A Dragon's Fate Read online

  Appropriate for Teens, Intriguing to Adults

  Immortal Works LLC

  1505 Glenrose Drive

  Salt Lake City, Utah 84104

  Tel: (385) 202-0116

  © 2019 Daniel Swenson

  http://www.dragonsfate.com/

  Cover Art by Ashley Literski

  http://strangedevotion.wixsite.com/strangedesigns

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information email [email protected] or visit http://www.immortal-works.com/contact/

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

  ISBN 978-1-7339085-0-4 (paperback)

  AISN B07RG3BK4C (Kindle Edition)

  I dedicate this book to my children each

  of whom holds a special place in my heart.

  I hope they know how much they inspire me

  every day. And in return, I hope that my example

  of chasing my dream will inspire them to

  chase their dreams.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Immortal

  The room lit up with a bright flash of lightning, and thunder rattled the steel table where Marcus wearily tapped his fingers. The door to the room opened causing Marcus to jump. A large man who appeared to enjoy food a little too much squeezed his way into the room.

  The man grabbed hold of one of the steel chairs, which screeched with an unearthly wail as he dragged it along the cement floor. The hair on the back of Marcus’s neck stood on end.

  “What is your name?” the man asked in a nasal tone.

  Marcus sighed. “My name, for the thirtieth time, is Marcus Silver.”

  The rotund man adjusted himself in his chair. “And do you know why you are here, Mr. Silver?”

  “Honestly, no. Until two weeks ago, I was one of the lead geological scientists for Union Forest. Now, I’m being held captive!”

  The man grunted something unintelligible.

  “You can’t hold me here forever! Where is my lawyer? I want to speak to my lawyer.”

  Another volley of lightning raked its way past the window illuminating the room in its eerie light. The thunder that followed shook dust loose from the walls. The man pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped the dust off his clothing.

  “You believe a traitor like you gets access to a lawyer?”

  “I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about,” Marcus spat. He gripped the table to keep himself from jumping up and throttling the corpulent cretin.

  “Oh, I believe you know exactly why you are here, Mr. Silver.” The rotund man slowly lifted his bulk off the steel chair. “Guards!”

  Two well-armed guards entered the room with stun batons in hand.

  “Take Mr. Silver back to his cell. Maybe a few more days in that godforsaken place will help you change your mind.”

  The two guards grabbed Marcus roughly by the arms. He tried to fight them off, but they were too strong for him in his weakened state. One of the guards punched him hard across his face, and stars swirled in Marcus’s vision. As his consciousness slipped away, he vaguely recalled being lifted from the chair and dragged into the hallway. On the way out, one of the guards whispered, “Isn’t this the guy that had cojones enough to confront Mr. Perkins?”

  Back in his cell, Marcus leaned his head against the cold cement wall and contemplated how he got there. He thought back to the day when he had shuffled out of the Union Forest conference room, shaken up as a nest full of rattlesnakes. He remembered how he’d felt having just spent the better part of four hours arguing with several department heads and Roger Smythe against sending over the special ops to retrieve the malfunctioning data core from the drilling site in Ardmore, Ireland.

  In preparation to send the team over, Union Forest had requested that his department prepare multiple reports and provide satellite images of the area to prove that it was safe enough to send a retrieval team. Unbeknownst to him, this hadn’t been the first team the company had sent to retrieve the malfunctioning data core.

  Marcus blinked away the memory. The colors around him seemed to warp and bubble like an old melting film reel. Everything returned to crystal clarity, and Marcus found himself back in his lab working late days before the special ops team was to arrive. His computer beeped in alarm, and he leaned over to glance at the screen. The satellites were reporting a tremendous spike in temperature around the drilling site. He thought it might have been a malfunctioning sensor since it reported a temperature jump of thirty degrees in two minutes. He ran a diagnostic of the satellite array and found that everything worked as it should. Confused and curious, Marcus adjusted the sensor array to see the surrounding area of Ardmore. To his shock and horror, the spike in temperature was only in the area around the drilling site.

  Marcus scrambled about, pulling up all past reports and thermal images of the area, finding multiple discrepancies in the thermal satellite images, many of which had been tampered with. Fearing for the lives of the special ops team, he printed all his findings and arranged for a meeting with the president of the company.

  Again, his vision twisted and turned like an angry snake. When it returned, he found himself seated in the office of the president and CEO of Union Forest, Steven Malcom Wentworth III. Mr. Wentworth looked over Marcus’s findings while he patiently waited. He was about half way through the report when the doors to his office opened and in walked Mr. Perkins.

  “Walter! Please come in.” Mr. Wentworth said in his thick Alabama accent. “Mr. Silver has brought… You do know who Mr. Silver is, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I am aware of who Mr. Silver is.”

  “Good. Now as I was saying. Mr. Silver has brought to my attention some concerning news about our upcoming recovery mission to Ireland. Would you mind looking over the report?”

  “It would be my pleasure, Steven.”

  Marcus should have known what would happen next simply by the fact that Mr. Perkins didn’t even take the time to sit down to thoroughly read his report.

  “I appreciate your tenacity, Mr. Silver. However, your colleagues Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rudy have both given us reports contrary to this report. Are you certain about this?”

  Marcus confirmed he was certain.

  The salt and pepper-haired man stood up, walked over to the shredder, flipped on the switch and shoved Marcus’s report into the machine. Marcus watched with his jaw appearing as if it would strike the floor with a resounding thud like a Looney Toons characte
r.

  Once the report had been destroyed, Mr. Perkins returned to his seat and smiled. “I hope you understand that this mission is of the utmost importance, and if the media were to get a hold of your report and show even the slightest bit of doubt regarding what you’ve found, it could put the entire retrieval mission in danger.”

  “But what about the men you’re about to send over?” Marcus said.

  Mr. Perkins smiled and leaned forward in his chair. “We appreciate all you have done, Mr. Silver, and we will certainly take precautions and make the team aware of what you have discovered to assure their safety. Now if you don’t mind, I need to speak with Steven, and I believe you need to head back to the lab to complete the new power converts for project T183.”

  And with that, he was dismissed.

  Stunned beyond belief, Marcus blundered his way down the hallway back to his lab. He couldn’t make any sense as to why Union Forest seemed so hell-bent on retrieving the data core in Ardmore and was willing to sacrifice the lives of the ops team.

  Back in the lab, Marcus furiously went back to work. Everyone had gone home, so he searched through the files his level seven security clearance would allow him to view. What he wasn’t allowed to see, he hacked through the Union Forest Mainframe to find, bypassing many of the security protocols and restrictions, allowing him to review many of the company’s classified documents.

  Darkness encroached around Marcus as he discovered the many secrets Union Forest didn’t want the world to know. Many of them had shocked and startled him. However, one project in particular caused dread to descend upon him. It was the very one that he currently worked on.

  Without any thought for his own safety, Marcus immediately downloaded every scrap of classified information he’d found onto one of his personal thumb drives. Once completed, he slipped the drive into his shoe, packed up his stuff and quickly made his way to the elevators.

  The doors to the elevator opened before Marcus could push the button. Out rushed six-armed security guards, Mr. Perkins and Roger Smythe, the chief operations officer of Union Forest and a royal pain in the neck.

  Smythe stepped in front of Marcus, blocking his path. “Now where are you going, Mr. Silver?”

  “I’m heading home,” Marcus said.

  Something caught Marcus’s eye causing him to turn from the dream unfolding before him. He regarded the darkness cautiously as it continued to creep ever closer. A shudder raced down his spine when he spotted something moving in the darkness. However, as soon as he had spotted it, it was gone. He waited for the thing to return. When it didn’t, he turned his attention back to the dream, and as he did, the scene played again as if he had un-paused a movie.

  “Unfortunately, I had to put in a late night. Now I just need to head home and get some extra sleep. I’d hate to screw up something on those new power converters due to a lack of sleep. That would be a real disaster.”

  Smythe looked at Mr. Perkins who nodded his head.

  “Mr. Silver, would you please come with us?”

  Unsure what to do about the armed guards, Marcus decided to comply and follow them into the elevator. Marcus watched one of the guards reach down to indicate which floor they wanted to go to. Out of nowhere, the other guard lifted his baton and bashed it over Marcus’s head. Darkness lurched for him.

  Marcus awoke with a scream in the cold, heartless bastille. He glanced down at his big toe that poked through a hole in his sock. They had taken his thumb drive and all the files he had saved to it weeks ago, but he could still feel the bump on his head. He tossed aside his ragged sweat-stained blanket, swung his feet off the old army cot and quickly made his way to the semi-rusted toilet, where he emptied the contents of his stomach.

  Marcus slumped back against the cool cement wall and wiped the remnants of vomit from his lips with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “You’re right, captain blubber pants. I have figured out why I’m here,” Marcus whispered to the empty room. “It’s because of what I uncovered about project T183 and what Union Forest was hiding from the residents of New York—and the world. I don’t know how, but against all odds, they found, sedated, and trapped another cold-blooded monstrosity like the Beast, and the damn dragon is being held captive within the confines of Union Forest’s private facility in Central Park.”

  The moon rode high in the cloudless sky as the small watercraft silently made its way across the waters of Little Peconic Bay. The pilot of the craft pulled on the control stick to adjust his approach. He reached up and tapped a small button that rested on the side of his goggles, which allowed the lenses to switch to an infrared display. It didn’t appear that there was anyone positioned on the shoreline, so he brought the boat into shore.

  He quietly stepped out of the watercraft and into the water, making sure not to make any noise that would attract unwanted attention. He carefully pulled the water craft onto the sandy shore up near the tree line and removed some camo-netting from a side compartment to cover the watercraft so it wouldn’t be easily spotted. Once satisfied that the watercraft was secure and hidden from any passersby, he threw on his pack and carefully made his way through the large oak trees and lush undergrowth.

  Robin’s Island was small, a little over four hundred and thirty-five acres. Union Forest had purchased the island a couple years back from the previous owner who had been some big-time investor and hedge fund manager back in the day. Somehow, the energy mogul had bypassed all the red tape that had prevented numerous other businesses from acquiring the small island.

  The device on his left forearm vibrated slightly letting him know he had just received a message from headquarters. He tapped the device, activating the comm line.

  “This is Vairin.”

  The familiar female voice of his assistant came over the comm line. “How are things looking over there?”

  “So far, so good. I was able to make landfall with no incidents. The trees and underbrush have provided me with more than enough cover,” he said as he continued to make his way toward the compound located on the west side of the island.

  “How did the goggles work?”

  Vairin reached up and tapped the side of the goggles again changing the setting to night vision. “They work far better that the last pair. They’ve been able to transition from the different settings much quicker.”

  “Sweet!”

  “I take it you’re happy about that.”

  “Well, of course I am. I have to be honest; I was afraid that the salinity of the water could wreak havoc on the control panel near your right temple. If that would have happened who knows what kind of electro feedback you would have experienced.”

  “Wait what?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. The electric feedback would have been minor. The possibility of it lobotomizing you was relatively high and well worth the risk.”

  “Kenzey, when I get back, you and I need to have a chat. Our definitions of risk are vastly different. If I would have known these things could have lobotomized me, I wouldn’t have allowed you to talk me into using them.”

  “Oh, quit being a baby!”

  “I’m not being a…”

  Vairin heard the crack of a nearby stick snapping. He ducked behind a tree, quickly tapped the device on his forearm muting the comm line and pulled his side arm from its holster. The device on his arm vibrated signaling another response from Kenzey had come in. Not daring to look around the tree, he switched the goggles from his night vision setting to infrared.

  He easily spotted the Union Forest patrol slowly walking in his direction. The two individuals walked as though they hadn’t spotted him, so he holstered his gun and patiently waited until they passed. Once their heat signature dwindled out of sight, he switched back over to night vision. The goggles illuminated the darkness with vivid detail in monochrome coloring of green and black. The device on Vairin’s forearm vibrated again, and he tapped his finger on it once again, restoring the comm line.

  “Are you ignor
ing me again? Because if you are, I swear to God I’m going to put another rattlesnake in your locker.”

  “No, I’m not ignoring you. I almost ran into a Union Forest patrol and had to mute the line.”

  “You could’ve given me a warning at least.”

  Vairin groaned as he climbed to his feet. “How about we get back on point. I’m almost to the target. Can you pull up the satellite images of the island, ping my GPS location and guide me to where they’re most likely holding the package?”

  Kenzey gave an exasperated sigh over the comm line. “Fine. Just don’t get shot this time.”

  “This time? What in the world is that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Do I have to remind you about the Venezuela job?”

  “Are you kidding me? How was I supposed to know that a twelve-year-old was packing heat?” Vairin made his way through another clutch of oak trees.

  “Because when you’re in a war-torn country, you’re supposed to suspect everyone you come across is packing heat. Duh!”

  “Okay, if you’re just going to sling insults my way, I’m going to drop the line.”

  “Wow! You’re super moody tonight. What’s got your undies all twisted in a bunch?”

  “Kenzey, I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “Oh, come on; now you have to tell me!”

  Up ahead Vairin could see the lights of the Union Forest compound. He muted the line and quickly surveyed the area to find a tree that would provide the best vantage point and cover. When he found one that suited his needs, he swiftly made his way into the high branches. He tapped the control panel on the right side of the goggles, activating the zoom feature. The goggles immediately detected and zoomed in on the squat rectangular building.