The Cerberus Protocol (Hellstalkers Science Fiction Horror Series) Read online

  THE CERBERUS PROTOCOL

  Joseph Nassise & Jon F. Merz

  Chapter One

  Completely unaware that in just a few short hours he would be fighting for his life, Captain Memphis Stone, U.S. Army, was bellied up to the bar in a pub known as the Cask and Flagon in Geneva, Switzerland, with nothing more important on his mind than figuring out how he was going to convince the ravishing brunette a few stools away to go home with him. It was the first bit of liberty he’d had in more than a month. He smirked; right about now the stocky, unshaven, Mongolian women he’d seen in Manzhouli would probably have looked good to him. But Memphis had his sights fixed on a much better-looking target that he had no intention of missing.

  Just forty-eight hours before he’d been knee-deep in the snow and bitter cold of the Russian tundra, skirting the Mongolian and Chinese borders while wargaming against members of the Vozdushno-Desantnye Vojska, the airborne unit of the Russian Ground Forces. His unit had done exceedingly well; beating the Russian team they were paired up against three times out of four. That was fortunate for Memphis; he found out later that his commanding officer had bet his Russian counterpart that that’s exactly what was going to happen. When the joint exercises had finally come to a halt, and the Russian General had paid up, General Hanscomb had seen to it that Stone was transferred to an easy billet in Switzerland for a few months.

  “It’s an easy temporary duty assignment,” Hanscomb had growled. “You’ve earned some time off, so enjoy it while you can.”

  Memphis had every intention of doing just that. Some decent food, good music and female company would feel more than welcome to him after freezing his ass off for the last few months.

  Ostensibly, his assignment in Geneva was to help protect the delegation of American scientists that were on hand to observe the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known the world over as CERN. The truth, Memphis admitted to himself, was that a bunch of egghead scientists really didn’t need all that much guarding, particularly since the only way to get them to leave the confines of the laboratory was with a prybar and a package of high explosive. As if to prove the point, upon reporting in the day before Memphis had asked what his duties were and the unit commander, Colonel Warren, had told him to keep his mouth shut and stay out of sight. Memphis had been all too happy to comply.

  It was how he’d ended up here with an ice-cold lager in front of him and plenty of time to kill.

  Memphis glanced at his face peering back at him from behind the mirrored bar back. At thirty-two years old, his sandy-hair and blue eyes still had a youthful vibrancy to them, but a few creases on his forehead spoke to years of military service. A graduate of West Point and the Army’s Ranger program, Memphis had felt called to the military ever since he could remember. Following in his father’s footsteps through West Point had seemed as natural as breathing. He’d graduated with honors and had quickly proven himself, both through the grueling Ranger training at Fort Benning, Georgia and in the dusty wastes of assignments that had taken him all over the world.

  He’d been working as a staff liaison to Army contacts at the State Department when the second Gulf War had broken out and as a result he had missed most of the major fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the time he’d been released from that assignment, the invasion was over and Iraq was all but run by the U.S. government. He’d spent some time in the Green Zone, but all of his work had involved coordinating efforts between the multinational partners of the Coalition forces. He hadn’t gone out on a single combat patrol the entire time he’d been in country. Two years, in the midst of the biggest war of his generation, and no actual command experience to show for it. When he’d been transferred to Russia for the war games, he’d nearly screamed in frustration at the injustice of it all.

  The long grueling exercises in the harsh Russian weather had tempered his dismay, however, and if he was honest with himself he had to admit he was happy to have the chance to simply sit back and unwind.

  Now if he only had some company to unwind with…

  The brunette he’d spotted earlier was still at the end of the bar, nursing a glass of wine and keeping to herself. Memphis guessed she was in her late twenties. She had long, dark hair that fell gently around a face with high cheekbones and lips that pouted just enough to be sexy. From where he sat, Memphis could see that she was wearing a sweater that fit nicely in all the right places, accentuating her curves; it was obvious that she kept herself in shape.

  She turned suddenly, catching him staring, and Memphis felt like a school boy caught passing notes in class. He looked away, struggling to keep from blushing and failing miserably; knowing he looked like an idiot but unable to do anything to help it. He’d never been any good with women and his insecurity kept him from making overtures when any opportunity presented themselves, which only served to make him feel worse. It was a vicious cycle that he couldn’t seem to break out of.

  He glanced over at her again, watching as she applied fresh lipstick. He sighed and wondered what those lips would feel like beneath his own.

  Was the lipstick a signal, he wondered. Was she doing that to catch my attention?

  You aren’t going to find out sitting on your ass over here.

  The combination of the alcohol and his need for some company in a strange and foreign place finally drove him to take a chance.

  He stood up and started threading his way through the crowd, heading for the other end of the bar like a missile homing in on its target. He was only a few feet away. His thoughts swirled.

  Here we go.

  Don’t blow it.

  Think of something witty.

  Memphis cleared his throat.

  Took a breath-

  A tall good-looking man suddenly emerged out of the crowd and tapped Memphis’s target on the shoulder. The brunette turned, squealed in glee, and practically threw herself into the newcomer’s arms. The resulting kiss left absolutely no doubt how they felt about each other.

  Memphis immediately altered his course so that it looked like he’d been headed for the men’s room. As he passed the couple the woman came up for air (how the hell did she hold her breath for so long?) and then glanced at him as he passed them by. Memphis kept his eyes locked straight ahead; he already felt like an idiot and didn’t want her to see the disappointment in his eyes.

  He made it to the toilet, urinated, then washed his hands and splashed some cold water on his face. Catching his reflection in the mirror, he gave himself a rueful smile.

  “Well, that went about as well as expected.”

  Memphis returned to his seat and ordered another beer. While he waited, commotion on the television screen behind the bar caught his attention. The set was tuned to the BBC and a pretty blonde reporter spoke into the camera, while behind her a large crowd of protesters stood outside a set of massive steel gates that, to Memphis, looked suspiciously like the entrance to the CERN complex. At the bottom of the image a digital clock slowly ticked off minutes. Memphis frowned. A countdown? For what?

  He caught the bartender’s attention with a wave of his hand.

  “Mind turning that up?” he asked.

  The man glanced at the screen with disgust, but did so anyway and the telecast audio spilled into Memphis’s ears.

  “...where less than an hour ago, the world’s largest particle accelerator was switched on for only the second time since its creation.”

  Damn, that is CERN, Memphis thought. He glanced down at his belt to make sure his cell phone w
as turned on. If there was a problem at the lab, the duty sergeant would call him. Memphis was expected to report in for duty within twenty minutes of the recall signal. If he missed it, there would be hell to pay. Thankfully, the device was on, as it was supposed to be, and so far, it had been quiet.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t needed, Memphis focused on what the reporter was saying.

  “Many in the crowd behind me have been here for days; some, for weeks. Each and every one of them is protesting this momentous event, though their reasons for doing so vary as widely as the countries they come from.”

  The camera zoomed out to show the reporter wasn’t alone; a slim young man stood next to her. His narrow face was topped with a mass of thick dark hair and his eyes burned with a sense of righteousness that Memphis hadn’t seen since the fire-and-brimstone sermons his pastor had served up every Sunday in the Baptist church he’d attended with his family as a child. The man was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and it was clear from the rumpled state of his clothing that he’d been wearing them for a few days, which slightly spoiled the effect. Still, the slogan on his shirt was easy enough to see.

  “Stop the Collider Before It’s Too Late,” it read.

  The reporter went on. “With me is Dr. Carl Reese of the Center for Ethical Research and Discovery.”

  She turned to face the earnest-looking young man.

  “Earlier you revealed some very strong feelings about the Large Hadron Collider, isn’t that correct, Dr. Reese?”

  She said Hadron with a long vowel sound, like the A in made, rather than the correct short vowel sound, but Memphis forgot about her her error as Dr. Reese started speaking.

  And the more he spoke, the more Memphis could only stand there and gape in disbelief. It was a like a train wreck; he just couldn’t look away.

  “Yes, that’s correct, Diane,” Reese replied. “And so should every man, woman, and child living on the planet. If they want to live past tomorrow, that is.”

  Reese turned to face the camera directly, the reporter at his side forgotten as he made his passionate plea to anyone and everyone who was listening.

  “My fellow citizens, these people must be stopped, by any and all means necessary. We cannot allow them to destroy the planet through their arrogance, greed, and blindness to the truth! If the Collider continues to run, there is only one possible conclusion to the experiment — the destruction of Earth itself!”

  The reporter’s name was Stovington, he remembered, Diane Stovington, and she had a smile on her face as the camera focused on her once more. To Memphis, it was clearly one of the “let’s humor the crazies” kind of grins and Memphis didn’t blame her in the least. Her next words seemed to confirm this viewpoint. “Surely that’s a bit of an exaggeration, Doctor?” she asked, the seriousness of her tone in direct contrast to the sparkle in her eye.

  “Not at all,” Reese insisted. “When those two streams of protons smash together at the speed of light, they will form a mini black hole. You can’t change the laws of physics. I repeat — they WILL form a black hole. There’s no way to avoid it. Our fate is already catching up to us as we speak.”

  Diane’s expression altered just a little, but she moved gamely on.

  “If a black hole actually forms, what happens then?”

  Dr. Reese stared directly into the camera lens again and in his eyes Memphis could see the fear that was driving him onward. This was a man who believed in what he was saying. And not just a little bit, either; he’d bought the whole package.

  His answer started out calmly enough, but by the time he had finished he was practically shouting at the audience. “If a black hole is allowed to form in the heart of the Collider, it will start to consume everything around it. Nothing will be safe. Nothing will stop it. When it is finished with the facility itself, it will start gorging on the earth around it, like a hungry god with an appetite that can’t be satisfied no matter how much it consumes, digging deeper and deeper into the heart of our planet!”

  His eyes grew wide, his expression one of horror.

  “Eventually, the black hole will reach the core of the planet, triggering a massive explosion the likes of which the world has never seen! It will tear the planet in half!”

  The cameraman suddenly shifted his focus from Dr. Reese back to the reporter, catching her by surprise. For just a moment Memphis thought he saw a flash of fear cross her face as she realized the scope of the devastation that Reese was describing. She quickly regained control of her emotions and the mask of calm indifference settled into place once more. “I’m not making the news, just reporting it, that mask seemed to say.

  “Dr. Reese is just one of hundreds of people here today demonstrating against the Collider’s start, which has been running now for ...” a pause with a hand lifted theatrically to the speaker in her ear... “fifty-seven minutes.”

  Memphis looked away from the screen with an uncomfortable feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. What if Reese was actually right? Memphis tried to recall what he had learned at the hurried briefing yesterday afternoon.

  Billed as the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, CERN was home to a variety of experiments, not just the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but it was the Collider that currently held the spotlight, and for that Memphis wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t every day that 10,000 scientists from more than twenty nations gathered under the same roof to work as a unified team. Like most scientific experiments, this one had been named without fanfare or even the slightest hint at style. It was known as the Large Hadron Collider because it was 1) large, approximately twenty seven kilometers in circumference, 2) Hadron, because it accelerated protons, or ions, which are both hadrons, and 3) Collider because the particles from two different beams were smashed together at the four points where the two rings of the accelerator intersect. Its purpose was simply to study the smallest particles of the universe. From those, scientists hoped to get a better understanding of the way the universe was created and the physical properties that bind it all together.

  The popular media had taken to claiming that the experiment was designed to replicate the moment just after the Big Bang, to recreate the very spark of Creation, so to speak, which, of course, had the religious crowd all riled up. Man was not meant to understand the secrets of the universe, they claimed, and no good would come of trying to play God.

  In short, the whole thing was a bit of a media circus for the scientific community.

  “They are all crazy, if you ask me,” the bartender said, and it took Memphis a moment to realize the man was speaking to him.

  “Who? The protestors?” he asked.

  “All of them. The protestors and scientists alike.”

  Memphis was opening his mouth to reply when it happened.

  A shock wave rolled over them, shaking the bar and everything in it for several long moments. Memphis had lived through more than one California quake and this was quite mild by comparison, but for the Swiss this was something new. Shouts and screams of fear added to the cacophony as liquor bottles topped off the shelves behind the bar and the long glass mirror that ran the length of the back wall cracked with a loud snap.

  At last the shockwave stopped and in the silence that followed Memphis distinctly heard someone with perfectly good English say, “Holy shit! What the hell was that?”

  It took Memphis a moment to realize he had been the one speaking.

  His gaze flickered back up to the television set and what he saw on the screen put his heart in his throat. The front gates to the CERN complex were twisted and smashed, barely hanging in their frames. Behind them, a long column of twisted black smoke rose up into the sky from somewhere deep in the heart of the facility. The protestors were scattered all over the ground in front of the gates, as if a giant hand had just reached down from the ether and waved them aside like a bunch of bowling pins. The reporter he’d been watching just a moment before was on the ground, pushing herself up on unsteady arms; he could see a trickle
of blood running down the side of her face as she shook her head as if to clear it. The cameraman must have been down and out as well, for the camera was flat, unmoving, the scene in front of it caught in its frame by chance rather than design.

  Something had gone wrong with the Collider experiment.

  Something big.

  His cell phone began going off, the sound penetrating his stunned amazement and he answered it.

  “Stone.”

  The voice on the other end sounded shaky. But what the duty sergeant said was clear enough. “This is a recall. Priority Alpha. Repeat: Priority Alpha.”

  Memphis’s heart responded to the surge of adrenaline flooding his system. He could already feel the effects of the alcohol fading. “Copy that. I’m en-route.”

  Memphis slid off the stool and pushed through the crowd, one thought echoing over and over again in his mind.

  What in heaven’s name have they done?

  *** ***

  In the aftermath of the accident, no one noticed the short, thin man in the last booth at the Cask and Flagon take a cell phone out of his pocket and dial a number.

  As the man waited, he looked at the confusion and fear infecting the bar’s patrons and smiled a grim but satisfied smile.

  A click in his ear told him his call had been answered. He spoke quickly. “He’s on his way,” and then he hung up without waiting for a reply.

  His work done, the man slipped out the door and into the fading light of the Geneva afternoon. In seconds, he simply vanished.

  Chapter Two

  The roads were full of crashed automobiles and milling crowds of people, all of them wondering what had happened and asking themselves and each other if it could happen again. Consequently, it took Memphis almost twenty-five minutes to get to the CERN complex. By the time he reported in, the protestors in front of the main entrance had been cleared away. In their place were a mixture of Swiss, French, and U.S. troops and a clear series of checkpoints that made it quite clear to anyone looking on that it was strictly authorized personnel beyond this point.