The Covenant of Genesis

‘There’s a US Air Force base across the border in Uganda, at Entebbe. Either that, or a carrier in the Red Sea.’ He shouldered the rifle and picked up the rucksack, tossing it to Nina. ‘Doesn’t matter - it’s here, and in about five seconds some nerd in Las Vegas is going to try to blow us up!’

‘What do you mean, Las—’ Nina began, but was cut off as Chase hustled her away from the technical, Sophia hurrying after them. A dot detached itself from the Reaper and fell away - then lanced towards them at the head of a line of smoke.

An AGM-114 Hellfire missile, homing in at almost a thousand miles an hour.

‘Run!’ Chase yelled, but Nina and Sophia were already racing away from the pickup as the Hellfire streaked across the plain and arced down to its target—

The missile struck, nine kilograms of high explosive detonating on impact to gouge a crater twenty feet across out of the rock and sand. The front half of the Hilux disintegrated in a storm of torn metal, the remains of the pickup cartwheeling through the air to smash against the cliff wall. A shockwave of dust and stones tore past the trio as they dived to the ground.

Nina raised her head. What was left of the Toyota slid to the foot of the slope on its one remaining wheel, the machine gun nodding on its bent pole. ‘Son of a bitch!’

‘Get up,’ Chase said, already on his feet. ‘It’ll fire another one in a minute.’

‘How many missiles does it carry?’ Sophia asked.

‘Fourteen.’

‘Fourteen? ’ Nina gasped, looking nervously at the Reaper. It was still heading for them, less than two miles away.

‘Yeah - and now it’s taken out the truck, it’ll probably switch to an anti-personnel warhead to take out us.’ No cover on the plain, and against the steep face of the mesa the Reaper’s targeting laser would pin them like butterflies on a board . . .

‘Split up,’ he ordered. ‘Nina, go that way; Soph, go the other way.’

‘What about you?’ Nina asked.

He pointed at the mangled remains of the technical. ‘That way. Go on, run!’

Nina was about to object, but Sophia was already sprinting away. Chase shot Nina a ‘Move it!’ look, then ran for the wreck. Out of options, Nina took off.

Chase rushed through the field of blackened debris, glancing at the closing Reaper. The aircraft was a remote-controlled drone, its operator on the other side of the world in Nevada, watching on a screen. Warfare as videogame.

But unlike in a game, the targets could shoot back.

He reached the smouldering back end of the technical and swung the Kalashnikov round. The Reaper’s operator would already have seen him reach the gun, making him an immediate threat. Another Hellfire would be launched any moment—

Chase took aim - and pulled the trigger.

The PK still worked, a testament to its rugged design. Bullets roared from the barrel, the green lines of tracers shrinking to burning dots as they arced into the sky. He adjusted his aim, trying to ‘walk’ the tracers on to the Reaper—

Hellfire!

It dropped from beneath one of the long, slender wings, rocket motor flaring.

The tracers closed on the aircraft. Chase kept firing, knowing he had only seconds before the missile hit. Almost out of ammo, the last section of the belt clattering through the feed—

Smoke puffed from the Reaper’s fuselage.

A hit!

Chase didn’t know how much damage he had caused, and wasn’t going to stand and watch. Instead he jumped out and raced along the foot of the cliff, seeing a boulder part buried in the scree.

He flung himself over it.

The missile hit the remains of the technical, striking with such force that it punched straight through the wreck and into the cliff face before exploding. A huge eruption of sand and rock burst outwards, shattered stone smashing down in the dry stream bed.

The boulder had shielded Chase from the worst of the blast, but the shockwave had still felt like being hit by a bus. He groaned, squinting up at the sky. The missile’s smoke trail led back to its starting point, the Reaper . . .

It was no longer there.

‘Yes!’ he gasped triumphantly, seeing the crippled robot aircraft spiralling towards the distant dunes. The orange flash of a fuel explosion, a rising pillar of oily black smoke . . . and, after a few seconds, a thump as the sound of the detonation finally reached him.

Sophia and Nina came back to him, Nina limping. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

‘Just about,’ he grunted, finding several new sources of pain across his battered body. ‘But the Blue Oyster Cult were right.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Sophia tiredly. ‘Don’t fear the Reaper.’

‘Tchah! You spoiled my joke.’ He turned to Nina. ‘How’s your leg?’

‘Sore. But I can still walk on it.’

‘That’s good,’ Sophia said, gloomily regarding one of the Toyota’s burning tyres, ‘because you’re going to have to.’

‘We’ll nick a new truck from the Covenant,’ said Chase.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Callum must have called for that Reaper to look for us - they probably told the pilot we were high-ranking terrorists or some bullshit to justify crossing into Sudanese airspace. But it found us, which means they’ll have told Callum where we are. The Covenant’ll be on their way.’

Sophia swept a hand through her blonde hair. ‘Marvellous. But at least they won’t have any more luck at finding Eden than we have.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Nina said quietly. Chase and Sophia turned to see what she was looking at.

‘Bloody hell,’ they said in unison.

The missile hadn’t merely blown a crater out of the side of the mesa. It had blown a hole. Through the drifting dust and smoke, a cave entrance was now visible.

‘There was a spring here once,’ Chase realised. The dry stream bed began its journey across the desert directly beneath the opening. ‘It came out of there. But . . .’

‘Somebody blocked it up,’ Nina finished. A simple landslide would have piled debris outwards from the cliff, but the remaining rocks covering the entrance were inside the cave mouth. They had been deliberately placed to seal it.

‘From the outside - or the inside?’ wondered Sophia.

Nina started towards the entrance, the pain in her leg forgotten. ‘Let’s find out.’

‘If there isn’t another way out, we’ll be trapped in there when the Covenant arrive,’ Chase pointed out.

‘You’d rather wait for them out here?’ She climbed over strewn rocks to the opening. It was roughly five feet across and four high, dusty darkness beyond. ‘Is there a flashlight in that pack?’

Sophia produced a torch and tossed it to Nina. She caught it and switched it on, leaning through the opening. The drifting dust made it difficult to see, but beyond the broken rubble the cave went back into the rock for some distance.

Not a cave. The shape was too regular. A tunnel . . .

‘It’s man-made,’ she announced, excited. She bent to duck through the hole. ‘Come on, there’s a way through!’

‘Wait,’ Chase called, but she had already scrambled inside. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

By the time he reached the opening, Nina was already picking her way down the heaped debris on the other side. ‘Check it out,’ she said, shining her light round the tunnel. It was oval in cross-section, taller than it was wide, some twelve feet at its broadest. While the walls had clearly been carved by hand, it had been done to widen an existing channel, the floor grooved by once-flowing water. She directed the beam down the tunnel, which curved away out of sight. ‘It must go right into the mesa.’