On hearing the word, Yair Shamir cleared his throat and Adira shot him a murderous glare. “What?” Her eyes blazed. “What?”

The scientist shook his head and waved both hands before him.

“Clarke’s third law.” Sam looked from under his folded brows, his eyes going from Yair back to Adira. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

A sticky sound drew their gazes back to the thing’s head. Its mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak, but its lips were gummed with the tar-like slime. Alex couldn’t take his eyes from the loathsome thing.

“I don’t care how they’re doing it,” Alex said. “Frankly, I’m not sure I even care why they’re doing it. But I think something else is driving them – there’s another motive we’re not seeing yet. The end result is the same: a lot of death rained down upon us. I only care about stopping it dead, and if it’s a single person or a whole lab full of high tech wizards creating these things and launching them at us, then we need to deal with it, conclusively.” He punctuated the word by stabbing down with the probe, driving it into the center of the thing’s skull and down into the steel bench below it.

“The stakes are high. We just don’t know how many nukes they have ready to go. We could set the whole Middle East on fire. Israel would be first into the inferno.” Adira grimaced.

“As far as I’m concerned, the inferno will be upon us if we don’t act.” Alex straightened. “They like playing with the dead so much; I say, we go and help them join the ranks.”

“Into Iran?” Sam asked, a grin beginning to split his face.

Alex looked back down at the head and saw its eyes were firmly fixed on him. Alex’s smile was grim. “Hammerson said we’re to follow the leads, wherever they take us. Then we terminate with extreme prejudice.”

CHAPTER 10

Hammerson scrolled through a screen of the latest Intel. “We’re blind and deaf in there now. I can use our orbiting hardware to guide you, but we’re just eyes from a long way up. The rest is up to you.”

“Got it,” Alex said. “It’s a weird one, Jack. These … things were not really alive. It was more like someone jump-started a Mac truck. They were all sewn together, no blood, just a weapon delivery system on two legs. Got the strength of a dozen men – hard to kill.” Alex snorted. “No, already dead; make that, hard to stop.”

“But you took one down,” Hammerson said.

“Yes and no. I beheaded it, but I didn’t see what happened to the body. Might still be jerking around down there, or worse, having another head fitted, and then coming right back at us.”