The man didn’t look like an insurgent and Peel was startled. From the man’s wrinkled skin and shrunken complexion he looked ninety-years-old.
Rust. It was all about rust.
Ex-Australian Army sergeant Emerson James Ash grabbed the toothpick in his mouth and twirled it between the fingers of his right hand. He stared at his left arm to where the military had replaced his chipped, sophisticated prosthetic arm with a cybernetic upgrade. A stupid accident in central South Australia, and before that a small secret war in the Horn of Africa, had led him down a disastrous path. The deformity was one thing, but the arm was also a symbol of his denied right to a peaceful life with Amye. An accident, a death, and a reassignment to the reserve list—the artificial arm would always remind him of so much he had lost.
All of that was behind him now, or so he liked to tell himself, and yet here he was again at the military’s beck-and-call. He understood how a prostitute felt when faced with the alternatives their pimp would offer. It sickened Emerson.
To distract himself, he contemplated the intelligence report and shook his head. Emerson had spent the entire day analyzing a series of Special Operations Task Group photo images of rust, and wondered why.
The disintegrated contraption in the digital image was a US Air Force McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle. The multi-role fighter jet was gutted from nose tip to engine exhaust, destroyed by severe corrosion. According to the accompanying reports, the Strike Eagle had lifted off from Bagram Airfield at 06:40 hours yesterday local Afghan time and flown southwest into Afghanistan’s Nimruz Province, a most remote and inhospitable area, to bomb a recently identified Taliban stronghold.
It never made it.
The F-15E had fallen from the sky as a rusted contraption, crashed into the desert, and disintegrated into five large pieces and a thousand smaller shrapnel fragments. The two pilots had been flayed of their skin, flesh, organs, and muscle, and nothing more than dried bones, disintegrated flight uniforms, and G-suits remained. Emerson had been tasked with analyzing, and then prepping, an accurate assessment of what had caused the destruction, using his ‘special threat’ experience he had gained in Somalia.
He had nothing.
He stared out his window. There was so much going on in the world, some of it so bizarre, and yet he felt so disconnected from it. The new intelligence job wasn’t quite what he’d hoped, but it provided a steady income, and Canberra was about as boring a place as you could find in mainland Australia. At least what the job lacked, the local Irish pub in town, The King, or ‘O’Malley’s’, made up for after work. Canberra really did come alive after dark, and the pub, frequented by ex-military guys like himself, had a constant turnover of fresh Australian National University short-haired, sophisticated women with their superior ‘I’m-so-clever-and-wearing-librarian’s glasses stare’. But the ANU locals were more than willing to hear a story or two.
“You look bored, Emerson.”
The analyst looked up at his supervisor and smiled. He’d been distracted again, and realized that he was unable to keep his mind on his assigned task.
“Not bored,” he said, “just… I don’t know… I’m a cyber-analyst and these Intelligence reports are fine, but…”
The senior civilian intelligence analyst, whose name was Peter Morrissey but insisted on being referred by his last name only, even amongst friends, laughed. “I understand.” He waved Emerson’s comments aside and smiled. “That implant of yours still work?” Morrissey stared at Emerson’s left arm.
Emerson frowned at the reference to his implant and nodded, unsure why the man would bring up his disability.
“I wanted you to know I’ve put your name forward for Afghanistan.”
Emerson’s throat tightened. He swallowed hard. “Me?”
“Don’t you want to be involved in an Information Security survey of Afghanistan?”
Emerson straightened in his chair and struggled to hide the enthusiastic smile. With his disability he’d thought fieldwork an impossibility. “You’re kidding?”
“Nope.”
Emerson grinned. Information Security meant Cyber! Now that was right up his specialization! Not rust, but something he understood without thought. “When?”
“Tomorrow morning. The civvy that was supposed to go pulled out because of wife issues. We’ve made some allowances, given your military currency…” The man laughed again. “And your obvious skills.”
Emerson wanted to laugh, but instead he shifted uncomfortably at the mention of ‘wife issues’ after what had happened to Amye. “Say the word and I’m there,” he said.
“It’s related,” Morrissey pointed to the corroded wreck of the F-15E on Emerson’s flat screen. “You don’t think we wasted your time today, by having you go over that report as a time-filler?”
And suddenly Emerson didn’t think that they had.
In a closed wing of the Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital, well within the secure confines of Bagram Airfield, Peel and Warrant Officer Kudjic watched as the old, confused soldiers wriggled in their beds. The few survivors had drips in their arms now. DNA and fingerprint analysis confirmed the men were Royal Australian Regiment soldiers on a routine patrol. The men should have been in their twenties, thirties at most. Dementia stopped any of them recalling the weapon that had hit them.
“Do you know what caused this, Major?” asked Kudjic.
Peel looked at the man’s solid Bagram-supplement-fed frame and wished he had guns half as massive as the warrant officer. “It’s Harrison Peel, remember, I’m here as a civilian consultant.”
“You’re Mitchell Peel’s nephew, right? You’re just like him now.”
Peel nodded, and remembered his uncle, the civil servant who’d dedicated a career to the Department of Defence, and his dogged steadfastness had inspired Peel to enlist for patriotic duty when he was a young man.
“I worked with him years ago, your uncle. He was a legend.”
“You speak of Mitch like he’s dead.”
Kudjic looked surprised. “Is he, sir?”
“No, retired.”
“Yes sir. Glad to hear.” His face shone with admiration. “Can I ask? I’ve heard stories about what you did in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.”
Peel ignored the warrant officer’s blatant probe into his latest covert operation and looked back to the dying old men. They had years at most, not the decades or half centuries promised to soldiers who survived the theater of war. “They’ve been aged artificially,” said Peel.
“Chemical or biological weapons, or something else?” Kudjic raised an eyebrow and hinted to something, but Peel was determined not to rise to the bait.
“Something else… Their clothes and equipment have also been aged.”
Kudjic seemed angry and shook his head. “It makes no sense.” He thrust a report at Peel. “I was told to give you this and inform you I’m Code-89 cleared.”
Peel smiled at the man. Code-89 meant that Kudjic also had the security clearance to discuss alien threats and other dimensional anomalies that sometimes plagued the various corners of the Earth. It was Peel’s specialty, putting down such ‘specific threats’. A means to age people artificially certainly fit the mandate. No wonder they had been paired up.
“Did you know your uncle was Code-89 cleared?”
Surprised, Peel raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t known, and suddenly so much made a lot of sense. Not getting married, the unhappiness and keeping himself distant from those he supposedly cared about. That doggedness to fight back was Peel all over too, doubly so ever since his first ‘special threat’ experience against a horror that made no rational sense in the human world. No wonder Uncle Mitch had been reluctant for Peel to enlist—he hadn’t wanted his nephew to end up like him.
Peel felt a tang of regret. He was angry that the Army had discarded him so easily after he had saved Sydney from a Code-89 threat known as a shoggoth, admittedly by using a nuclear weapon to do so. Casualties
had been high and he’d paid for that. He’d told himself later he didn’t need the military anymore, that he’d moved on, but now he was back, he had to acknowledge how much he missed this life.
Peel scrolled the daily Code-89 Intelligence Summary and noted the mention of a super-weapon in the daily theatre reporting from Afghanistan. The word karez, or ancient underground aqueducts, stood out and he sighed: the local US Marine detachment, or the Brits, would jump on it because karez were the supply tunnels that allowed insurgents to move around the countryside unseen. Coalition forces would scour the road from Kajaki to Musa Qala, checking as many of the aqueducts in use by local insurgents to transport people or equipment until they were satisfied that no super-weapons were hidden down there. Peel considered if this was the same device that artificially aged soldiers.
“I heard you were in Rawalpindi looking for WMDs that might have fallen into the hands of the Taliban.”
Kudjic wouldn’t give up, and again Peel ignored him. He handed back the report.
“Did you find any, sir? WMDs?”
“Weapons of Mass Destruction? Of course.” Peel nodded, answering his own question. “Now drop it, Warrant Officer. I can’t talk about what I did, and it’s not related.”
“Well, I think you’ve just found another one.”
Footsteps echoed down the hospital corridor. Peel turned and faced four US Marines. They halted next to him and Kudjic. Peel stood tall and tried to not look surprised by the unusual visit.
“Major Peel, we’ve spoken to the Australian Liaison Officer posted to Camp Bastion. He’s obtained permission through your NSA seniors for your involvement on a specific mission against a credible threat. It’s related to what happened to those poor soldiers.”
Peel smiled at the use of his military title again, and his ears pricked up at the mention of a ‘specific threat’. It was another NSA/Five Eyes code for a special compartmented mission outside of normal channels.
He looked at the full Colonel’s bird on the lead Marine’s shoulder and decided to err on the side of caution and not be so bold. In the past, his flippant Australian attitude to rank had cost him. “Colonel Patterson?” he read the name off the officer’s pocket stitch.
Patterson grinned. “I take it the Warrant Officer has briefed you?” His nod indicted Gary Kudjic.
“We’ve covered the basics, sir.”
“I was told that as an Aussie, and a certain major with your ‘contacts’ you’d be interested in this mission to Kajaki. It has all of the artifacts of your specialization. Fourteen-hundred hours in the main briefing room for a combined J2, J3, J5 brief, and then a separate compartmented J25X briefing before you fly out.”
Peel closed his eyes and smiled. After his botched operation in Pakistan he thought he was on his way home in disgrace. But his NSA superiors had thought differently by assigning him this mission. Someone back home in Australia had likely also pulled some strings, otherwise he would have been paired up with the Americans.
“It’s a joint USMC-SOTG operation, and we want you to lead it.”
That meant he was back in uniform, at least until the mission concluded. He couldn’t be sure if this was a good or bad outcome: an acknowledgement he shouldn’t have been discharged in the first place, or an exercise to rub in his face again what he had lost. Either way, his future was laid out before him.
“Thank you, Colonel.”
The Transit Center at Manas was not in Afghanistan, but as far as Emerson Ash was concerned, it might as well be. Kyrgyzstan Republic was land-locked in the heart of Central Asia and featured nothing that could pass as modern infrastructure. He couldn’t walk the local streets and presume to be safe, or expect the mod-cons found back home.
Emerson figured that until he shipped to Bagram Airfield he would lose himself in his work, and spent the day on a secure login into the Five Eyes nations’ shared Intelpedia. He scoured Taliban websites for any clues to their latest activities and downloaded pertinent information into his implant. Search words including ‘rust’, ‘corrosion’ and ‘skin flaying’ brought up nothing, in English or Arabic. His frustration doubled because he only had one biological arm, and despite its electronic componentry, his prosthetic wasn’t equipped to touch-type as fast as real fingers once could. He cursed. Every search took longer than it needed.
It was only when he slowly typed in the word ‘time’ he got a hit from a cell operating from Zaranj, the capital of Afghanistan’s Nimruz Province.
The senior insurgent who led the cell boldly pronounced himself online as Ahmad Komdani, and boasted he had recently recovered a weapon from an unspecified location referred to as the Holy Temple of Yog-Sothoth. Komdani bragged he could accelerate time and that time was his to command. When Emerson read that the priest claimed to have shot down a US fighter jet with his holy weapon, he knew he had a match.
Back on Intelpedia, Emerson searched on ‘Yog-Sothoth’. He received a thousand-plus hits, but all were classified above his security clearance. So high that if he kept probing, soon he would be detained for questioning. He considered the risks: would interrogation for a couple of days be so bad if he also uncovered a dangerous Taliban-funded insurgent cell, and then put it down?
Not to be deterred, and because he was a cyber-analyst and these things were expected of him, he executed a few stored programs from his implant, and electronically probed a few back doors until he discovered why he couldn’t access the information. Code-89 clearance flashed up, which he didn’t have. He didn’t know what that meant.
“Emerson Ash?”
Emerson faced the Marine who’d just entered the office Emerson had commandeered for the day and nodded. He wondered if he’d already set off virtual alarm bells, and this solider was his interrogator.
“You’re the cyber civvy?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“The transport is ready to take you out to Camp Bastion.”
Emerson sighed with relief over not having been detected and frowned. He looked at his watch. They were five hours early, and the destination was wrong. “Helmand Province? What have the Brits got to do with this? I thought—”
“Do as you’re told. Can you do that? Or have you forgotten what it was like to follow military orders, Sergeant?”
“No,” said Emerson.
“You’re military,” said the Marine sergeant with more force this time, “you can’t just take your uniform off and be someone else, hide behind civilian clothes!”
“I can, and I’m not hiding,” said Emerson. Anger forced him to his feet. “I’m ex-military now.” He stated it clearly as if for official record keeping, and considered he might be over reacting because he was afraid he may have been caught looking into secrets he shouldn’t have.
“You’re military from where we stand, son.”
“But I finished my tour. I changed my life.”
“Sure. Good for you. When did this miracle happen?”
Emerson closed his eyes, fighting the darkness that seemed to envelop him from nowhere. “Months ago.”
A Marine corporal entered the office, Suleiman by his patch. He stepped forward and interrupted. “Sergeant Ash was here during the last rotation in place, sergeant.” Suleiman stared at Emerson. “I remember you, Sergeant: you’ve got the implanted arm.”
Emerson raised his left arm. The prosthetic had served him well except when it came to typing, or cooking, or gardening, or any other fine motor control task. “Yeah, that’s me, so what?”
“This should be fun during your force prep briefings.” The sergeant laughed. “Civvy and an ex-sergeant.”
In a secure briefing room in Camp Bastion, with the muffled sounds of insurgent artillery shells pounding their outer defenses, Peel looked out across the expanse of a half-dozen Australian Army Special Operations Task Group soldiers. An equal number of US Marines Corps stood nearby, and Peel prepared to brief the joint USMC-SOTG operation.
Colonel Chester Patterson stood toward the back, and although
nothing had been said, he was assessing Peel. Worse, perhaps, Peel was again in his major’s uniform. They were turning him into a soldier after they’d simultaneously disowned him. He understood they called him back because of his expertise. Publicly the rank would be retracted after the mission, because Peel was the soldier who had detonated a nuke in Sydney Harbour to destroy an alien monster about to raze the city. The day had been saved, and he became the scapegoat. He wondered what his Uncle Mitchell would have said if he’d known Peel’s history for the last couple of years. Would he be disappointed, or proud? It was hard to know in the shadow world of Code-89 black ops, where good and evil were continuously blurred concepts.
Peel ran the PowerPoint presentation and showed the maps of Nimruz Province, known and suspected routes of the local karez, scant details on the cell leader Ahmad Komdani, photographs of the aged soldiers, and new intelligence of a rusted Strike Eagle that had literally aged hundreds of years in flight.
“What caused that kind of destruction,” asked a lance corporal from the Marine contingent, “sir?”
Peel took a deep breath and silently thanked fate that all these men were Code-89 cleared, all except one, but that was only a formality soon to be rectified. “We think it’s some kind of ESB super-weapon, one that accelerates time.”
“ESB?” asked the only other civilian in the room, a former Australian Army sergeant turned cyber-analyst who had prepared much of the report Peel was now delivering. “I’m not familiar with the terminology, sir?”
“Extra-terrestrial Sentient Being, Sergeant Ash.”
The man nodded and scratched his chin with his prosthetic arm.
Later, after the briefing was concluded and the men were prepping final mission checks on the two Humvees, Peel sought out Ash.
“That was some detailed report you put together, Sergeant?”
“I’m no longer a sergeant, sir.”
“And I’m no longer a major, but here we are.”
Ash looked away. “The world always wants to be complicated.”
Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1 Page 36