Dark Rising by Greig Beck Read Free Book Online

for the Hammer, and he would also kill for him. He just wished he hadn’t had to lose Aimee.
    Alex walked slowly towards the small group of men Hammerson had put together for this mission. The HAWC recruitment pool was drawn from the ranks of the Green Berets, the Navy SEALS, Special Forces Alpha, and Hammerson’s old stomping ground, the Rangers. Hammerson’s job was to select the best of the best – soldiers with outstanding skills in various forms of physical or technological combat techniques. Each man or woman in this unit was a controlled killer; a force of nature unleashed by the Hammer as and when necessary. Now it was Alex’s job to test them for final preparation and mission readiness.
    Alex looked analytically at each of the four men. Two he’d worked with before and two were ‘potentials’. The new men both looked to be in their thirties – battle-hardened professionals. Alex needed to get inside their heads – give them some scenarios and ask how they would resolve them; talk to them about their successes and how they’d achieved that success; about their failures and what would they do differently next time.
    Alex enjoyed testing the recruits. They nearly all believed they were made of iron, world-beaters, and in their own units they probably were. But in the HAWCs they were among peers; they joined a small team of men and women as good as or better than they were. Sometimes it took a little while for them to adjust, sometimes they needed a ‘push’, and the part Alex liked best was when someone pushed back.
    He looked at the four faces watching him; all had an even expression except for a mean-looking guy with red hair who was barely concealing his irritation. My money’s on you for the push-back , Alex thought.
    He acknowledged the two men he knew first; each nodded once in return – Second Lieutenant Hex Winter and First Lieutenant Samuel Reid. Both had been HAWCs for a while now. Hex Winter, at just thirty, was the youngest HAWC Alex had vetted and had also come from Alpha. Hex stood about six feet four inches and only weighed in at around 190 pounds – he looked a bit like a scarecrow with a coat hanger stuck down the back of his shirt. His nose had been broken several times, his hair was white-blond, and his eyes were the pale grey of a North Atlantic storm swell – the name ‘Winter’ was appropriate indeed. When Alex had first met Hex, the thing that caught his eye was the multiple knives the lieutenant carried on one hip – unusual in an age of guns. Alex had been able to identify the standard US long-bladed Ka-Bar – his own pick due to the blade’s low chromium steel mixture, which kept a razor edge in combat. In the field you could dry shave with it. Or open a man’s throat from ear to ear before he even knew he’d been touched. But the other two were less familiar. One was a German Kampfmesser 2000, the standard knife of the elite Bundeswehr and the strike forces of the German Army. It was a beautiful weapon, a laser-cut seven-inch stainless steel alloy tanto blade with a distinctive forty-five-degree chisel-shaped end – balanced and deadly. The third was a new version Kampfmesser, the KM3000, with a spear-point blade instead of the 2000’s tanto point – not as tough, but better balance and weight for throwing.
    Alex had asked for a demonstration of it in action, pointing to a crossing of beams in the waist-high fence running around the edge of the oval, more than fifty feet from where they stood. Without hesitation, Hex Winter had spun the knife in a back-handed motion at the fence. Alex’s enhanced vision had seen that the knife was going to find its mark, dead centre, before the blade had even travelled half its distance.
    The young man came with a few other ‘tools of the trade’ as well, including an upgraded M24 long-gun variant sniper rifle with his own modifications – longer receiver, detachable sight on a raised rail with maximum sound suppression. It also