by Lowry, Chris
WIZARD
AT
WAR
by
Chris Lowry
A Marshal of Magic file
@copyright 2017
Grand Ozarks Media
All Rights Reserved
WIZARD AT WAR
1
The Chinook flew in low and heavy over the Kyber Pass, the whirring blades cracking the silent dawn air and revealing to every person in the area their exact location.
The belly was filled with seven men, covered head to toe in black combat fatiques, faces hidden behind baklavas, short barreled MP-5’s cradled against their chests. They sat silent, stoic as two men manned the giant M-60 mini guns pointed out of the windows.
The seventh man sat apart from the rest and even though he was dressed exactly the same, he was in fact, different. The man, this soldier in SEAL combat gear was in fact a wizard.
More than a wizard, he was a combat trained Magus, CTM embedded with a Special Operations Group comprised of Navy Seals.
His name was Davees MacAlroy and he was a trained killer who could do the job with the automatic rifle in his hands or the wand he wore strapped to his combat webbing. Right now, his eyes were closed in concentration as he murmured a cloaking spell for the helicopter as it flew past the barren mountains.
The spell casting was draining, and sweat slipped down the bridge of his nose to soak the black fabric that covered his mouth. He could cloak the passage of the chopper, mask it from prying eyes, but he could do nothing for the sound.
“Davees?”
“Chief?”
“How you holding up?”
Chief Warrant Officer Gregory Lucas sat closet to Davees on the benches in the helicopter. His gray blue eyes were hard as flint and glared out at the world.
“Fine.”
“How far?”
Chief motioned to the copilot who consulted a radar map.
He held up one hand and flashed five fingers twice.
“Ten minutes,” Chief told Davees.
The wizard nodded and never stopped murmuring.
2
Ten minutes later the helicopter settled quickly onto a bare patch of earth at the edge of a canyon. The SOG Team quickly jumped out of the helicopter in a standard two by two formation.
The first two men to hit the ground took up positions to set up a cross-fire as the others followed and assumed their positions.
By the time Davees stumbled out of the side of the whirly bird seconds later the men had established a perimeter which they held as the chopper lifted off and disappeared into the thin altitude.
Davees crawled forward to join the Chief.
“Two klicks up that hill,” he pointed up the vertical mountain path that slid up into the canyon.
“I’ll take point,” volunteered Davees.
“Move out,” the Chief ordered.
3
Davees took lead about six yards ahead of the others. He volunteered for point because that was his job. Even as his eyes scanned the details of the geography, his senses were stretched out. Wizards were real keen on senses, which is how they came to be attached to almost every Special Forces Team in both the American and British armies.
Davees had been in the SOG for three years, commissioned there after distinguished service with four other SEAL teams.
It was a lonely existence.
The American government “discovered” wizards at the end of World War II when a Ranger detachment discovered a Nazi camp in Germany that trained the magic users for combat.
Before that there were no records of wizards being involved in human conflict.
Uncle Sam decided if the Nazis could use Wizards for war then so could they. Just as they smuggled out scientists and intellectuals from the country, they stole and gave solace to German wizards in exchange for developing an American force.
“Anything?”
Davees extended his sight up into the canyons. He could feel people around them, but no one near enough to notice.
“Clear, Chief.”
The Chief nodded and Davees kept walking. The rest of the men fell in behind them.
Contrary to what the movies and Hollywood would have you believe a SOG Team can spread out almost fifty yards between point and rear. The idea is to keep the men away from each other so that any ambush would limit losses.
A SEAL Team was cut down that way in a pass not too far from where they were.
The men bunched up at a boulder and the terrorists they were hunting attacked and killed them all. That team did not have a Wizard embedded.
“Around that bend, Chief,” Davess warned.
They had traveled the distance very quickly. The Chief passed Davess by and moved for the curve in the path. He glanced around the edge, confirmed the area was occupied by friendlies and motioned the rest of the SOG forward.
The area was another mountain clearing. This time it was occupied by a group of soldiers and odder still four men in suits who looked very out of place in the arid mountains. The soldiers were an Army Special Forces recovery unit, a designation given to teams that retrieved the bodies of fallen soldiers from a combat site.
They moved around now, preparing body bags for the seven men who lay in various stages of death. There had been a firefight, that much was obvious. Shell casings littered the bodies and bullet scars gouged the sides of the mountain and rock face. There was no sign of what they were shooting at.
The CTM for this team was on point and the furthest body away from the men as they filed into the clearing.
Davess noticed right away that the body was scorched by magic. All of the men were touched in some way. No bullets, but plenty of blood. Limbs at odd angles, looks of surprise, shock and agony etched on every face.
The CTM was young, his baby faced cheeks making him look barely out of his teens.
Davees stared down at the body.
“Know him?”
One of the suits walked up to stand beside him.
“No Sir.”
“Rogers.”
“Your name or his?”
“His. Six months out of AT.”
“He’s too young to be this high up.”
“This was a routine patrol,” the Suit motioned to the hills. “We’re in ally territory.”
“They do this?”
“You tell me.”
Davees muttered a spell, casting out into the region. Again he could feel more people, a village over the hill, but nothing malicious. No hint of the kind of magic that did this.
“I got zero,” he said.
“Then you know what this means?”
“Yes Sir.”
He didn’t have to say it.
“Al Queda’s got themselves a wizard too,” said the Suit.
“Shit,” said the Chief.
It was how they all felt.
The bodies were bagged and tagged by the forensics team while Davees cast a seeking spell into the crags and hills surrounding them. He searched for clues, a trace of the magical energies that had been used to wreak havoc on the SEAL team.
“Anything?” asked the Chief.
“No Sir,” Davees blew out a soft breath releasing the magical energy pent up inside his chest.
“It’s like they were never here. There’s no life energy, no residual energy, nothing.”
“Weird?”
“Real weird, Sir.”
Chief turned to the others.
“All right boys, the Wizard says he can’t feel anything and he put the voo doo on it. That means we’re working with some non-regulated shit. Got it?”
The men nodd
ed. They were pros.
“What we doing Chief?”
That was Redeye, a tall thin man with tiger stripes painted across his face with camo paint.
“Orders are to move on that village and find the magician doing the voo doo.”
“Wizard.”
Chief shrugged.
“Same thing, right.”
It wasn’t a question.
He nodded for Davees to take point again and lead them up the rocky path.
4
Davees stopped at the edge of the village and studied the layout below. Some might think he was using his eyes to trace the lines of the sunbaked mud huts, or the tiny plots of donkey offal enhanced soil that sported meager plants.
But he was casting his senses to see the hidden.
He squinted his eyes against the glare of the sun and wished for a moment he could put on the pair of aviator sunglasses he kept in a pouch on the front of his jacket. But while the mirror lenses looked cool, they interfered with his ability to sense magic.
He needed true eyesight for this.
He was searching for signs of use, hidden signatures that any wizard would leave behind in passing. It wouldn’t be much, like a tracker seeing a blade of grass bent in the wrong direction and knowing it indicated someone moved through.
So too did magic leave a trace.
Especially the kind of magic used to take out an entire squad.
The Pakistani wizard would be exhausted, he knew that much.
Davees motioned the Chief to join him.
“I can’t see him down there.”
“With your eyes?” the Chief double checked.
“Those either. Maybe our tracker can look for a boot print or something. They might be carrying him.”
“He like to get treated like a royal princess too?”
“Am I a burden to your command Chief?”
The Chief hung his head for a moment and chewed on his ample lip.
“Sorry,” he offered. “Still not used to you guys on the Teams.”
“Here by DOD order,” Davees squinted. “It’s a new world Chief.”
“Sometimes I miss the old one.”
He opened his mouth and a bubble of blood burst from his lips as he fell forward across Davee.
The magic user barely had time to shout before the rest of his squad flopped to the ground in grotesque spasms that left them twisted and twitching in the dirt.
Davee shoved the dead weight of the Chief off of him and prepared his death curse even as he scrambled to his knees, ready to fire a spell back.
The area around him fogged up in a bubble. He could make out the almost perfect edges where the smoke ended and the acrid desert began.
But he couldn’t see his foe.
He didn’t see the spell that crashed into the base of his skull where it met the spine. He just blinked into darkness as he pitched forward and rolled down the hill.
5
“You’re being drafted.”
The hell I am.
That’s what I wanted to say. It’s what I almost said.
But when you’re standing in front of the Judge, who may be the most powerful magic user on the planet, maybe even the whole galaxy, it’s always good advice to keep your mouth shut.
“Sir?”
I tried not to squeak it.
I mostly succeeded.
“Did you blow yourself up in the lab?”
“No,” I said.
I thought I knew where this was going though.
The Judge did not like to repeat himself.
“I don’t like to repeat myself.”
I know.
“Yes sir.”
“I can hear you, you know.”
Gulp.
It’s not so much I forgot that my boss was probably a mind reader. It was a craft beer induced state of fogginess.
Also he had dragged me out of bed with a summons in the middle of the night.
Technically, it was morning, because of the whole after midnight turns into tomorrow deal.
Personally, I always wondered about the way we kept time, but I had other things to research.
I put a pin in it.
Maybe one day I’d ask the judge about the whole calling early morning “the middle of the night” debate.
Or save it for my Watcher, Elvis Rodriguez. He liked to research, and obscure information like that was right up his alley.
“You ready to join me son?”
He didn’t ask with any affection.
I wasn’t his son. I was one of his Marshal’s, one of a rotating roster of twelve scattered across the seven continents.
He might have liked me a little bit more than the rest, but only because I had been with him the longest.
Alive the longest.
A Marshal of Magic does not have a long life span.
Not normally.
My magical gift is a pre-cog, combined with some training as a Battle Mage and a whole lot of luck.
I outlived the others.
Anytime he brought on someone new, he tossed them in the Eastern USA for me to train.
Sometimes it was Bueno. Muy beuno.
I got to help prepare a new Marshal on a million ways to not die in our line of work.
Which was keeping magic users in line and taking care of those who got out of it. Usually in a spell first, get info later kind of manner.
Except now my boss was telling me I was drafted.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, get your hump in gear. We’ve got a situation over in Afghanistan.”
“Yes Sir,” I agreed. “We’ve got a war going on in Afghanistan.”
At least I think we did.
Don’t blame me for not keeping up with current events.
They’re way more important to the normals than they are to us. Me.
I was born in the early 1900’s, so I’ve watched a lot of changes.
I hazarded a guess that the Judge was born sometime before Merlin. Hell, he might have been Merlin, except that he looked like that Colonel in the TV show about Army doctors in Korea. Small round spectacles.
He didn’t need them.
Balding pate.
Did you know magic can’t cure baldness? If that’s not ironic, I can’t define it.
Bright blue eyes with hourglass shaped irises.
Eyes that drilled through you and laid bare your soul. Eyes that were staring at me right now, waiting for an answer.
Or movement.
That’s what he wanted. The Judge wanted me to move my hump over to the other side of the world.
“Why isn’t the Marshal handling it?”
I referred to the two Marshal’s on the Asian continents. One was Russian. One was Chinese. Two Marshal’s per continent, except for Antarctica.
Nothing there to Marshal.
“Because,” he said in a really slow voice. “I want you to handle it.”
Yikes.
There’s no other way to answer except to agree. I wasn’t sure if he expected a salute, but I gave him one anyway.
It made him smile.
“Keep that in mind,” he flicked a finger in my direction.
I felt a whoosh and I was standing outside an FOB in the middle of the Afghan desert.
6
The four Marines guarding the gate of the FOB had standing orders to fire first, ask questions later. That or they were so spooked when a man popped out of thin air in front of their guard shack that they lost control of their trigger fingers, sprayed and prayed.
I had been with some Marines in World War II on an assignment and figured they were as well or better trained now than they were then.
My pre-cog kicked in half a second before the first bullet flew, so I threw up a shield between us and caught almost all the bullets. They deflected out into the sandy wash with dull thuds.
They emptied their magazines and stopped shooting as they ran out of bullets. I guess they realized I was a magic user before they started
shooting again, because they didn’t waste any more ammunition.
They did fan out and surround me while reinforcements from the base joined them.
Most folks get a little squirrely at the center of a ring of machine guns aimed at their face.
I am not the exception to that rule. Well trained or not, I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, most of all me.
So I lifted up both hands in the universal sign of surrender.
They weren’t fooled.
“Wizard!” one of the gate guards shouted to the others.
That meant they were zeroed in on my hands. I saw eyeballs flick up to my fingers, and hoped the guys behind me didn’t decide to shoot anything off.
They didn’t need to know that a wizard uses willpower for magic, and the hands, fingers, wand were just for focus and sometimes show. Strong magic users could make it happen with their mind.
Battle mages are some of the strongest on the planet. Hey, we have to be. Battle isn’t for the weak.
Lucky battle mages who have pre-cog usually don’t worry about being surrounded by Marines.