The Bleeding Sun

About The Author

Abhishek Roy
is a software engineer by profession who loves to bring out
his creative side time and again. He is an ardent photographer, an
avid video gamer and a traveler. His love for travel has led him to
a lot of different places leading to interaction with a wide array
of people. He tries to blend up his experiences with the figments
of his imagination leading to plots like these. Bleeding Sun is the
first part of the two book series taking the readers through the
adventures of Roy Lucas, the protagonist.

Copyright © 2015 by Abhishek
Roy

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the
express written permission of the publisher/author except for the
use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Published: November 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Abhishek Roy

The Bleeding Sun

How It All Started

(The Roy Lucas Chronicles)

By

Abhishek Roy

Prologue

My hands were starting to ache as I continued to
hold on for a last few minutes. My body started trembling as I
could really feel the heat now. The ventilator shaft had been
purposefully sealed to prevent my escape. I held on to one end of
the shaft trying to balance my body against the ceiling. I needed
to find some other modes of support pretty soon to prevent my
drastic and untimely fall. Suddenly I could hear the footsteps near
the door. The guard had come. It was dinner time. The steel door
opened up with a rusty sound. The guard came in with a bowl in his
right hand. He held his machine gun on his left. He entered the
room and kept the bowl on the table. Then he moved towards the bed
and shouted out………‘Lucas, eat this up quickly. The boss has sent
some special preparations as this will be your last meal….. Ha Ha
Ha.’

He kept on laughing for half a minute only to
realize that I was not responding. He moved up to the bed with the
machine gun pointed at the covered figure lying on it. I waited
eagerly in anticipation for the next sequence of events to unfold.
The room seemed to have been heated up tenfold in the past few
minutes. My shirt was soaked in sweat and beads started developing
on my face. As the guard moved forward to lift the sheet covering
the figure, sweat started to trickle down my face and salt water
beads developed on the tip of my nose just on the verge of a fall.
It would surely land on the guard’s shoulder thus letting my
presence be known. I just could not wipe it off as trying to do so
would make me fall off the ventilator shaft. Finally the drop fell
down landing straight on the guard’s head.

The next few moments seemed to occur in slow motion.
The guard touched his head to feel the moist drop. As he moved his
head up straight towards the ceiling, I let both my hands off the
shaft and landed straight on him. He fell down crashing heavily on
the table as I landed on his back. He lost his gun before managing
to fire a few rounds at the door due to the sudden impact. The man
was huge in size. The impact didn’t seem to affect him too much as
he tried to stand up once again. However I was in no mood to take a
chance. We had been taught the Krav Maga during our training. It is
a military self-defense hand to hand combat technique used by the
Israeli army. It is not just about self-defense, but more about
utilizing your chance to disable your enemy before he can cause you
the least possible harm.

I used my fist to land a punch on the perfect spot…
his Adam’s apple. The man collapsed on the ground in sheer agony
once and for all. My plans had all gone berserk due to the bullets
the guard had fired. I could hear the alarm bells as I quickly
moved out of the cell. Although my plan had failed, I was already
crafting a new one…a new route for escape… a new way to accomplish
my mission. That was what we were taught during our training at the
base camp in Jammu.

‘
We work alone… we work perfectly…
we do not leave any trace… and we never fail. We give our enemies
Hell so that all our innocent countrymen continue to live in
Heaven. We are the proud members of the biggest secret the Indian
Army, any information of which has been withheld even from the
Prime Minister. We are only answerable to the President of India.
We belong to the top secret club of the Defense Intelligence Agency
(
DIA
) and are known
as Authority for Neutralizing National Threats (
ANNT
). Every President passes this
secret to his successor when his tenure ends’.

‘
I never make mistakes. I complete
all my missions and leave no trace. I always cheat death and leave
my enemies to rot in hell. I am an agent of ANNT. I am Roy
Lucas’.

Dehradun

The room had the appearance of one that did not have
a single speck of dust. The Persian carpets, the velvet curtains,
the huge mahogany desk, a big globe of the world, a set of tall
mahogany racks holding files and facts that no one would ever know
about. A small man was working on something in the computer on the
desk. The man was Colonel H. K. Subramaniam alias Serpent, the
director of the ANNT. The room was the headquarters of ANNT and was
located on the premises of IMA Dehradun. No one knew about this
secret office apart from the ANNT operatives. They visited the IMA
compound as visiting officers with specialized training in various
fields who had come to teach the same to the cadets. However after
entering the compound they would vanish into thin air as they
headed for their headquarters. Only one man present on the IMA
compound had any information about this organization… Major A.
Kapoor, the IMA director. He had been an operative of the ANNT for
several years before being removed from espionage operations due to
his declining health. He was currently in charge of handling any
situations which might arise leading to a suspicion that something
was wrong in IMA. Being the director of the IMA, his immense power
on the premises made his job easier.

A knock on the main door forced the Colonel to stop
his work and look up at the door. The Serpent knew who had come as
he had been intimated as soon as the person had entered the IMA
premises. He pressed one of the several buttons located underneath
the desk thereby opening the door. The person who entered the room
was the most tried and tested operative of the ANNT…Major Ajay
Saxena. Dressed in his uniform, Major Saxena was also a cadet of
the IMA. He had played very important roles in several operations
along the LOC before being reallocated from the Indian Army to the
DIA. The Serpent himself had moved him into the ANNT several years
back. Since then Major Saxena had been one of the best operatives
of ANNT with operations in Iran, Russia, China and even at the
heart of the United States. His father Prof. V Saxena was a
renowned physicist while his mother Alice worked for the UNICEF.
She was a Czech girl who had fallen in love with Prof. Saxena and
had later married him. Ajay was their only child and he had all the
physical traits of his mother. He could be easily mistaken as a
European international which always worked to his advantage. He had
been christened ‘Roy Lucas’ after joining the ANNT.

Lucas knew the Serpent very well and had worked
under him during all his operations. The Serpent had become the
director of ANNT when his predecessor Colonel Tiwary was killed in
an air crash two years back. The Serpent had handled the
organization very well since then. He was a wily old cat…a real
mastermind. He did not speak at all for about five minutes and
continued to be busy with his work. Lucas on the other hand was not
looking too pleased. He did not seem to be in the best of
conditions. He had been in Morocco for his last mission just ten
hours ago. And just when he had been on the verge of completing it,
the Colonel had ordered him to come back.

The Serpent looked up once and realized that Lucas
was not pleased at being made to wait for so long. So, he finally
decided to talk to him regarding what it was all about. ‘How was
your flight back home? Did you get some sleep? Your face looks
terrible.’ He chuckled after speaking about the face.

‘
Well, the journey was one of the
best that I have ever undertaken. You don’t get a chance every day
to travel with a bunch of high priority mails and parcels in a
private aircraft of a courier company. The box on which I was
sitting for seven hours was even better than a recliner. I suppose
I shall buy one of those for my drawing room when I return
home.’

‘
Sleep…Ha Ha Ha…I have been keeping
these eyes open for the last forty eight hours…and I simply
couldn’t afford to doze off on the plane as either and fall on the
fragile stuff kept all around and wind up damaging those as well
myself. I badly need some sleep.’

‘
Well then get some sleep within
the next twenty four hours because you have several sleepless
nights coming up after that.’

‘
What? Fly again tomorrow itself? I
really need some answers now. I was just about to wrap up
everything in Casablanca. And you bring me back? Why? What could
have been more important than the retrieval of the stolen
plutonium? I had everything working according to plan and was about
to get them once and for all when the deal would be made in the
Casablanca Twin Center itself…I was this close after these two
months of hard work…But you abort the mission and call me back at
this crucial junction to do God knows what.’

‘
Agent Lucas, always remember that
you are here to serve your country and your organization first.
There is no place for sentiments and self-glory here. I hope I am
clear.’

‘
As far as the deal in
Casablanca…it will be made tonight at the Twin Center. We have
informed our agents from RAW. They will be present there to
retrieve the consignment and bring it back to our nation with the
help of a group of elite commandos specially trained for this
mission. Your job there is done.’

‘
As for the current mission, you
will be travelling to Havana tomorrow. Something is definitely
wrong in Castro’s land. Agent Alpha K had been sent there to look
into the matter. He was clearly on to something and we need to find
out what it was. Recently there has been a lot of movement in the
Tropicana Casino in Havana. Suleiman Hussein, the notorious
Al-Qaeda operative and Yuri Rosmus, the biggest Russian mafia boss
were seen meeting each other there. They were supposed to strike a
deal on something and Alpha was on the verge of tracing what it
was. But something has gone drastically wrong. We have not received
any communication from him for the last three days. Today our
informers in Havana found a mutilated body by the beach. They are
sure that it belongs to Alpha.’

‘
You need to go there and take care
of the unfinished business. We believe that this may be even bigger
than what Alpha was originally thinking. Your tickets and forged
Dutch passport have been sent to your hotel. You will find them in
the locker. You will also find a brown envelope containing the
mission documents and details of what Alpha had initially found
out. Lucas, this one’s not going to be easy. This time there is no
information, no identified enemies and certainly no particular
mission objective. It’s more of a free role. You are renowned for
your photographic memory. So, make it count and get back as much as
you can find out. If you find something sinister, leave no stones
unturned to prevent it.’

As Lucas rose in order to leave, the Colonel
interrupted. The Serpent really delivered a venomous strike through
the next news.

‘
Well Lucas, I did forget to
mention something. You will not be travelling alone this time. We
don’t want an incident like Agent Alpha to be repeated once again.
So you will be having a backup with you this time. Let me introduce
you to your wife.’