Extinction Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Damian Howden

  The right of Damian Howden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 0681 7

  Cover design © www.blacksheep-uk.com

  Cristo Redentor photograph © Alamy

  Remaining photographs © SuperStock

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

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  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About J.T. Brannan

  About the Book

  Also By

  Praise

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  About J.T. Brannan

  J.T. Brannan trained as a British Army officer at Sandhurst, before deciding to pursue a writing career. A former national Karate champion, he now teaches Karate, MMA, and his own system of reality-based self-defence. He lives near Harrogate with his wife and two young children. EXTINCTION is his second novel.

  About the Book

  An extraordinary discovery in the Sahara desert will turn history on its head . . .

  A series of unexplained phenomena create shockwaves across the globe – a huge religious statue moves its arm, and there’s a spate of floods and earthquakes. Many think it’s the end of the world . . .

  Investigative journalist Alyssa Durham receives a call from an old friend claiming that these phenomena may not be entirely natural, but when he is assassinated in front of her, she finds herself on the run for her life.

  Alyssa teams up with Jack Murray, a scientist from a secretive government research laboratory, to uncover the truth. But who wants them dead, and what are they trying to protect?

  As chaos descends, Alyssa and Jack are drawn into a battle against an unknown enemy with the highest possible stakes, because one thing they’ve learnt is that nothing is safe from extinction . . .

  By J.T. Brannan and available from Headline

  Origin

  Extinction

  Destructive Thoughts (A Short Story)

  Praise for J.T. Brannan:

  ‘What an absorbing, rollercoaster of a read’ Elly Griffiths

  ‘Origin is a truly original novel, seamlessly meshing a modern high-tech chase thriller, stuffed full of guns and gadgets, with elements of ancient history to produce a book that’s both thought-provoking and relentlessly exciting’ James Becker, bestselling author of THE FIRST APOSTLE

  ‘Hugely authentic . . . unpredictable’ SciFiNow

  ‘There are shades of Dan Brown in this impressive debut novel’ Choice Magazine

  ‘A high-octane cross genre thriller’ Living North

  For Justyna, Jakub and Mia

  Acknowledgements

  I WOULD LIKE to express my heartfelt thanks to my terrific agent Luigi Bonomi and everyone at LBA; my fantastic editor Alexander Hope, along with editorial assistant Darcy Nicholson, my publicist Ben Willis and the rest of the team at Headline Publishing; my parents for their continued support and help with last-minute baby-sitting; my children for letting me write, and for telling everyone they meet that their daddy is an author; my good friend Tom Chantler for his excellent eye for detail and his scientific expertise; and most importantly, thank you to my wonderful wife Justyna, who does . . . well, almost everything, really! You’re the best.

  ‘Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.’

  Carl Sagan

  The Varieties of Scientific Experience:

  A Personal View of the Search for God

  Prologue

  ‘READY?’ CLIVE BURNETT asked, excitement written across his weather-beaten features, clear in the intense midday sun of the unforgiving Egyptian desert.

  ‘Ready,’ Tom Bowers answered, barely suppressing his own excitement. He was the archaeological team’s demolitions expert and he had rigged forty pounds of plastic explosive to a natural rock formation nestled within the country’s fabled Valley of the Kings.

  Burnett had been a field archaeologist for over three decades, and he was convinced this barren desert location was hiding what he had been searching for all these years – the legendary ‘Hall of Records’. The Hall was one of those common myths of Egyptology that might just be true – a huge repository of ancient texts, including those from the Library of Alexandria, which were thought to have been secreted away in Egypt before that city had been razed to the ground thousands of years before.

  Years of painstaking, meticulous research had led Burnett to believe that he had at last found the location, and high-altitude X-ray tomography had recently shown a very large structure under these sands. The only trouble was, the fifty thousand tons of granite which covered it precluded a dig further into the sand beneath.

  But Burnett had presented his evidence, and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities had finally relented and authorized the use of explosives to clear the site. As Burnett watched Bowers make his final preparations, he felt a trickle of sweat slide down his face – caused by anticipation, not the fiery heat of the desert sun.

  Bowers nodded to Burnett as the rest of the team stood watching behind the safety markers. Bowers smiled, one friend
to another, and pushed the plunger of the demolitions box.

  At first there was nothing – no sound, no explosive concussion – and Burnett feared that the charges had failed to go off. But moments later he felt the ground shake beneath his feet, and grinned as clusters of debris shot high into the pure blue sky above them, shattering the foundations of the rock formation which hid his prize.

  He could see the rock shivering, resisting the power of the linked explosives, putting up one last fight, before it forever relinquished its hold on the sands and shattered.

  Burnett watched as dust and debris was thrown hundreds of feet into the air and the solid rock seemed to literally disintegrate before him.

  He turned to Bowers, ten feet ahead of him at the limits of the safety zone, and gave him a gleeful thumbs-up.

  But something was wrong; Bowers wasn’t smiling. Instead he seemed alert, confused, scared even.

  Then he turned fully to Burnett and the rest of the team. ‘Get back!’ he yelled at the top of his voice, struggling to be heard over the falling rock. ‘It’s going down!’

  Burnett only had moments to consider what his friend meant. Surely the rock was supposed to be going down, wasn’t it? But then he saw what the demolitions expert meant as the remnants of the vast granite rock slipped beneath the rapidly opening ground and millions of tons of sand were pulled towards what was now a gigantic sinkhole.

  Burnett saw Bowers’ legs go from under him as he was pulled inexorably towards the ravenous mouth in the middle of the valley. He instinctively made a move forwards to help his friend but then felt the ground moving once more beneath his feet, rooting him to the spot. His legs seemed useless, turned to stone by the shock of the event, and then arms grabbed him, hauling him further behind the safety lines. His breath ragged, adrenalin coursing through him, he turned and looked one last time at the place where the rock had once stood, and saw his friend’s hands disappearing over the edge, pulled deep into the sinkhole in the desert floor.

  He struggled against the hands of his colleagues, straining to get to his friend, but eventually relaxed, head bowed, resignation taking him.

  It was too late. Tom Bowers was gone.

  It was over twelve hours later that the site was deemed secure enough to venture close to it and the first order Burnett gave was to retrieve the body.

  He and his team stood at the edge of the sinkhole, which seemed to drop far, far down into the valley floor, straining their eyes to find Tom Bowers. It took several minutes, but the battered form was eventually spotted, half buried in the sand about thirty feet down, one broken arm and two-thirds of his mangled face sticking out grotesquely from the caved-in wall.

  Burnett was issuing instructions to the retrieval team when he heard a cry from Claire Goodwin, a senior member of the team. ‘Get over here!’ There was a beat pause, and then she repeated the call with increased urgency. ‘Get over here! Everybody! Now!’

  Burnett was the first one there. He peered down into the chasm, in the direction Goodwin’s finger pointed. ‘What?’ he asked, irritated by the interruption. ‘I don’t see any. . .’

  Burnett’s voice caught in his throat as he saw what Goodwin was pointing at, and it didn’t take long for everyone else on the team to spot it too.

  Metal, glinting dully in the glare of the sun, perhaps one hundred feet down.

  There was no ancient stonework here, only a long, curved piece of metal – the outer edge of something far larger, still buried.

  The discovery excited Burnett but he put aside the archaeological purpose of the mission until the body of Bowers had been retrieved, his family had been – painfully, but necessarily – informed, and repatriation arrangements had been made.

  The funeral was to be held back in the US in ten days’ time, and Burnett decided to postpone his grief and concentrate on the mission at hand, determined that his friend should not have died in vain.

  Some members of his team suggested the metal structure buried deep beneath the sands might be some sort of war bunker, or research facility left over from the Nazis. Hitler was known to have been interested in archaeology, looking for historical evidence in support of his ‘master race’ theories. He had authorized many digs throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and it was possible that the structure was in some way related to this.

  But, Burnett argued, how would they have buried it in one hundred feet of sand – over the entire valley, he added, and not just in this one area – and then topped it off with a fifty-thousand-ton geological formation?

  It was possible that seismic activity might have shifted the sand, but the granite suggested something else.

  Two days later, the site had been cleared up and the walls of the sinkhole shored up and secured, enabling members of the team to descend on to the top of the structure and start clearing away more of the sand and debris.

  ‘What’s it made of?’ Burnett asked the team’s chief metallurgist, John Jackson.

  ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ Jackson replied. ‘Seems to be some sort of variant of titanium, but nothing I’m familiar with.’

  ‘Can we get through it?’

  Jackson thought for a moment, then nodded his head. ‘We can, yes. It’ll just take some time.’

  ‘Get started now then. We don’t know when the locals will turn up, and I want to be inside before they get here.’

  Jackson announced that he was through more than six hours later. Word quickly spread to other parts of the camp, and within minutes all thirty members of the crew were there.

  The curved metal object was an access hatch, much like a submarine hatch, and was located on what appeared to be the roof of a building still buried underground.

  The hatch opened to reveal a metallic access tunnel, with a ladder leading down into the dark.

  Burnett stepped forward and turned on the torch secured to his helmet. ‘I’ll go first,’ he announced with authority, and as he placed his feet on the metal rungs, he only knew one thing – this wasn’t the Hall of Records.

  He hoped that whatever it was would be worth his friend’s sacrifice.

  Claire Goodwin and two other members of the team accompanied Burnett, while the others listened to the radio sets connected to their chief’s communication system.

  There were long pauses as the four archaeologists descended the ladder, Burnett commenting every now and then on the structure of the tunnel, and their current depth.

  ‘We’re at the bottom,’ Burnett eventually announced. ‘We’re leaving the access hatch and entering the structure itself.’

  There was another pause as the team dismounted the ladder, and then everyone still on the surface heard a sharp intake of breath, loud over the radio.

  ‘I . . . I. . .’ Burnett seemed lost for words. The team members still on the surface heard him breathe deeply several times, trying to collect himself. ‘I. . .’ he continued eventually, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Another pause. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before in my entire life.’

  PART ONE

  1

  THE COLOSSAL STATUE could be seen from miles away by anyone approaching the city on the main freeway that crossed through the rainforest until it broke out on to the coastal plain. The statue loomed over the city from its position over two thousand feet high on the mountain, a robed, bearded figure with its arms outstretched towards the ocean beyond.

  Made out of concrete and soapstone, the forty-metre-high statue had been a symbol of the city for over ninety years, a focal point for the nation’s devout religious fervour. Weighing in excess of seven hundred tons, it was one of the world’s largest statues, visited by millions of tourists each year, many of whom made the pilgrimage all the way up to the top of the mountain to stand at the huge pedestal upon which the statue rested. There they stood, craning their necks and looking up in awe at the image of the prophet above them.

  One such group of pilgrims stood there now, squinting tired eyes into the sun to see their redeemer in all hi
s glory.

  And despite the strength of their religion and the passion of their beliefs, nothing in their experience had prepared them for what they saw next.

  It was early in the morning, a time many people made the pilgrimage to the top of the mountain, to watch the sun rise over the horizon. It bathed the statue in an otherworldly glow, making it seem even more impressive, as if the statue and the sun were somehow connected. But this morning was different. As the tourists looked on, believers and non-believers alike, they saw the statue move.

  The movement of the statue was no mere tilt, as if with the wind, or wobble, as if disturbed at its base; incredibly, the entire statue leaned backwards and raised its enormous head to look at the rising sun, lifting its gigantic stone arms high above its head.

  It stopped then, leaning backwards slightly and gazing at the sky between upstretched arms, as if this was how it had stood for almost a century. But the people there knew that this was not the case; they had watched for two whole minutes as the statue had moved ever so slowly to reach for the sky, as if asking the Heavens themselves for help. But help for what?

  Soon, it wasn’t just those who were there who were asking the question. The first footage went out over the social media networks just seconds after it happened; within ten minutes, everyone who had filmed it or taken pictures had sent them over the airwaves to family and friends across the globe. And within thirty minutes the entire world knew, and had seen it.

  The statue – this seven-hundred-ton block of concrete and soapstone – had moved.

  And the world wanted to know why.

  2

  JOYCE GREENFIELD FELT the bracing morning air and smiled. Another beautiful day, she thought as she skipped lightly down the steps of her brownstone apartment, holding the lead of Sebastian, her pedigree hunting dog.

  Sebastian was the pride of her life, at least ever since her boyfriend Adam had left her for another woman late last year. You couldn’t trust men, she’d learnt that the hard way. But dogs you could trust. Especially Sebastian, whom she’d had since a puppy, a wonderful little thing who had been her constant companion in both the good times and the bad.