Hammerhead

By Wesley Britton

 

20 years in the future, humanity has been decimated by climate change and waves of fatal plagues released by Islamic terrorists.

In this new world, Special Operative Mary Carpenter of the Commonwealth of Independent States takes on deadly opponents, including white supremacists, cells of the Everlasting Caliphate, and an international organization of smugglers called Hammerhead plotting to dominate the planet with an all-powerful fear gas.

 

Join Mary Carpenter in four fast-paced, futuristic adventures that might be in tomorrow's headlines-

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesley Britton
• Release date: Mar 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215227138

Book preview

Hammerhead

The Mary Carpenter Alpha-Earth Spy-Fi Mysteries

By Dr. Wesley Britton

Hammerhead: The Mary Carpenter Alpha-Earth Spy-Fi Mysteries

© Wesley Britton 2023. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in the USA by:

BearManor Media

PO Box 71426

Albany, Georgia 31708

www.bearmanormedia.com

eBook construction by Brian Pearce \ Red Jacket Press.

Second edition published by:

AlienVision Press, 2023

Table of Contents

Fates of Evil Men (second edition 2023)

The Last Bomb (formerly The Deadly Decoys)

Hammerhead Part 1: It’s About Fear

Hammerhead Part II: A Day in the Death of the Magic Majestic

About the Author

Fates of Evil Men

(Second Edition, 2023)

Without missing a beat, Lieutenant Mary Ward Carpenter spun left at the corner of Maple and Wolfe and strode up the right side of the two-lane Wolf Alley.

Not pausing for a single moment, Mary scanned the mostly empty corner Dallas drinking institution called the Maple Point on her right and the small strip mall that sat behind the bar.

What a sad little sight, that shopping strip. Most of the small shops had closed long ago. The only store still open was the battle-scarred Mustafa’s Islamic Place, Clothing for Brothers and Sisters. The store looked much different from any other establishment in Dallas, Texas, or anywhere else Mary knew of.

That was because Mustafa had been forced to build a foot-thick, ceiling-high concrete-block façade around every inch of his store.

The extra protection had become necessary in the wake of so many vigilante attacks on anything Islamic after the waves and waves of weaponized plagues the Everlasting Caliphate had released on the Western world. That organization and its countless affiliates thought the horrors of Twenty-First Century climate change weren’t enough punishment for the hated god-less infidels.

However, what the perpetrators of these murderous plagues hadn’t reckoned on was how the viruses they created couldn’t stay contained in infidel lands.

Instead, they would be even more devastating in the home breweries of the Middle East.

Worse, the artificial viruses spread so quickly, mutated even faster, and replicated themselves at an astonishing, alarming rate resulting in whole towns, cities, communities, and especially the regions already impacted by the horrors of coastal flooding and global warming were wiped out.

No wonder the planet of Alpha-Earth was full of hot anger and unrelenting fear. No wonder even innocent, backstreet Islamic businesses were targets of revenge-minded Westerners.

So Mustafa’s little store had been hit with bombs, bricks, bullets, and graffiti to the point the ugly gray concrete shell had to be erected around it just to keep the shop more or less intact. It’s too bad, Mary thought, as she walked up to Mustafa’s front door, that the neighborhood couldn’t know the boney shop owner in the thick, wire-rimmed glasses was, in fact, a double agent reporting to her, a lieutenant in the DIPU, the Dallas Infiltrator Police Unit. No one in his Mosque, as far as Mary knew, was aware that Mustafa was a traitor to the cause of planet-wide purification.

Stepping onto the store’s curb before the bullet-proof door, Mary patted two of her waist-belt pouches reassuringly.

She carried a gold lipstick case which was really a small derringer-type gun. She had a tortoise-shell comb which looked ordinary enough but was made of surgical steel and was handy as a stiletto. Her two rings were useful for springing open locks of all kinds. The varieties of powders, nail polishes, and costume jewelry on or about her person were deadly too. In fact, she had enough nitrates in her makeup case to manufacture demolitions and time bombs. The only trick to the whole business was remembering which was which and never being careless enough to err. The simplest error and she could destroy herself. None of those devices could compare, of course, with the Zoomer she wore on her wrist which looked like an old-fashioned wrist-watch but in fact contained a mini-communications ap center, a mini-laser-cutter, and a tiny computer with all the search and contact functions any agent could ask for. 

Her old private joke bounced around her mind – that she was wearing a utility belt much like that old, very old costumed superhero, Batman. But Mary didn’t feel much like a superhero. She never did. She didn’t feel like a vigilante either, cape and cowl or no cape and cowl. Instead, vigilantes were her ongoing enemies.

As she walked through Mustafa’s front door, the tall, lean, darkly tanned Syrian male peered through his thick glasses at her. Standing purposefully behind the counter, he thought again how that Texas beauty stirred up so many impure thoughts in his soul, especially because of her magnetic long, loose, thick, lustrous, deep-shaded auburn hair she was constantly brushing off her face. Gratefully, the lieutenant of the DIPU who Mustafa reported to did her best to underplay her feminine charms. By his standards, Mary was much more modest than most Western women.

Just over six feet, four inches tall, Mary let her usually guarded expressions signal she didn’t give a damn about any male’s responses to her. Her very large and dark brown eyes seemed to look straight through anyone who took too much time gazing at her high cheekbones, well-sculpted figure, or the long legs she made no effort to show off. She used only the most basic of make-up with nothing so feminine as using any colored nail polish. For her, her nails were natural weapons, sharp slicing scalpels that would punish any advances by males who thought a bit too much of themselves. She liked it that most men found her physically intimidating. Especially the young gangsters and street thugs who weren’t frightened by much else.

Mustafa’s attention didn’t linger on Mary but instead he studied a customer standing before him. Obviously, she was a Westerner as Mustafa was telling her, Our Quran corrects your Bible. We believe in the same God.

Mary wanted to snort, remembering her first conversation with Mustafa on that very point. What an arrogant thing to tell a Christian! she had retorted.

To tell us our Bible needs correcting!

Correcting Holy Scripture, Mustafa had replied with warm, scholarly tones, has been part of history since the beginning. Doesn’t your new Testament correct the Old? What happened to all your apocrypha? The Book of Mormon? All those never-ending translations resulting in so many interpretations of Allah’s will?

Mary smiled with the memory of that unresolved and innocent debate between people of good will, of which there were too few any more. She shook her head and brushed away the hair that had fallen down her face. Once again, her eyes wandered around the store, taking in the racks and display counters of modest Islamic Abaya, Hijab, Jilbab, Thob, and Kofi women’s clothing, a variety of Prayer Rugs, Attar & Body Oils, Incense, Black Seed, Soaps, and of course shelves and shelves of books and discs of Arabic music and films.

Then Mustafa came around the counter to show his customer a copy of the Quran in English. But, suddenly, he began to shake and his jaw dropped as if it had lost control of itself. Mustafa dropped the book in his hand, the woman screamed, and she began to quickly back away toward the door.

To her horror, Mary saw Mustafa’s eyes explode behind his eyeglass lenses. His skin began to split open like a desert landscape being torn apart by seas of earthquakes. The splits tore up his cheeks, his forehead, his arms. Blood dripped in rivers and darkened his clothes, socks, and shoes.

Instinctively, Mary popped open one of her waist-belt pouches and pulled out a gauze face mask, two nose plugs, and two plastic gloves. She too began backing for the door as she pulled on the protective items. She wanted to gag. This was the first time she’d ever seen the Damascus virus erupt like this. Yes, she had walked through towns and communities where corpses had littered the sidewalks, parking lots, and streets. She remembered the movie clip from that old Monty Python film. The scene where a soldier pulled a cart around a street during the ancient black plague calling out, Bring out your dead! Bong. Bring out your dead! Bong.

In real life, those atrocious sights Mary witnessed came after the various, often unnamed plagues, had done their work.

Mary had watched as med-bots scooped and shoved bodies and body parts onto hearse-sleds and trucks to take them to large crematoriums to be burned as quickly as possible. Often, these corpses were burned anonymously in the haste to purge as many infectious bodies as could be done in the often vain hope to save the families of the doomed.

This was America? Well, it was what America had become.

Many chilling memories flooded Mary’s mind as the still walking body of Mustafa lumbered toward her, his arms stretching out for her. She knew he was already a mindless creature acting instinctively, not with any remaining intelligence. She opened the other large pouch on her belt and pulled her tube-shaped Stunner out of its holster. She aimed the tube at Mustafa’s chest. She pushed the setting to stun. Yes, Mustafa was already dead and nothing she did could be considered murder. All she wanted was for the gyrating body to fall away from her. She pulled the trigger and a wide yellow beam shot out and pushed Mustafa back against the counter which toppled behind him. Man and counter crashed together on the floor.

Mary turned and raced out the front door, being certain to touch nothing except where her gloves pushed against that door. She hurried back to Maple Street and was nearly back at the corner of Maple and Wolf when she heard a large explosion behind her.

Looking back to where she had just been, Mary’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. Mustafa’s building blew up in one huge explosion. A fiery red and yellow plume reached skyward through the roof as the walls below were so thickly protected. The rain of dust and building bits carried as far as the corner where Mary’s knees shook. What the hell? I didn’t see anything like a large bomb in there. Hell, the only image filling Mary’s mind was the disintegration of Mustafa’s body.

Questions flew all through her consciousness. How was it Mustafa died just at the moment when he was preparing to give Mary what she had come for, a list of names of new recruits in the Everlasting Caliphate in Texas? Why the explosion? Was it to kill Mustafa, Mary, both of them, or just strike a blow against the Islamic population by Dallas vigilantes? With very different possible motives, this mystery would start with a wide net of very different kinds of suspects with completely different goals and agendas. Islamic terrorist, anti-Islamic terrorists, maybe both. With a strong tug of guilt, Mary realized Mustafa’s death had clearly saved her life. If he hadn’t started to break apart before her eyes, that explosion would have taken her along with all the wares on the walls, racks, shelves, and display cases.

Mary strode purposefully across Maple Street and up the steps into the Stonely Hotel, a building with a long and distinguished history in Dallas. Once, it had been a place where the rich and famous lived and played. Now, it had fallen into a state of restrained decay. Before she pushed open the wide, double doors, Mary heard a loud crowd appear shouting and crying behind her. She looked across Maple and saw a flood of people pouring out of the Maple Point.

No surprise, that. If I were an innocent civilian hearing that blast, I’d be heading away from the scene ASAP myself. Well, it’s true I am heading away as fast as I can. But for different reasons.

In fact, if any witnesses ever connected the tall, auburn-haired beauty to the explosion on Wolf Street, Mary had nothing to worry about. She was a high-ranking officer in the DIPU, and her supervisors knew where she had been and what she had been doing. Like her, they’d be very disappointed her mission had turned into a total bust, resulting in the death of a very helpful and irreplaceable contact.

But only Mary would be mourning him as a fellow human being. Mourning him and the terrifying images of his death she would never forget.

Mary walked through the hotel’s front lobby, pushing a small button on her wrist-Zoomer, the latest device everyone now used as a communicator, mini-computer, timepiece, and in the case of law enforcement officers, a tiny repository of useful weaponry. She still wore her face-mask and gloves although she had returned her nose-plugs to her pouch. If anyone saw her walking by in the mask and gloves, these items wouldn’t seem all that out of place. Not anymore.

Her mind still full of the ghastly images of Mustafa’s final moments, Mary walked past the front desk, past the hotel’s bar, and through the building’s back doors. In the small parking lot, a simple Yellow air-Cab slowly floated down in front of her. She smiled. The signal she had sent by pressing her Zoomer had resulted in quick work from one of her team members.

She slid into the cab’s back seat and looked up at the driver. Hi, Chuck. Downtown. Headquarters. Commerce Street. Realizing she was being a bit redundant, she smiled awkwardly and added, You might want to avoid Maple for a few blocks. I suspect it will shortly be filled with our units.

After that explosion across the street, Chuck replied, flying the cab in the opposite direction, we’ll be very busy very soon. What happened?

Wish I knew, Mary answered, knowing her face must looked strained and haunted. My contact is dead. By the skin-splitting Damascus plague. At least, that’s what it looked like. He was dead before the explosion. It nearly got me, the explosion that is.

Chuck whistled. Yep, the Colonel is going to be very busy.

As are we.

Lieutenant Mary Carpenter stepped out of Chuck’s cab in the basement garage of police headquarters on Commerce Street. A tingle ran up Mary’s spine when she realized she was standing on the exact spot where, seventy-five years before, a nightclub owner had gunned down an enigmatic sniper in front of a crowd of surprised witnesses. While no one had called him Lee Harvey Oswald before that November day, the victim would forever be Lee Harvey Oswald in all the history books thereafter.

Mary rode the elevator up to her sixth-floor office where she dictated her report of the events on Wolf Street. She smiled thinly when she realized the time it took to dictate her report was pretty close to the amount of time the events actually took place.

Walking into Colonel Buell’s office down the hall, she realized the time it took for him to read her report was also close to the amount of time it took to write it and the time it took to experience the horror of the Damascus virus death and the explosive aftermath.

Colonel Buell looked up at Mary’s face, one eyebrow raised high on his forehead as he studied his officer’s expression. Not for the first time, Mary thought her boss with his stylishly-cropped curly brown hair, impish twinkles in his