by Nick Pollota
“This is great!” I complemented, patting him on the shoulder. “What is it? Some sort of laser scanner? A relay from a NSA Keyhole satellite in low orbit?"”
“Better,” he replied proudly. “A special device built by your own Technical Services. It combines science and magic into a sort of super-radar.”
I think my eyeballs momentarily left my head before I was able to move and slap the machine off. “Jesus Christ! Didn't you listen to our early conversation?”
Hassan stared at me blankly. “Not all the time, no. I had work to do. Why, something wrong?”
“Battle stations!” I cried dashing into the aft compartment searching for the parachutes. But I was still in the short service corridor that separated the two sections when I was nearly deafened by a terrible silence.
“What the hell happened?” Mindy demanded from the aft compartment, her sword at the ready.
“Engines died,” Hassan announced, busy flipping switches and adjusting dials.
Bitterly, I cursed the enemy for their efficiency. “Richard, fix'em!”
Wordless, the wizard nodded and rose from his seat. But he was back in seconds with a strange expression on his face. “Fix what?” the mage asked, his voice cracking like a nervous schoolboy.
I grabbed his jacket in a fist. “Explain.”
“There's only black smoking craters where the engines used to be on the wings.” He paused. “Rimmed with teeth marks.”
Hoo boy.
“We're going in!” Hassan shouted, the words echoing over the PA. “Prepare for a crash!”
The deck tilted and the plane banked. I lost my footing and flew off into a jumble of noise and pain. Trying to stand, I hit my head on something and lost consciousness. My last vague thought was a valiant try to shout, “Aim for the beach!”
SEVEN
Swimming through a warm sea of blackest ink, I slowly came awake with somebody tugging at my clothes. Summoning what strength I could muster, I rammed a fist at the dimly seen figure. Somehow, they dodged the expert attack, so I brought my knee up to crush testicles and only succeeded in smacking myself in the jaw. Ow. As my vision focused, I found myself sitting on one of our equipment trunks on a sandy beach, the booming surf spraying me with a mist of salt water.
“Yo,” I said to the blur.
“Hi,” Mindy said, offering a canteen. “You always wake up this way?”
“Always,” I replied after drinking deeply. “Ever since a nasty man stole candy from me as baby.”
“Hmm, that could be dangerous to any intimate associates. Jessica, I suggest you be careful in the future.”
Sitting on top of a nearby rocky outcropping, Jess blushed and I turned red in the face from anger and embarrassment. Was it that obvious?
“Everybody okay?” I said, trying to stand and succeeding.
Mindy said, “Just fine. You were the worst injury.”
“Injury?” I repeated shocked, looking over my fatigues. “Where was I hurt?”
“It was your groin,” she said pointing. “There was something there red and swollen. Looked dangerous. We decided to remove it.”
“Ha. Very funny. You're fired.”
“Oh no! But what about my pension?”
“Never had one.”
“Well, that was lucky.”
Turning around, I saw that we were on a little half-circle of beach made of fine white sand, so pure it had a silvery sheen to the grains, the kind you only find in movies. Curving about us on three sides, like a tan glass wall, was the cliff. It reached some thirty or forty meters into the ocean before arcing out of sight. Soaring impossibly high above us, the light brown rock of the cliff was indecently smooth, without a single crack or fissure to mar its facade.
Forming a dome over everything in view was the ever present cloud, thick and gray as an old man's nightmare. It gave me the feeling of being confined in a bell jar. Personally, I had no doubt this cliff was of artificial construction and not a natural formation. We had seen similar when the team took care of a nasty voodoo problem in the Virgin Islands. However, that brought up a good point. Was it built to keep others out, or something in? We'd have to answer that question the hard way.
Only a short walk away, the DC-3 had pancaked into the cliff, its nose crushed flat against the stone. Behind the plane, trailing off down the beach, irregular skid marks told the story of a frantic, but successful, battle to bring the aircraft to an emergency halt.
Favoring my right knee a bit, I ambled over to where the team was busy unloading the plane; bags and backpacks piled about like canvas mountains. The main body of the seaplane seemed okay. But one of the flotation pods was smashed to kindling, and the right wing had a rend in it large enough to stuff Father Donaher through. Which was no exaggeration, as he was standing in the rift studying the inside.
“Struts are okay,” he announced stooping down and walking away. “But the fuel tanks are empty. Even if we find the engines, she'll never fly.”
“Nonsense,” Richard stated, tossing a duffel bag to the sand. “What a negative attitude. We can always make fuel, and find a replacement engine, from a car or speedboat. My old station wagon had a huge 400 horsepower monster under the hood. I used to joke that with a set of wings she'd fly.” He raised his head. “Hey, Abduhl what kind of engines were they? Six cylinder? Eight cylinder?”
Glancing at us from the open window of the cockpit, the pilot reversed his cap and spit into the distance. “Two thousand horsepower, supercharged, 24 cylinder, Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp with a top speed of eight hundred miles per hour.”
The wizard slumped. “Okay, we're trapped.”
Mindy slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Rich. Don't worry about it. We'll probably never leave alive anyway. Not against combined science and magic.”
“That's the first thing we should do,” Donaher said brusquely. “Shut off any combination stuff still operating in the hold.”
“Check,” Abduhl said, and he did something on the control panel. There was an odd noise from the belly of the plane and a puff of smoke rose into view from around the seam of the external hatch.
“Fire in the hold!” I yelled dashing forward. Instantly, George was at my heels.
Undoing the hatch, we climbed into the subcompartment. Inside, a small fire was burning in the corner of the amassed equipment and the place was stuffed full of every scientific and magical defense I had ever heard of or seen. There were banks of NASA fuel cells powering radar scramblers, pulse generators, field distorters and a collection of sealed black boxes erected in the style of a miniature Stonehenge.
A huge copper bracelet hung from the ceiling, glowing crystal pyramids dotted the floor and at odd angles, endlessly turning mobius strips were mounted on silver rods. Plus, the walls were lined with crucifixes, Mogen David's, ankhs, pentagrams, astrological signs, a delightful Kathi Somer bikini calendar, dollar bills, horse shoes and rabbit feet. This collection in the cargo hold is obviously what had gotten us through the cloud. TechServ hadn't missed a trick.
From the top hatch, Hassan passed down some CO2 extinguishers and we put the blaze out. It had been nothing serious. A short circuit in a relay set fire to a transformer. No magic involved, we were safe.
Exiting, I dusted off my hands and called for a council. They gathered round. “Mindy, do an inventory. Rich and Jessica, prep our stuff for immediate departure. Abduhl ready the plane for lock down, and see about jerry-rigging a self-destruct. Michael keep guard with the flamethrower. George grab your super rifle. We're going to do a perimeter sweep.”
“Its a Masterson Assault Cannon,” George, replied falling into step alongside. “Mark IV.”
“Lovely,” I nodded. “But I don't care if you call it ‘Tootsie,’ just make damn sure the thing is loaded.”
“That's good,” he said.
“What?”
“Tootsie.”
“Oh geez.”
Following the skid marks in the sand we traced the plane bac
k to its initial approach. Staying clear of the waves washing on the west shore, I studied the ocean. Sure enough, there was something jagged just under the surface, momentarily exposed with the crest and gully of the waves. I pointed it out to George and asked for his opinion.
Adjusting a set of folding binoculars, George scrutinized the formations. “Too regular to be natural,” he decided. “And yet too irregular to be a trap.”
“Conclusion?”
“A waterfront dock in extremely bad condition. See? Those are the pylons, and out there, the breakers.”
That alleviated my fears of us hitting a sea serpent. A little bit, anyway. Proceeding along the edge of the beach, we encountered nothing interesting until the far east end. The thing was mostly hidden by a mass of seaweed, but enough showed. It was the body of a human male in a scuba suit laying face down on the shore. Since he was making no effort to turn over, his lifeless condition was self-evident. Even more so when we moved the seaweed to find only half of the body. From the hips down, he was gone. His wet suit ending in a ghastly view of bones and intestines. There were pressurized airtanks strapped to his back, the breathing hose still in his mouth, and a cracked mask on his face. A bulky sealed bag was over a shoulder and an underwater equipment belt encircled his waist.
I beeped the team on my wristwatch, and they came a running, weapons at the ready. At a safe distance, the group halted and inspected the beach before moving closer. But there was nothing dangerous or suspicious showing, so they joined us with the corpse.
Carefully turning him over, George removed the diving mask. Not a friendly face. Looked like the kind of guy who wouldn't smile without written permission from the boss. He had been a big man, with the kind of a muscular build that comes from hard manual labor, not a gymnasium. His hands were heavily callused, especially along the edge of the palms. I pointed this out to Mindy, who checked the tips of his fingers and thumbnails.
“A fellow martial artist, without a doubt,” she declared. “Definitely a student of karate, with a high probability of something else.”
“Strong and trained. A formidable opponent. Father?” I requested pointing to the lower extremities.
“Bitten,” the priest said kneeling, inspecting the wound with a pocket medical probe. “But not by a shark. There's no ripping or tearing of the tissues. This is a single clean slice, almost as if done with a guillotine.”
“Interesting. Hypothesis?”
“None.”
“Hasn't been dead long, either,” Richard remarked, pressing the pale skin on a forearm with the tip of his staff. “No rigor mortis and the flesh hasn't become bloated with water.”
This was hardly dinner conversation, but then we weren't first-timers to this sort of thing. Dead bodies were an occupational hazard. Happily, Abduhl seemed unperturbed. Good man.
“Let's check his stuff,” I directed.
In the waterproof holster at his hip was a 10mm automatic pistol filled with explosive bullets. The manufacturer's name and serial number had been filed off. Odd. An ammo pouch in his belt held ten additional clips, a silver edged combat knife, and four thermite grenades. The bag contained nothing more than the expected spare clothes without labels, generic compressed food and assorted no-name camping gear. But hidden inside a pair of rolled socks, we found a small book in an unknown language. I passed it to our resident scholar.
“That's Greek,” Father Donaher identified, thumbing through the pages.
“Can you read it?”
He gazed at me askance. “I am a Catholic priest.”
“So?”
“The original version of the New Testament is in ancient Greek.”
“I thought it was in Latin,” Mindy said puzzled.
Donaher scowled mightily. “The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, New Testament in Greek. They were both converted into Latin about 200 AD.”
“Oh.”
Under his breath, the priest muttered something about dullards and heretics. Better not have been talking about me.
Callously, we stripped the body, searching for additional clues. He wore only swim trunks under the wet suit, as was standard practice. There were no tattoos, but his body was a mass of thin scars, mostly on the back. On a hunch, I checked about his neck and sure enough found a set of invisible dogtags. Setting my sunglasses to maximum, I was able to dimly perceive some flowing script on the metallic ovals.
"Machlokta d'Sitna," I said, wiping my fingers off in the sand.
“Satan Department,” Richard translated, taking a step away.
Jessica hawked and spit on the corpse.
“Who?” Captain Hassan asked, hooking both thumbs into his wide belt.
We explained. Satan Department was an old and bitter enemy of ours. Operating as a counterpart to the Bureau, they did not neutralize, or subdue evil supernaturals. But instead, tried to enlist and, if necessary, brainwash, the creatures into becoming spies and assassins for their government. In addition, we strongly believed them to be the masterminds of the slaughter of ‘87. If we ever got any proof, we'd find their headquarters in the Elburz Mountains and reduce it to a smoking hole. We held them in lower esteem than used car dealers.
“My own people,” Hassan said in disgust. “Well, come on, Father. Get it over with.”
Raising a hairy eyebrow, Donaher scowled. “What?”
“The last rites, or whatever you call them.”
“You are joking,” the priest said coldly.
Abduhl appeared flustered. “You ... you aren't going to lay his soul to rest?”
“A Satan Department agent?” Donaher said, his voice rising in timber. “A murderer, heretic and worse? One of the people who tried to assassinate his holiness, the Pope, and stole the Shroud of Turin, leaving that awful copy in its place? Never! May he burn in hell for all eternity!” An awkward silence followed, as the priest turned and walked towards the plane.
“You guys play hardball,” Hassan softly said.
Mindy kicked sand on the body. “And don't you forget it.”
“What about meat-boy here?” George asked, nudging the body with the barrel of his rifle.
“Let his bones bleach in the sun,” Richard snarled in raw hatred.
“And his weapons?”
“Leave them. We have more than enough. Besides they might be booby trapped.”
“Good point.” I clapped my hands. “Okay, people, spread out. Let's see what other delights we can find.”
Fanning out in a standard search pattern, the team poked and prodded their way along the beach. I followed the shoreline to the plane and was working my way back along the bottom of the cliff where I found Mindy and Michael talking in animated conversation.
“Find something?” I asked, joining them.
“We're just studying this door,” she said, pointing to the blank wall.
Confused, I looked at the cliff with my Bureau sunglasses. It appeared perfectly normal. “What door?”
Father Donaher gestured. “Step closer.”
As I did, a door appeared in the cliff. A sharp cut rectangle set in a recessed alcove. Pretty high flouting illusion to beat my glasses. This beach was becoming a plethora of surprises. On the lintel above the portal there was an arcane symbol of some sort and a collection of tiny squares set in staggered horizontal lines. Interesting. Ornamental design, or message?
“Jess, can you get any impressions?” I asked hopefully.
Occasionally by holding an object the telepath could tell us a wide variety of things about the owner; age, sex, disposition, inclination, political affiliations, all sorts of stuff.
“Just old,” she said, hugging herself. “Very, very old. Two thousand, three thousand years. Maybe more.”
That was something anyway. Going with the theory of Occam's Razor, I tried the obvious first. The simplest answer is often correct. But no hinges or handle were readily apparent. I checked in the usual places for hidden levers, or counterweights, to no avail. I could see why they calle
d for me. Pulling out an old fashioned magnifying glass from my fatigue jacket pocket, I examined the portal from top to bottom and side to side. The smooth flowing grain of the stone was almost hypnotizing in its dull regularity.
“Well?” Donaher asked eagerly.
“Beats me,” I admitted stepping away and brushing sand off my knees. “Couldn't locate a pinhole for physical manipulation and the doorjamb is too fine for jimmying.”
“Try something else,” Mindy suggested helpfully.
“What a grand notion. Unfortunately, I can think of any number of ways it may be unlocked; a magnetic key waved over the correct spot, radio message beamed in code, vocal command like ‘Open Sesame.'” I waited. Nothing happened. Oh well. “Whoever built this knew what they were doing.”
The rest of the team had gathered round by then and were brought up to date.
“Blast it open,” George said, reaching into a canvas bag over his shoulder. “We have plenty of C4.”
Judiciously, I decided to give Richard a try first.
Drawing his wand, the wizard chose a page from his book and gave a short incantation. A stream of sparkles flowed from the tip to dash against the portal in a pyrotechnic display of multi-colored lights and nothing more.
“Sealed,” he said at last, lowering the wand. “There was a faint indication of an internal mechanism, so it is a doorway. But the thing is so heavily magic shielded, we may have to use dynamite.”
“C4,” George corrected with a smile.
“Hopefully not,” Father Donaher drawled. “That would only preclude us from closing it again behind us, and might just inform the whole damn island that we're here.” There was general agreement to that.
I addressed Mindy and George. “Bring the supplies. When we get this open, it may only be so for a short time and we better be ready to move.”
“Good idea,” she said, and they departed.
The sea breeze tugging at her hair, Jessica worried a knuckle. “Too bad we can't leave a radio beacon, or broadcast a message, to the Bureau in case this cloud lifts.”