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    Centroblis
    Centroblis
    Centroblis
    Ebook255 pages5 hours

    Centroblis

    By Tony Masero

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    About this ebook

    Hidden fast for centuries and created by a genius, the discovery holds the secret to a vast potential unknown since the world was first created. Varied and diverse forces are at work in order to uncover the source. From military beginnings in the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of New York city where the Mafia hold a vested interest, to the more placid and academic environs of Cambridge, England. The past always plays a part, overshadowing all and drawing together warring factions to gain a treasure born in alien skies with the deadly capacity to reshape the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTony Masero
    Release dateFeb 1, 2016
    ISBN9781310343827
    Centroblis
    Author

    Tony Masero

    It’s not such a big step from pictures to writing.And that’s how it started out for me. I’ve illustrated more Western book covers than I care to mention and been doing it for a long time. No hardship, I hasten to add, I love the genre and have since a kid, although originally I made my name painting the cover art for other people, now at least, I manage to create covers for my own books.A long-term closet writer, only comparatively recently, with a family grown and the availability of self-publishing have I managed to be able to write and get my stories out there.As I did when illustrating, research counts a lot and has inspired many of my Westerns and Thrillers to have a basis in historical fact or at least weave their tale around the seeds of factual content.Having such a visual background, mostly it’s a matter of describing the pictures I see in my head and translating them to the written page. I guess that’s why one of my early four-star reviewers described the book like a ‘Western movie, fast paced and full of action.’I enjoy writing them; I hope folks enjoy reading the results.

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      Book preview

      Centroblis - Tony Masero

      CENTROBLIS

      Tony Masero

      Murder, crime and mystery surround the greatest and most dangerous discovery in modern times. Hidden fast for centuries and created by a genius, it holds the secret to a vast potential unknown since the world was created.

      Varied and diverse forces are at work in order to uncover the source. From the dark streets of New York where the criminal Mafia have a vested interest to the more placid and academic environs of Cambridge, England.

      The past always plays a part, overshadowing all.

      Sixteenth century Florence and the battlefields of Vietnam and the Falkland Islands draw a diverse group together to try and discover a unique treasure born in alien skies and with a capacity to reshape the world.

      Cover Illustration: Tony Masero

      Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations,

      or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

      mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the

      written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

      Copyright © Tony Masero 2016

      Smashwords Edition

      ‘It will emerge from dark and gloomy caverns,

      Casting all human races into a great anxiety, peril and death….

      It will take away the lives of many,

      With this men will torment each other with many artifices, traductions and treasons.

      O monstrous creature,

      How much better it would be

      If you were to return to hell.’

      Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

      Chapter One

      Chu Lai Airfield, Quáng Ngãi Province, 1966

      The vast supply base of Chu Lai lay on a peninsula fifty-six miles south of Da Nang and was a heap of curling dusty roads circling depots full of parked lorries and flat plains of tents laid out in a huge service area. The only relief from the oppressive heat came from the breeze off the South China Sea out beyond the helipad on the sheltered side of the Ky Ha peninsula. A few scattered UH1D’s helicopters, the ubiquitously nicknamed Hueys, stood on the tarmac cordoned off by protective low sandbagged walls.

      One of them was marking time with a steady whop-whop as the twin rotors turned and raised a swirl of dust around a soldier engaged at the open cargo bay door.

      4th Marine Sergeant Joe Castellone cursed as he struggled with the strong sealing tape looped around the wrapping a few more times than was necessary to keep the covering plastic sheet in place. A heavy built, dark haired man with a busted nose and square chin that was an almost permanent shade of blue no matter how often he shaved, a duty he performed only when on the base. Castellone was not a man given neither much to the niceties nor much to patience.

      ‘Come on,’ he grumbled, talking to the recalcitrant tape as if it would obey him as readily as the young men he had under his command. ‘Will you give me a break?’

      He was sweating in the hot liquid air but it was more the exertion and tension that pumped liquid from his skin than the atmosphere. He looked across at the grinning face of the pilot beneath his ball-domed helmet, the smiling man rolling his fingers one over the other in a hurry-up sign.

      ‘Okay, goddammit! Will you hold on, I’m coming.’ Castellone shouted back at him, his words lost under the steady repetitive pulse of the rotors.

      In desperation he drew the K-Bar knife from his webbing and sliced through the tenacious plastic, running the blade along the length of the covering sheet until it flapped free in the down draught.

      ‘At last, you mother!’ breathed Castellone.

      He tore the sheet away from the rippled white ceramic snout of the squat barrel. The thing looked pretty disgusting to Castellone. It reminded him of a termite queen about to give birth. Quickly he snapped the sight on the nipple into place as he had been told, locking it with a turn of a butterfly wing nut.

      Behind him, forgotten, the plastic covering sheet billowed and skipped away across the drab green ridge tents and army vehicles, over stockpiled bales of barbed wire to lock, at last, around the base of a set of transmitter aerials.

      With one last hurried look at the barrel of the thing, Castellone hoisted his M16 over his shoulder and climbed up into the open bay. Slumping down inside he watched through the door as the Huey rose rapidly, veered over the LST dock and turned the spread of the Support and Logistics base below into a toy town.

      A gang of Seabee engineers for the mission had adapted the Huey and the helicopter’s firepower had been seriously reduced to make way for the heavy power units stacked within. All the seating, enough for thirteen personnel, the mortars and two point seventy-five rockets had been left behind as well as the minigun. All of it dumped to make way for the strange looking device with its ugly nose now hanging out of the bay door.

      ‘Like running naked through a briar patch,’ Castellone bitched mentally.

      Without the hardware it was bad enough but what else did he have for this questionable patrol? Three punk kids pretending to be soldiers. Only one of them had any time in-country and that was Gillette, a weird kid who fondled his M60 as if it were a bar girl back at his hooch.

      The three pfc’s lay sprawled in the rear of the helicopter. Peace badged and hippy beaded, with joints already smoldering between their lips. Castellone sighed in despair as he looked from them across to their fearless leader.

      A tall, fair haired man with a long neck and protruding Adam’s apple, Captain Mahlen hung onto the ceiling rig as the chattering Huey climbed higher into the cloudless sky and then wheeled suddenly inland. The captain shouted a conversation with the two technicians that crouched at his feet hanging nervously onto the quivering floor plates.

      Mahlen was telling the college boy, the one with the buzz-cut and gold rimmed spectacles, where they were headed.

      ‘Few miles south of the DMZ up in the Central Highlands,’ he bellowed. ‘Deep valleys and heavy jungle there. No name for the place, just a map reference. Hill 4A4. Intel is we get a lot of NVA mortar action from the area. Great place for this new weapon as air and artillery can’t locate the gooks due to the hills and canopy cover.’

      ‘Sounds ideal,’ agreed the older of the pair, who glanced at his watch, ‘Are we on time?’

      He was a robustly built white haired man, serious faced and stolid but with something of an academic air about him. Both the technicians were clad in plain overalls with no markings evident, no nametags or any other indication of their stations or rank.

      Mahlen, always prone to being a little gung-ho, bunched his fist and pumped air, ‘It’s okay, Colonel. We’ll make the ETA, we’re on the ball here.’

      Shit! Thought Castellone suspiciously, a colonel on an assignment like this. A guy without any official insignia, he realized this spoke of a secretive black ops mission and guessed that something heavy was going down. No wonder he had received no other brief than to speedily form a small squad and with most of his own men off on well earned R and R he had been forced to shanghai the two unknowns.

      He popped open a carton of Foremost Fresh Milk hoisted from the canteen before they left and swallowed half the warm liquid. It was an attempt to moisten his parched throat but it was too thick and did little good and he wished he had taken a can of soda instead.

      ‘Time we checked the device, I guess,’ called the colonel.

      Mahlen circled a thumb and forefinger in response. Castellone had noted how the captain was a great one for using all the visual finger display the army had to offer. A thumb was jerked at Castellone, officiously waving him away from the bay door.

      ‘Let’s move it, Sergeant. We have a war to run.’

      Castellone leisurely eyed the officer and spat a ribbon of milk into the slipstream, tossing the carton after it. With his show of dumb insolence gratified he scuttled over the vibrating metal floor to squat down beside his men. Mostly he had no time for officers, they thought they ran things but he knew who really did and that was his own battle-hardened self and no other.

      Aside from Gillette the other two youngsters were strangers, drawn from another platoon pool just for this patrol. It was obvious though; they were grunts, fresh to The Nam.

      ‘Yo, trung-si,’ Gillette greeted him with his title in Vietnamese. ‘What’s the word?’

      ‘Beats me, soldier. I just do what I’m told, same as you.’

      ‘What is this thing, sarge?’ asked one of the new boys, waggling a finger towards the strange looking device sitting strapped to a palette on the bay floor.

      Castellone looked across at Gillette, raised plaintive eyebrows and ignored the kid. He had no idea what it was but there was no point in displaying his ignorance before the grunt.

      It looked damned heavy, he calculated, glancing at the machine. The sides appeared to be walls of solid metal and encased some sort of recoil mechanism that supported a pot shaped object on the top. He watched the two technicians crouch over the box, attaching different colored concertina wires and running them across to the two hefty batteries. The tech youngster with the gold-rimmed specs rapidly depressed buttons on a control panel and enlivened a plate on the side that lit up with a sudden blipping firefight of tiny lights. Swiftly he ran through a checklist against the gauges and both men seemed to agree that all was well with the machine.

      ‘Appears to be some kind of laser,’ observed one of the grunts laconically.

      ‘And, do tell, oh wise one, what exactly is that?’ Gillette asked him sarcastically.

      ‘Studied them in physics just before I came out. It’s a beam of light that’s somehow powered up by being passed through a precious stone, a ruby, I think.’

      Castellone allowed himself to ask a question, his curiosity finally overcoming the prohibitive class restraints of his veteran status. ‘So what’s this beam do, smartass? Some kind of searchlight, is it?’

      The grunt shook his head, ‘No, it concentrates the light, makes it run in a straight line. Pumps it up so it gets very powerful, can cut through metal even.’

      Gillette shook his head and looked at the machine balefully, ‘Sounds like it sucks, just like the rest of this frigging war.’

      The pilot angled the go-stick and varied the pitch of the blades as at the same time he throttled the grip in his left hand. He brought the Huey down low and fast at just under a hundred miles an hour. The tree cover below grew closer and sped past in a dense undulating field of green.

      ‘Okay, men. This is it,’ yelled Mahlen. ‘We’re expected but I want a covering outfield just in case, got that, Sergeant?’

      Castellone aped an affirmative salute with a finger to his helmet brim. ‘Gotcha, asshole,’ he muttered.

      The welcoming committee in the small clearing consisted of a very large black Southern corporal accompanied by two other colored soldiers as drivers, they sat solemnly behind the wheels of three battered jeeps and looked towards the northern horizon above the tree tops with obvious apprehension. The corporal dismounted and casually saluted Mahlen once he had cleared the rotor wash.

      ‘Sah,’ he rumbled in a deep bass voice. ‘I’d recommend you off-load immediate, we usually expect incoming any time about now.’

      ‘I hear you, Corporal. Get your men to help, will you?’

      ‘Yessir,’ snapped the corporal.

      The contraption came out of the Huey surprisingly easily, the weight far less than Castellone had imagined by the look of it. He watched the offloading with one cautious eye on the surrounding jungle, the damp reek of rotting vegetation and fecund growth strong in his nostrils. The batteries and generator were more of a problem to offload but finally the struggling men manhandled the weapon and its attendant gear onto a collapsible steel stretcher base and latched it to the rear of one of the jeeps.

      The men were finalizing the loading when an advancing pattern of mortar shells began crumping through the tree line towards them. The ground beneath their feet shook and the dull sound of the explosions, muffled at first by the enclosing foliage became progressively louder. The trees and vines shivered as the blast waves expanded and the air itself began to shake around them. Flights of panicked birds left the canopy in a wave, screaming and fluttering over the heads of the men.

      Mahlen waved the Huey pilot away and the helicopter veered skywards as they all raced to bundle quickly into the jeeps.

      A mound of earth spiraled skywards amidst a boiling flame of orange as a shell exploded just beyond the clearing’s perimeter.

      ‘Holy shee-it!’ breathed the corporal thankfully as he slammed the jeep into gear. ‘I truly believe we is just in time. Welcome to the 4A4, boys.’

      Parachute flares burst in the night, their brilliant glare swinging down through the jungle canopy to glow in yellow and green halos as they hung, trapped in the overhanging foliage.

      The white haired colonel turned to his younger associate, ‘All set, Marmoset?’ he asked.

      The twin lenses of the boy’s spectacles flashed circles of light as they reflected the flares, ‘Ready to go, sir.’

      The colonel turned to Castellone, ‘Are your men safely back out of harm’s way, Sergeant?’

      Castellone nodded silent affirmation, his gaze fixed gloomily on the looming shape of the mechanism that stood above them on the edge of a trench that his men had been ordered to dig.

      The colonel smiled at his reticence, ‘Now don’t look so down, Sergeant. What we have here is the future of warfare,’ he began proudly. ‘It is something that is going to knock those damned gooks on their ass’s. This one here is only a prototype; stage one in an extended plan. Not your normal laser, no, not by any means. This here is an enhanced deluxe model,’ he patted the ugly creation affectionately. ‘It all rests in there,’ he indicated the tin pot on top of the machine. ‘The damndest stone known to man. Taken a long while for us to perfect this machine and that crystal in there is the only one of its kind in the world. We had one hell of a job getting hold of that, I can tell you.’

      ‘That some kind of jewel is it, sir?’ Castellone asked, remembering the conversation with the young private on the chopper.

      ‘No, boy. More valuable than that. Far as we can tell this one is extraterrestrial, you won’t find its like anywhere on the planet. Hell, a handful of that stuff would buy you a condo on Palm Beach. A sack full would buy…. Hellfire! It’d buy you all of Palm Beach.’

      ‘Outstanding!’ breathed Castellone, rubbing his bent nose with the back of his hand. ‘Then that’s some kind of money we’re talking here?’

      ‘Indeed it is, but right now it’s time we gave back the taxpayers some of their righteous due, wouldn’t you say? Where the hell that damned Captain get to?’

      As he spoke, Captain Mahlen, his face now striped with camouflage paint and his helmet draping foliage, slipped from the shadows behind the tank treads of a large M113 armored vehicle and dropped down beside them.

      ‘We’ve got them vectored, sir,’ he reported. ‘Near as dammit anyway, can’t give you no more than a blanket area. The little beggars up and move around some.’

      ‘Not to worry, Captain. Just show me on the map.’

      Mahlen took the plastic covered sheet from his thigh pocket and laid it on the ground between them. They both knelt to study it in the light of the falling flares.

      Mahlen spanned an area between index and middle finger, ‘Right about here as far as we can figure.’

      ‘Okay. Is the area in front of us now free of all personnel?’

      ‘Yes, sir. Battalion Commander wasn’t too happy about it but he’s opened up a corridor as requested. You have a mile wide free zone directly in front, we’re wide open there so I sure hope the enemy doesn’t get wind before we start operations.’

      ‘Very well.’

      The colonel turned to Marmoset and passed him the map, ‘Fix the range according to these coordinates. We want a stepped repeat with an automatic firing sequence. Get to it.’

      Marmoset nodded and referring to the map, he rapidly tapped out a pattern on the small keyboard under the control panel. He slid back down into the trench and turned to the colonel, ‘Pulse rate is rising, she’s cranking it up, sir. Ready to go when you are.’

      The colonel rose slowly, to stand at his full height. He climbed up out of the trench to take up a position alongside the laser and faced forward looking out into the impenetrable darkness of jungle before them.

      ‘Sir….’ Castellone said nervously, concerned as the man boldly placed himself in danger of enemy sniper fire.

      ‘Not now, boy. Hell! I’ve waited a long time for this; I want to see it all. You will not appreciate it right now but you are about to bear witness to one of the most outstanding advancements in military history.’ He leaned across, lifted a protective cover and jabbed a finger onto a red firing button.

      ‘Something to tell your grandkids about, you’ll be able to say you were here.’

      The colonel’s trembling fists clenched down by his side, his obvious excitement transmitting to the men below him in the trench as with a rumble the machine began to commence a low murmur of sound.

      ‘Now’s the time, Marmoset! Now, boy, let’s see our baby do its thing.’

      Chapter Two

      A fist-sized blip of light began to glow at the snout of the repulsive barrel and the ceramic undulations gleamed with slippery shards of reflection that appeared to slide back from the tip in snakelike ripples. A low humming emitted from the machine and wound itself slowly higher, upwards towards a screaming intensity. Then, suddenly, a streak of bright green light zipped in a single, short burst off into the jungle.

      Somewhere distant, the dark

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