a storm and ended up on the beach where the whalers found it. When Hitler got it he tracked the source back to here and sent his submarine crew to obtain the other.”
Lana swam forward to pull more weeds out of the way. “This was the tablets’ original home.” She paddled back a few feet to take it all in. “Amazing. Their grasp of science was astounding. And all of this without computers.”
Matt swum closer and used a hand to wipe away the weed and mosses and then traced some of the glyphic inscriptions with his fingers as he tried to read. He wished Megan was here now as the majority of the information seemed to be more coded in mathematics, and he felt a pang of misery in his belly at the thought of her.
“This was how they determined when the events would take place,” he said. “When the silicoids would emerge – the minor events and the major ones.”
“Take your time,” Maddock said. “This is important.”
Lana hung in the dark water beside him, and Maddock began to take pictures along the wall.
“It’s the rings and ellipses again. They signify our planet and its rotation around the sun. Many cultures use the sun and stars for everything from navigation to measuring time. But the Aztlanteans used it for much more than that – they used the past to predict the future.” Matt looked along the submerged story.
“I think I see what they discovered,” Lana said through her mic. “Matt, come take a look.”
She punched in some numbers on her gauntlet computer, moved to another set of figures, circles, and marks carved into the stone, and entered more data. Then she laid a hand on a set of rings. “They determined that once every five hundred and twelve years, the planets all lined up with the sun.”
“The lining up is quite rare, right?” he asked.
“It sure is,” she replied. “But that’s not all. They also worked out that once every 1.6 million years, the planets all lined up on just one side of the sun.”
“The gravitational effect must be enormous,” Maddock said. “It’d create significant effects on our tides.”
“It does more than that. There is strong evidence now that the moon affects everything from Earth’s tides and geological forces to animal fertility,” Lana said.
“Then the lining up could be what causes the quakes, and the silicoids to be released to the surface,” Maddock said.
“That’s what I think,” Lana said. “And the bigger the magnetic effect, the bigger the release. Maybe whatever place these things were lying dormant in – an underground sunken cavern, embedded in some sort of matrix, whatever, was pulled open by the gravitational effects of the planets, and it allowed the silicoid eggs to spill out and bubble up to the surface.”
Matt grabbed her arm as he translated. “There’s more: when all the planets line up, and on the same side of the sun, as well as their orbiting moons, then it would create the biggest effect of all. How often is that?”
Lana worked the figures for a few seconds, and then looked up. “It happens once every sixty-five million years, and just for a few days.”
“That’s all they need. Once they’re on the surface, they’re self-sustaining. And I bet that timeline matches the mass extinction events from Earth’s history,” Matt replied.
The trio hung in the silent dark water for several moments, with only the sound of the respirators in their ears.
“The Aztlanteans must have observed a minor upwelling of the creatures, and stumbled onto the meteorite fungus by accident. They then worked out where the creatures came from and why,” Matt said, and floated closer to another of the walls.
“And they also worked out how to halt them. Then this brilliant race tried to leave a message for the future, to warn us.” Lana turned to him. “I wonder what happened to them.”
Lana frowned as a tree of seaweed wafted aside revealing another enormous image.
“Events overtook them.” Matt stared at the new image.
Lana came closer. “This doesn’t seem related to the other images. What the hell is it?”
Matt couldn’t form words for a moment. The image looked to be of a single eye in the center of a mass of coiling ropes.
Matt already knew what had happened to the Aztlanteans. Ten years ago, he’d bee
n beneath the dark ice of the Antarctic and seen the remains of their civilization.
A creature had evolved in the stygian darkness. Perhaps once it was a sort of prehistoric cephalopod, but it had grown into something monstrous, powerful, and intelligent. Matt had encountered it himself.
“What is it? It’s a deity of their underworld,” he said softly.
Matt knew that when the great city had been submerged between the snow and ice, trapping the last survivors, the creature had hunted them in the dark, picking them off one by one. It was a terrible way for such a brilliant and noble race to end.
“Pretty freaky legend,” Lana observed.
“Yeah, a legend.” Matt felt a tingle on the back of his neck and slowly swiveled in the dark water. He held up his light, throwing the beam out to the dark corners of the cavern. Suddenly he felt exposed and vulnerable in the black, cold water.
Matt turned back to the wall where the stones had been removed and noticed a small piece still lodged in the corner that had broken off. He quickly swam closer and brought his light up.
“What is it?” Lana joined him.
He rubbed it clear of seaweed as his brows came together. “It’s a missing piece, the Aztlantean symbol for a month – December.”
“What does that mean?” she asked. “It’s November now.”
Matt tried to put it in context from what he remembered from the stones, but couldn’t. “I just, don’t know.”
He hung in the dark water, a knot growing in his belly.
“I think we’ve got all we can for now, people. The rest is up to Colonel Hammerson,” Maddock said. “Time to head back.”
Lana lowered her light. “Will we be getting back to a functioning world? Or something very different?”
Maddock snorted. “Always trust the Hammer.”
CHAPTER 48
The MASS dispersals had continued around the clock. As fast as Lana Miles and her teams could incubate and grow more stock, it was immediately aerosolized, loaded, and dispersed.
Colonel Jack “The Hammer” Hammerson stood with arms folded in his large office as he watched the satellite feed display the next dispersal run over a large swarm. The converted bombers blanketed the approaching horde of bugs, which were now taller than men. Some even carried tools that they used to pry open safe-rooms or basements to get at the people inside.
Hammerson ground his teeth as some of the monstrosities turned to look upwards at the plane as it passed over them.
The mist settled among their ranks, and they immediately shuddered, became chaotic in movement, and then, in mere seconds, their bodies became covered in spidery white webs. The next moment, they fell to dust.
“Back to Hell, you sons of bitches,” Hammerson seethed.
Maybe in the future some geologist will comment on the layer of silicon in the environment, and it’ll be a mystery to them. Unless, like the Aztlanteans, they left some sort of message to the world’s future inhabitants.
Hammerson snorted softly. And that only just worked out by luck rather than design, he thought. If Matt Kearns hadn’t been watching television then the planet would have new rulers by now.
Hammerson continued to stare at the video feeds as the minutes turned to hours. In a few more hours all the major swarms had been destroyed, and it was now a mop-up operation. The missions had been so successful, with a hundred percent takedown rate, that the fungal spores would be dispatched around the globe to every affected country.
Hammerson checked his watch. There were just a few loose ends, and he had a meeting to tie those up.
*
“Ten-hut.” Five-star General Marcus Chilton snapped to attention, and beside him Colonel Jack Hammerson did the same.
The Commander in Chief, President Dan Redner, strode into the room, filling it with his six foot five inch presence. At each shoulder came his most trusted political lieutenants. The first was Michael Penalto, Secretary of State, and also Mark Jasper, the Secretary of Defense. None of the men were smiling.
“Gentlemen, at ease.” Redner took his seat at the table, and everyone else did the same. “Take me through it.”
General Chilton nodded. “It was a Russian operation, and our people on the inside tell us it was authorized from the very top.”
“That sonofabitch Volkov,” Penalto growled.
“Yes, sir,” Chilton replied. “But though we believe Volkov wanted to poke his finger in our eye as payback over Ukraine, we don’t believe he knew the operational details. Those intricacies were engineered by one Colonel Nadi Borishenko, in their Biological Warfare Unit. He was the one that tried to take down New York.”
“Over eight and a half million people in New York.” Redner clasped his large fingers together. “That’s how many people could have died, just because some guy wants to poke his finger in our eye.” He sat forward. “This is an act of war. We should take out one of their cities – let them know that this sort of action has severe blowback.”
“There’d be retaliation,” Chilton replied evenly.
Jasper scoffed. “The Russian economy is the same size as Texas’s, and their military is out of shape. Our war games determine they wouldn’t last four days against us.”
“That’s a given, but we don’t need to do that,” Hammerson said. “We know the swarms are ravaging the Russian countryside and moving into the major cities. Soon, Volkov will be begging for the fungal spores. We can also leak to the Russian press that their military is responsible for their release. Then their own people would ensure that heads would roll and necks would stretch. The Russians do revolutions very well.”
Redner folded his arms. “Not enough.”
“I agree,” Hammerson added. “But why punish your average Russian because a few assholes got a rush of blood? Begging your pardon, sir.”
“Go on,” Redner said.
Hammerson leaned forward. “So let’s just punish the assholes.”
Redner stared at Hammerson for a full twenty seconds, before he slowly began to smile. “Give Volkov a black eye, send him a message.” His eyes became flint hard. “But the other guy …”
Hammerson smiled back with zero humor. “Yes, sir. My team will deal with that personally.”
CHAPTER 49
Volkov’s residence at Cape Idokopas was also known as Volkov’s Castle, and was a large Italianate complex with eighty rooms, two ballrooms, three swimming pools – indoor and out, a gymnasium, sauna, lavish gardens, and elaborate security measures. And all located on the Black Sea coast near the village of Praskoveevka in Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Krai. It was both his fortress and palace.
Jack Hammerson lifted the phone as the VELA satellite came up over the horizon and into a complementary orbit. His two teams were ready.
“Team one, go for Special Delivery.”
“Roger that,” came the deep and calm response.
Hammerson was like a block of stone as he watched the feed from the helmet cam that showed him everything his soldier saw. They had already deployed a communication net, blinding the compound from the outside world, and also anyone watching from inside.
The team went over the grounds like wraiths, their camouflage suits blending into the different environmental shades, dappling from green, to black, to mottled as they passed over patches of snow and grass.
Hammerson had used his deep, embedded agents in the Volkov household to orchestrate a shift change on the inside security – their mission window was open, but small.
They came to the external cellar door, and the team leader turned to his team, counting down on his fingers. Hammerson saw the huge pack slung over one of their backs – the special delivery for Volkov.
They got to zero and went in fast, moving like an elemental force along the corridor on the way to the master bedroom.
Hammerson smiled as they came to the huge bedroom; inside there was very little other than a four-poster bed looking big enough for half-a-dozen people, and all draped with plush red velvet. The HAWC le
ader made hand signals and the team worked quickly. In seconds it was over, and the team withdrew.
Hammerson smiled cruelly. “May the eyes of the dead be on you.”
In just minutes more team one were already on their way home.
He lifted the phone again. “Team two, go for excision.”
Hammerson ended the link, folded his arms, and watched the screen. This mission was a little more detailed. And final.
This time the helmet-cam wearer was speeding through the back streets of the wealthy resort area of Bulgaria. The waterfront was only one or two streets away but the villa that they sought was on a slight hill affording a magnificent view of the bay.
A gloved hand appeared in front of the camera and made several gestures to the three-man team. Hammerson recognized the instruction to spread out.
They had come to a rear wall, nine feet high and with razor wire coiled along its top. The gate would undoubtedly be locked and alarmed.
The camera-wearer was hoisted up, and he set to using a small laser cutter on the wire. It instantly melted through the hardened steel and the section was dragged away.
The small group went over the top, and landed softly. The camera moved fast again as the trio raced to the back door.
The satellite feed using thermal imaging had shown there were two people in the villa, both in the upstairs bedroom and both asleep – there was the 48-year-old Borishenko, and a sixteen-year-old female companion: a local escort.
Once again the glass door was alarmed, but the trigger was on the lock, and so they cut the glass pane out, attached a suction cap and lifted the glass away. They were in.
Like ghosts, the trio moved through the house to the stairs and then up to the bedroom door. It was an old-style door with an ornate bronze knob handle. Hammerson watched as the gloved hand held up a small flat device that scanned the inner workings of the locking mechanism. It showed no alarms and also that the door wasn’t locked.
Next the gloved hand slowly opened the door and the darkness was illuminated a phosphorescent green. A long-barreled weapon was poked in, the target was the young woman, and with the sound of a soft sigh the dart hit her neck – she’d be out for another eight hours at least.
