Gorgon: An Alex Hunter Novel Read Online Free PDF

get the technician to play back footage of the statues’ faces when the tomb-like silence exploded into chaotic sound. Shouts quickly turned to screams, followed by gunfire, and the images on all five screens bounced and jerked. On each appeared a fleeting image of something large and mottled – a face ? Frustratingly, the image refused to clarify and become distinct. It was well over the tallest man’s head, hanging there for a second or two, motionless, but not still. Its edges seemed to boil with movement, like coiling ropes thrashing in fury.
    Baykal felt like his brain was being squeezed, and he turned to throw up. He wiped his mouth and spun back. Around him, the technicians vomited, or fell from their chairs unconscious.
    The screens were a chaos of light and movement, then transformed into a snowstorm of static. Only noise was being relayed now from the pit’s depths – that same cacophony of screams, shouts, and rapid bursts of full automatic gunfire.
    Before Baykal could give his instructions, the remaining Çekiç team member flew down into the darkness to support his comrades. For the first time in years, Baykal’s calm exterior burst and he pounded the table, roaring into his handset – but no one listened, no one responded.
    As the last man reached the deep chamber floor, his screen turned to static and new screaming started.
    *
    ‘Someone’s coming up!’ The shout immediately quietened the frantic movement and chatter of the command center.
    An unmanned drone used for bomb disposal had been sent into the cisterns. Its tractor wheels had easily navigated the sludge and small pools of water, and it was perched at the top of the pit, its single eye on the end of a crane-like structure that reached out and down, scanning for the slightest movement on the dark circular stairs. For hours there had been nothing.
    Kemel Baykal had been joined by the head of the local police and his counterpart from the Askeri Komandos, as well as dozens of local security personnel and a growing army of media that had to be corralled and kept well back from every entrance to the Basilica Cistern. It was proving to be a frustrating and enormously distracting job when all Baykal wanted to do was get back in and find his men. He was convinced they’d been attacked by an unknown number of assailants with access to superior weapons technology. He would have staked his men against any unit in the world, and knew there was not a chance in hell they would have allowed themselves to be ambushed and either killed or incapacitated so easily.
    Just as he was contemplating sending in a larger force with more firepower, the shout had come from the technician monitoring the robotic camera.
    There was complete silence as the technician zoomed and refocused the lens. Someone was coming up the stone steps on their hands and knees, crawling in the agonizingly slow manner of the heavily fatigued or mortally wounded.
    Baykal pushed police and commandos out of his way to get back in front of the screens. His eyes still watered after glimpsing the floating face and he had a headache like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer, but he concentrated on the image. As the figure came closer to the rim of the pit, the camera was able to pick out further features. It was a man, and he was entirely gray, as though he’d been painted or showered in plaster dust.
    At last, he placed one hand on the rim of the pit and pulled himself out. In agonizing slow motion, he rose from his knees to his feet.
    Baykal could see that it was his last soldier, the man who had been stationed at the pit’s rim. He whispered the man ’s  name softly. ‘Zeren.’
    Finally on his feet, Special Forces soldier Zeren Yanar opened his eyes and blinked several times. He slowly lifted one arm in front of himself and waved it about, as though blind, then let it drop it as if it was too great a weight for him to sustain.
    The technician telescoped the camera upwards, level with