“Ain’t roller coasters fun?” Caraway replied, distracted as he worked over the controls, his smile a faded memory.
“No,” the little girl said.
“Yeah, everyone loves a roller coaster,” he mumbled as a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. He needed to get them out of this, he had promised Harry; he couldn’t let him down now, not when they were so close. Come on, you can figure a way out of this, Johnny. You’ve faced bigger things than this, he tried to reassure himself. Nothing can be bad as—
The idea popped into his head, a trick Eddie Rickenbacker taught him back in the day; the “Whirling Dervish.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to shove the notion back down into his unconscious, but... “Dammit, it worked before,” he said aloud. He turned to Helen: “I’m gonna try something, it’s pretty stupid and it ain’t gonna be fun, but it might be our only chance outta this.”
Helen met his gaze. “Then you should just get it over with, nicht wahr?” she said, tightly gripping her hands around her armrests, her knuckles bone white.
Caraway gave her a somber expression and nodded. He glanced back over to Nancy and Robert; they were both buckled up safely. He gave them one more reassuring smile. He wished he could promise them it was going to be okay, but he didn’t believe that was true anymore. Better to remain silent than to lie.
He turned back to the controls. “Here goes nothing…” He pulled the plane up into a steep climb, his body pressed against his seat as gravity fought to keep hold. “Dammit, where’s the Green Lama when you need him?”
• • •
BLOOD SPILLING out from his nose, Gary whirled around and aimed his revolver at the Fifth Columnist. All he needed was one clean shot—didn’t even need it to be deadly. Shatter a muscle or slice a bone. Just get the bastard to the ground and the machine gun out his hands. Simple as that, and no one was as good a shot as Gary Brown—at least that’s what he told himself. Please, God let that be true now, he thought. He squeezed the trigger, his stomach dropping as he heard the hollow, metallic click!
Dammit, he was getting rusty; he thought he had counted five.
Evangl had promised it was going to be simple when they were pulled out of semi-retirement to face off against the fascist terrorist group. Come on, sweetness, she had said, kissing him gently on the cheek. How many times have we taken these guys down? Besides, after that mess up at the Fortier, this will be a cakewalk. Maybe it was the war ratcheting up in Europe, maybe the Fifthers had finally gotten their act together, or maybe Gary was simply losing his touch; whichever it was, things had quickly gone south.
As the Fifth Columnist swung the machine gun toward them, Gary’s eyes snapped over to Evangl, whose face wore the same expression of panic, and he knew their thoughts were shared: Who would take care of their daughter?
“Get down!” he screamed as he dropped his gun and raced toward Evangl. Let me get there in time, he thought. Please, just let me get to her in time.
It was all a blur of light and motion. The machine gun came alive in a blast of noise as fire laced through the air, brushing against Gary’s cheeks. Neither of them screamed—they were braver than that—but they couldn’t help but wince at the sound. But the bullets never hit, there was no burning pain of metal slicing through them—only the odd pitter-patter echoes of the slugs bouncing unusually to the floor.
Gary risked opening his eyes to find a wall of jade standing over them. “Tulku!”
• • •
THERE IS no word in the English language to describe what it feels like to wield the power of the gods, to know that with a flick of a wrist you could destroy cities, though Jethro Dumont tried hard to find one. It is nothing to stare down the barrel of a gun when you have the fire of ten thousands suns burning through your veins. The bullets struck Jethro’s chest and stomach with an echo of a sensation he would have once described as pain, but was now only an annoyance.
He glanced back at Gary and Evangl crouched behind him. Gary was staring at him with a mixture of shock and amazement—and perhaps, fear—on his face. Jethro fought back a frown; he had forgotten Gary hadn’t been there with them at R’lyeh, hadn’t seen him become the Scion and defeat a deity. There was so much to explain, but now was not the time to give answers, only a quick wink of reassurance.
Jethro turned back to the Fifth Columnist and raised his hand. A green light began to emanate from within his veins, out into his skin, growing brighter and brighter until his whole hand was a single point of emerald luminance.
He whispered, “Om! Ma-ni Pad-me Hum!” as a short blast of energy shot out from his open palm, disintegrating the machine gun in an instant, an explosion that sent the Fifth Columnist flying back through the doorway, crashing into the far wall of the neighboring room.
Boots clomped against the rotting wooden floor, racing down the steps, the metallic click of machine guns being loaded as men shouted in German. Jethro closed his eyes, pricked up his ears, and listened to the footfalls rushing towards him. There were six of them, all armed. Jethro grimaced.
“Stay down,” he commanded Gary and Evangl. He took a step toward the doorway, feeling his heart thrum in his chest. The Fifth Columnists funneled down the hall past their fallen comrade. That was sloppy, Jethro thought. These weren’t the soldiers he had faced back in his early days down in Camp Himmler; these were hate-filled boys falsely believing themselves men. Another energy blast was out of the question. It was one thing to send out a small controlled blast to incapacitate one gunman, but to take them all out at once would require an amount of energy that would more than likely kill them along with Gary and Evangl; and that wasn’t an option. He had already broken that central tenet of his faith once when he had murdered Heydrich in R’lyeh; he would not do so again if he had the choice. Instead, he would have to face them one-by-one.
To the naked eye, Jethro appeared to be little more than a green blur, a continuous streak of motion that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once, but for Jethro, it was as if time had slowed down. The first Fifth Columnist charged forward, his gun already singing. Jethro grabbed the muzzle and twisted up. He heard a bullet hit the inside the barrel and bounce back into the magazine, the gun exploding in the Fifther’s hands. Jethro then moved to the second attacker and struck him hard in the jaw with an open palm. A tooth flew out of the attacker’s mouth with a bloody comet’s tail as he fell backwards, his gunfire going wild. In a single motion, Jethro caught four bullets that were heading toward Gary and Evangl and dropped them carelessly to the ground. Then, without a micron of hesitation, Jethro shifted his left leg out, tripped the third man, and slammed an elbow into the back of the man’s head.
Two more men charged at him. Jethro dove forward and whipped around in mid-air, tapping them both at the base of their skulls, sending a small shock into their vestibular nerves and the Brocas Centers, shutting down their balance control and speech centers. The effect was instantaneous and both men collapsed into two limp, mumbling piles.
Jethro rolled into a crouching position as bullets whistled past his ear, a sound that, in a past life, would have left him frozen in fear, but had now become so commonplace there were days that he almost felt he missed it. Jethro spun around to face the final terrorist, a brick wall of a man with a forehead to match, his machine gun ablaze. Ignoring the bullets now bouncing off him, Jethro focused his energy into his glowing fists, wincing at the sensation—power did not come without its cost—and in a fluid attack, struck the gunman in stomach, chest, and head. The man was unconscious before his legs decided to give out.
The air crackled with electricity as the energy slowly ebbed from Jethro’s hands. The sensation was intoxicating, if not frightening. Looking over the destruction in his wake, he was reminded that with power like this, he could easily conquer the world or, he so desired, destroy it. There were those who would call him a god, and perhaps that was true, and if not a god, then a member of Asura, a demi-god. But, he was not, he reminded himself.
Though a Bodhisattva, he was still flawed and breakable, filled with passion, desire, doubt, and pride, hunting for enlightenment. He was still part of the samsara, the continuous flow, the Human Realm.
“Holy God,” Gary breathed in disbelief as he and Evangl gingerly got to their feet. “How the hell did you do that?”
The Green Lama looked back at them, fear stinging their eyes, and gave them a tight, somber smile. “Things have changed.”
Chapter 2: The Twenty-Two
THE PROJECTOR rattled to life, the soft white glow doing little to lighten the darkened conference room. Twenty-two figures sat around the long black table, their faces hidden in shadow. Seven seats were conspicuously empty, and an eighth had been permanently removed. The film fed through the lens and the numbers counted down. 5, 4, 3, 2…
“As with other costumed vigilantes and adventurers, we have been tracking this Green Lama, for a number of years. We can confirm his activities in New York as early as 1933 and his work against the Medusa Council in 1935. This, however, was the first footage we were able to find of him,” one man said, a small gold Γ—the Greek letter Gamma—on his lapel. His voice was gravelly, old and scratched from years of cigarettes. His fat fingers were soft with long, well-manicured nails. “Item number four-five-five was filmed the twenty-fifth of January 1936 by an operative in Cleveland during the Pelham Incident.”
The first of a series of clips began to play, an extreme wide shot of a city street littered with unconscious bodies and stalled cars. A robed man darted out from the shadows toward a hardware store and then disappeared.
“Hm, not much is it?” another man frowned, considering the blurry black-and-white footage, drumming his boney fingers on the table. He was wearing a gold ring with the Greek letter Δ—Delta—in the center of a field of black. His voice was like reeds on a windy day, just above a whisper and disquieting.
“This next clip is significantly better,” Gamma said. “From the unfinished Carter Mitchell film, Midnight in the Garden, marked item number six-six-one.”
The screen flashed white before a close up of Hollywood stars Betty Hall and Ronald Tolman appeared. They were talking, their words unheard as the audio for this section had been removed. The camera zoomed out to a wide shot of a stage ballroom, with dozens of cookie-cutter pretty faces dancing around in circles. A shadowy figure appeared out from the background, dressed in a monk’s robe, the hood pulled low, covering his face. The audio popped back on as the figure paused and starred directly into the camera and whispered: “It is written that justice will seek you out even though you hide beneath the smallest pebble. Om! Ma-ni Pad-me Hum!” The figure turned away and disappeared back into the background.
“When is this from?” a man with silver Σ—Sigma—cufflinks asked between two long drags of his cigarette. His voice was hoarse, as if he had just finished shouting at the top of his lungs.
“March 1936, during the Sanctuary Kidnappings,” Gamma replied.
“He was in Hollywood?” a man with a Λ—Lambda—tattooed on his wrist asked in a deep and lyrical baritone.
Gamma nodded. “On several occasions. Most recently, he was involved in the events surrounding the death of actress Fay Reynolds last year.”
“He certainly does get around with some regularity…” Delta commented.
Gamma nodded. “There have been numerous appearances throughout the country and abroad. There are rumors he once engaged German forces in Tibet, but those claims have yet to be substantiated…” Gamma trailed off and there was a brief rustle of papers before the next clip appeared. “Item number nine-six-four-point-five was taken shortly after the attack on the German consulate in New York early last year.”
The footage was a grainy vision of night, heavy black and blinding whites of the street lamps. The camera whirled around in a frenzy; up and down, spinning left and right as people ran screaming as the street exploded out from below, concrete and stone launching into the air. The camera fell suddenly to the ground, landing on its side so that the street became a long hill. A robed man tumbled down with the debris, his body limp, the robes stained with dark splotches of blood. Seconds later, a large rock-like hand appeared from the crater in the ground.
“What is that?” Sigma gasped in muted horror as they all watched the massive creature climb out of the crater.
The creature’s face was rudimentary, the mouth nothing more than a slit. On its forehead were three symbols dug deep like a child’s name in wet cement. The feet balanced the massive body, but even they were too large, too rounded and fat. The legs were thick and stubby compared to the long sequoia-like arms. Its eyes were vacant holes of darkness, impossibly glowing from within.
“We don’t know,” Gamma replied as the robed man weakly pushed himself off the ground.
“How can we not know?” Lambda pointedly asked, anger lacing his droll, old voice.
“We believe the creature was behind the slaughter at the German consulate, but whatever it was,” Gamma began as the robed man’s hand began to glow on screen, “it is something we have never seen before… or since. We have theories, but they remain only that.”
The twenty-two figures shifted uncomfortably in their chairs as a beam of energy shot out from the robed man’s hands hitting the creature square in the chest and the screen went white.
“What happened to the creature?” a monotone voice asked from the far end of the table.
Gamma’s body straightened. “Destroyed, or so we believe,” he admitted and left it at that. “We also have reason to believe the Green Lama was somehow involved with the Bartlett crash on Liberty Island, though the events surrounding the accident still remain under investigation.”
“Who is the Green Lama?” the monotone voice asked after several moments.
Gamma licked his lips. His hands were shaking as the projector rattled on to another clip, a blurry cacophony of motion and grey. “He’s been described as everything from Caucasian to Negro to Oriental. More often than not, he’s been associated with the ‘Buddhist Priest’ Dr. Charles—or James—Pali; but upon further investigation we’ve established Pali is an alias. While the Green Lama could conceivably be several men pretending to be one, we believe he uses theatrical makeup to disguise his identity. Additionally, based on the frequency of his travels, we believe he is a wealthy man, perhaps a millionaire of some standing.”
There was a brief moment of silence as papers were shuffled in the darkness. Gamma tried to ignore the sweat dripping down the roll of fat on the back of his neck.
“What about Jethro Dumont?” another voice asked, this one coming from the very head of the table.
Gamma gave a quick, propitiatory nod. “Yes, we have consid—”
“He fits the parameters, does he not?” the voice from the head of the table interrupted, his gold A—Alpha—cufflinks glinting in the dimmed light. “Millionaire, Buddhist; his return to America even coincides with the first appearance of the Green Lama. Our report even notes that Pali, Dumont, and the Green Lama have, more often than not, appeared in the same city within days of one another. There is even an unprinted article by Betty Dale of the Herald-Tribune postulating that very theory.”
“Then, this shouldn’t be an issue, should it?” Delta quickly added, always trying to curry favor. “Jethro Dumont is the Green Lama.”
Gamma cleared his throat and shifted through several of the documents in front of him as the next clip came to life on screen. “The following was filmed during the von Kultz Affair by an operative, marked item number five-seven-seven.”
Shot from a considerable distance, the footage showed the western tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge below filled with cars and people. There were seven people on the tower, two more climbing the cables. Of the seven atop the tower, two were clearly bound together by a thick rope, three were standing by as the final two—the robed man and a Nazi—were locked in a vicious struggle.
“We had assumed that Jethro Dumont was the Green Lama for s
ome time,” Gamma began as he walked over to the screen. “The coincidences were too significant to ignore. The likelihood that three notable Buddhists would arrive in the same city, at the same time, but never be seen in the same place, were too convenient to ignore… That is, until this…” he said with a small wave toward the screen.
The battle was a stalemate until the robed man back flipped and kicked the Nazi hard in the chin. The violent blow threw the Nazi back into the air, and the Nazi landed hard on the tower. The Nazi then ripped open a small cylinder in his hand, tossed it at the robed man, unleashing a cloud of gas. The robed man stumbled back as a glowing shockwave of energy exploded out from his body.
“This occurred shortly after Heinrich von Kultz escaped police custody following his murder of Alexandrian Foreign Minister Georges Kitheron,” Gamma explained. “It should go without saying that the man in robes is the Green Lama, we’ve confirmed this with eyewitness and police reports. Obliviously, the Nazi was von Kultz—”
“It is unfortunate von Kultz was killed,” a woman with a Ψ—Psi—pendant necklace commented as the rest of the clip continued to play out. “His talents could have been put to use.”
Gamma shook his head. “Von Kultz was a true believer.”
“Pity,” a man with a Ξ—Xi—tie clip sighed, his voice full of gravel. “I do hate those.”
“Have we had any luck replicating von Kultz’s ‘Epsilon Mist’?” Psi asked, indicating the large gas cloud that enveloped the robed man.
“We’ve been able to reverse engineer it from the residue on a canister we retrieved, though we have still not determined why it has such a violent effect on the Green Lama,” the woman with the Φ—Phi—shaped earrings replied. “We have established it is based on Harrison Valco’s Delta Liquid Ray, but beyond that Dr. Metchnikoff has only made minimal progress,” she reluctantly admitted.
“Which means he still has no idea how the Germans made it… Russians,” Sigma scoffed.
The Green Lama: Crimson Circle Page 4