Hammer of God: Alex Hunter 5.5 Read online

  About Hammer of God: Alex Hunter 5.5

  When the coalition of Allied Forces established an international zone in Iraq, they meant to bring peace to the region. They were succeeding – until the moment something hulked into the zone and detonated a nuclear bomb.

  The last images from the area prior to the blast are not of drones or the trail of an ICBM. Instead they show a solitary figure carrying the enormous weapon to the soon-to-be ground zero on its back.

  Consulting an ancient prophecy, scholars warn that an ancient evil has returned, wielding the power to raise the dead to do its bidding.

  Major Jack Hammerson, leader of the elite commandos known as the HAWCs, knows that only one one soldier is up to the task. But he cannot do it alone.

  Alex Hunter, the Arcadian, teams up with old ally and Mossad spy Adira Senesh to unravel the age old prophecy, tracing it back to the very heart of madness.

  Perfect for fans of Matthew Reilly, Steve Alten, Myke Cole, Graham Masterton, James Rollins and Michael Crichton.

  Contents

  About Hammer of God: Alex Hunter 5.5

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  About Kraken Rising: Alex Hunter 6

  About Greig Beck

  Also by Greig Beck

  Copyright

  To the four marines and one sailor killed in Chattanooga by hate, ideology and cowardice. Know this: they’ve never beaten you in a fair fight and never will. You will not be forgotten.

  Greig Beck

  “Father always said that when things were darkest, when evil was everywhere, then the angels would come – and they would strike like the hammer of God.”

  Leyla ba Hadid, Soran, Northern Iraq

  PROLOGUE

  Soran, Northern Iraq, late afternoon

  Arki Bapir and Mohammed Faraj watched as the huge man lumbered down the road toward them. He was headed toward the city center. A thick shawl covered his head and body, but still could not hide his powerful frame.

  Strapped to the man’s back was a huge pack – oil drum size, and covered in an ancient script. And even though it looked to be of considerable weight, the man came on steadily, bowed forward for balance, but not staggering or straining.

  “What is he carrying?” Mohammed asked his friend.

  Arki shrugged. “Not sure, but it looks heavy. Maybe dumbbells?” He turned and grinned.

  Mohammed snorted. “Well, let’s find out if he is selling something worth buying… or taking.” He turned the car around and pulled up beside the man, slowing. He nudged Arki. “Go on, ask him.”

  Arki wound down the window, letting in a blast of hot dry air that mingled with the warm humidity in the car. “Hey, hey, my brother, what is it you bring us today?”

  The pair waited for the man to respond. Mohammad coasted to stay alongside him, but the man continued to lumber forward, his face lost in the long folds of his shawl.

  “Is he deaf?” Arki asked as he half-turned toward Mohammed. “He doesn’t know who we are.”

  “Or maybe just rude?” Mohammed replied. “Shoot him in the leg.”

  “Perhaps he’s stupid.” Arki leaned out the window. “Hey you.”

  Mohammed’s eyes narrowed. “Be careful, he is big.” He dragged his aging AK-47 up onto his lap.

  The lumbering giant was approaching the center of the city now, wooden single story dwellings giving way to multi-level concrete and glass blocks.

  “Hey, brother, no need to be rude … oops.” Arki pulled back into the car.

  The man stopped, seemed to orient himself. He shrugged out of the pack and it made a resounding thump as it hit the ground. He straightened to his full height of around seven feet, making the men in the car gasp.

  “He truly is a giant. Let’s leave him be.” Arki shrunk back into his seat. “We are supposed to be gone by now anyway.” He watched as the huge man reached forward to pull open the backpack.

  Mohammed squinted. “I think it’s some sort of machine in there.”

  The man drew his hood back, and momentarily looked skyward as though praying or listening to something. His face was now revealed, its patchwork surface scarred and waxen. There was more of the ancient writing, but this time it was carved or branded into his very flesh, along with the zippering of deep stitches.

  Mohammed recoiled. “Ach, mother of horrors, what happened to him?”

  The giant man’s dead eyes never flickered as he reached into the pack and pressed a single button.

  The pair of fighters from Mosul never knew what happened at the moment they were vaporized. The twenty-kiloton nuclear device detonated at ground level. The hypocenter of the explosion reached ten thousand Kelvin and was hotter than the sun. In the first few seconds it melted a crater down a hundred feet, and, within a mile, buildings, streets, trees, and men, women and children were all fused into a black, glass-like slag.

  The thermal compression wave then traveled on at around seven hundred miles per hour, crushing everything before it – a heat and pressure tsunami straight from hell.

  Before the blast, the city of Soran had a population of 125,000 inhabitants. By sundown, the remaining eight thousand souls, who were unlucky enough to survive, would then die slowly from burns, or from radiation poisoning, as their cells simply disintegrated within their own bodies.

  Soran, the ancient city that had stood for nearly two thousand years, had ceased to exist, and the now toxic land would ensure it never existed again.

  *

  The winds blew the radioactive dust and debris back over the western desert, where it would settle over the dry plains. In the mountains to the northeast, Leyla ba Hadid, a girl of just ten, sat and watched as the mushroom cloud rose thousands of feet into the sky.

  Her home was gone; everything was gone. Her father had said there would be trouble as soon as the bad men from Mosul had arrived. But even he could not have foreseen this. She sat and hugged her knees tight, her face wet and the skin on her neck peeling and raw.

  Her father had told her to run and hide as the bad men maimed and killed, and then finally rounded up hundreds of men, women, and families, and bundled them all into trucks, along with her father, still in his favorite blue shirt. No one fought back – they just let themselves be taken and driven away. Leyla had followed, staying on the mountain slopes. She had cursed their ill fortune. But that changed in a heartbeat. Now, she realized she had been one of the lucky ones.

  Soran was now ash and smoke. God had reached down a finger and touched the city, and taken it from them. The back of Leyla’s neck still stung from the heat flash and she wrapped her shawl there to dry its sticky rawness. Her eyes were sore, but it was pure chance that she’d been looking away from the blast and hadn’t lost her sight.

  Leyla rocked back and forth, wondering how she would tell people of this moment. What would she say of Soran? Of all the poor souls who stayed; of her friends, neighbors, and when it came to it one day, what would she tell her children?

  Leyla knew immediately how she would remember this moment. She would say to them:

  I was ten when my world vanished in the flames. When the bad men came and beat us, we didn’t fight back. When they raped and killed us, we stood silent. And when they finally smashed God’s house and took us as slaves, we still did nothing. We were weak and maybe that
’s why we were punished. God turned our world to ash.

  She rocked faster, feeling tears on her cheeks. Father always said that when things were darkest, when evil was everywhere, then the angels would come – and they would strike like the hammer of God.

  She lowered her head. I pray they come soon.

  CHAPTER 1

  United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) – Nebraska

  Major Jack Hammerson stared at his computer screen with a clinical, military interest. It showed an aerial shot of the small Iraqi city – former city.

  Data windows beside the images displayed wind direction, rad-count, and drew colored lines suggesting wind dispersal patterns. Body count and survivor numbers were also displayed – the first number was over 130,000, and the second number, showing the survivors, was expected to be only in the hundreds – a maximum kill rate, Hammerson thought.

  Already, the VELA satellites had tasted the composition of the blast and supplied their findings: High-grade fission blast delivered by a single twenty-kiloton nuclear device. The bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima was only around fifteen kilotons.

  Hammerson leaned forward, fingers steepled. He knew this was a tactical weapon designed purely for asset destruction – people and property – it was a city killer. And it was packaged at ground level. This accounted for the high radioactive fallout, and significant cratering of the landscape.

  Hammerson exhaled and opened the eyes-only folder and read from the first page. The suspects ranged from the obvious to the far-fetched. No group of the dozens making a mess of Iraq right now had this sort of technology, or the means to develop it. He rubbed at his chin. But there were a few certainly wealthy enough to buy a weapon like this, and a few sellers with a corrupt enough ideology to supply one.

  Due to the chaos in the Middle East, they had various orbiting birds watching most parts of the landscape. Hammerson called up the orbit log of the VELA satellites and selected one that had eyes on Northern Iraq. He then tracked the data feed back a month, looking for any high energy particle traces. Most bombs of that size will shed, giving off minute traces of enriched uranium, plutonium, deuterium, tritium, or dozens of other elements used in thermonuclear explosive devices, all tidily collected under the heading of Highly Radioactive Elements, or HREs.

  Leaning forward to stare at the screen, Jack Hammerson started with the fireball, and then moved back in time, by seconds at first, then minutes – there, there it was, the hotspot, the trace within the boundaries of the city. He reversed back more minutes. The hotspot was moving, but so slowly, at approximately four miles per hour – walking speed.

  Hammerson sat back and folded his arms. He knew tactical nukes could be packed down to suitcase size, but even the smallest would weigh several hundred pounds. And the smaller you made the device the smaller the detonation. But the blast at Soran was twenty kilotons, and for something with that much punch, it would mean the initiation and storage technology had to be between five hundred and a thousand pounds, at least – way too big for any normal man.

  Hammerson ran a hand through his iron-gray crew cut, and then reversed the time back more hours, watching the trace continue its slow march. The weapon had traveled west, across the desert, to its ground zero point. He moved it back days, and still it was there, plodding forward. Whoever or whatever it was, was either in the world’s slowest vehicle, or it was on foot, carrying an impossibly heavy nuke.

  Hammerson drew the dates back further, and saw that the trace signature was still on a direct path from the east, until it finally stopped. Its genesis point was one of the worst places on earth – Mosul – the viper’s nest of terrorism, and one of the declared state capitals for Hezar-Jihadi, the Party of a Thousand Martyrs.

  He lifted his coffee mug, sipping, staring at the screen. “Could you assholes really get access to that sort of weapons tech?”

  Hammerson went back another day, then another week, then a month. The trace was gone, vanished. It didn’t exist one day, and then the next, it just shows up in Mosul.

  “Well now, who dropped that gift into your laps?”

  Hammerson was in luck; the satellite had been directly over Mosul, making drill-down possible. He selected and amplified, diving down to the city blocks and then to the roofs, until he came to a single dwelling – a large flat structure that could be a small warehouse or factory.

  “Love to get a look in there.” Hammerson read the Case Activity Section of the classified report – the situation was currently under the jurisdiction of the CIA, who was coordinating with the local Iraqi police and armed forces.

  So, a nuke goes off in the Middle East and we let the suits and sunglasses go front and center, he thought. Might as well close the file now. He grunted, drumming his fingers. He knew he couldn’t push his nose into everything, but something about this incident made the hair on his neck prickle. He had the feeling it was like a test run – a prelude to something bigger.

  Hammerson turned in his seat to look out of his large office window. He doubted the Israelis would be treating a thermonuclear explosion in their backyard with as much indifference.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  General Meir Shavit was the head of Metsada, the Special Operations Division of the Mossad. Short and grizzle-haired, he had served his country for over fifty years in both military theaters 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.

  Though the Mossad was classed a civilian bureaucratic security operation, Shavit’s Metsada was the most structured and professional. It was also the deadliest, responsible for assassination, paramilitary operations, sabotage, and psychological warfare. Metsada was Israel’s fist, and Shavit was its brain.

  Shavit spread the photographs out on his desk like a hand of playing cards. His stubby finger came down on one with a circle of red around a flat roofed building.

  “In here, Addy. That is where we believe the bomb originated.” He looked up at his niece, his eyes yellowed from years of smoking. “There are no traces leading in, only ones leading out.”

  Adira Senesh nodded, looking at the building, memorizing every stone, crack and piece of rubble in the streets surrounding it. Noting access points, exits, and potential danger zones from surrounding buildings.

  “A bomb factory.” She knew it must be fortified. “They must have landed a helicopter on the roof. Dropped the components or completed device in that way.”

  Shavit grunted. “I think yes. They received it there, and then someone, one person, somehow walked it to Soran.” He sat back. “Impossible.”

  “Not impossible.” She remembered one man who could do it. And if he could … She stood at attention, waiting for her orders.

  “The American Central Intelligence Agency has combined with the Iraqi National Intelligence Service and the Iraqi Army. But none of them can safely enter Mosul while it is under the control of Hezar-Jihadi. And what good is a spy agency when every informant they pay, the terrorists pay more to send them wrong information or entrap them.”

  His fingers drummed for a moment. “Addy, we cannot wait for our answers. We must know what’s in there.” He breathed wheezily for a few moments. “Be our eyes in there, Addy.”

  “And if we find something?” she asked.

  Shavit seemed to hold his breath, and looked up at her with rheumy eyes. “Then destroy every atom of it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Central Baghdad – outskirts of the International Zone

  The International Zone, formerly known as the Green Zone, or just “the Zone”, was home to American, British, Australian and Egyptian embassies, as well as numerous private military contractors.

  It was an oasis of modernity and what the Iraqi government hoped would one day be a template for the rest of the country. Access was heavily guarded, and few thoroughfares were larger or better monitored than the Arb
ataash Tamuz Suspension Bridge that crossed the Tigris River, a border to the Zone.

  A watch tower and a series of gates slowed the traffic across the bridge, and a couple of M1117 Guardian Armored Security Vehicles, or ASVs, were parked off at each side, both with their turret mounted M2HB Browning machine guns pointed at the roadway.

  There had been no attacks in months now, and slowly, hour by hour, the city seemed to be moving back to a sense of normality.

  Zaid Surchi was one of six guards in the span tower that stretched across the entire roadway. His automatic weapon was slung over his shoulder, and in a large hard covered case at his feet sat an RPG rocket launcher. The barriers would slow any foolhardy suicide bomber in a vehicle and then the RPG would send them to hell long before they got to the Zone.

  Zaid checked his watch – four more hours to go of his shift. The sun was high, and a small mercy of working on the bridge over the river meant a constant cool breeze; he knew there could be a lot worse places to be stationed.

  On his rotation he had five shift partners, and they were currently spread along the long watchtower’s platform. Three chatted quietly together, one watched the boats moving on the river with a powerful pair of field glasses, and the last, his friend Hajii Mahmoud, watched the road, his neck straining.

  Hajii pulled the glasses away from his face momentarily before going back to staring, his brows knitting together. From the roadway there came the sound of car horns blaring.

  “Hey …” he said. “Hey, Zaid, come look at this.” He was grinning now. “Looks like some oaf has decided to bring their washing.”

  Zaid turned and squinted at the rows of cars. One lane of the approaching traffic was being held up, slowed by a figure walking ponderously down the center of the road with what looked like a huge sack over his shoulders.