Forsaken Read online

  FORSAKEN

  A UNIT 51 NOVEL

  MICHAEL

  McBRIDE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK I: MODERN DAY

  1 - BARNETT

  2 - EVANS

  3 - ROCHE

  4 - JADE

  5 - BARNETT

  6 - TESS

  7 - ANYA

  8 - BARNETT

  9 - JADE

  10 - KELLY

  11 - EVANS

  12 - TESS

  13 - BARNETT

  BOOK II

  14 - ROCHE

  15 - ANYA

  16 - TESS

  17 - KELLY

  18 - DUTTON

  19 - EVANS

  20 - BARNETT

  21 - ROCHE

  22 - DONOVAN

  23 - BARNETT

  24 - JADE

  25 - TESS

  26 - ANYA

  27 - BLY

  28 - KELLY

  29 - CARSON

  30 - EVANS

  31 - BARNETT

  32 - ROCHE

  33 - JADE

  34 - BARNETT

  35 - MOIRA

  36 - KELLY

  37 - ANYA

  BOOK III

  38 - RUSSO

  39 - TESS

  40 - EVANS

  41 - ROCHE

  42 - JADE

  43 - KELLY

  44 - ANYA

  45 - BARNETT

  46 - EVANS

  47 - ROCHE

  48 - JADE

  49 - TESS

  50 - KELLY

  51 - BARNETT

  52 - EVANS

  53 - ROCHE

  54 - JADE

  EPILOGUE

  Teaser chapter

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 Michael McBride

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4160-2

  First electronic edition: May 2018

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4161-9

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4161-7

  For Jane Gauthier

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Gary Goldstein, Steven Zacharius, Elizabeth May, Lou Malcangi, Arthur Maisel, Lauren Vassallo, and the entire team at Kensington Books; Alex Slater and Tara Carberry at Trident Media Group; Chris Fortunato; Andi Rawson and Kim Yerina; Jeff Strand; my amazing family; and all of my loyal friends and readers, without whom this book would not exist.

  PROLOGUE

  There are some secrets which do not permit

  themselves to be told.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Antarctic Research, Experimentation

  & Analysis Station 51,

  Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, six months ago

  The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk streaked across the ice cap and came in low over the mounds of snow at the edge of the cliff. The ferocious gusts from its rotors filled the air with the accumulation and revealed the red arctic vehicles buried underneath. It battled the brutal gales screaming through the Drygalski Mountains until it was steady enough for the men inside to open the sliding side door. Several lengths of rope slithered down into the blizzard. Four shadows disgorged from the chopper and rappelled blindly through the whiteout. The moment they hit the ground, they unclipped and staggered away from the chopper through the knee-deep snow.

  Special Agent Rand Morgan signaled to the pilot and the Black Hawk banked away, buffeting the men with one final gust before thundering back across the frozen plains. He unslung his custom SCAR 17 semiautomatic assault rifle and tromped toward the arctic research station, its massive garage doors rimed with ice. His men were nearly invisible in their snow-camouflage GEN III ECWCS fatigues as they advanced.

  He knelt and brushed away the upper layers of the accumulation until he found what he knew would be there: an amoeboid pattern of pink ice, which crumbled with gentle pressure. He rubbed a piece between his gloved fingers and sniffed it through the holes in his neoprene balaclava. Stood and wiped it on his pants, leaving a faint reddish smear on the fabric.

  Morgan nodded to his men, who fanned out in search of any sign as to where their quarry might have gone. Less than half an hour had passed. It couldn’t have made it very far, not with as much blood as it was losing.

  The door between the garage bays stood wide open and nearly concealed behind a drift of snow, which extended halfway into the building.

  He paused, lowered his thermal vision goggles over his eyes, and switched on his laser sight. The narrow beam cut through the darkness, which revealed itself in shades of gray. His beam reflected from the frozen concrete inside. The droplets of blood were spattered and congealed to the consistency of paint. They retained just enough heat to stand apart from the ice.

  “I picked up its trail,” he whispered into his comlink.

  Morgan entered the garage with his assault rifle seated against his shoulder and swept his laser sight from one side of the building to the other, absorbing everything he saw as quickly as possible. He created a mental overlay of the garage over the blueprints he’d committed to memory.

  His rubber soles squeaked when he stepped from the ice onto the bare concrete.

  He stopped and waited for any response to the sound. His breath formed a cloud around his head and toyed with his thermal optics. The delicate skin of his lips and the mucous membranes inside his nostrils were already starting to freeze.

  Another laser passed over him from behind and traced the workbench against the back wall, beside which lay an overturned tool cabinet, its contents scattered across the floor.

  The trail of blood led straight toward it.

  Morgan stepped sideways, one foot over the other, to get a better view of the area behind the toppled cabinet. The access hatch to the sublevel was flush with the ground beside the hole in the floor, the rim of which glowed faintly with the residual warmth of the transferred blood.

  “It’s gone underground,” he whispered. “Pair off. Allen. Fitz. You two head down the opposite side. Ryan, you’re with me. If it’s still down there, it’ll be trapped between us.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  The reply was tentative, nervous. Morgan had neither the time nor the inclination to coddle these men. They were supposed to be professionals. The problem was they’d seen the live feed from the security cameras inside the station and knew what this thing was capable of doing to them.

  “Then we’ll have our work cut out for us, won’t we?”

  Morgan leaned out over the access hatch. An iron ladder materialized from the darkness. The rungs were smudged with blood and the wall behind it dotted with expiratory spatter, which meant t
hat their prey’s lungs were filling with blood. A pool of it stood apart from the cold floor at the bottom of the ladder like a beacon.

  Hinges squealed from across the room as his men removed the lid from the hatch on the other side.

  “In position,” Allen’s voice whispered through Morgan’s earpiece.

  “On my mark.” He straddled the orifice and aimed his weapon down between his feet. “Go.”

  Morgan slung his rifle over his shoulder, gripped the side rails with his hands and the arches of his feet, and slid straight down into the depths. Braked ten feet above the bottom to make sure there was nothing underneath him. Let go and dropped into the darkness. Landed in a crouch and shouldered his rifle.

  The quarters were tight and limited his movements, but he was able to maneuver his weapon so that it was aimed back underneath the garage. The ground was smeared with blood and patterned with distinct handprints, which led to an industrial fan with a broken blade, behind which was a discrete source of heat—

  His laser reflected from a pair of eyes.

  A frenzy of movement and they were gone.

  “It’s coming your way,” Morgan whispered into his transceiver.

  A blurred heat signature scrabbled through the tunnel in the distance.

  Screams erupted from his earpiece. He instinctively ducked out of the tunnel as the man at the far end shot his rifle straight at him. Another scream nearly deafened him. He yanked out his earpiece and shouted up at the man descending the ladder above him.

  “Move! We can’t let it get out the other side!”

  Morgan slung his rifle over his shoulder and clanged up the ladder. He broke the surface on Ryan’s heels and propelled himself into a sprint toward the other side of the garage.

  By the time he reached it, the floor surrounding the access chute positively glowed with the heat from the blood all over the concrete. Footprints led back into the corner, where the glass bridge to the main complex had broken off. They reminded him of those of a bear, only the toes tapered in length from medial to lateral.

  He glanced down the ladder. Allen and Fitzpatrick were heaped on top of each other in a rapidly expanding pool of warmth.

  “Jesus,” Ryan whispered.

  “Stay sharp,” Morgan said.

  He advanced into the ruined corner of the garage in a shooter’s stance, his laser probing the dark gaps between the toppled shelves, fallen cabinets, and the crumbled sections of the walls and ceiling.

  “We’ve got it cornered.”

  “A cornered animal is infinitely more dangerous.”

  The footprints led to a narrow gap beneath where a cabinet leaned against what almost looked like a makeshift gurney. Blood covered the floor inside as far as he could see.

  Ryan crouched and used his laser sight to explore the rubble.

  Plip.

  Morgan stepped backward and surveyed the scene.

  Something was wrong.

  He could feel it.

  “Should we go in after it or try to flush it out?” Ryan asked.

  A white blur streaked through Morgan’s peripheral vision and struck the floor.

  Plip.

  He retreated another step and readjusted his grip on his rifle. He was only going to get one shot at this.

  “Just stay where you are,” he whispered.

  Ryan must have heard something in his voice. His posture stiffened and he quickly stood—

  A white streak struck him on the shoulder.

  Plat.

  He looked straight up toward the source—

  The creature fell from the ceiling. Struck him squarely on his head and shoulders. Drove him to the ground.

  Ryan screamed, which only served to expose his throat to the creature. It buried its face into his neck. Shook its head back and forth. Released an arterial spray that turned its entire face and chest white in Morgan’s thermal night vision.

  He targeted his laser on its exposed ribcage, beneath its left arm.

  It rounded on him and bared its teeth. Its elongated head appeared too heavy for its thin neck. It swayed when it leaned forward onto its spindly arms and tensed to attack.

  The tranquilizer dart his man had fired from the helicopter during the extraction of the scientists was still embedded in the meat between its neck and shoulder and issued a steady stream of blood. They’d used enough etorphine to drop a charging rhino. There was no way it should have still been conscious, let alone functional enough to take out three of his men. Surely it wouldn’t be able to withstand another dose from his retrofitted assault rifle, which had been modified to replace the carbine with a pressurized gas accelerant and the twenty-round magazine with a clip that held eight ballistic syringes.

  It hissed and sprung at him.

  Morgan fired.

  The dart struck it squarely at center mass. Its legs went out from underneath it. The impact knocked it backward into the puddle of Ryan’s blood.

  Morgan cautiously approached and stood over it. He couldn’t be entirely sure what it was, let alone if it was still breathing.

  BOOK I: MODERN DAY

  Only those who will risk going too far

  can possibly find out how far one can go.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  1

  BARNETT

  Subterranean ice caverns,

  Forward Operating Base Atlantis,

  Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, March 24

  “This way, sir.”

  Director Cameron Barnett fell into stride beside Special Agent Rick Donovan. The earthen walls of the tunnel were smoothed by eons of running water, which had taken a serious feat of engineering to divert so they could drain these passageways. Residual puddles splashed underfoot and echoed ahead of them beyond the range of sight. LED lights were mounted to the ceiling and spaced so far apart that they had to walk through walls of darkness between the glowing auras, but they were already taxing the limits of their ability to produce enough electricity, especially with the increased demand provided by the discovery of new tunnels seemingly on a daily basis.

  “What do we know about it?” Barnett asked.

  “Nothing at this point.”

  The two men veered to the left and into a narrow corridor. The outlet was so small they were forced to crawl more than a dozen feet, which was made even more awkward by the full-body isolation suits. The Plexiglas shields covered the better part of their faces and upper chests, revealing only a hint of their black fatigues.

  Barnett stood and checked the seals around his wrists and hood. Such precautions might have seemed like overkill, but with everything he’d seen in the years since cofounding Unit 51, he’d learned to never leave anything to chance.

  “How much farther?”

  “Maybe a hundred feet through that tunnel to the left.”

  Barnett didn’t wait for his escort, who carried a SCAR 17 semiautomatic assault rifle slung over the shoulder of his yellow suit, and headed directly toward the passage. He hadn’t been this deep into the warrens before, but he made it his business to commit every new inch of the map to memory as they discovered it. As with each new cavern they explored, they’d placed a small black mousetrap in an inconspicuous place, just in case they got lucky and finally caught the escaped rodent belonging to his former microbiologist, Dr. Max Friden. Assuming it wasn’t dead already, which he sincerely hoped. It had been infected with the same alien microorganisms as the creature responsible for the deaths of their earlier scientific team, but they hadn’t seen any sign of it since first penetrating the research complex, following the extraction of the survivors.

  The sloped ceiling was spiked with stalactites that grew longer and longer until they became columns where they reached the ground at the back of the chamber, leaving barely enough room between them for the men to squeeze into the rugged hole at the base of the rear wall. The light on the far end shimmered from standing water so cold that Barnett’s entire body clenched when he slid down into it.

  He cleared his mind
so as not to form any preconceptions. If there was one thing he’d learned on this job, it was that an open mind was critical when it came to rationalizing the inexplicable.

  The tunnel terminated at the base of a crevice so narrow he could barely force his shoulders through. He emerged into a frozen cavern the size of a two-car garage and paused long enough to gather his bearings. He was roughly a quarter-mile southeast of the main entrance beneath the pyramid and seventy feet below the bed of the drained lake.

  Donovan sloshed from the orifice behind him.

  “Through that crevice over there,” he said

  The walls were coated with a layer of ice so thick it appeared almost blue and refracted the brilliant glare of the lighting array in such a way as to grant it the opacity of diamond. The nature of the running water and the pressure at this depth combined to keep this cavern relatively dry and just warm enough to cause the ice to grow incrementally thicker with each passing year. His team hadn’t even been able to enter the passageways concealed behind it until their third day of going at it with flamethrowers. Even now, the ice created an illusion reminiscent of a hall of mirrors, which made it appear as though there were no way through, until he found himself standing in the mouth of a tunnel so tight he had to turn sideways.

  He was barely five feet in when the muscles in his lower back tightened and goosebumps rippled up the backs of his arms. He stopped and scrutinized his surroundings. His primal instincts had been honed to a razor’s edge during his years as an Army Ranger and an intelligence operative with the NSA, and served as an early-warning system he trusted with his life.

  “Sir? It’s—”

  Barnett raised his hand to silence Donovan.

  Something wasn’t right.

  The sound of dripping water echoed from ahead of him with a metronomic plink . . . plink . . . plink. He could feel the heat from the adjoining cavern even through his isolation suit.