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.

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.

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.