by Weston Ochse
“And the tattoo skin suits?” Walker asked.
Yaya nodded his head slowly. “My bet is that you’ll find them linked in some way. This Thuza Tun character is probably the mystery guy walking around wearing one of the suits. My guess is that we’ll find the truth at the end of the trail of circus breadcrumbs, so we need to be prepared.”
Walker nodded, but wondered how they were expected to be prepared for something they had absolutely no information about.
45
STARLIFTER. SOMEWHERE OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN.
After two hours of discussing the targeting parameters, the other SEALs, including Hoover, curled up next to their gear for some shuteye. But Walker couldn’t sleep. He’d tried, but had immediately plunged into a memory of when he was possessed. As if from a third person, he saw himself chewing off the heads of roasted rats, sucking out their eyeballs, and spooning their brains into his mouth with the crook of a little finger.
Laws and Holmes both believed that the skin suits could be used to protect someone from a powerful spirit, the idea being that the spiritual residue of all the people who made up the suit would keep the wearer safe from the demon he or she was channeling. How anyone could ask to be possessed, or channel a demon, was beyond his ability to comprehend. Clearly the lust for power was stronger than the need for self-preservation.
He’d been an American boy in the Philippines possessed by a Hantu Kabor from Malaysian mythology, a grave demon. If people weren’t buried properly according to Malay custom, the demon would crawl through the graves and eat the souls of the dead. The Hantu was a collector of sorts. It had many souls within it. Walker remembered them and how at times they would scream at him, and whisper to him, an apartment building full of souls in a small boy’s head.
During screening and selection they’d asked him how he’d known that he’d been possessed—what was the first sign? Walker had to think back on it, because he hadn’t known he was possessed until it was too late. But as he delved into the memories he so desperately wished he didn’t have, he realized that it had been the whispers. Whether he was walking down the street or alone in a room, he’d begun to hear the susurrations of faraway voices. It was like someone saying something right on the edge of his hearing. He remembered being infuriated that he couldn’t understand, so he’d listened harder. By the time he did understand them, he realized that all along they’d been telling him to run. He just hadn’t understood until it was too late.
Finally he couldn’t take it anymore. He rolled over to where Laws was snoring gently. When he got next to him, the snoring ceased and Laws opened one eye. “What the hell, Walker?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“So you thought you’d share that affliction?”
“Sorry, it’s just that … Never mind. Go back to sleep.”
Laws sat up and grabbed a liter of water. “No. It’s okay. Ask away.”
“Okay, then. How are we going to take down Chi Long?” Seeing the judgmental look in Laws’s eyes, he hastily added, “I know how to kill a man a hundred ways. I can disable anything mechanical. There’s very little I don’t know how to do because of the training we’ve received. But neither A school nor BUD/S provided me with even an infinitesimal crumb of information regarding ghosts, goblins, or ghouls.”
Laws nodded grudgingly as he screwed the top back on the bottle. “Well said. Here’s what we know. A suit of tattooed skin was sent to the Karen. Historically, there’s only been one use for such a suit. Each piece of skin still holds an echo of the soul it once enclosed. Each piece of ink still holds an echo of the idea and thought someone put into it. When people get a tattoo, they usually expend a lot of mental energy planning it. Each one has its own special meaning. The wearer continuously looks at the tattoo and remembers why it was so important. This is akin to worship and imbues the ink with power. The combination of the pieces of skin and ink presents a problem set for a demon who was called to inhabit that body. Under normal circumstances, a demon’s soul would quickly burn out a person who hasn’t found a way to prepare him- or herself. And when I say burn out, that’s exactly what I mean. Suits of skin are one way to allow the wearer to survive the internal forces exerted by the demonic soul, the power shared by all the echoed souls who so recently owned each piece of skin.”
“So it’s like a suit of armor for the soul. I get that,” Walker said. “But how does one go about summoning demons?” When he saw the look on Laws’s face, he shrugged and spread his hands. “You’ll have to forgive me. All I know on the subject is what I’ve seen from movies, and for some strange reason I have the image of two young boys with underwear on their heads playing with Barbie dolls.”
“Weird Science.” Laws chuckled. “Starred Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith. They summoned a genie, Kelly LeBrock. Classic eighties movie. Bottom line is that there isn’t one specific way.”
“No specific way?”
“Well, there has to be a focus.”
“A what?”
“Focus,” Laws said more slowly. “Like a cross in a Christian ceremony.”
Walker nodded. “Like the Barbie dolls.”
“More like the underwear. Those would have been the focus for those boys. They wore them on their heads and used them to help them concentrate.”
“So if we find the underwear, then we can do what? Sever the connection between the demon and the human? Short-circuit the summoning?” Walker held out his hands. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Actually you do. I think you understand it pretty damn well. The focus might be a knife, or an amulet, or a ring. Very often it’s a piece of jewelry. And yes. I think it might short-circuit the connection between the human and the demon, if we can find it and if we can remove it from the host. You should read the mission log. There are quite a few missions whose success was based on a team member first discovering, then removing a focus.”
Walker nodded.
“Does that help?” Laws asked.
“Yeah. I think I’ve got it now.”
“Good. Now roll back over and get some sleep.”
Walker started to do just that when an alarm began going off in the cabin.
Holmes popped up and made a beeline for the crew chief, who’d also awoken and was already on a hard line to the cockpit. He spoke animatedly into the phone for what seemed like several minutes but could have only been a few seconds. When he was done, he addressed the team.
“We have weather. A cyclone is brewing and sending up thunderheads ten miles high. We have no choice but to fly beneath it. We’re talking about two hundred feet above the water. It’s going to be a rough ride.”
“We gonna have enough fuel to reach our rendezvous?” Ruiz asked.
“Negatron. Air refueler was already called back. We’ll be landing in the beautiful garden spot of Guadalcanal. NFI.”
Walker shook his head. Murphy was with them already. It wasn’t a good sign.
The Starlifter went into a forty-five-degree dive. Yaya and Ruiz fell on their rumps. The other SEALs managed to stay upright, although Walker’s stomach felt like it was still a thousand feet above them.
They made it to the benches and strapped themselves in. The plane began to shake as it coursed through the outer edges of the cyclone.
Walker grabbed onto his straps and forced his mouth shut so that the vibrations wouldn’t get his teeth chattering. Looking around, he realized that he wished there were windows. Not that there was anything he could do about it, but knowing that they were about to crash into the ocean seemed better than not knowing.
Ruiz, who was sitting beside him, pointed at his rucksack. The altimeter they would use for the HAHO into Myanmar was on top of it, the digital numbers rapidly running backwards. They were at twenty thousand feet and descending fast.
After a few moments, Walker closed his eyes. He decided it was better not to know. If death was going to claim them, he’d rather it be a surprise.
46
&
nbsp; GUADALCANAL. MORNING.
As it turned out, they didn’t die.
The wide blue sky made a lie of the fact that a cyclone had just blown through. But the tattered palm fronds and coconuts littering the ground were a picturesque testament to the angry winds that had buffeted the South Pacific since creation. Still, after a few days of wind and another of rain, the Solomon Islands would be back to normal. They’d survived far worse than a simple cyclone. They’d survived bombardment from the Japanese and Americans as this small hunk of rock and dirt had been battled over until tens of thousands of men had bled out on the sand.
Walker was cognizant of this and more as he stared out upon the island. He’d just gone to the monument and was in awe of the place, just as he had been at Gettysburg. There’s a feeling at places where so much life has been lost, and Guadalcanal had it.
It also held some sort of magic. His skin was buzzing gently, as if a low current of electricity were running through it. But this was a benign sort of magic, perhaps created in the confluence of violence and death. A side effect of the battles, perhaps. Nothing like the malevolent ice pick he’d felt jabbing his psyche at the sweatshop.
He wiped sweat from his brow. They were essentially on the equator. The heat was stifling. He went shirtless above his cargo pants. He couldn’t imagine how the U.S. Marines had fought in such heat while wearing old wool uniforms. Even as relatively cool as Walker felt, moving was a little slow-motion. Wearing full battle rattle and in uniforms with a steel pot on one’s head had to be akin to walking on the bottom of the ocean in a diving suit. Fighting seemed an improbable occupation in this gloriously beautiful but terribly remote place.
He made his way back to the airstrip. The crew chief and ground personnel were talking off to one side, smoking cigarettes. Holmes, Ruiz, and Laws lay on their gear in the shade of the Starlifter. Down the runway, Yaya played with Hoover. This could almost have been a perfect moment. But it was the quiet before the storm. It was that single moment of peace before all hell broke loose. The Japanese had felt it before the marines landed. The marines had felt it as they huddled, wet and miserable in their foxholes, every morning that they held the island. And Walker had felt it aboard the USS Tennessee as he prepared his sniper rifle, with the sun, the wind, and the sea something out of a travel magazine rather than a Somali pirate sea adventure.
They were waiting for an agency jet. The initial infiltration plan had been High Altitude/High Opening—HAHO. They’d switched that to High Altitude/Low Opening—HALO. They’d changed it yet again to Low Altitude/Low Opening—LALO. The plan was for the jet to cruise in just above the jungle canopy east of the Thaton airport. SEAL Team 666 would jump out the back and land before anyone noticed their exit.
It was a simple plan.
But there were problems with it.
The United States had no diplomatic relations with the government of Myanmar. Among other things, this meant that no U.S. citizens or their conveyances were allowed into or around the country. Additionally, the government had made it known that they were pretty pissed at the posture of the United States against their regime and in support of the Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. In fact, a high-level minister was quoted as saying that he “wouldn’t spit into the mouth of an American, even if he was dying of thirst”—translated, of course. The bottom line was that they were not wanted and the Myanmar government would be on the lookout for any sort of American intervention into their internal politics.
Another problem was that neither Yaya nor Walker had ever done a LALO jump—a jump of less than nine hundred feet. Since it took three hundred feet for the chute to deploy, that left six hundred feet to steer the chute to safety.
They also had the wrong parachutes. The MC-4s were designed for free fall. They were highly maneuverable and agile, because the parachute canopies were relatively small. After all, it had more than thirty thousand feet to scoop air. But now they had less than nine hundred feet. They needed a much larger canopy. They also needed something they could leave behind that wouldn’t identify them as American.
The final decision had been to pair Chinese cargo chutes with drag chutes. The drag chutes would be deployed from an open air ramp. The wind would rip these back, thus drawing out the yards of material that composed the cargo chutes. Without the drag chutes, the cargo chutes wouldn’t have enough time to open. But with them, opening of the cargo chutes would be simultaneous to the SEALs’ exiting the aircraft. And when the cargo chutes deployed, they’d reduce their speed to almost nothing.
Then they’d flutter gently to the ground like a feather from the ass of an eagle.
Simple, Laws had said.
Piece of cake, Ruiz had said.
Deal with it, Holmes had said.
Walker watched Hoover play for a while. It was going to be toughest on the dog. Walker hoped the pooch was going to be okay. He had a feeling they’d need her before it was all over.
The sound of an aircraft reached him. He craned his neck and looked for it in the sky. Finally he spied it and tracked its approach.
Laws came up to join him. “You look nervous.”
Walker shrugged. “Always nervous before an op.”
“All the changes don’t help, either.”
“It is what it is,” Walker said flatly. He knew he was nervous. Talking about it would only make him more so.
Laws seemed to realize this, because he shut up until the plane was coming in for a landing.
It was a big cargo jet, painted yellow with red stripes and letters. Walker recognized the logo. DSL—WE DELIVER WORLDWIDE. He chuckled and shook his head. Count on the agency to find the sort of plane that would be able to land at an airport in a country that despised Americans. Not only was DSL not an American-owned company, it was essentially the mail, and even the most backwater, right-wing dictatorships liked to get packages filled with sleek Western merchandise. It landed and taxied to a stop near the Starlifter.
“Okay, SEALs. Get your gear and load up. We got a delivery to make.”
Walker did a double take. It appeared as if their fearless leader had just made a joke.
And you know what? It was almost funny.
47
KADWAN. TWO WEEKS EARLIER.
The city was theirs. Their power was unimaginable. No one could stand against them. They rose as one, two souls within one body, and stood amid the ruins of what had once been a church, a ridiculous symbol to one of the angry gods the meek insisted upon worshipping. A dead priest lay at his feet, unable to comprehend the reality of Chi Long even when he’d met him face-to-face.
A thrall came to them. He wore the suit of a policeman, but he was a Karen, one of their people. The thrall leaned back his head and knelt. “My lord, they are ready.”
“Have they prepared themselves?”
“They have, my lord.”
“You have done well.” Chi Long reached out with jagged nails and sliced the man’s neck from ear to ear. The man sighed and seemed to smile beatifically, then collapsed as his body bled out.
Chi Long and the soul known now as He Who Had Once Been Alone strode out of the church and into the street. Bodies lay in piles. Funny how they clumped together when they were about to die. If his people were to retake the world, they’d have to rid themselves of the bodies. Their rot would bring unneeded disease and pestilence.
He Who Had Once Been Alone recognized one of the dead. The man had been his doctor and had seen him through a fever that had killed many. Such a shame that he’d died. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t Karen. Saw Thuza Tun’s body had been transformed into something beautiful with the coming of Chi Long. Gone was his balding head. Gone was his growing middle. He was now tall and muscled and regal. He was a warrior from a time long gone. He was a leader who could capture the hearts of other Karen. He was a king waiting to take his kingdom.
Yet despite this outward change, covered with the suit of tattooed skin, he remained himself, sometimes able to exert control, always
able to hide from the ever-searching souls Chi Long had captured before. Together as one, they moved through the city until they reached a wide-open space. His thralls were moving his beasts in place. It took four of them for each beast. The arrangement was predetermined and would allow them access to the most power.
When the time came, their deaths would be beautiful.
48
SKY ABOVE THATON. LATE AFTERNOON.
Walker crabbed to the edge of the ramp. Wind whipped around him. His head was ensconced in a Protec skate helmet. He wore a fishing vest, cargo pants, and black body armor over a black T-shirt. On his back was a chute so big it looked like the top half of a Volkswagen Bug. The Stoner was in its M1950 weapons case. This LALO jump, unlike his previous HAHO jump, he didn’t require lowering. Instead, he held on to the case for dear life.
He was the first one out. Without looking back, he knew the other SEALs were stacked behind him. Once he jumped, the next drag chute would be deployed, then the next, etc. Unlike other jumps, they wouldn’t be able to come down together. The operation of the drag chute necessitated the passage of time, and that meant distance as the jet moved over the jungle.
“Ready.”
The agency crew chief wore black cargo pants with a black Marilyn Manson shirt. Black glasses completed his ensemble. He held the drag chute in his arms.
Walker gave him a thumbs-up and turned around. The other SEALs turned as well. Walker leaned forward as far as he could. When the drag chute deployed, he felt a hard tug as it began to peel away the loosely packed Chinese cargo chute. As the cargo chute gathered air, he felt an increase in the pull against him. Then he was jerked so hard, he was sure his lungs, eyes, and tongue had been left on the ramp.
He went from ninety miles an hour to zero in less than five seconds. When he finally opened his eyes, his feet were brushing the tops of trees. He had no hope of steering, but he still tried. Pulling the risers of the cargo chute gave it all the maneuverability of a Cadillac on an ice rink.