Keeping low, Scarecrow moved into the cell on his left, his weapon at the ready. The room was exactly the same as the others in the previous chamber... except for the large pool of congealing blood that covered half the floor.
"Oh, shit!" he hissed. This is not good, not fucking good at all, he thought as he began to back out of the cell.
A man stepped from the shadows. In the split second between the shock of registering his presence and the muscle memory of his training kicking in, Scarecrow recognized the man as Alil Al Abba, the target his team had been sent to capture. Scarecrow's weapon was rising before he even knew it, his finger slipping off the guard and onto the trigger. But before he could fire, Al Abba deftly stepped toward him, grabbed the muzzle of the weapon and wrenched it from his hands.
Scarecrow stepped back and reached for the pistol strapped to his thigh. He had just managed to pull it from its holster, when a second and third man rushed from the darkness of the other room and grabbed him, wrestling the pistol out of his hands and sending it spinning away into the dusty corridor. Scarecrow threw his head back and aimed a head-butt at the nearest man's face, colliding with enough force to break his assailant's nose. The attacker, a dark-skinned man in his mid-forties, let out a grunt of pain as blood spurted from his shattered nose. But his eyes never left Scarecrow's, and Scarecrow could see the cold hatred of a seasoned fighter behind those eyes, even as the man's grip tightened around his wrist and arm.
Scarecrow didn't see the punch his second captor threw hard and deep into his solar plexus. He felt the air burst from his lungs as he doubled over in pain. A second punch to his kidney drained all the fight from Scarecrow. The two assailants pushed him face down onto the dusty rock floor.
Scarecrow wheezed, flashes of white light sparking in front of his eyes, as he gasped for breath like a fish dumped on the bank of a river.
The two men pulled Scarecrow roughly to his feet.
Al Abba stepped forward, grabbed Scarecrow's sagging head by his jaw and slowly tilted it up until it was level with his own. The al-Qaeda leader stared deep into Scarecrow's eyes as though he was looking for something only he could see.
"Let me tell you a story," Al Abba said, his English almost perfect, with only a hint of accent to betray his Pashtun origins. "Over two thousand years ago, Alexander the Great made his way through these mountains. There was nothing here, nothing but rock and sand and dust and death. The perfect place to build this fortress. He left a select group of men behind to guard it until he called on them again. And to those men he entrusted his greatest secret: a weapon. The ultimate weapon; something he used to forge his legacy. And we have kept that weapon hidden here, protecting it with our lives, until it was needed again."
Al Abba released him. Scarecrow's head drooped then lifted slowly until he faced Al Abba, his eyes defiant.
Al Abba continued. "Through the millennia we have kept that secret safe behind these walls." Al Abba stepped back and stared at Scarecrow. "But tonight, I will give you the honor of experiencing it firsthand. And if Allah is willing, you will become the tip of a spear that will strike at the exposed heart of your country."
"Fuck you!" the sniper spat. But despite the act of defiance, Scarecrow felt his heart sink. They had all been duped; his team, the CIA, the intelligence assets, every damn one of them. Directed to this place by planted or unwitting local informants. All while Al Abba and his men had lain patiently in wait, ready to spring their trap.
Al Abba shook his head, then leaned in and whispered into Scarecrow's ear. "You are a brave man, even in the face of what you believe to be certain death. But you are mistaken, I am not going to kill you."
Al Abba nodded to the big man holding Scarecrow's right arm, and he felt himself being dragged toward one of the locked cells. Al Abba unlocked the door with a large iron key.
Scarecrow caught a glimpse of a smaller darkened room beyond the doorway. At the back of the room, a second door was hewn into the rock wall, looking like something from a fancy European castle.
"What the hell is this?" Scarecrow yelled, digging his heels into the floor to try to slow his captors. Rough hands forced him into the cell, the only answer to his question the sound of the cell door slamming shut behind him.
Scarecrow pushed himself to his feet.
The scrape of metal locks against ancient rusted hasps was followed by the screech of a small wooden window in the door sliding open. A shaft of light filled the room. Alil Al Abba's eyes appeared at the opening, watched Scarecrow for a moment, then disappeared as the wooden cover slid back into place.
Darkness swallowed Scarecrow. He fumbled for the night vision goggles still hanging around his neck, found them, and slipped them over his eyes as he fought to get his breathing under control. The goggles were still working, thank God. He looked around the room. The prison was as sparse as the other cells he had seen before he was captured. A light layer of sand covered the floor. Ignoring the pain in his muscles from the beating, Scarecrow stumbled to the door at the opposite end of the small cell, his right hand clasped to his side, cradling what he was sure were a couple of fractured ribs.
This second door was an ornate piece of work that looked as though it had been hand carved. Images of armor-clad warriors had been engraved deep into the ancient wood. Behind them, bodies lay strewn across the ground. Ahead of them, more soldiers in different armor fled in obvious panic, leaving behind weapons and shields, which was strange because the attackers carried no weapons or shields of any kind. Around the edges of the door were what Scarecrow took to be skulls.
It reminded him of a picture he'd seen of the Bayeux Tapestry when he was a kid. The tapestry had been created to commemorate the Battle of Hastings when the Normans had invaded and ultimately conquered Britain in 1066. The carvings on the door in front of him were in that same simplistic, almost childlike style, but the scenes they depicted were anything but childlike. They were vicious and bloodthirsty. Obviously whoever had crafted this wanted to impart the military value of whatever was locked away behind the door.
Despite his dire situation, Scarecrow could not help but be impressed by the exquisite workmanship of the craftsmen who had made this work of art. He ran his fingers slowly over the wood. There's no lock, he realized after a few more seconds. And no handle either. In fact, there was no visible way for the door to open at all.
He worked his fingers around the edges of the door where it met the wall. He felt the slightest of gaps between the wood and the rock.
Amazing workmanship. The door sat in a slit that had been carved out of the rock face. And somehow the architects of this fortress had slotted the door into that carved space so that the door could only be raised or lowered.
Scarecrow jumped as something banged against the opposite side of the door.
"Boss, is that you?" he whispered, his ear flat against the wood of the doorway.
There was another thump against the door and Scarecrow pulled his head away.
"Boss, it's Scarecrow. Can you hear me? You okay?"
He heard a sound, barely audible through the thick wood of the door; a low keening, almost a mewling, like that of a child.
"Jesus!" Scarecrow hissed. He immediately began looking for a latch or a handhold that he could use as leverage to open the door, but found nothing.
"Shit, shit, shit!" Scarecrow stepped back from the door in frustration. He could feel his anger rising, threatening to get the better of him. He needed to get control of himself if he was going to gain any kind of advantage out of this situation.
A metallic rattle, like chains being dragged over a cobblestone floor echoed through the room.
Scarecrow spun around to see the door slowly beginning to lift. A gap of six inches had already appeared between it and the floor. An icy gust of cold air flowed out of the opening, and Scarecrow felt the already chilled temperature of the room begin to drop even lower. He took a step toward the door, reaching down to grab the base of it as it rose higher.
A hand, small, almost childlike but unnaturally white to the point that it was virtually alabaster, reached through the growing space beneath the door. Thin spider-like fingers grasped at the empty air. Long nails at the tips of each finger scraped against the rock floor. A second hand appeared, attached to a spindly arm.
Scarecrow took another step back, his hand instinctively reaching for the empty holster on his thigh. His back hit the opposite wall just as a pair of flat, luminous yellow eyes appeared in the blackness of the space beneath the rising door.
The eyes looked around the room and Scarecrow thought he could hear whatever owned them sniffing at the air, like a wolf scenting its prey. Then they fixed squarely on him. A hiss escaped from the creature's mouth, as it pulled itself through the gap, out of the darkness beyond the door.
And in the final moments of his life, as the creature scuttled across the floor toward him, Scarecrow screamed.
•••
The American soldier succumbed, just as the others before him had. History demanded that the American remain nameless other than the call sign Alil Al Abba had overheard; Scarecrow. Beyond the wooden door separating Al Abba and his men, the soldier's screams quickly faded to a wet gurgle then finally stopped completely, replaced by a deep slurping sound, like mud forced through a blocked pipe.
Eventually even that sound faded to nothing.
Alil Al Abba observed as this all unfolded through the narrow wooden slit in the door. He watched the pale, skeletal creature sniff the now-still corpse of the dead soldier, the American's mouth agape, a line of bloody drool dripping from between his lips.
The creature, its head bald except for a few tufts of black hair, dipped and lapped at the blood. When it was done, it sidled spider-like around the cell. The creature's eyes locked with Alil Al Abba's, and the living man felt a shudder of revulsion, tinged with a strange attraction that seemed to emanate from the thing's eyes. They shone like pools of shifting molten sand, fascinating, compelling, unrelenting...
Alil Al Abba raised his right hand. Instantly, the cell was flooded with light from a single UV bulb in the ceiling of the room. The creature squealed and hissed, bouncing off the walls, blinded, before vanishing back into the darkness of the room beyond the ornate door.
The gate descended noisily back into place.
"Bring the bodies of the others," Al Abba said, not taking his eyes from the lifeless soldier sprawled on the cold floor in front of him. The change could take as little as a day to take effect, for others two, so there was little time to waste. Every second was precious if his plan was to be successful. "We leave in twenty minutes."
Alil Al Abba continued to stare at the soldier's body. A minute passed, then another. Finally, a grim smile formed on his lips as he whispered "Allah hu akbar," and slid the cover closed.
ASSOCIATED PRESS—BREAKING NEWS
The bodies of twelve US military advisors were found this morning near a military base in northern Afghanistan. The military advisors are reported to have been killed by a roadside bomb. According to sources, the advisors were a part of an ongoing effort to train Afghan military units in the war against al-Qaeda insurgents in the area.
CHAPTER TWO
Captain Mike Lewis yawned, closed his eyes for a second then blinked them open, then repeated it a couple more times until the instruments on his flight panel finally swam back into focus. This had been a particularly grueling flight—fourteen hours straight in the air—and the lack of sleep was finally catching up with him. But his cargo was considered precious, and this flight, well it was more a mission of conscience for him and his two other crew. He'd brought back bodies from Afghanistan before, but never so many, and never of guys he had worked with on such a regular basis. It was a crying shame what had happened to them. A goddamn crying shame.
Captain Lewis yawned again, then spoke into his helmet's microphone, "GM-Heavy-two-niner-one to March tower we are on approach. Over."
The response came almost immediately, "Roger that GM-Heavy-two-niner-one, you are cleared for landing on runway two. Over."
Captain Lewis eased the C-17 Globemaster until the nose of the plane aligned with the lights of their assigned runway twinkling like tiny candles in the darkness ahead of him, about seven miles away. Surrounding that tiny strip of light, the brighter lights of Los Angeles glowed.
Captain Lewis's co-pilot, First Officer Cecilia Fasciano spoke into her microphone, "Loadmaster, we are on approach, please make sure your seats are in the upright position and your ass is in one of 'em."
Lewis smiled at the line, a routine he'd heard played out God knew how many times over the last four years he'd worked with these guys. After all the shit they had been through, they were a tight-knit, well-oiled, team... most of the time, at least. He instinctively paused, waiting for Dave Shafer's usual response of 'Ass down and secured, sir'.
It didn't come. Captain Lewis glanced across at Cece, who caught his gaze and returned it with one that showed her bemusement at the lack of a reply. She followed the look with a shrug of her slim shoulders. Cece leaned in and turned a knob on the instrument panel, switching the microphone to the cargo bay speaker, just in case there was a problem with Dave's headset. It wasn't like he wouldn't know they were on their descent, the landing gear had just come down with a thud that reverberated through the plane as the wheels locked into place. And there was an unmistakable shift in the handling of the aircraft as its aerodynamics changed.
"Dave? We're on approach, you need to let me know everything is okay back there." She paused for several seconds, waiting for a reply. When none came, she repeated the question, but there was still no answer from the loadmaster.
Cece let out an exaggerated sigh of exasperation. She turned in her seat to face Lewis. "Captain, request permission to go and make sure our loadmaster hasn't fallen out the back of the aircraft?" Her voice contained only half the sarcasm the sentence should have carried.
"Make it fast," Captain Lewis said. They were now less than three miles out and their altitude was dropping rapidly. The last thing he felt like doing was making another pass because his loadmaster had fallen asleep in the bathroom.
"Roger that," Cece said. She unbuckled her harness and slipped through the door between the cockpit and the cargo bay of the aircraft.
Thirty seconds went by before Cece's cool professional voice crackled in Lewis's ear, and he could tell by his copilot's tone that she was spooked. "Captain, I'm back here in the hold. There's no sign of Dave. And it looks like a couple of the coffins have—"
Lewis caught a sound that lasted only for the briefest of instants and that could have been the first part of a sharp intake of breath or an exclamation of surprise, but Cece's microphone cut out and left him with just a barely audible static hiss.
"Cece, do you copy?"
Silence.
Captain Lewis felt a cold line of sweat drop from his armpits and run down the sides of his chest. "Cece, get your ass back here, right—"
A loud boom filled the cabin as something hit the cockpit door hard enough to rattle the hinges.
"Jesus Christ," Lewis yelled, glancing back toward the door while keeping one eye on his approach. "Dave, this is no time to be screwing around, get yourself—"
An even louder thump, like someone had just shoulder charged the door, echoed through the cockpit.
The lights of the airport now lay directly ahead of the cockpit window. A rough crosswind of eighteen knots buffeted the C-17. It was all Captain Lewis could do to concentrate on keeping the aircraft's nose pointed where it should be. "Dave, get your ass in your seat," he snapped, unable to keep the anger from his voice. "That's a goddamn order." They were only seconds away from touching down and this kind of idiocy was simply unacceptable. He was going to have to bust Dave's balls later for this out of character BS. Christ! If he was drunk again there was going to be hell to pay.
Lewis pulled the cup of the headphones off
his right ear and listened.
Scccriiitch!
The new sound floated across the space between the door and the pilot's seat. It took a few seconds for Lewis to place it; it sounded like nails being drawn down the metal exterior of the cockpit door.
There was another sound; the unmistakable click of the cabin door's lock unlatching. The sound vanished in the screech of the massive transport plane's tires touching down on the runway.
Lewis began to throttle back. Aiming the nose of the plane toward the lights of a clutch of military vehicles waiting on the skirt at the end of the runway.
"You idiots had better have a really good reason for why you'd pull such a goddamn stupid stunt," Captain Lewis called back over his shoulder.
There was still no reply.
Now he was really pissed. Joking around was acceptable, it was a universally understood way to relieve the stress and horror that servicemen and women endured on an almost daily basis. But this stunt, this was just plain dumb. The two idiots had put the entire flight in danger, not just their three lives but the lives of those on the ground too, not to mention the fact that they were carrying the remains of twelve of their own in the hold. He was seriously considering filing a reprimand.
And what the hell was that weird smell? Lewis's nose wrinkled. "Jeez-us!" Lewis exclaimed as he throttled the aircraft's engines back. He looked back over his shoulder again, expecting to see Cece's and Dave's smirking faces. Instead he saw the pale, ghost-like faces of two dead men. He knew they were dead because of the blood-stained battle fatigues they wore, and by the way their eyes seemed to glow yellow in the dim electronic light of the cockpit's instrument panel.
The Darkening Page 2