The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [65]
He scratched nervously at his raw palms again before turning his attention to the computer monitor, where the cave’s camera feeds were showing plenty of activity. As Crawford had indicated during their last phone conversation, the PackBot was being sent into the cave to explore the passages and pinpoint the Arabs’ location.
To buy some time, Crawford had cleverly diverted the robot down the passage leading away from the Arabs. Stokes had watched the machine rove through the winding tunnels, on three occasions pointing its robotic eye up at the cave’s surveillance cameras. But Stokes wasn’t concerned, because not one component of the security system could be traced back to him.
The bot was now parked in the cave’s voluminous burial chamber, panning its camera left to right. For those viewing the bot’s video transmission, the macabre sight would be nothing less than terrifying - like glimpsing Hell itself.
All those skeletons, he thought.
He remembered the first time he’d seen the massive bone piles. He’d tried to imagine how gruesome it must have been when the festering bodies had first been interred in that cave, so many millennia ago. Pools of rancid blood. The stench of decaying flesh. Insects and vermin feasting on the rotting corpses.
He vividly recalled the skin-crawling sensation he’d felt upon entering that chamber - an unsettling energy which could only come from another realm where the souls didn’t rest. It was the first time he’d come to terms with the idea that true evil - a malevolent force - had been trapped beneath that mountain.
Not just evil: a weapon.
This subterranean mass grave was even more shocking than the excavated pits unearthed in Iraq’s southern deserts. Stokes had no doubt that the marines, and particularly the Kurdish interpreter who Crawford had said was assisting the mercenaries, would attribute the atrocity to Saddam’s secret police. But they’d be sadly mistaken.
On another panel, Stokes honed in on the distraught Arabs, slowly making their way deeper into the tunnel and still determined to find a way out. He shook his head in amusement.
The Arabs were very close to the cave’s most secret chamber now. Too close. And Stokes was concerned that if they were to stumble upon the installation that was the heart of the operation, they might try to destroy his precious handiwork.
‘It is time,’ a voice suddenly called out to him.
Startled, Stokes sat bolt upright and scanned the room.
‘Let loose the fury,’ the voice calmly commanded.
‘Yes …’ Stokes said, still hoping the Lord would reveal His countenance. The voice was all around him. It even seemed to permeate his skull. How would God eventually manifest Himself? ‘I understand.’
Composing himself, Stokes brought up a new window on his monitor to access the cave’s command interface module.
‘Let loose the fury,’ he said to himself.
He stared at the seven icons blinking ‘SEALED’. It was time to slay the Hydra. Time to eliminate the Middle East threat. For too long, humankind had interfered with the natural order of things. The balance God intended needed to be restored - the checks and balances that truly determined history’s winners and losers.
With trembling fingers, he clicked each icon in turn, and the flashing indicators flipped from red to green; ‘SEALED’ now changed to read ‘OPEN’. When the password box came up to confirm the changes, he paused.
Finally the appointed hour had arrived. The culmination of years of research and sweat. After taking a few seconds to savour the moment, he whispered, ‘When the lamb had opened the first of the seven seals, I heard the first of the four beasts say with a thundering voice, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a white horse; and he that sat on him had