The Lost Army

by Christopher Golden

  CHAPTER THREE

  —

  “Thanks for coming,” Anastasia said warmly. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.” “That’s a lie,” Hellboy replied. “I could never say no to you.”

  “Well, that’s only because my logic is flawless,” she boasted.

  “Actually, it’s just that I hated the way your lip quivered whenever you were disappointed,” he said.

  Hellboy noticed Arun settle himself more firmly in the driver’s seat of the jeep. He suspected that the man was attempting to listen to his conversation with Anastasia, but if so, his efforts were in vain. The wind tore their words away so quickly that they could barely understand one another in the back of the vehicle. Arun could not have heard them.

  Hellboy was pleased. Anastasia’s complete lack of discomfort regarding their relationship, despite her awareness that most people could not understand it, had always impressed him. But other people weren’t always so understanding. Even now, Anastasia appeared not the least bit uncomfortable with their minor flirtation — a conversation that implied past intimacy — despite Arun’s presence and surreptitious attention.

  That nonchalance had been one of the things that made Hellboy love Anastasia from the very beginning of their acquaintance.

  “But enough about my irresistible nature,” she joked. “And back to business. I asked you to Egypt to join my current investigation.”

  “Which is?” he asked.

  “Five weeks ago, the British Museum sent an archaeological team here,” Anastasia explained. “One of the team members was a third cousin or some such to the Royal Family.”

  “That explains why Creaghan and the other James Bond wannabes are here,” Hellboy noted. “But I still don’t know why I’m here.”

  “The team had Bedouin couriers deliver supplies and mail once a week,” Anastasia continued. “Last week, when the couriers arrived, the team was gone.”

  “Gone?” Hellboy asked. “Okay, so a half-dozen people get lost in the desert, can’t find their way home, and wind up walking until they drop. Tragic, but not exactly my area of expertise.”

  Anastasia sighed.

  “I’m afraid you misunderstand,” she said. “I mean they were gone.”

  “Yeah, I got that part,” Hellboy insisted. “I don’t see a mystery. If they didn’t get lost, then some desert bandits killed them or something.”

  The jeep bounced over a small dune and rolled into the investigative team’s base camp. The sun was brutal, and every time the wind kicked sand up from the desert floor, Hellboy shielded his eyes. Several Bedouins pointed at him and hid in their tents. Others merely stared.

  “Are these people going to mutiny if you bring me into their camp?” he asked.

  “First of all, it’s my camp,” Anastasia said. “Secondly, I’ve told my people about you. Creaghan will probably have told the rest of his team about you by now. Word should spread fairly quick. Then they won’t bother you anymore.

  “As for your getting-lost-or-attacked-by-desert-bandits theory, this wasn’t a half-dozen people wandering about the desert,” Anastasia insisted. “We’re talking about twenty-seven people, eight vehicles, and an enormous amount of equipment. Look around at this camp, and you’ll understand the kind of undertaking we’re talking about here.”

  Hellboy squinted and nodded as he looked around. Tents and trucks and equipment and camels and people.

  “I know what you’re saying,” he admitted. “It would take a lot of people a lot of time to evacuate a camp this size. But the thieves would have had all the time in the world. No one around, no rush. I still say desert bandits.”

  “And it’s a nice fantasy,” Anastasia replied. “But you’ve been asking why I called you here, and I’m trying to explain it to you. When I said they were gone, I meant everything and everyone. Twenty-seven people disappear in the Egyptian desert without a trace. No tents. No food or garbage or equipment. Not a scrap. Even if somebody took everything, like the bloody Grinch, there would still be some sign that people had been here. The desert covers everything, but it’s like the ocean tides. Things get thrown back to shore after a while. We’ve found refuse from geographical surveys twenty years ago, perfectly preserved.

  “It’s as if they were never here at all,” she concluded.

  “Well, that’s more like it,” Hellboy nodded. “Now I know why you asked me to come.”

  Arun Lahiri climbed out of the jeep. Hellboy and Anastasia both followed.

  “That’s not all,” Anastasia said. “It gets weirder.”

  Hellboy was about to reply when Creaghan appeared from within one of the tents. He scanned the camp, spotted them, and strode across the sand in their direction.

  “Here comes my fan club,” Hellboy grimaced.

  But Creaghan barely glanced at Hellboy. He marched up to Anastasia with a grim set to his jaw.

  “Miss Bransfield,” he began. “I thought you would want to know that the Americans have commenced bombing Libya.”

  “Wonderful!” Anastasia cried. “That’s just what we need!”

  “How close are we to the border, again?” Hellboy asked.

  “Just a few miles,” Arun responded, and Hellboy glanced at him curiously. He had almost forgotten the man was there. He seemed to hang back, to skulk as if frightened or ashamed. Hellboy didn’t trust him. At least with someone like Creaghan, he was dealing with an eminently predictable nature.

  It was midafternoon. The camp seemed busy already, and Hellboy didn’t want to consider how cramped it would get when the search teams who must be out in the desert returned to their tents.

  Spicy cooking scents filled the air.

  “Do you guys think we could talk about this while we eat something?” he asked. “I’m starved.”

  “I don’t know if we’ve got enough food to feed you,” Anastasia joked. “Not the way you eat.”

  “Is this a time for humor?” Arun asked in alarm. “We’ve got a damned war coming down on our heads, and you make jokes?”

  “There won’t be a war,” Anastasia insisted.

  “You sound sure of that,” Creaghan said skeptically.

  “Fairly,” she answered. “The American President, Reagan, wants to make a stand against not only terrorism, but the arrogance of the Libyans. They crow about their involvement in such acts. They’ll come in and bomb the shit out of Libya’s military and industrial targets, then go home. Khadafy will run away with his tail between his legs.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Hellboy said, but Anastasia’s logic seemed sound to him, as usual. “But just in case, I guess I’d better eat now if I’m going to get anything at all.”

  “All right,” Anastasia surrendered. “Let’s go fill your stomach. I can’t worry about things I can’t control. War is one of those things.”

  A short time later, Hellboy sat with Anastasia and Arun while a Bedouin cook made them plates of falafel, cheese, and roasted pigeon. A basket of figs sat not far from the fire.

  “I don’t know about this,” Hellboy complained. “I mean, pigeon?”

  “Don’t be so narrow-minded,” Anastasia chided him. “It tastes just like chicken.”

  “That’s what they say about everything,” Hellboy mused. “I kind of have a feeling pigeon will taste like pigeon, though. No matter what you say.”

  Anastasia sighed and tore into the bird on her plate. Arun chewed in silence and Hellboy glared doubtfully at his plate. He bit off a piece of falafel and nibbled on a small hunk of cheese. Finally, he gave in and tasted the pigeon.

  “Not bad,” he admitted with a shrug. Then he gave Anastasia a skeptical sidelong glance. “Doesn’t taste a bit like chicken, though.”

  They ate quietly. When the cook offered them figs, Hellboy took several gratefully. He pondered the ease with which he and Anastasia had fallen back into the rhythm of patter that had once been so familiar for them. As if it had been five weeks since they last saw one another, not five years.

  None of which
meant anything in the end. They had ended their intimate relationship and maintained a carefully balanced friendship in its place. No matter how bittersweet it might be, he would do nothing to jeopardize that friendship, and he knew Anastasia felt the same, though they had never discussed it.

  “So, Hellboy, what do you think?” Arun asked, interrupting his musing.

  “Tasty,” he confessed. “Even the pigeon. But it could have used some cayenne.”

  “I meant about our conundrum,” Arun said, smiling broadly. “I wondered what you thought of our Saharan Triangle.”

  “Like Bermuda,” Hellboy noted. “I like that. But a couple dozen people disappearing in the middle of the desert is no comparison to the Bermuda Triangle, where boats and planes have been vanishing for years.”

  Arun and Anastasia stared at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Anastasia said. “Creaghan interrupted us and I never got to finish the story. Remember I said it got weirder?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hellboy nodded, though he had, in fact, forgotten.

  “There have been a number of minor disappearances in this area over the years,” she said. “Which is to be expected in the desert, right? People get lost, they die of dehydration or starvation. It happens.”

  “Okay,” Hellboy agreed, unsure where Anastasia was leading. “There’s a ‘but’ coming up, right?”

  “Arun can tell it better,” Anastasia said, and glanced at Lahiri, who sat a bit straighter now that his knowledge and expertise as a historian was in the spotlight.

  “The year was 525 B.C.,” Arun began. “Egypt was at war with Persia, and they were losing. The Persian king, Cambyses, was an extraordinary military leader, among other things. But it wasn’t enough for him to have Egypt’s metropolitan areas, to have the pyramids and the Nile. He wanted it all, the greedy bastard.

  “That year, Cambyses sent fifty thousand soldiers on a trek across the Sahara to claim an oasis city. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, near the end of their six hundred-mile trek, a hurricane-force sandstorm blew up and swallowed the army. Fifty thousand men, their supplies, their armorers and animals. Vanished.

  “In two thousand years, no one has ever found a single trace of the lost army of Cambyses,” Arun concluded.

  “Fifty thousand men, huh?” Hellboy asked, mulling it over. “Are we sure this happened?”

  “As sure as we can be,” Arun replied. “It could be historical hyperbole, but after that, Cambyses never seemed to be quite so in command of his empire.”

  “Let me guess. We’re sitting on the spot where the army disappeared?” Hellboy asked.

  “As near as we could determine, yes,” Anastasia confirmed.

  “Of course,” Hellboy sighed.

  He thought about what Arun had told him, and considered the disappearance of the archaeological team as a factor. Finally, he shrugged.

  “I don’t know what I can do, really, to help you out,” he said. “But the way I see it, you’ve got only two options.”

  Anastasia looked at him expectantly. He glanced at Arun and saw that the man wore an identical expression.

  “Well, it’s just my opinion, remember. But either that story is all crap and we’re all out here for no reason whatsoever except to find some poor saps that wandered off or committed some mass suicide or something. Or, there actually was an army that got swallowed up by the desert,” he explained.

  “You actually believe that’s possible?” Arun asked. “I mean, I know the history, but I don’t know what to believe.”

  “I’ve seen some things that made a believer out of me, Professor,” Hellboy said. “And as for you, well, you’ve seen me, haven’t you?”

  “Indeed,” Arun answered thoughtfully.

  “Nothing is impossible,” Hellboy declared. “That’s the first thing I learned when I started to do fieldwork for the Bureau. Nothing is impossible.”

  “So what could have done that, some enchantment or something?” Anastasia asked.

  Hellboy winced at the skepticism in her voice. She had seen her share of weirdness when they had been together. But such things were always hard for people to accept at first.

  “Maybe,” he answered. “Or maybe giant sandworms like in Dune, but I doubt that.

  “Look, the way I figure it, if anything paranormal happened here, it comes down to annoyance,” Hellboy said. “Your friends probably stuck their noses where they didn’t belong and somebody got pissed off. Why don’t we start looking at it from that angle?”

  “So, you believe we could find them?” Anastasia asked.

  “No,” Hellboy admitted. “Look, your lost army was fifty thousand guys and nobody ever found any of them. When you take that into consideration, our chances don’t look too promising.”

  The three of them fell silent, watching as the cook twisted four more pigeons on spits over the open flames. After a moment, they heard a commotion coming from the edge of the camp.

  “Anastasia!” somebody yelled.

  “That’s Larry Scott,” she explained. “One of our search squad leaders.”

  “He sounds excited about something,” Hellboy observed.

  Larry ran to Anastasia, tripped in the sand, and fell face first on the desert floor. He looked up at them, and recoiled slightly when he saw Hellboy. The man shook it off quickly, and Hellboy remembered that they had all been warned to expect him. All but Creaghan and his bonecrushers.

  “What is it, Larry?” Anastasia asked. “Why are you so out of breath? Where did you run from?”

  “From the oasis,” Larry replied, still breathing heavily.

  He stared up at Anastasia.

  “Stacie,” he wheezed. “We found them.”

  Just under a mile northwest of camp, even closer to the Libyan border, lay a freshwater oasis several hundred yards in diameter. It was almost a crater in the middle of the desert, a deep depression with stone and earth walls that sloped steeply down from the sand to the edges of the small forest that surrounded the lake at the center of the oasis.

  “Wow,” Hellboy mumbled.

  “Indeed,” Anastasia said. “Intellectually, you may know that they exist, but seeing an oasis, particularly one of this size, is still nearly a surreal experience.”

  “It just doesn’t look like it belongs here,” Hellboy observed, glancing around at the arid desert as they began their descent into the oasis depression. “It’s like somebody planted this huge garden in the middle of nowhere.”

  “And yet you find them all across the desert. Few and far between, true, but there nonetheless,” Professor Lahiri said.

  Their jeep bounced down the steep incline, tires tearing into dirt, finally getting traction after weeks on the sand. Hellboy gazed out across the blue expanse of fresh water and nodded slightly in amazement as he realized the extent of the oasis. The land around the lake for forty or fifty yards was truly verdant, almost lush. Where the green stopped, the soil began. He was amazed the desert didn’t simply overtake it all. Apparently the high walls around the oasis protected it from the Sahara.

  Something distracted him far off to the left. He glanced in that direction and searched the hillside for some sign of movement. Nothing moved, but after a moment, Hellboy identified what had drawn his attention. The side of the hill seemed stained with several dark spots. Then he realized what the spots were.

  “Are those caves?” Hellboy asked.

  “Your eyesight is incredible,” Arun commented. “As far as we can tell, there was once a clan of cave dwellers that lived on the banks of this oasis. It isn’t on any map I’ve seen, but I believe it’s probably the oasis of Ammon, which was previously considered to be merely a myth.”

  “But nobody lives here now?” Hellboy asked. “Why?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Anastasia replied. “It certainly could sustain a small village or town. But few people, even among the nomads, would be hardy enough to make the trip to the nearest settlement for tr
ade or communication without modern transportation. Which the desert people just don’t have access to.”

  “So, of course, we’re out here in the middle of nowhere, where not even an Egyptian would want to be,” Hellboy said sarcastically.

  “It’s the desert,” Anastasia said, and shrugged.

  They reached the bottom of the slope and Arun turned left to follow the outer perimeter of the oasis. The jeep rattled and wheezed and Hellboy began to wonder if they would be able to make it back up the hill.

  Anastasia turned to glance back, and Hellboy followed her gaze. Creaghan and several of his men had followed them in another jeep, guns at the ready.

  “You know, I’m beginning to feel a bit useless here,” Hellboy admitted. “You people seem prepared for just about anything, and more than capable of coming up with any strategy that might occur to me.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Anastasia said. “You’re far more familiar with the paranormal and how to combat it than anyone on my team. I don’t know what we might run into, but I definitely want you around. Your instincts may be all we have to go on.”

  “I’m all fuzzy inside,” Hellboy mused. “But at this point, you don’t even know that there’s anything paranormal happening around here.”

  A little more than forty feet ahead of the jeep, a black woman shot from the trees and stood in their path. She waved at them frantically, and Arun swerved the jeep to the left and jammed on the brakes. The jeep shuddered to a halt.

  “What happened to Larry?” the woman asked, staring at Hellboy so vacantly that he could not even decide if she really were staring, or just shell-shocked by what she had found.

  “He’s resting, Jenny,” Anastasia responded. “He really didn’t want to see it again, he said.”

  “Can’t blame him,” Jenny said. “Soon as you guys have had a look, I’m going back to camp. I don’t even want to be near this oasis again. Not after today.”

  Hellboy got out of the jeep and stood with Arun and Anastasia as the men from MI5 leaped out of their own jeep and ran up to meet them. Unlike most people, who would run at the first sign of something supernatural, Hellboy had made a career out of hunting down and investigating such things, and often enough beating them senseless. That was his job. Yet, despite that such investigations often came to violence, the BPRD held the acquisition of knowledge as its main goal. The defense part was easy: some paranormal being got out of line, the BPRD was there to take it down, hard.