Phase One: The Incredible Hulk Read online

  “I know you cashed in some chips for this, Joe,” Ross said.

  Greller shrugged. “Glad I could help. Just make it good.”

  As the plane buzzed toward Brazil, Major Sparr handed out briefing folders containing photos of Bruce Banner, Bruce’s apartment building, and the town of Racinho Favela. The commandos studied them.

  “This is the target and the location,” Sparr lectured. “Snatch and grab only. Live capture. You’ll have dart clips and suppression ordinance, but live fire is for backup only. We’ve got local help, but we want it tight and quiet.”

  Ross joined the briefing in the rear of the plane. Blonsky looked up at him. “Is he a fighter?” Blonsky asked.

  “Your target is a fugitive from the US government who stole military secrets,” Ross replied curtly. “He is also implicated in the deaths of two scientists, a military officer, an Idaho state trooper, and possibly two Canadian hunters. So don’t wait to see if he’s a fighter. Tranq him and bring him back.”

  Blonsky nodded.

  CHAPTER 4

  That night Bruce was relaxing, trying to stay cool, when a chime sounded from his laptop. Mr. Blue was contacting him over the encrypted channel. Bruce hopped out of bed and hurried to the table.

  B: Good news. Preliminary blood tests show significant gamma reduction.

  Hardly daring to believe it, Bruce typed:

  G: Will it cure me?

  B: Yes.

  B: But… I need more data.

  “Oh, come on,” Bruce said. Mr. Blue was still typing.

  B: Exposure levels, gamma concentration, cell saturation…

  G: Impossible. Data is not here.

  B: Where is it?

  G: HOME.

  Frustrated, Bruce closed the laptop and sat for a long while, looking at the picture of Betty. Again, just when it looked like he might be making some progress, he was cut off. He’d almost allowed himself to hope that he’d be able to find the cure himself, and then he’d be able to go home. Maybe he and Betty could have picked up where they’d left off before the accident.…

  But no. Now it didn’t look like that would be possible at all.

  CHAPTER 5

  As Bruce slept, Cachorro stretched against his feet. _The night sounds of the city—car horns, a distant siren, a radio playing a samba-reggae mix—echoed softly in the apartment. Somewhere down the hill, a dog barked. It was an ordinary evening in Racinho Favela… except for the commando operation just now swinging into action.

  At the base of one of they alleys that wound up the steep hillside, a commando scanned the area with night-vision goggles. Between two tenement buildings he saw a narrow walkway that rose at a sharp angle toward the target location. Laundry flapped on clotheslines. The commando signaled to the other soldiers.

  Five figures stepped out of the shadows, and the squad moved up the alley in formation, their black uniforms making them seem like shadows themselves. They carried dart rifles and had backup MP5 submachine guns slung over their shoulders. The few people still out at this hour saw them and steered clear, not wanting any trouble. Ahead of them, at the top of a short flight of stairs, a dog stood barking.

  In Bruce’s apartment, the sound of the dog barking stopped. Cachorro looked up and growled.

  The commandos climbed the stairs and continued up the alley, stepping over the tranquilized dog. Guided by handheld Geiger counters, they zeroed in on the target, a four-story tenement built into the hillside near the top of the ridge.

  At the base of the hill, General Ross, Major Sparr, and a Brazilian officer supervised the commandos’ progress from the command vehicle, which was filled with surveillance equipment. Ross monitored the gamma-radiation levels on the feeds from the Geiger counters. They ticked up sharply as the commando team approached the target structure. “Gentlemen,” he said, “here we go.”

  When the soldiers reached Bruce’s apartment building, Blonsky hand-signaled for one of them to head for the roof, using an interior stairwell since the building had no fire escape. Blonsky then motioned for two of the commandos to approach the target’s door. Geiger counters ticked softly. One soldier dropped into a crouch and snaked a miniature video camera attached to a thin flexible rod under the door.

  The soldier couldn’t see any movement on the tiny monitor. He adjusted his device and was startled by the sight of a giant dog’s muzzle sniffing the camera. A tongue blotted out his view as the dog licked the lens. Then it backed away and he could see again. The target appeared to be asleep in his bed.

  The soldier with the camera held up one finger and then pointed it to the right, signaling that one person inside was low to the ground. Another soldier applied small blobs of plastic explosive to the hinges and lock. Blonsky stepped back and faced the door, his tranquilizer gun ready.

  He keyed a code into his microphone communicator.

  When Sparr received Blonsky’s signal, she turned her attention to the monitors, which showed feeds from one of the team’s helmet cameras, one from the back of the building, and one from the soldier on the roof.

  Everything was in place. Ross nodded. “Take him,” he ordered Blonsky.

  Boom! The explosives ignited, blowing the door off its hinges.

  Before the door had hit the floor, Blonsky hustled into Bruce’s apartment, with the other commandos right behind him sweeping the apartment for hostiles. The target’s dog barked furiously as Blonsky cleared the doorway, stepped to his right, and and fired three tranq darts at the sleeping form. Each dart hit its target—one dart in the torso, and one in each of his legs.

  The target didn’t move. That was unusual; the tranquilizer worked fast, but it wasn’t instantaneous. Suspicious, Blonsky slowly approached the bed. He yanked the covers back.

  On the pillow was a Styrofoam head covered with a wig and a baseball cap. Blonsky ripped the covers all the way off, revealing bunched-up pillows on the bed. The target’s dog was still barking and Blonsky, irritated, silenced it with a tranq dart.

  Then he saw the rope dangling out the window over the kitchen sink. Blonsky activated his microphone. “Target’s on the move,” he reported.

  CHAPTER 6

  With his backpack over his shoulders, Bruce lowered himself from his kitchen window, down the outside of the building. His time in the gym had paid off. Before… the event… he wouldn’t have had the strength to do this.

  As he descended, the door right below him opened and Martina looked out, drawn by the commotion upstairs. She gasped when she saw Bruce. He shushed her and she let him in, shutting the door behind him.

  Bruce heard Cachorro stop barking up in his apartment. He hoped the commandos hadn’t hurt him. He also heard what they were saying to each other. “Target’s on the move,” one of them had reported, and then a moment later, “He’s on the ground.”

  Footsteps thumped above as the commandos searched Bruce’s apartment and headed out in pursuit, assuming Bruce was on the run. He waited in Martina’s apartment, crouching by the door, until they were gone into the mazelike alleys of the favela. Below, on the street, he heard someone gunning a powerful engine. Probably a military support vehicle. This had to be an American operation, even though at least one of the voices coming from upstairs had sounded British.

  When it had been quiet for a minute, Bruce nodded at Martina, and she nervously opened her front door and glanced outside. She shook her head: nothing out there.

  With no time even to thank her, Bruce fled the apartment and hustled at a controlled walk down the street with the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. He took an indirect route down to the street, using the confusing alleys to his advantage. Along the way he caught a glimpse of the black van and the black-clad commando guarding it. Unfortunately the commando saw him, too. Bruce froze, just for a moment—but the suspicious reaction was all the commando needed. He started calling to the rest of his team.

  Bruce broke into a sprint, turning down the street. His heart rate was rising, inching up past eighty beats pe
r minute. He had to stay calm. Otherwise the monster would get out and everyone could be in danger.

  Behind him, the commandos were in hot pursuit. Bruce doubled back away from the main street again and worked his way downhill, ducking under hanging laundry, leaping over baskets, careening across courtyards. Blonsky and his partner followed close behind, anticipating Bruce’s turns through the labyrinth of alleys.

  When Bruce reached a paved street with fewer people, he bolted at full speed. He had to stop short when his path ended at a steep hillside with a sheer drop to the houses below. Bruce jumped onto the nearest roof and, jumping from one to the next, ran across the tops of the squat buildings. His feet pounded on the rusty tin, and shouts of complaint bellowed up from the occupants inside.

  Blonsky and his partner reached the hillside a few seconds later, in time to see Bruce jumping from house to house. Blonsky scanned the area, looking for a faster way down. Two other commandos had a different line of pursuit. They were right on the target’s tail.

  Meanwhile, the black van circled around the slum at top speed to catch Bruce if he came out the other side. Ross and Sparr stayed glued to their video monitors, watching the chaotic green-lit images of the chase.

  Bruce reached an area thick with laundry, and the flapping sheets almost obscured the edge of a roof. He whipped through the cloth, his hood slipping back as he jumped down to another level of roofs.

  The two commandos following him hit the same patch of clotheslines, but the taller soldier missed the blind jump. He fell hard, rolled to a standing position, and headed downhill, knowing the target had to come out on the main street sooner or later.

  Bruce reached the end of the residential area and hopped down from the last roof into a party area of bars and late-night clubs. The streets here were crowded with people out for a good time; it would be easier to disappear. But he had to stop. His pulse was hammering, up toward 170, and that was monster territory. Pressing himself into a rack of empty bottles at the back of a restaurant, Bruce worked himself through a quick set of mental exercises. He knew he didn’t have much time. As soon as he got it down toward 150, he looked out—only to see one of the commandos.

  The commando raised his gun and fired. Bruce heard the dart go by, too slow to be a bullet. They were trying to tranquilize him. He launched himself into the midst of the crowd, turned right, getting a step on the pursuing commandos again.

  Blonsky charged after Bruce but the crowds on the narrow sidewalk slowed him down. The operation was no longer quiet, but it could still be successful. He lost visual contact and shoved through the crowds, looking for a sign of where the target might have gone.

  Bruce checked his pulse monitor: 160… 165… He was in trouble. His pulse was too high, and he was really sweating now. He veered into an alley, rushed around a corner, and popped out onto a side street, almost running into the black van’s open door.

  Seated inside was General Thunderbolt Ross.

  Ross looked up and, for a dizzying second, he locked eyes with Bruce. It was the first time they’d seen each other in five years.

  Bruce broke into motion just as fast as he stopped, and launched into another alley. Ross. He should have known.

  Bruce reeled through the narrow street, breathing hard. When the alley ended, he took a hard right down a busy, wide street filled with restaurants. Bruce glanced back to see if anyone was following him, and he slammed right into a group of four men. Bruce recognized them as the tough guys from the bottling plant, led by the one who’d been harassing Martina—and he could tell from the looks on their faces that they recognized him, too. His stomach sank.

  The guys were rowdy and looking for a fight. And for them, no one better than Bruce could have shown up at that exact moment. The problem was, Bruce couldn’t afford to fight. He couldn’t spare the time, or Ross’s commandos would catch him, and he couldn’t take the stress… or the monster would get out.

  The leader of the group stepped up and threw a wild punch at Bruce, who saw it coming a mile away. His aikido training kicked in; he caught the guy’s sleeve and used his own momentum to send him crashing into a pile of trash.

  Before the man’s friends could react, Bruce ran, skidding into another side alley. Behind him, he could hear pursuit. Now he had commandos and local dirtbags chasing him. Great.

  At the end of the alleyway, Bruce found himself outside the bottling factory. With little time to think, he raced toward it.

  At the same time, the commandos had narrowed their pursuit. They knew the target couldn’t be far. General Ross had just seen him, and from the van’s location, there was only one way the target could have gone without one of the team spotting him. Blonsky climbed back onto a low-hanging roof and surveyed the town. He spotted a group of locals slipping through the loosely chained back gate of a small factory. They were chasing someone, and Blonsky had a feeling he knew who.

  “Where is he?” General Ross demanded over the comlink.

  “Target acquired,” Blonsky reported.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the factory changing room, Bruce heaved deep breaths, his back against the wall. He listened to the drip of the showers as he tried to lower his pulse rate, slowly easing it down from a very dangerous 187 toward a safer 100 beats per minute.

  A noise on the factory floor startled him, and his pulse jumped again. It was the tough guys.

  He couldn’t stay in the locker room, waiting to be found. He crept out amid the machinery, pausing every few seconds to listen for footsteps. He could hear the men whispering, drunkenly following him. Their leader would want Bruce’s head on a stick for interfering with his pursuit of Martina—and for the embarrassment of having the manager yell at them like schoolchildren. If a fight became inevitable, so would…

  No. No monster today.

  Bruce threaded through the banks of bottling machines, getting closer to the far side of the factory, where he could see an exit sign dimly glowing green. Under it was a steel door. He pushed gently on the latch and escaped.

  The leader was waiting for him. He laughed and shoved Bruce back into the factory. Bruce stumbled backward and then turned to run, but the other tough guys were standing behind him. They gathered around Bruce and began to shove and kick him against the machines.

  Bruce caught one of them with an elbow and got free for a moment, but the others pinned him against the wall.

  “Please,” Bruce begged, “don’t do this.” His pulse hit 140 beats per minute.

  The leader pulled off Bruce’s backpack and slapped his face. “What?” the leader sneered. He flung the backpack away.

  “No! Not the computer!” Bruce said. He was still gasping for breath, and his pulse was starting to get out of his control.

  “Not so tough now, huh? Try those fancy moves again. Come on, we all want to see.” He gave Bruce a hard push, and Bruce fell back onto a knobby piece of equipment, crying out in agony.

  The commandos raced into the factory and heard the confrontation. Blonsky signaled for his men to split up, and he slid on his night-vision goggles. He could see the heat signatures of a cluster of men, glowing neon green in the darkness.

  The four guys continued to bully Bruce with two of them pinning him against a labeling machine.

  “Please stop,” cried Bruce. His pulse climbed to 150 beats per minute. “Me. Angry. Very bad,” he said in Portuguese.

  “You bad angry?” the leader replied. “I bad angry!”

  Behind him, Bruce spotted a quick motion in the shadows. A black-clad figure crouched in the dim light. Panic flooded his body, and Bruce’s pulse shot up to 175, climbing rapidly to 190… then higher…

  “You don’t understand!” he yelled. “Something really bad is going to happen here!”

  “Yeah,” the leader agreed, “something bad is going to happen.”

  A commando’s night-vision scope alighted on Bruce’s face, then dropped its sight on his neck.

  Bruce saw a gleaming tranquilizer gun’s muzz
le, peeking out from the shadows. He lunged to the side, pulling the tough guys with him. The leader punched Bruce in the gut, and Bruce crumpled.

  Blonsky fired the tranq gun, missing Bruce but nailing one of the other men in the neck.

  Bruce gasped as his pulse leaped past two hundred, his heart throbbing.

  Blonsky peered through his night-vision goggles at the cluster of green men. One of the shapes dropped where the tranq had hit him, and another was already huddled on the floor. Maybe Banner is a fighter after all, he thought. Then a strange blast of green light flared. All the commandos’ Geiger counters spiked.

  In the van, Ross saw the radiation spike and bolted forward in his chair.

  Blonsky ripped off his night-vision goggles, then signaled for the other commandos to hold position. He watched as the tough guys, the two who were still upright, nervously backed away.

  Blonsky couldn’t clearly see what was happening, but it looked like Bruce was being twisted into strange shapes. Then Bruce let out an anguished scream, and a strange tearing sound filled the factory. “Anybody else seeing this?” asked one of the other commandos.

  All of them were. Where Bruce had been lying on the ground, groaning in pain, now there was… something else.

  “Shut up!” the leader hissed, and he launched a kick at Bruce’s warping body. That was the worst mistake of his life. His foot met something insanely hard. Almost too fast to see, the leader was launched upward by his leg, across the expanse of the factory. He crashed through an office window and hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the sheet metal. The sounds were nearly drowned out by an inhuman howl from the creature in the shadows.

  When the roar faded, everyone in the factory fell silent.