The Last Line Series One Read online

  This agent of the Unseelie Court had infiltrated an energy research facility that in reality was a nuclear munitions research facility in a strategically sensitive neighbouring country. What worried the STG was that one of the top physicists at the facility had been taken alive. Dr Shah was a man educated at Cambridge, a top man in his field with the highest security clearance. Not a man that could be allowed to vanish off the grid, into the hands of the real enemy.

  Dr Shah had contacted the Special Threats Group via their man in the Middle East. He had spoken of being approached by a shady organization to help develop a delivery device for some new chemical weapon they had created. By his own admission he had taken the considerable sum of money offered and loaned them his technical expertise. Once the true nature of their plans had emerged, he had suffered a crisis of conscience and approached the STG in exchange for his safety. Before Usher and his team could extract the doctor, the Unseelie had acted first.

  Advancing down the tunnel, scanning with their rifle mounted tac-lights, the team were soundless apart from the padding of their desert boots on the sandy floor.

  Ahead was a glow from another chamber. Usher could hear the ranting of a man, presumably Dr Shah. Usher knew a little Persian and recognized a prayer when he heard one. This man may have been a Muslim but he was also a physicist, and his worldview had until today not included desert demons as kidnappers. The man’s prayer was cut short by another voice echoing down the tunnel. It was the language of the Unseelie Court and it sounded like something chewing on beetles.

  Usher came to the mouth of the tunnel, signalled his team to hold fast while he edged out, cutting the cake inch by inch to get a sight picture of what lay within.

  There in the middle of the room, strapped to a rickety wooden chair was the Doctor. Worse for wear, bloodied and bruised, clearly terrified. But alive.

  He stared at Usher in terror. Usher raised his hand in a placatory gesture. He realized that to someone seeing him for the first time he may look strange and intimidating. The reflective desert goggles, ballistic helmet and shemagh completely obscuring his face, the body armour and terrifying array of weapons. Usher looked like Death, and he was usually the last thing most human terrorists he encountered ever saw in their lives. An undignified final benediction for the self-styled warriors of god he used to be pitted against. As they desperately mumbled some final pleading prayer to the lord of whatever gospels they followed, Usher usually gave them his own ‘good news’ with both barrels. On this occasion, the terror in Dr Shah’s eyes came from a deeper darker place. It was nothing natural to this world that had frozen his blood in the desert.

  Usher could sense something was wrong, the hostage was too exposed, too on offer. He weighed up the risk to his team against his own human conscience. After so many years of deniable missions, compromised morality and putrid violence, Usher’s conscience was a battered and starved legionnaire, broken down and rebuilt from scratch, who did not usually speak until spoken to. He made up his mind, decided to eliminate any risk of haemorrhaging information to the enemy, and levelled his passive red dot sight onto the heart of Dr Shah.

  A moment’s hesitation as the ordinary man who did not have to make extraordinary choices whispered up from the depths of his soul. Usher sighed.

  By then the sand had already begun to rise. Slowly at first, swirling from the rocky floor around the Doctor’s chair, then rising in a great vortex around him, obscuring vision and forcing the soldiers to instinctively shield their faces despite their goggles.

  They were compromised and they knew it, the room was a sandstorm in a bottle. Tiny shards of sand howling around them, scouring their body armour like accelerated erosion, they could barely breathe or see.

  Usher raised his carbine, preparing for the inevitable attack. In an instant he felt his oppo pressing against his back, covering him from behind.

  “No viz behind Christi, can’t see a thing. Clear ahead?”

  Christi pressed harder against him and raised the carbine ahead. Usher barely heard the frustrated voice above the storm.

  “Tunnel entrance ahead I think. Looks clear. Someone ahead. Davis is that you in tunnel entrance confirm?”

  The soldiers desperately tried to regroup, knowing their only chance was to operate as a team. Operator Davis crouched at the tunnel mouth, trying to locate his team members. Visibility was so poor he could barely see the muzzle of his own weapon. He was sweating beneath his armour, the cold shiver of a fear he was trying to get control of. He thought he could see Usher and Christi ahead but wasn’t sure.

  Behind him, the rock wall began to move.

  The way sand dunes morph under the hot desert wind and reconfigure, the wall itself formed a dune like a granular cancer. Tiny grains of silica and quartz compressed until fingers formed, fingertips glowing a dull orange, swords upon a blacksmith’s anvil. A protuberance of sand suddenly caved and there was an opera mouth of anguish singing silently by the soldier’s ear.

  Christi saw the dull glow through the sandstorm and shouted to Usher.

  “Boss, threat ahead. It’s one of them. Davis! Contact!”

  Usher spun and brought his G36k up to his oppo’s shoulder. Shouted a warning. It was too late. The thing had reached out of the rock and grabbed Davis around the face with fingers of burning sand. The shemagh he wore burst into flame, the polycarbonate goggles melted into his eyes and the sharp scream was cut short as the lips fused together. The hungry Djinn wasted no time and dragged him back into the wall with it, leaving half his body compressed into the stone. His free arm spasmed once, twice, then exploded with the pressure of all his blood being forced into one side of his body.

  Usher heard Christi cry out. “Fuck! Davis!”

  Then from all around them more amber glowing limbs appeared as Djinn began to reveal their presence in the chamber. He heard the deep rocky grate of their bodies moving, felt the desert heat of their breath in the wind that howled around them.

  Usher felt the battle rage rise, and all time compressed into that moment. He shouted for his team and felt them instinctively move in, closing ranks until they stood back to back like a medieval chiltrum.

  Usher shouted. “There’s more than one. Multiple threats. Stay tight and call in.”

  From around him Usher heard the soldiers sound off.

  Usher glanced around, keeping his weapon pointed at the threat.

  “Where’s Timmons?”

  The sand ahead of him dropped like gauze in a magician’s prestige and Usher saw a huge Djinn holding Timmons around the waist like a broken ragdoll. The soldier was trying to scream, wrenching his way out of the tightening grip, when the Djinn opened its own maw and shot a jet of burning hot sand down Timmons’ throat, filling his every cavity. The soldier jerked convulsively, his legs flailing in an effort to get free as he choked and his body tried to vomit the burning grains back out. Within seconds his abdomen had distended and then suddenly burst open in a slop of ruby soaked sand and viscera. The Djinn threw his still pulsating body aside and smiled up at the huddled soldiers. It cocked its head and spoke in the grating demon tongue. Usher had never been able to learn it but the mocking tone was clear.

  Next to Usher, the Danish operator Brock had drawn his sidearm and began to fire off rounds into the body of the Djinn. For a moment Usher absent mindedly wondered how Brock had managed to lose his primary weapon. The 9mm rounds passed through the inconsistent body of the Court Agent. The creature laughed a bone dry laugh and advanced on them faster than the desert wind.

  Usher slapped Brock on the shoulder. “DU Brock. Fucking DU for Djinn.”

  Usher got a clear bead on the advancing creature and pulled the trigger.

  Usher had never had a great deal of time for the lab geeks that did the research on the nature of the Unseelie Court, but when it came to Djinn they had discovered this;

  Fulgurites are natural tubes or crusts of glass formed by the fusion of silica sand as it is struck by lightning with a te
mperature of at least one thousand eight hundred degrees Celsius.

  The boffins at STG had made the connection that the depleted uranium tankbuster shells used in the Gulf war had also often accidentally created Fulgurites in the desert environment. Because uranium is pyrophoric, at the moment of impact it burns away into vapour, filling the tank with lethally hot gas at temperatures of, co-incidentally, one thousand eight hundred degrees Celsius. To Usher this meant one very simple thing.

  Depleted Uranium rounds destroy anything made of sand.

  The rounds peppered the Djinn’s torso, bursting instantly into bright starbursts. The Djinn’s advance slowed, each step towards them becoming laboured, until with a final exhalation it solidified and froze like a smoking statue. Instead of a densely packed formation of sand, it was now quickly cooling to become a petrified being of rough blown glass.

  Usher didn’t wait to admire his handiwork. He lunged forward and delivered a brutal muzzle strike to centre mass of the creature, shattering it into a million crystalline shards that clattered onto the cave floor.

  Usher looked to his team through the diminishing sandstorm.

  “Break every window.”

  The Djinn came at them from every angle, camouflaged creatures using the rock walls as cover, but their heated fingers gave away their position, and Empire One used this to their advantage. The cave was aflame with muzzle flash, hissing cartridges cascading onto the floor like scattered coins, smoke and cordite filling the air with a fugue.

  Every defeated Djinn was promptly shattered like a broken bottle, stamped underfoot with desperate aggression, struck with muzzle or a swift kick. It was three and a half minutes of desperate fire fight that felt like a lifetime.

  Then it was over.

  The dust slowly settled, smoke cleared, and the adrenaline dropped to post combat levels. Breathing hard, the team attended to its casualties, going through the ingrained motions of trained combat medics. It was obvious that their two fallen team members were beyond help, just quivering flesh.

  Once they were certain that the room was clear and no further threats were present, Usher gave the signal and the team removed their shemaghs and goggles, breathing in the firework air of the cave.

  Usher looked to the centre of the room, and cursed.

  Dr Shah was leaning as far back in the chair as his bonds would allow, his breathing ragged, three entry wounds in his chest, surrounded by ever increasing circles of blood.

  “Fuck.”

  “Must’ve been a ricochet boss.”

  “Might not be a bullet wound boss, looks like a cauterized burn, think a Djinn got to him.”

  “I dunno boys, lot of ricochet in a cave like this.”

  Special Forces teams like Empire One spent hours in kill houses, clearing rooms in dark and smoke, using live rounds and live teammates as hostages. They spent a long time honing their skills so they could engage in a firefight in enclosed spaces without hitting the hostage.

  Sometimes, shit just happens.

  Usher removed his constricting ballistic helmet and crouched down next to him, putting pressure on the wounds.

  “Doctor Shah, you’ve been injured, I’m keeping pressure here to try and stop the blood, I’m freeing your wrists and you may need to put your own hand on the wound and apply pressure if I tell you ok? We have help on the way, and I want you to keep talking to me if you can. Can you hear me? My name’s Usher, I’m here to help you.”

  Usher gave a quick flick of his head towards his teammate, indicating for her to get on the radio for evac ASAP.

  “Christi, time is of the essence here.”

  Christi removed the ballistic helmet and revealed a strong deeply tanned female face. Her blue eyes glanced at the stricken hostage, then she nodded to Usher.

  “Yes Boss.”

  As Usher tried to keep the quickly fading Iranian scientist alive, the rest of his team looked on.

  A lanky Afrikaner operator called Kruger pulled a pack of Stuyves from his pocket and lit one up, his deeply weathered face like the crags of a mountain. In thick South African brogue he spoke.

  “That Bru is fucked Boss, if you ask me.”

  “Didn’t ask you Kruger. Dr Shah. Did you tell the Djinn anything? Did you tell them anything about Iran’s nuclear programme? The codes?”

  The physicist seemed to fade in and out of consciousness; his fingernails were white, his brown skin turning grey. He was going in to shock. Usher had maybe a minute.

  “I don’t…. I don’t think so. They… they didn’t ask me with words…. I could hear that thing’s thoughts. Its thought pushed into my mind.”

  Usher nodded. He turned to Christi, who was busy on the comms, listening hard to what was coming through the headphones to her. She looked at Usher and gave a small shake of her head.

  “Thirty minutes. But we need to get topside.”

  Usher cursed under his breath.

  “Doctor, what did they ask you to work on for them? What were you helping them create? Who were they?”

  The Doctor’s face looked puzzled.

  “They called themselves the Chromium Project. They took me to a ship. A huge ship. What they have on board. It is not possible. It is a monster. A monster that can create more monsters.”

  “What sort of monsters Dr Shah? what are they planning?”

  Dr Shah was fading now, his eyes viewing a world Usher could only imagine.

  “They will no longer hide in the shadows. The man behind them. He is a man who eats souls. A terrible man. ”

  Usher felt his blood run cold.

  “Was his name Argent?”

  The Doctor was gone. His eyes were fixed upon the high vault of rock above, tiny flakes of ash and sand coming to rest upon his unseeing eyes, no longer an irritant.

  Usher turned to Christi, his most trusted oppo and one of his oldest friends. He shook his head. She cursed under her breath and went straight to the comms, informing control that the helivac could take its damn time.

  The rest of the team set about securing the perimeter until Usher gave the signal to retake the corridor and move back to the exit, where they would have a long tiring ascent.

  Kruger just stood there shaking his head and smoking, his world-weary face gathering sand into its deep lines. In his Cape Town accent he grumbled.

  “Fucking shit day at the beach, bru.”

  Christi passed the headset to Usher, who addressed his Op Commander.

  “Yes sir, as we thought, but multiple subjects. No information leak it seems, but the hostage is down. Repeat hostage is down.”

  Usher looked around him at the carnage, the settling dust, and his bruised and battered team.

  Well that could’ve gone better.

  He had a deep sinking feeling, a sense of impending doom, as if he were crouched in the pit and the pendulum had only just started swinging.

  “Sir, before he expired, the hostage may have gleaned something from the Djinn’s mind. He made mention of a ship and the Chromium Project. I think we may have opened a can of worms here. I think Isaiah Argent might have his hand in this.”

  Silence on the other end of the radio. Usher sighed.

  Never a good sign.

  3.

  Usher let his head rest back onto the interior of the plane as the engines howled and it took off into the night.

  He still felt the shakes. That was normal after a live contact, it would pass. No new scars on this one at least.

  Seven years he had been doing this. Seven years of bursting into rooms with no idea what monster was waiting inside to eat him.

  He had lost two men today, good men. Davis and Timmons were the newest members of the team but they had followed Usher’s orders without question all over the world, no matter how insane the mission. They were his responsibility, losing soldiers on an operation was unacceptable.

  Losing friends was worse.

  Join the army, the posters said, you’ll be windsurfing all day and out boozing in polo shir
ts all night. The recruiting officer never mentioned that if you stick in and show ability, one day you might be fighting trolls or decapitating ghouls or battling fanatical human death cults. Just wasn’t on the poster at all.

  The boffins at Hereford who designed all their Gucci anti-monster kit had told Usher that it had been like this for hundreds of years. How their predecessors survived back in the day with nothing but courage and a blade he would never know.

  As the cargo plane thrummed around him, Usher’s mind drifted to quieter times when he would sit by his son’s bed and read him stories as he drifted off to sleep. His boy had loved Grimm’s fairy tales, Arthurian myths, legends and sword and sorcery stories. He couldn’t get enough of dark tales of the Dragons, Ogres and Goblins that haunted forests and caves. Back in those days the line between fantasy and reality was neatly drawn. Life was as normal as it could get for a soldier and his family.

  One night creatures leapt from the pages and stole Usher’s family away from him. Since then all lines were blurred.

  Fairy tales were real, and they were not at all like the storybooks.

  To the supernatural secret society that was the Unseelie Court, the rise of modern terrorism was the opportunity they had been waiting on for centuries. Usher had read in the Arcane Library at Hereford that the Court had been punching their way through to us since the earliest days, creating any number of half-way houses, foul buildings where they squeezed like cockroaches through the smallest fissure in a skirting board.

  These thin spots were unpredictable, allowing only a few unnatural beings to crawl through at a time then collapsing like old burrows, but they were enough to cause the world a whole heap of trouble.