“Your men are gone,” Knight said. “And we’re next unless you listen up.”
Surprise fell over the man’s face, but his eyes quickly narrowed into angry slits. There was a bulge of chewing tobacco in his front lip, and he spit a black liquid stream onto the floor. Knight saw the man bite back an angry comment, as the officer looked him up and down. Instead, he said, “Okay, I’m listening.”
“I’m American spec ops. The rest of the U.S. team is gone. Killed by the same thing that took out your men. It’s big. It’s nasty. And it’s tougher than anything you’ve ever come up against.”
The SAS commander snorted. “Quite frankly, kid, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. So don’t talk to me like I’m one of the sodding paper pushers. I’ve probably spilled more blood in more mud than your whole damn unit combined.”
Knight rolled his eyes. The old-timers always looked at his smooth, handsome face and assumed that he was some kind of newbie. And they didn’t have time to swap war stories and compare scars.
Beck said, “You should listen to him, Donahue. He’s experienced in situations like this. You’ve heard the reports of what attacked those bases.”
Donahue waved her off. “I’ve heard the horror stories, but I’ve yet to see any hard intel to back them up. Just you showing up here with some stranger making a bunch of wild claims.”
Confusion contorted Knight’s features. “What are the two of you talking about? What bases? What attacks?”
Donahue gave him a strange look. “I thought you were with the Americans?”
Beck said, “He got dropped into this mess without being briefed. Donahue, just have your men keep an eye on the perimeter, and we’ll all play a little game of show and tell.”
Donahue nodded to one of his men standing in the shadows nearby, and the rest of the SAS team scattered. Beck stepped forward and laid the AA12 on the table. “Okay, Knight. Let’s start from the beginning. Since the Hydra incident, I’ve been tracking down other illegal activities being conducted by Manifold Genetics. I’d been hearing rumors that one of the scientists escaped from the Alpha facility with a sample of Hydra blood. My sources said that this man, who was of Chinese decent, had decided to go to work for his homeland developing the possible military uses for the Hydra DNA. He had recruited another former Manifold employee named Giusseppe Salvatori, who is one of the world’s foremost experts in genetic recombination. Salvatori has done quite a bit of work with reptilian DNA. He’s also an old friend of mine. He must have heard that I was trying to track down what Manifold was up to because he tried to contact me.”
“What did he say?”
“All his message said was that he needed to speak with me and that the world was in great danger. Needless to say, that got my attention—especially from someone like Giusseppe. He’s a very practical man. Unfortunately, I never heard from him again. Neither man popped back onto the grid after that, at least so far as I could tell.”
“Until now.”
Beck nodded. “Two days ago a British clandestine military outpost and a secret American research facility were wiped out. The only transmission received described a creature that couldn’t be killed. That’s when the SAS brought me in as a consultant.”
“Like I said, a crazy horror story,” Donahue added.
“I wish that were true,” Knight said to Donahue then turned back to Beck. “How did you trace things back here?”
“That was your American friends,” Donahue said. “They used some surveillance satellite logs to backtrack the path of a transport chopper that landed near their base. When our governments each learned that the other had also been attacked, this became a joint operation.”
“So the chemical spill explanation for the city’s evacuation was bullshit.”
“Which our governments suspected anyway. They just didn’t know the whole story.”
Knight put his fists flat on the table and leaned over. “And we’re here to fill in the blanks and get to the bottom of this mess.”
Donahue straightened up and said, “I still don’t buy the story about some bloody monster that can’t be killed. I know science today can seem like magic, but how the hell is something like that even possible.”
Knight thought back on the explanations for the Hydra’s abilities that he had been given. He shrugged and raised his hands, unsure of how much classified information to share with the man. “I’m not a scientist, but I know that all life on the planet shares something like ninety-eight percent of the same genetic structure and our DNA bonds in pairs. All of those genetic pairings are glued together with water. But this thing’s DNA is glued together with something called heavy water or D20. It’s this abnormality that allows its DNA structure to contain genes not found in other organisms. Some of those extra genes give it unique regenerative capabilities, among other things.”