The Lovecraft Code

by Levenda, Peter;

  As he stepped outside of his temporary command post at the outskirts of Kamdesh he saw figures in the shadows all around him. Villagers, elders, even children. Everyone was afraid of him. Everyone hated him. But that was no matter. It was better to be feared than to be loved. He read that somewhere.

  There was a cry as if from a dog howling at the moon. Dogs were disgusting creatures. Coprophagic. Islam says that dogs are unclean, the eaters of filth and dead bodies. The mere sight of a dog was sometimes enough to make him ill.

  He started walking down the dirt road between the buildings on his street. His men were walking behind him, looking in every direction, armed to the teeth. It was then he noticed that there was only a waxing moon, a sliver of light in the heavens. The rest of the sky was filled with stars. For some reason, the sight of all those stars filled him with a kind of dread, as if they were faces of a jury and the sliver moon was the prosecutor assigned to his case.

  The howl came again. He heard a shuffling sound as more and more villagers came out of their homes to stand in the dirt road and watch him pass.

  Mansour was the head of the Taliban in Pakistan, and as such was a wanted man by the Pakistani authorities. He was tall and thin, with a long black beard that came to the middle of his chest. In his thirties, and the father of three children, he was a charismatic leader who loved to play volleyball. He only had a high school education, plus some time spent in a madrassa: a religious boarding school. Other than that, he was self-taught, having learned English by listening to the BBC. He joined the Taliban in 2007 and rose to prominence within its ranks. His men loved him and called him Emir, “prince,” and even Khalifa, or “caliph”; he was considered an uncompromising supporter of jihad and an opponent of everything that was decadent and western.

  He loved the tribal regions and tribal people. He loved their simplicity and honesty, and their pure faith untainted by materialism and slavish devotion to western culture. The only exception to this rule was Nuristan. They were tribal people, too, but they represented a time before Islam, before even Christianity or Judaism. They were from before Abraham, worshippers of jinn. They were people of darkness, and if he could get away with it he would slaughter them all.

  More people left their homes and simply stood on the streets, watching him and his entourage pass. They had no expression on their faces. It was as if they were all dead, spirits of the dead, come to accuse him of murder.

  He strode among them, through them, without a word. He was heading to the place where they kept the prisoners and he had a decision to make. If he slaughtered them now, he and his men could leave and make for the border. If he didn't, he could either take them with him or stay there another day or so until he heard back from his men in Kalasha territory.

  He kept walking.

  Another howl in the night, another dog or some other animal. It meant the jinn were out in force. Dogs could see them and alert their masters.

  Then he passed the building where the dead shaman was still chained to the pillar with its obscene carvings, and the howl became stronger: a rolling, deep-throated sound that vibrated the stones underneath their feet.

  Omar exchanged glances with his men, then gestured for them to enter the building. They nodded, locked and loaded, and carefully went through the door.

  They froze when they got a few feet inside. Omar followed and walked through the midst of them to face the source of the howling.

  It was the head of the shaman in the corpse's lap, eyes wide open, mouth distended in an unending, animalistic bellow.

  They opened fire on the shaman's head and corpse in a deafening roar in that enclosed space, splintering the body as well as the pillar to which it was chained. Omar shouted at them to cease firing. They were only wasting ammunition, and were firing out of absolute terror at something that was already dead.

  “Stop! Stop firing! It is dead! Stop!” He slapped his hand down on the arm of the man closest to him, then moved to the next. Soon, the ringing in their ears from the automatic fire subsided and the smoke from the barrels of half a dozen AK-47s drifted away. What was left of the shaman was now nothing more than an indentation on the dirt floor of the temple.

  That is when Omar realized that they had been had.

  “Where are the prisoners?” he shouted at his men. “Where are they?”

  Adnan and the two CIA anti-terrorism agents were running on the road south of Kamdesh, armed and free. The two Taliban who were guarding them had their throats slit by a group of villagers who had appeared out of nowhere, distracted them, then overpowered them. They untied the prisoners and handed them the weapons. They were told there would be a pickup truck going south on the road out of town that would take them as far as Jalalabad. Then the villagers melted back into the town just as the firing began at the shaman's temple.

  The terrorists began searching the town, looking for the escaped prisoners. Omar was furious, both with his men and with the villagers. If he tried to exact revenge, however, the wrath of Nuristan would fall on him. The Afghan National Army would probably take that opportunity to finish them off. He consoled himself with the thought that Angell was on his way to find the Book, and that no matter that he lost his prisoners there was nothing they could do to interfere with his plans.

  Adnan heard the engine first. They scattered to the side of the road to make sure that the truck coming down the road was their contact. When the vehicle came slowly around a bend in the dirt track Adnan spotted the driver and recognized him as one of the men who had freed them. He waved him down, and the truck stopped. The three men jumped on the bed in the rear of the pickup and covered themselves with a tarp that had been spread there for the purpose. The truck then set off for Jalalabad.

  Near Chitral

  Afghan-Pakistan Border

  Angell was jostled awake by the sudden stop of the vehicle and the attendant shouts of the men. They seemed to have reached their destination.

  He was pulled roughly onto the road and was able to get some idea of where they were. The mountains were in the distance, and in his immediate surroundings he saw a young man dressed in black clothing. He was handsome, with very pale skin for a Pakistani, and with shocking blonde hair and blue eyes. He was their Kalasha contact, and stepped over to the side of the road to talk to the Afghans.

  Angell couldn't hear their conversation. He wasn't meant to. Instead a guard was posted to keep an eye on him while he relieved himself on the other side of the road. He thought briefly of making a run for it, but realized at once it was a plan doomed to failure. He had no real idea of where he was, and was surrounded by armed men. If he made it to a Kalasha village there was no guarantee that they wouldn't hand him over to the Taliban anyway. He needed a scorecard to keep track of all the players in this game, and knew that the rules of that game changed by the hour. If you weren't immersed in it, you would become the one being played.

  The men broke up and started walking back to their truck. Angell could tell that there was something disappointing in the news they received from the young Kalash.

  One of the men helped him back into the truck, and said, “We have a long drive ahead of us. The Book has had a head start. We have to cross to Kashmir.”

  Kashmir? That was in a disputed no-man's land between India and Pakistan.

  “Not to worry,” said the Afghan. “We will not make it in this vehicle. We will have some help.” His smile, missing a few teeth and an eye that had been shattered during a rocket attack in Chitral, was not reassuring.

  The Taliban raise most of their funding through taxes imposed on criminal gangs in the region—basically protection money—and funds derived from kidnapping and ransom, as well as through the extremely lucrative drug trade. For them, Nuristan is a good place to hold kidnapped victims due to its isolation and the difficulty of getting armed troops into the region. The local villagers will be forced into either supporting them, or tolerating their presence.

  Once inside Pakistan, however, a dif
ferent set of parameters is encountered. To a certain extent there is cooperation with ISI, Pakistan's security services, who can use the Taliban as pawns in their byzantine machinations concerning Afghanistan. They also derive some income from the drug trade that flourishes, virtually unopposed, in the border regions from Waziristan to Nuristan. The fact that Osama bin Laden lived quite freely in Abbottabad—not far from Nuristan—in an area dominated by the Pakistan military, is evidence of this realpolitik. America and the West may be fighting a global war on terror, but in Central Asia the dimensions of this conflict are quite different, and involve the sentiments and cultures of local people who see what the West calls terrorism through a local lens. Angell has fallen into the midst of this environment, and has no idea about the proliferation of terror groups and their relationships with criminal gangs in that part of the world. As a religious studies professor he has been blessedly unaware of this complex collection of competing groups, all of whom claim some identification with Islam but whose very idiosyncratic interpretation of that religion—combined with local tribal and pagan elements—has contributed to an environment that seems more like a bad LSD trip than the neat theological arguments of a Thomas Aquinas or an Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari.

  The reality on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan has more to do with tribal conflicts, criminal activity, and political maneuvering than it does with religion. Religion provides the moral justification for activities that would take place anyway and which are based on centuries of historical context. People, however, are still people and are still motivated by the same needs and desires as everyone else on the planet. Angell was gradually coming to realize that this intense focus on a book that had a blasphemous reputation wherever it was discussed represented a desire for power that was basic to all human endeavors. This need was more powerful than theological differences or even ethnic or tribal differences, for it was a lens for understanding the world and gaining control over the invisible machinery that hummed beneath its surface. Some groups claimed they wanted to obtain the Book in order to destroy it, but Angell didn't believe that for a second. Others claimed they wanted it to use it, and Angell appreciated their honesty. No one, however, claimed they knew what was in it, or who wrote it, or what its message may be.

  No one, of course, except the group he heard mentioned in whispers among the Afghans: the Keepers of the Book. Who they were, and how they were organized, remained a mystery to him.

  And now they were headed for Kashmir, an area of the world that was as heavily contested as Israel and Palestine. Both India and Pakistan claimed the region, and there was intense conflict between Muslim and Hindu factions that often resulted in violence. In fact, there is a strong local tradition that Jesus Christ himself had traveled to Kashmir after the Crucifixion and was buried in Srinagar, its capital. That meant that two locations associated with the founder of Christianity—Jerusalem and Srinagar—are centers of religious violence and political struggles. The irony of this was not lost on Angell.

  A heavy truck appeared about an hour later. They were proceeding east, across northern Pakistan, on another dirt road to nowhere when the truck's engine could be heard above their own. When it finally came into view, it was an incredible sight.

  The so-called “jingle truck” was an enormous affair when compared to their own Toyota Hilux pickup truck. It was painted in elaborate colors and designs and had a bed that was reinforced to carry as many logs of firewood—or bags of opium—as possible. The walls of the bed rose up far above the cab and even extended over the roof of the cab to permit more freight to be carried. It was a vehicle whose appearance would have made Ken Kesey proud, as psychedelic as a Peter Max poster.

  Both vehicles stopped, and Angell was dragged out and brought to the rear of the jingle truck. From the rear bumper hung dozens, if not hundreds, of chains which was the reason for these vehicles being called “jingle” trucks. The entire vehicle was covered in meticulously-executed and extremely colorful artwork. Many of the designs were familiar to Angell from his study of Sufism and other mystical schools. But there were others—not quite as conspicuous—that had a different pedigree.

  There were symbols from the occult workbooks of the European Renaissance, so out of place here except for how they were drawn and painted which made them look like the rest of the art. He recognized seals from the Keys of Solomon and magic squares from the Book of Abramelin. There were demon sigils from the Goetia tucked in between geometric figures that would have been at home in Istanbul or the Alhambra. And, to top it all, at the top of the rear of the truck like an enormous tail light was a heavily ornamented Eye in a Triangle. If the Illuminati had a party bus, this was it. Angell marveled at the décor but was so wired he thought no more about it, except for odd moments here and there when he wondered at the artist and his source material.

  There were bags of what appeared to be opium on the truck but it was a light load, more for appearance than for trade, and they formed a kind of surface on top of which Angell and his guards arranged themselves for the journey to Kashmir. No one would stop a truck carrying opium, since Afghan opium accounted for more than ninety percent of the world's supply. Even Army generals use military trucks to transport Afghan opium to augment their income, so one interferes with opium transport at one's peril.

  The engines started up again, and the Taliban's modest pickup drove back in the direction of the border while Angell's jingle truck shifted gears and made its way to the other side of the country.

  It would leave the dirt road in another few kilometers and join the highway going east. Angell and the guards became drowsy with the movement of the truck and the relative comfort of sitting on the bags. Angell watched them, and saw that he had an opportunity to grab a gun from the nearest man whose eyes had closed but knew if he did he would not get very far. He could shoot the guards and maybe force the driver to take him to a town or a city somewhere, but where? And how would he be received? His mission was to get the Book under any circumstances and, oddly enough, his captors provided the best chance he had to accomplish that goal, even as every instinct in his body told him to run, run into the forest, head for the mountains, and get as far away from these murderers as possible. Just run! But that would be suicidal. He knew that, even if the adrenalin coursing through his body didn't.

  So, he decided to take advantage of the lull in activity and get some sleep himself. He didn't know when he would get such a chance again.

  Adnan and the two CIA agents had made it as far as Jalalabad Airfield where they were welcomed by US Army personnel and offered hot showers and food. Their Nuristani driver did not hang around, but instead sped off as soon as his charges were at the airfield gate. He had fulfilled his duty and did not want to appear to be any friendlier with the American authorities than he had to be.

  Adnan welcomed the comparative luxury of the facilities with relief, and when rumors began to spread as to where he had been and the fact that he had escaped there were many intelligence officers who wanted to talk to all three of them, but that had to wait. First, Adnan had to get on the blower and talk to Aubrey who by now was fairly frantic in Baghdad.

  Once the preliminaries were over and the appropriate codes exchanged, Adnan got right into it.

  “They're taking him to Kashmir. At least, that's what we've heard. He left Kamdesh with a contingent of Taliban about the same time we did. They must be halfway across Swat by now.”

  “Are they holding him for ransom, then?” That was a common practice among the Taliban when it came to foreign captives.

  “That's a negative, sir. They know about the Book and they are doing everything they can to be the first to get hold of it. They need your man for that, so they won't harm him until they have the Book in their possession.”

  “So they know where the Book is?”

  “They have a pretty good idea. Another group passed through Kamdesh several days earlier. They talked to the local shaman there. We don't know what was said, but w
e do know that the Taliban were very interested. And then they took off for Kashmir.”

  “Where's the shaman now? Can we talk to him?”

  “Negative, sir. The shaman is down. They interrogated him. Harshly. They would have done the same to us, but some villagers released us and killed our guards. We don't really know why. They told the Taliban leader, guy name of Omar, that mountain vampires did it. They didn't buy it, of course, but they pretty much had no choice but to accept the explanation. For now. I have the feeling Omar will be back one day soon to execute some vengeance on the town.”

  “Omar? That would be Omar Mansour?”

  “Not sure, sir. They called him Emir, though.”

  “Yes. That's him. He's the leader of the entire Pakistani Taliban. If he's in Kamdesh over this affair, then he's taking it very seriously indeed. He can field hundreds of fighters on an hour's notice.”

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  Aubrey was in a bind. He needed eyes on Angell. He had GPS data and knew that the professor was nearing another dangerous locale. He also knew the man's days were numbered as long as he was in Taliban captivity.

  But he also needed the Book. He needed the Book more than he needed Angell alive or anyone else, for that matter. Monroe had made him understand the disaster that would take place if a religious fanatic—any kind of religious fanatic, from Islamic jihadist to Christian fundamentalist to any other kind—got his or her hands on the text. It was a lit match to the gasoline soaked rags of religious fanaticism and once the conflagration started there would be no way to stop it.

  Aubrey didn't believe that the legends told about the Book were true, despite Monroe's paranoia and his weird collection of old newspaper clippings and ancient star charts. He didn't believe using the incantations in the Book would open some kind of weird interstellar Gate that would allow space monsters unfettered access to the planet. I mean, who came up with that arrangement? he thought. Who says we would have to let them in? If they existed, why couldn't they simply break open the door and have their way? But that wasn't important. What was important was that these people believed in the Book and its power and they knew that the reputation of the Book was more than enough to guarantee at least some of their followers would believe in its power, too. And for most political and religious leaders a shared fantasy was enough. If it didn't seem logical, its proponents could always claim that elements of the argument remained a “mystery.”