Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

  Another of their captors sidled up to her after they'd walked a few minutes. “Take,” he whispered. He nudged something into her ribs. That it brushed against her boobs might have been an accident. She didn't think so.

  She resisted the urge to hit him. Whoever the kid was with, they weren't going to turn her over to the Army. For now, at least, they were the best option she and Zack had. She forced herself to remain calm and took the hard object he'd shoved into her boob.

  She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, but a plastic bottle filled with water and a handful of dried apricots were better than a feast. It had been hours since they'd left the last stream and her throat was about as parched as the mountains.

  She drank deeply, then passed the water bottle over to Zack.

  He nodded his thanks and she realized that she could see his gesture. Darkness was graying into dawn.

  "Hurry,” the kid urged.

  The fiery aurora of the sun barely peaked over the horizon when the kid dropped out of sight in front of her.

  She stopped abruptly, but the guy behind her, the one with the shotgun, shoved her, hard.

  Her feet slid out from under her and she scooted down a steep, but fortunately not too deep, hole on her rear.

  "Talk now,” the young Kurd announced as she landed with something of a splat—and Zack fell on top of her. “This cave is safe."

  She inhaled and understood why he knew about such a perfect hiding place. Black bricks of hashish, hundreds of them, lined the stone walls of a cave which was partly natural but that showed the marks of human expansion.

  "We seem stuck spending our lives underground,” Zack complained.

  "The last time we were safe was in that cave in Iraq. I'm not going to kick."

  "So, kid, you and your buddies are in the hashish business,” Zack observed. “I guess you showing us this means you aren't going to turn us over to the Army. But what are your plans?"

  "I am Cejno. A man, not a kid,” the kid reported. “My friends and I, we sell such hashish to the Americans in Iraq. Good soldiers like a smoke sometimes. It's,” he wrinkled his forehead, clearly looking for the right words, and settled on, “it's the prime shit."

  The kid with the shotgun, and Ivy could now see that all five of the men who'd found them were teenagers, toked up a small pipe and proceeded to enjoy some of that prime shit.

  "Congratulations on your entrepreneurial zeal,” Zack said.

  "Thank you.” Cejno didn't seem to hear Zack's irony. “But we are looking for the business expansions. More markets for our product."

  "And you think we might be able to help you with that?"

  Cejno nodded soberly. “Rich tourists, maybe American. Maybe English or German because the Army is looking for Americans. Such tourists can travel places a poor Kurdish man would be a questionable. No? And here are you, looking for a truck. It is meant to be."

  Ivy sank to the stone floor. She'd thought things were already as bad as they could get. Getting drafted into an amateur drug smuggling operation was the one complication she hadn't envisioned.

  "What do we get out of it?” Zack demanded.

  "You escape the Army. Very important, no? And you are looking for this certain truck. A truck can be found. You need papers? We have a friend provides papers. You need much money? Once we reach Istanbul and hand the hashish over to our friend there, he does pay you for the driving. Of course, you will also have a pleasant native guide to help you with your travels through historical Turkey."

  "Can we decide in a few hours?” Ivy asked. “We need sleep."

  Cejno grinned. “Sleep. Sure. Feel free to slip into something comfortable. My friends and myself will avert our eyes, surely, if you wish to wear less."

  Surely not.

  "I'm not going to slip into something comfortable but I do need rest. I can't remember the last time I got more than a couple of hours of sleep."

  Cejno said something in Kurdish and the kid with the shotgun rummaged around in a box and came up with a couple of blankets.

  "Here, sleep. We cannot move until it is night again, anyway."

  Ivy thought about asking for something to eat first, but her head hit the blanket before she came up with the words.

  * * * *

  Twelve hours of sleep should have helped.

  They didn't.

  Ivy groaned softly as she tried to stretch the kinks out of her muscles.

  Eight young Kurds were playing some sort of game that involved slapping cards on a makeshift table and roaring at each other.

  Zack watched the card-players from a seat on a crate of hashish. More importantly, he was eating.

  "Food,” she groaned.

  "Sorry, all gone."

  "You know I'm going to have to kill you for that."

  He laughed. “You wouldn't have liked it. Dried apricots and some sort of sheep jerky. Good thing I finished it."

  "Sounds like heaven. Gimmee, dead man."

  He handed her a rope of the meat and a paper tube filled with fruit and Ivy sank back into her blanket and blissed out. Her stomach rumbled in surprise that it was finally getting fed, but she told it to settle down. Who knew when they'd get their next meal?

  * * * *

  At twilight, Cejno led them out of the cave. They'd crated up a lot of the hashish and everyone had to carry some of it. Zack and Ivy hauled a forty-kilogram box up the steep entrance to the cave, and then they set off with Zack walking in front and Ivy bringing up the caboose.

  About a mile from the cave, they stumbled onto a narrow dirt road off the main highway. Cejno proudly led them to a shiny Mercedes Benz conversion van with German tags.

  "Such a perfect, isn't she?” Cejno effused. “We'll load up and get started. German tourists seeing their poor Moslem neighbors in Turkey. Very broadminded."

  Zack was tempted to leave it at that, but he knew Ivy would never agree to leave her precious Cross. “We've got something to pick up first."

  Cejno shook his head. “The Army took everything you'd left in your room. Even your money. No hundred dollar finder fee for Cejno."

  Zack shrugged. When the CIA heard about the money, they'd know where he and Ivy had holed up and would send their black helicopters to help out the Turks—whether the Turks wanted CIA help or not.

  "We hid something outside of town,” Ivy said. “It's important. Real important."

  "And we need to work on the disguise a bit,” Zack added. “We aren't going to fool anyone into believing we're rich tourists if we're still wearing clothes like this.” In fact, they looked convincingly like drug smugglers—exactly the wrong impression if they were going to be driving a van filled with maybe two hundred kilos of processed hashish.

  Cejno got into a fast, hand-waving, Kurdish-language conversation with the other drug smugglers.

  "They say you want to get your guns, steal the good stuff,” he finally reported. “I tell them you are my friends, but they remain suspicion."

  Zack would have been suspicious, too, if he'd been asked to risk a hundred thousand dollars worth of hashish and a pretty nice vehicle on a couple of AWOL soldiers who had just broken out of Turkish questioning.

  "We can't steal your hashish,” Ivy reasoned. “It would be too dangerous for us to try to sell it and we don't have your contacts. Remember, the authorities are looking for us."

  Cejno looked relieved and got into another animated conversation that Zack couldn't understand a word of. For all the good it was doing him, he could have skipped his Arabic lessons and spent his spare time playing computer games like most of the rest of his armored company did.

  "Sahmar's sister does the haircut. She helps you look German,” he finally reported. “How distance to your hiding place?"

  He lightened up when they explained it was only a couple of kilometers outside of Simak. “We stop there after we turn you into perfect German tourists. Now get in the truck. Mr. Zack, he will drive. Miss Ivy will sit in the middle. I ride the shotgun."

&n
bsp; The other drug smugglers vanished back into the woods or into the back of the van with the hashish. Zack, Cejno, and Ivy got into the front seat.

  Cejno took a call on his cellphone and routed them around one Army checkpoint, then pulled into town in front of a small shop labeled with a painted sign showing a pair of scissors.

  Sahmar's sister, Mijgul, took one look at them and shook her head. “Who cut your hair? Butchers?"

  Zack couldn't disagree. Being a Captain, he'd long since left the buzz cut of the new recruit behind him, but he kept his hair short. Ivy's hair had been spiky after her bath but now was just matted and dirty. When he'd first seen her, he'd thought she looked butch, but either he'd gotten used to the look or it had grown on him because she looked good to him. Hot, in fact.

  "They need to look different. German tourists,” Cejno said.

  "I know that. But you give me nothing to work with.” She grabbed at Ivy's blond hair. “Ruined. You let this grow out for some months and then I'll give you a real cut."

  "We don't have months,” Ivy said.

  Mijgul gave the universal sigh of the artist forced to work with inferior materials. “I will do what I can. No promises."

  What she could do turned out to be pretty good.

  Zack had never tried to analyze it, but Europeans and Americans have a slightly different look. Mijgul dunked Ivy's head in a bowl, shampooed her hair while Ivy blissed out, and then went to work with her scissors. A black dye completed the transformation from a spiky blonde to a spunky brunette with a definite European look.

  "Now you.” She narrowed her eyes as she stared at him. “You have darker skin, like a Kurd or a Turk, not like a German. This I cannot avoidance."

  "Maybe I'm a surf bum,” Zack suggested. “Dark tan from all those days catching waves."

  "Yeah, it could be so. I make you one of those. But still German, or maybe Swiss. A French or Spanish surfer bum would have the longer hair."

  Zack closed his eyes when she dunked his head into a bowl of water, shampooed him so hard he figured he would be lucky to have hair left at all, then smeared him with some sort of chemical.

  "My friend brought me these,” she said after she'd rinsed out his hair and attacked it with her scissors. “Perhaps they will fit."

  She handed over a contact lens box.

  He put in the no-prescription tinted lenses, then stared at himself in the mirror.

  He looked horrible. He also looked completely unlike Captain Zack Herrera.

  She'd bleached the tips of his hair and lightened the rest so it looked brown rather than black. The contacts turned his eyes deep blue. A pair of black linen pants and a natural wool sweater completed the look.

  If his friends from South Dallas ever saw him looking like this, he'd never live it down.

  "You do look different,” Ivy commented.

  "Perfect,” Cejno crowed. “The European, no?"

  Given the microdress Mijgul had found for Ivy, Zack didn't think Cejno had seen him at all.

  "No one will recognize either of you. Now we leave, head for Istanbul."

  "Now we pick up our, uh, item,” Ivy corrected.

  "But that will only take a moment."

  "I hope you're right."

  * * * *

  For the first time since she'd left the priestess's cave back in Iraq, Ivy felt a sense of, if not confidence, at least potential.

  She'd made major steps toward catching up on her sleep, had eaten enough to stave off starvation, gotten a new look and a classy European wardrobe, and she was going to get to drive a Mercedes to Byzantium where the Priestess had told her to go. She, Zack, Cejno, and the Cross would be traveling in style.

  "There is nothing here but hay fields,” Cejno argued when Zack turned onto the road they'd ridden down as she'd been searching for that evil yellow glow. “No place for hiding of loot."

  "Trust us,” Zack grated. “Ivy, I could use some help navigating. Everything looks sort of the same."

  She closed her eyes and felt for that arcane energy—and found it exactly where it had been.

  "Straight ahead,” she told him. “It's just over that rise."

  Straight ahead meant leaving the road and Zack bumped the Mercedes over a field, then stopped abruptly. “Holy Jesus."

  She inspected the ground with closed eyes. “We're not there yet. Another two hundred meters, I'd guess."

  "I sure hope you've brought us to the wrong place, Ivy."

  She opened her eyes, and wished she hadn't.

  Two days before, they'd hidden the Cross in what had then been a perfectly ordinary hayfield with perfectly ordinary sheep wandering around.

  Now, the fields were gray with death. Grass had died in a ring that extended hundreds of feet out from the yellow glow of the temple. A few battered sheep corpses lay on the ground, their guts scattered and bones gnawed. Even with her eyes still open, the shimmering outline of the temple was almost visible.

  The monster glaring at their truck had only a distant relation to any sheep. For one thing, its teeth had grown into fangs. For another, its hooves had sprouted long claws.

  A sense of wrongness swept over Ivy like fog over a Pennsylvania mountain.

  "This is my father's field,” Cejno's eyes looked as disturbed as Ivy felt. “What have you done to it?"

  "It's one hell of a good question,” Zack said.

  "We've got to yank the Cross out,” Ivy said. “The Cross must have created some sort of leakage where the orange glow is. The Temple's power is doing this."

  "I will wait here in the truck,” Cejno reported. “You get your baggage if you can. I'm not afraid but I don't like the look of that animal."

  Ivy didn't either.

  What had once been a sheep snarled at the truck, long canines glistening red with blood.

  She held out her hand. “Give me your gun."

  "You'll leave me here and steal my truck."

  "You know we're not going to steal your truck. I don't want that monster running loose. What do you think it could do to Mijgul if it came across her in the fields?"

  Ivy didn't think she'd mistaken the way Cejno had stared at the pretty Kurdish hairdresser. He might lust after American women famous for their supposed sexual appetites, but what the young Kurd really wanted was the girl next door.

  He swallowed hard, then pulled a handsome automatic from his pocket.

  She inspected it. It was a Beretta 9mm. A nice piece of equipment. She thumbed out the magazine, checked to see that it was fully loaded, then slapped it back into place.

  Zack cleared his throat. “Maybe I should—"

  "I'm infantry. This is my job."

  She slid over Cejno, opened the passenger-side door, and stepped out.

  The sheep that had been on the field when she'd been there a couple of days earlier had been slow-moving and lethargic creatures. This animal, the one survivor of the small flock, was a blur of motion—heading straight for her.

  She sank into a two-handed firing position and fired twice, hitting both times.

  The bullets’ impact knocked the monster back on its butt, but it was up again in less than a second, and charged straight at her.

  Too bad Cejno hadn't loaded with silver bullets, she thought. She fired again and again, methodically making sure she got a good aim for each shot as the monster absorbed the punishment and kept coming.

  It leapt toward her from about five meters away. From her studies of the martial arts, she knew it had made a mistake. It was committed now—unless it surprised her again and somehow grew wings. Of course, if you're a sheep-turned monster who shrugged off bullets, you just might be able to afford to make some mistakes.

  She dropped flat on her back as the beast leapt toward her, then fired her final two bullets into its gut as it sailed over her, its front claws and teeth ripping for where her throat would have been if she'd stay standing.

  The bullets’ momentum lifted the animal higher and flipped it on its back.

  I
t landed hard and for just a moment, Ivy felt a trickle of hope. What animal, even an animal empowered by the evil Temple's occult glow, could survive ten bullets in its brain, heart, and gut?

  The answer, it turned out, was this meat-eating sheep.

  It gasped for breath, as if the wind had been knocked out of it by the fall, but it struggled to its feet.

  The bullets should have ripped huge holes through the animal. Even if it could stand, it should be gushing blood from both entry and exit wounds. Instead, its thick wool seemed to have been transformed into something a lot more effective than the Kevlar the Army used for its armor.

  "Oh, shit,” Ivy said. She took off toward the Cross.

  Chapter 8

  "Get in the car.” Zack had joined Cejno in shouting at Ivy since her first shot had deflected off the transformed sheep's reinforced skull.

  In her battle-frenzy, though, she had clearly forgotten that she had allies, had a place of refuge. She ignored Cejno's advice and started running across the field, away from the doubtful safety of the van.

  The transformed sheep shook itself off, snarled, then clawed at the ground, tearing it up like an angry bull.

  Waiting was its mistake. If it had acted at once, it might have chased Ivy down before Zack could react. But its pause gave him the moment he needed.

  He shifted the heavy van into four-wheel drive and floored it.

  A full-grown sheep might weigh a hundred pounds. From the hard impact jolt when he hit it, this abomination had to weigh more than five hundred.

  The van shuddered as it collided with what had once been an animal but was now a monster. Zack held onto the steering wheel and kept driving, making sure that both front and back wheels passed over the thing.

  Then he reversed and ran over it again.

  He avoided its head. Ivy had already proven that its skull was harder than a steel jacketed bullet. Besides, its fangs looked sharp enough and tough enough to rip the van's steel radials to shreds. Its tough fleece could keep bullets from penetrating, but he suspected it didn't have much structural integrity. It wouldn't protect the creature's internal organs from two tons of Mercedes Benz squishing down.

  He put the van in drive again and rolled over the former sheep's ribcage a third time.