The Eternity Machine Read online

  “I don’t see any vehicles,” Phelps shouted through the sunroof.

  “They could be behind the buildings waiting for us,” Jack said.

  “Maybe,” Phelps said. “Do you see the ribbon of smoke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be from the crashed drone,” Phelps said.

  “Just charging in doesn’t seem wise,” Terrell said from the back. “The Iranians could be lining us up.”

  Jack had already been thinking that. How did it help Carter if Hammond blew up the jeep with RPGs or anti-material rifles? They had to survive in order to save Carter.

  “Hang on,” Jack told the others.

  One of Phelps’ hands appeared as she gripped the inner side of the open sunroof.

  Jack cranked the steering wheel. Phelps swayed. She didn’t complain at the treatment. Phelps never did.

  Jack circled the lonely cluster of ruins from an appreciable distance. If Hammond’s people fired an RPG from hiding, he wanted time to swerve and get out of the way. He kept an eye on the ruins, looking for dust, any sign of the three big trucks. So far, no one had locked any radar onto the jeep. He would have heard a ping otherwise.

  “Still think Hammond’s hiding back there?” Terrell asked. “Slowly moving his vehicles as he’s watching us circle?”

  “I do not,” Jack said.

  “Neither do I,” Terrell said. “Phelps, what you think?”

  “I don’t get paid to think,” she shouted from outside. “Just destroy stuff.” She was their demolitions expert. “I let Jack do the thinking for me.”

  Jack glared at the ruins. There was a time to play it safe and a time for wild chances. He yearned to go in and see if Carter was alive. There were low percentages to just storming in right now, though. A minute, maybe two, of circling wasn’t going to change the outcome of this. Thus, he would practice caution.

  “Phelps,” Jack said. “Bring it in.”

  “If they’re hiding over there—”

  “If Egyptian police show up, I don’t want you waving your AT4 around.”

  “Screw the police,” she said.

  “Phelps!” Jack said.

  “All right,” she muttered. “I’m disarming the launcher.”

  Jack kept circling as she began the process of bringing it in.

  By the time Phelps sat in her seat, Jack realized Hammond and his trucks had left the premises. If Carter was out there, why hadn’t he tried to contact them with his comm-set?

  The Chief Cherokee swayed as Jack roared down and then up a steep ditch, climbing onto the road. This part of the Qattara Depression had short but steep canyons to the immediate east of the buildings.

  The ride smoothed out on the tarmac road. He increased speed, heading for the ruins.

  “Feels deserted,” Terrell said from the back.

  “You said you hit an Iranian with your drone,” Jack said.

  “I did,” the big man said. “Phelps had it right before. That line of smoke is from the wreckage.”

  Soon, Jack was braking well before they reached the buildings. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted. He pushed the brake pedal harder, bringing the vehicle to an abrupt stop.

  “What’s up, boss?” Terrell asked.

  “Wait here,” Jack said, opening the driver’s side door, putting his feet on the baking road.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Terrell asked.

  “I’m going to reconnoiter on foot,” Jack said, getting out.

  “Think they buried land mines or some claymores over there?”

  “Maybe,” Jack said.

  “You stay,” Phelps said. “I’ll go. Booby traps are my specialty.”

  Jack stared into the Chief Cherokee at her as his neck tingled with unease. Phelps was lean, with a faint scar hidden under her baseball cap. She hated the scar and always wore something to hide it. When Phelps smiled and wore a tight miniskirt, it made every man’s heart beat faster with desire. In the field on a mission, she wore baggy clothes and kept her hair tucked under the hat. She had a cunning mind and set the most lethal traps Jack had ever seen. No one was better at finding little trip wires or the odd piece of junk lying in just the wrong place. She had issues, though, just like everyone else in D17.

  “Go,” Jack told her. He slid back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut.

  She opened hers.

  “Turn on your microphone,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Once you head out there I’m going to back up,” Jack told her.

  She nodded again.

  “Something is definitely off. I can feel it.”

  Phelps cocked an eyebrow at him. “You want to tell me to be careful?”

  “I do. Be careful.”

  “There. Does that make you feel better?”

  Jack stared at the ruins. He had come as fast as he could for Carter. The road to the Siwa Oasis dipped half a mile from here so any vehicles traveling the rest of the way would be out of sight from this location. Could Hammond’s trucks have high-tailed it there before the Chief Cherokee came into view? Hammond would have had to gun the big vehicles to hide in time.

  “What’s bothering you?” Terrell asked.

  “Where are the bodies?” Jack asked. “If Hammond left in a hurry, bodies should be lying outside the ruins.”

  “That’s easy,” Terrell said. “Hammond took the bodies with him.”

  “We saw Carter kill one of them. My bet is he killed more after your drone struck. Did they have enough time to load the corpses into the trucks before we showed up?”

  Terrell peered at the ruins as if judging time and distances. “It would have been tight.”

  “Climb back in,” Jack told Phelps.

  “You were going to check the area but you don’t think I can? Forget that.” Phelps shut her door, started walking and flicked something on her collar

  A speaker in the jeep crackled into life.

  “Testing, testing,” Phelps said over the comm-link.

  “We hear you, love,” Terrell told her.

  “I told you not to say that,” she said.

  Terrell looked over at Jack with a smirk. Jack shook his head.

  “Roger,” Terrell said into the microphone.

  Putting the Chief Cherokee into reverse, Jack began backing up.

  “You think police are going to show up?” Terrell asked.

  “Soon,” Jack said. “The Ninth Egyptian Border Regiment is stationed at Siwa. They’re sure to send someone.”

  “That makes sense. Yeah. We’d better hurry.”

  Jack kept backing up as he watched Phelps jog toward the dismal ruins.

  “See anything yet?” Terrell radioed.

  “I’ll let you know the minute—ah, look at this,” Phelps said. “I think there’s blood on the ground.” She swore softly.

  “What now?” Terrell asked.

  “The trail of blood leads to a building,” Phelps said. “Do you think they stashed the corpses in there?”

  Jack’s bad feeling solidified though he still wasn’t sure what caused it.

  “Do you see Carter?” Terrell asked.

  Phelps didn’t answer right away. When she did, she said, “Maybe he’s in the hut with the other corpses? I’m going to check.”

  Jack found himself backing up faster yet.

  “Do you see something, boss?” Terrell asked.

  “Tell her…” Jack said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell her to come back.”

  “Right,” Terrell said, “like she’s going to listen to that. We have to know about Carter, don’t we?”

  Jack frowned. The bad feeling was getting worse. A trick in this business—with life in general—was listening to your inner cues. Mugged individuals often told police later that they’d felt something was off but couldn’t figure out what. One’s subconscious often realized things faster than the conscious, logical mind. The wise man listened to his gut.

  “I’m
near the building,” Phelps said. “The line of blood goes through the doorway.

  Jack could see her diminishing figure approach the first ruin.

  “Don’t see any wires,” Phelps said. “Oh-oh.”

  “What?” Terrell asked. “Speak to us.”

  “Those look like Carter’s sunglasses on the floor,” she said.

  “Don’t touch them,” Jack warned.

  Terrell repeated that into his microphone.

  Phelps snorted softly. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? Course I won’t touch them.”

  Jack slowed his retreat as lines furrowed across his forehead. What was he missing? What didn’t he—

  “Take a look at my monitor,” he told Terrell.

  The big man swiveled around on his chair. “Your screen is blank.”

  “I know that. I turned it off. I want you to turn it on.”

  “Don’t make any sudden shifts while I’m doing it,” Terrell said. He moved to Jack’s console, clicking it on, sitting in the new seat. “It’ll take a second to power up.”

  Phelps cursed over the comm-link. “I see bodies, gentlemen, freshly dead and heaped on top of each other. Looks like Carter did a number on the Iranians.”

  “This is weird,” Terrell said. “I see her boots on your monitor. I thought Carter turned the optics off in the sunglasses.”

  “Get out of there, Phelps!” Jack shouted. “Run!”

  Terrell looked over at Elliot.

  “Tell her to run,” Jack said.

  “This is strange,” Phelps said over the speaker.

  At that moment, an explosion flashed on the computer screen. The brightness lit up Terrell’s face.

  Then, from the ruins, a titanic blast erupted. It demolished the hut and continued to blow skyward at an alarming rate. In seconds, a small mushroom cloud appeared.

  Jack understood its significance. He floored the pedal to the metal. The tires squealed as smoke billowed around them. Then the tires bit into the tarmac moving the jeep. Cranking the steering wheel, Jack spun around, aiming the Chief Cherokee away from the blast as he put the vehicle into drive.

  “Hang on!” Jack shouted. “Throw yourself onto the floor!”

  The contradictory advice failed to penetrate Terrell’s mind. He stared mesmerized at the growing blast.

  At the same moment, the Chief Cherokee sailed off the road. It flew through the air, the front end tipping toward the bottom of a mini-canyon.

  “We’re going to hit hard!” Jack shouted. “Hang on!”

  The Chief Cherokee flew down a steep embankment. The ground rushed up as the fireball’s blast reached the embankment, blowing over them. At the same time, the front end of the jeep smashed against the rocky hardpan.

  Seatbelt straps dug into Jack’s flesh, keeping him from hurling against the windshield. Air bags popped into existence, smashing against him. All around Jack metal crumbled and twisted, screeching horribly.

  The wreck of the Chief Cherokee groaned metallically as it flipped onto its top in slow motion. Then, blast wind howled over them. The heat became intense.

  Jack closed his eyes, enduring. An antimatter blast was in the process of killing them with radiation. Maybe Terrell and he had survived the heat for the moment, but they were too close to ground zero. Radiation poisoning would kill them soon enough. They were dead men. It was just going to take a little longer to die.

  -37-

  MINI-CANYON

  EGYPT

  After the airbags deflated, Jack cut himself free of the straps and crawled to the rear. “Terrell,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  Elliot reached the big man a second later. Blood pumped from the black man’s forehead. He must have gashed it against one of the consoles during the crash. Terrell hadn’t strapped in.

  Jack moved fast. He grabbed Williams’s jacket from a back seat and gently applied it to the terrible wound. If the man had injured his spine, Jack didn’t want to paralyze Terrell for good by moving him while there was still hope.

  “Terrell,” he said. “You have to wake up.”

  Elliot knew the radiation poisoning was going to kill them sooner rather than later, but it wasn’t in him to give up. The blow to the head would have caused a terrible concussion. He had to wake Terrell and keep the man awake.

  Jack crawled closer. The big man just lay there. On impulse, Jack took a wrist, using his fingers to feel the pulse. There was nothing.

  For the first time, it occurred to Jack that the blow to the forehead might have killed Williams. That seemed impossible, though. They had survived so much together. Phelps was certainly gone. There was no way she could have survived the blast.

  “Terrell, are you hearing me?”

  The man’s brown eyes were open and staring, lifeless.

  Jack froze as he stared back at them. Then, Elliot squeezed his eyes closed. His jaw muscles bunched tight. No sound came from Jack. No tear leaked from his eyes. He wanted to rave, but he refused to let himself do that. Instead, he silently grieved for Terrell Williams.

  I killed him. My stunt murdered another of my friends.

  The enemy had murdered Phelps, but Jack couldn’t escape the truth that she had been his responsibility. He had failed her and Terrell just as he’d failed Simon Green.

  “Damnit,” Jack whispered, the word torn from his soul. He was a lousy team leader. This proved it beyond a doubt.

  Jack opened his eyes. The sorrow was stark because such an emotion was so rare for him.

  Finally, the sorrow drained away as something else took its place. Jack didn’t want to return to old wounds. The new one was bad enough. While he lived, he would do his job. He did that one thing well—usually.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack whispered to Terrell’s corpse.

  He was getting tired of having to say that to his comrades. The desire to wallow in his agony nearly drove Jack to bow his head. Instead, he crawled deeper into the wreckage.

  Jack came to his smashed computer. He’d hoped to download the file and replay what the optics had seen the last few seconds in the hut of the dead.

  Someone had turned on the optics and set the sunglasses to watch the corpses. Obviously, the person who had placed several grams of antimatter had put the sunglasses there, knowing how the tech operated, to wait for the D17 agents to investigate.

  Why did they use the precious antimatter to cover their presence? It seems like wild overkill.

  Setting off antimatter was going to bring the Egyptian border personnel here in a hurry. They would likely think it had been a nuclear explosion.

  I have to get out of here.

  Jack made a sour sound a second later. None of this mattered because he was a walking dead man from the radiation exposure.

  Egyptian Army personnel would be coming from the Siwa Oasis. Jack would have to move away from the road, which meant walking in the desert for at least ten miles. The sooner he got started the sooner he’d reach the oasis. If he waited too long, he’d be dead anyway.

  Hardening his resolve—refusing to look at Terrell’s corpse—Jack began rummaging through the wreckage. He wouldn’t be able to take much. Hiking through the desert would be an ordeal.

  In three minutes, Jack crawled out of the smashed Chief Cherokee. He didn’t know if Carter was dead or alive. That was why he’d wanted to study the last video from the sunglasses’ optics: to see if Carter’s corpse had been in the heap of dead or not.

  Jack stared at the wrecked jeep. He knew what he had to do next. D17 protocols demanded it. He had the satellite phone and—

  Jack hefted the phone. Mrs. King’s supposed heart attack, the antimatter in Hammond’s trucks, Smith telling them to destroy the surveillance drone immediately—

  Jack pitched the satellite phone into the wreckage. If his instincts were correct, someone had compromised the operation. The jamming earlier from Hammond, the timing of all this—

  Jack mumbled softly, saying a prayer for the first time in years. That’s wha
t one was supposed to do at a funeral, right? Ask God to let the deceased into heaven. Jack sighed, turning away, studying the escarpment.

  He had purposefully aimed the Chief Cherokee for this spot, hoping to shield them from the antimatter’s blast. If he’d known the plunge would have slain his best friend—

  “Time’s up,” he whispered.

  Jack began to walk away from the wreckage, away from the sudden drop and the epicenter of the blast, the former cluster of ruins. He would have to go around for two reasons: to get away from the coming investigators and to stay as far away as he could from more radiation poisoning.

  If Carter still lived, he planned to rescue the agent. Nothing else mattered now.

  After circling a rocky area, Elliot took out a switch and pressed it with his thumb.

  A moment later, another explosion sent fire shooting into the air. Metal screamed and flames roared. He had to hide the presence of D17, leaving debris instead of computer files, a modified Chief Cherokee and a distinguishable corpse.

  Jack tightened the straps of his pack, lengthening his stride. The sun beat down on him. He had water, reasonable stamina and a core of stubbornness few could match. Ten miles through the desert—except for the radiation poisoning, he had no doubt that he could make it.

  How long until the radiation begins to wither my cells?

  After climbing up a rise, Jack stared at the blast zone in the distance. There was a crater with smoke lazily drifting into the sky. He was still far too close. This—

  Jack’s features tightened as he raised his right wrist, tapping the screen of what looked like a bulky watch. He readied himself for the worst of the report.

  What the—this wasn’t right.

  Jack shook the wrist-monitor, raising it to his ear, listening. He heard the soft clicking. It seemed to be fully functional. Lowering the watch, he ran through a quick diagnostic as he continued to trudge across the hot sand.

  The device worked. It told him something amazing. There were no traces of radiation at the blast site. It hadn’t been an antimatter blast or a nuclear chain reaction. He’d seen the mushroom cloud, though. That meant…