The Eternity Project Read online

  THE

  ETERNITY

  PROJECT

  Dean Crawford began writing after his dream of becoming a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force was curtailed when he failed their stringent sight tests. Fusing his interest in science with a love of fast-paced revelatory thrillers, he soon found a career that he could pursue with as much passion as flying a fighter jet. Now a full-time author, he lives with his partner and daughter in Surrey.

  Also by Dean Crawford

  Covenant

  Immortal

  Apocalypse

  The Chimera Secret

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013

  A CBS Company

  Copyright © Dean Crawford, 2013

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor,

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  B Format ISBN 978-1-47110-257-8

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-47110-258-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-47110-259-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  To the fans of the Ethan Warner series

  THE

  ETERNITY

  PROJECT

  CONTENTS

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  2

  3

  4

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  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

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  59

  1

  ANCRE RIVER, THIEPVAL, THE SOMME, FRANCE

  November 1916

  ‘Stand tall and show an imposing front!’

  Private Oliver Barraclough staggered to his feet as a thunderous blast shook the deep earthen walls of the trench towering around him. A shower of dislodged soil and stones pelted down onto his helmet and splattered into pools of icy water beneath his boots. His uniform was drenched and plastered with mud, and the sullen gray sky above was weeping thin veils of freezing rain that ran down his face. Dozens of soldiers clambered to their feet all around him, pale with exhaustion and cold, hands clenching the stocks of long-barreled Lee-Enfield rifles.

  A screech shattered the air and Oliver hurled himself against the slimy wall of the trench as a mortar shell crashed down nearby. The blast hurled chunks of earth and rock mixed with torn limbs and ruined weapons that crashed down in their midst. The shockwave from the blast rattled Oliver’s eyeballs in their sockets, his vision quivering. Oliver blinked and shook his head as his ears rang from the infernal noise, droplets of moisture stained crimson now dripping from the rim of his helmet.

  A distant stream of keening, agonized screams echoed up and down the trench as medics struggled to make their way through to the injured men. An officer’s voice rang in Oliver’s damaged ears.

  ‘Stay on your feet! Stand your ground!’ he raged, a silvery moustache lining his upper lip like twisted bayonets and his blue eyes piercing the early morning gloom like searchlights as he stormed down the trench. ‘Fix bayonets!’

  Oliver scrambled with hands too numb to feel anything and unclipped his bayonet from its sheath on his webbing. He twisted it into place on the end of the rifle’s barrel and pulled hard, ensuring the weapon was securely fixed, then turned to where tall ladders were being placed against the twelve-foot-high walls of the trench. The soldiers gathered around the ladders, huddled against the cold and fear that permeated their miserable existence.

  Puddles of partially frozen water filled the muddy floor of the trench, the ice crunching beneath their boots. Oliver could feel his feet likewise crunching inside his boots, victim to the trench-foot and frostbite that was slowly rotting away the blackened flesh of his toes. He could no longer feel them but it was better without the searing pain haunting his every step. A tiny part of his mind had hoped that one day soon he would no longer be able to walk and would simply fall over, to be sent to the rear to convalesce and perhaps never return to this living hell. But he had seen others try the same trick only to be shot in their dozens at dawn for cowardice. The Somme was no place for hope.

  Now, there was no time left for his feet to rot further. The troops lined up against the ladders as mortar rounds thundered down across the mud-churned fields above and rained more debris down into the trench to mix with the bitter rain. Oliver clutched his rifle more tightly, his knuckles shining white beneath the skin.

  ‘Stand by!’ yelled the officer.

  Oliver’s teeth chattered in his jaw and his body shivered with the cold as amid the chaos a brief image flashed into his mind. Home. He saw in his mind’s eye a tiny hamlet in Somerset, remembered the warm summers of his childhood; the school and parish; his parents waving him goodbye with pride in their eyes as he left home for the first time in his life.

  Oliver Barraclough was six days short of his seventeenth birthday.

  From somewhere deep within him came a choked cry as tears spilled from his eyes to mix with the mud-stained rain trickling down his face. His legs quivered, the strength gone from them as he felt other soldiers lining up behind him, huddling together for warmth and comfort and blocking his only chance of escape. Suddenly, with all of his heart, he wanted to be home.

  ‘All arms!’ the officer bellowed. ‘Up and at ’em!’

  A ragged cheer soared from the trenches and, before he could think about it, Oliver was clambering awkwardly up the ladder, trying to keep his fingers from being crushed by the boots of the man above him. The soldier crawled off the top of the ladder as Oliver popped his head above the trench wall for the very first time.

  The man before him stood up and his tin helmet flew off with a metallic twang as he toppled backwards into the trench, his face a bloodied mess of bone and tissue. As Oliver dragged himself up off the ladder, he heard cries of pain as the lifeless body slammed down onto the men below him.

  Time seemed to slow down as he scrambled onto a gloomy wasteland of churned mud and freezing snow. Ranks of men charged into a thick, swirling, yellowish morass of smoke that drifted like ph
antoms up ahead where twisted lines of barbed wire coiled like thorny metal snakes across the desolate expanse of no-man’s-land. Gunshots crackled out and Oliver saw several more men fall before they had even cleared the trenches, toppling back on top of their comrades below or collapsing flat onto their faces on the freezing ground.

  Oliver ran forwards, slipping and staggering through potholes and around craters with his rifle cradled in his grasp. Mortar rounds blasted the frigid earth around him and sprayed rocks and stones into his face but he kept running because to turn back was to die. Tears streamed from his eyes and he both cried with fear and screamed in outrage as he powered forwards through the hellish battlefield, lifting his rifle to aim at whoever came at him from the writhing veils of smoke.

  He saw figures like ghouls stalking toward him through the fog ahead, saw his comrades running ahead of him and firing at the enemy lines, their rifle shots snapping and cracking. And then, as though cut down with an invisible scythe, they toppled as one and tumbled into the dirt and the ice.

  Oliver’s brain registered the hellish cackling chatter of the enemy’s machine guns and saw a scattering of bright flickering forks of fire spitting death toward him. Oliver shouted something unintelligible as he sprinted faster and took aim at a figure close to the guns. And then his chest shuddered as a salvo of bullets tore through him.

  Oliver was lifted off his feet as the massive bullets shredded his lungs, smashed through his bones and tore chunks of flesh from his body as they passed through. The world spun and he landed flat on his back in the mud. Chunks of ice trickled down his neck as his unfired rifle slapped down alongside him.

  Oliver blinked, not entirely sure what had happened. And then he tried to breath. Raw pain seethed through his chest but no air reached him. He tried to cry out in horror but no sound came from his throat as he coughed and choked and realized that he was drowning in his own blood. In terror and fear he clawed at his own chest and his hands came away thick with blood. Fresh tears tumbled from his eyes and he stared up into the bleak clouds above as the cries of mankind’s hymn of war raged around him. His vision starred and then began to turn black as with the last vestiges of air in his lungs he screamed silently for the one person he wished dearly he could lay his eyes upon one last time.

  His mother.

  *

  BRIDGWATER, SOMERSET

  November 1916

  Pennie Barraclough sucked in a lungful of air and sat bolt upright in bed as though a bolt of electricity had surged through her chest. Her heart pounded as her eyes adjusted to the gloom of a winter’s morning peering through the curtains of her bedroom.

  She looked down beside her and saw her husband still deep in sleep.

  Pennie felt cold seeping through her bones despite the warmth of the sheets, unease lying heavily across her shoulders as she stared across the room. Slowly, she climbed from the bed and walked to the bedroom door, unhooking her gown and slipping it over her shoulders as she walked out onto the landing. The stairs beckoned and she walked with unthinking reflex downstairs and into the hall, then turned and drifted almost dreamlike toward the front door.

  As she reached out for the handle, she could see through the frosted panes of glass a figure standing on the other side of the door waiting for her. She flipped the latch and turned the handle, then opened the door toward her.

  A waft of bitterly cold air swept into the hall, touched with the scent of early morning frost that enveloped her in a freezing embrace and seemed to reach into her very bones as she looked into the eyes of her unexpected visitor.

  Oliver, her son, stood before her on the porch of their home. His face was splattered with a gruesome mess of mud, blood and dirt. He was wearing his full battle uniform, the material thickly smothered in mud and ice, and, as she stared at him, her stomach plunged in despair as she saw a half-dozen ragged bullet holes torn through his young body. Fresh blood soaked the coarse material of his uniform.

  Pennie opened her mouth to speak but no sound came forth. The cold morning air seemed frigid and utterly silent as though time had come to a stop. She stared at her son, his brown eyes looking into hers, and Oliver smiled softly as though he were suddenly old and wise beyond his years. He slowly reached out toward her with one muddied hand and then faded from view until he vanished into the misty air before her eyes.

  Pennie felt a sudden, wrenching loss as though her own life was being ripped from her and she sank down onto her knees on the porch.

  She knew without a shadow of doubt that her Oliver had died.

  2

  DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS CENTER, JOINT BASE ANACOSTIA-BOLLING, WASHINGTON, DC

  Present day

  This would be the last time he would visit this place.

  Douglas Ian Jarvis was flanked by a pair of security guards in an elevator that was making its way with an efficient hum up to the seventh floor of the DIAC building, the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The producer of military intelligence for the Department of Defense, the DIA employed almost six thousand staff and worked on a budget that was largely shielded from congressional scrutiny. The DIA was more clandestine than other celebrated partner agencies such as the FBI or CIA, chiefly because it handled all intelligence that passed through the myriad of Pentagon departments via the ultra-secretive National Security Agency.

  Doug Jarvis had seen much of that intelligence. He had begun his career serving with the US Marines in South East Asia and later in both the Gulf Wars, before resigning his commission in order to serve his country on home soil. His chagrin at being unable to continue a field posting due to his advancing years had been replaced by a stoic patriotism as his increasing authority and experience peeled back layer after layer of military secrecy. In recent years, his work had unveiled a Pandora’s box of extraordinary discoveries, many of which now languished under military protection in locations kept secret even from him.

  Jarvis’s last mission within the DIA had been to create a small but efficient department of investigators that were willing to scrutinize cases that other agencies rejected as paranormal or the work of fraudsters. He had relinquished the chance to take the DIA director’s chair in favour of starting the new unit, and had hired a former United States Marines officer with whom he had served some years before. The fact that the said officer had been a drunken recluse at the time had not endeared him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Pentagon, but the results he achieved had. In fact, they had been so spectacular that the CIA had begun taking a great interest in seizing the department’s assets, and had eventually done so with customary zeal.

  A congressional investigation into malpractice at the CIA, started eight months before by a Democrat senator in DC, had initiated a brutal manhunt by CIA agents desperate to conceal their own abuses of power. In the aftermath of the investigation’s closure, Jarvis had seen his authority and security clearance revoked, the director of the CIA cleared of all charges via a Pentagon inquiry that nobody trusted and Jarvis’s two best investigators forced to go underground for fear of assassination attempts. Put simply, everything had gone to hell in a hand-basket and that mightily pissed Jarvis off. So much so that he had spent the last six months collating evidence to clear his own name and that of his colleagues, all of it contained in an envelope in his jacket pocket that he fingered subconsciously.

  For the last three months of his personal crusade, he had repeatedly been denied an audience with his former boss at the DIA. Hence, he had not expected to be summoned urgently to that very office this morning and was still none the wiser as to why. There was a fire under somebody’s ass and Jarvis presumed he was about to be accused of lighting it. He ran a hand through his thick white hair and lifted his chin. Confidence was everything. Semper fi, as they used to say in the corps.

  The elevator reached the top of its climb and Jarvis stepped out with his escort onto a carpeted corridor. A secretary looked up at them from behind her desk and pressed a button: Jarvis knew that it would i
lluminate a discreet light on the director’s desk, alerting him to the arrival of his guest. The two guards took up flanking positions either side of the door to the DIA director’s office. Jarvis tightened his tie before knocking.

  ‘Enter.’

  Jarvis walked into the office and was struck by the unexpected desire to bow. DIA Director Abraham Mitchell, a three-star general, sat behind a large desk, his burnished-mahogany skin glistening. With him were seated the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior officers from each of the services forming neat lines of gray hair and polished medals: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Alongside them were the JCOS Chairman and Vice-Chairman, and, most remarkably, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General William Steel, the man directly responsible for Jarvis’s demise. Between them there was enough brass to fit out an orchestra and enough authority to influence and perhaps even overrule the President himself.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Jarvis said, deciding to leave the chip on his shoulder outside the room.

  ‘Jarvis,’ Mitchell rumbled, and gestured to the only remaining empty seat.

  Jarvis sat down and was relieved to find that the chair wasn’t wired to the mains for the amusement of the most powerful men in America. Even with his recently revoked authority, Jarvis would have been a small fish swimming in a shark tank.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Doug,’ said Admiral John Griffiths.

  Jarvis felt a rush of gratitude toward the admiral for his unguarded familiarity, born of their working together in the past. The mood in the office changed instantly as the other chiefs took note of the admiral’s tone. Only DCIA Steel retained a stony silence.

  ‘No problem,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Where are your people, Doug?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘By my people, I suppose you mean Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez?’ Jarvis asked and was rewarded with a nod. ‘I’ve been asking without success for an audience here for months. Now you drag me in here at a moment’s notice. What’s the deal?’