The Genesis Plague (2010)

theatre.’ She studied the sonar image five seconds longer. ‘It’s not picking up any exit tunnels. Looks like a dead end. Nothing throwing off a heat signature in there either.’
    ‘So no one’s in there?’
    ‘Nothing living.’ Her eyes narrowed as she studied the image more. ‘There’s some strange formations along the outer edges of the cave. See here?’ She pointed to the anomalies for Crawford and Jason and they each had a long look at them.
    ‘Probably just stones,’ Crawford said dismissively.
    ‘No,’ Jason disagreed. Atop the strange mounds structured like beaver dams, he could make out plenty of orb-like shapes. ‘Those aren’t stones,’ he gloomily replied. ‘If no one is in there, let’s turn on some lights.’
    This time, Crawford was hard pressed to protest. He reluctantly nodded. ‘Fine. Do it.’
    The engineer clicked off the infrared, turned on the floodlight.
    Onscreen, the immense space came to life.
    ‘My God …’ she gasped.
    Jason cringed. The space was indeed a cavernous hollow deep within the mountain. And heaped like firewood all along its perimeter were countless human skeletons.

35
LAS VEGAS
    Stokes noted the time again and felt his adrenaline bubble up. Over an hour ago, the assassin Crawford had dispatched to Boston was supposed to have provided a kill confirmation on Professor Brooke Thompson. Twenty minutes earlier, he’d tried to take matters into his own hands by calling the assassin directly. The call had immediately gone to voicemail. That meant the pesky professor could still be alive - a very sloppy loose end.
    Looking over at the photo wall, Stokes glared at a framed shot of himself and Crawford, barely men, dressed in full combat gear. Their hands were clasped in a victory handshake. We were so glad to be alive, he thought. The photo was taken the same day US peacekeeping forces had withdrawn from Beirut following the 1982 Lebanon War - one in a long line of Arab-Israeli turf wars.
    It was in Beirut that he and Crawford had engaged in their first covert operation together. The CIA had planted them in Lebanon at the onset of hostilities, long before the peacekeeping operation had formally begun. They’d assisted Israeli Mossad agents to take down unsuspecting senior members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He’d learned immeasurably from the Mossad agents - men unparalleled in their drive and focus, with a centuries-old bloodlust imprinted in their DNA. They were the most cunning killing machines Stokes had ever met.
    This same snapshot, however, also reminded Stokes of Osama bin Laden’s 2004 videotape, in which the coward specifically mentioned Beirut as his inspiration for bringing down the World Trade Center. Another example of how winning the battle did little to win the war. That got his adrenaline pumping even harder. Fucking terrorist scum, Stokes thought. I’ve got inspiration too, you Muslim freak. You wait and see. I’m gonna make your little jihad look like child’s play. You’ll all pay. Every single one of you.
    He scratched nervously at his raw palms again before turning his attention to the computer monitor, where the cave’s camera feeds were showing plenty of activity. As Crawford had indicated during their last phone conversation, the PackBot was being sent into the cave to explore the passages and pinpoint the Arabs’ location.
    To buy some time, Crawford had cleverly diverted the robot down the passage leading away from the Arabs. Stokes had watched the machine rove through the winding tunnels, on three occasions pointing its robotic eye up at the cave’s surveillance cameras. But Stokes wasn’t concerned, because not one component of the security system could be traced back to him.
    The bot was now parked in the cave’s voluminous burial chamber, panning its camera left to right. For those viewing the bot’s video transmission, the macabre sight would be nothing less than terrifying - like glimpsing Hell itself.
    All those skeletons, he thought.
    He remembered the first time he’d seen the massive bone piles. He’d tried to imagine how gruesome it must have been when the festering bodies had first been interred in that cave, so many millennia ago. Pools of rancid blood. The stench of decaying flesh. Insects and vermin feasting on the rotting corpses.
    He vividly recalled the skin-crawling sensation he’d felt upon entering that chamber - an unsettling energy which could only come from another realm where