That was all right, though. Lex was no slouch in the fighting department either.
They passed sunbathers who were lounging beside a crisp blue swimming pool, sipping drinks, fiddling with their smartphones, scrolling through books on their e-readers, plugged into music on their MP3 players, yelling at their children—all blissfully oblivious to the hostility simmering between Lex and Buckler, the potential for bone-crunching violence.
Then the two men were on the beach, striding across sand like muscovado sugar, fine-grained and fawn. They walked until they reached the beach’s end, where coconut palms grew thick and tourists were few and far between. They were well out of earshot of the hotel, distant specks to the unaided eye.
“I’d prefer this not to come down to a smackdown between us,” Buckler said. “We’re meant to be co-operating. Special relationship and such.”
“I’m happy to co-operate,” said Lex. “What I will not accept is some bloke who thinks he’s hot shit waltzing in and taking advantage. Whatever your mission is, Wilberforce Allen and Albertine Montase have no part in it. I draw the line there, and you do not cross it.”
“You, Mr Dove, if I may say, are arguing from a position of total ignorance. You wouldn’t be so quick to make blanket statements like that if you had the first clue what we’re up against and how urgent it is that we see the matter resolved.”
“Ignorant I may be, but some things are non-negotiable, and this is one of them.”
“Has it occurred to you that your friends might volunteer their services, willingly, if asked?”
“Whether that’s the case or not, I’m not prepared to let you ask them or put undue pressure on them in any way. Because you will, and they’re good people—innocents—and I won’t have them placed in harm’s way, even if it is with their consent.”
Wearily Buckler shook his head. “You know, it’s a shame. I was hoping you and I would be able to settle this with a reasoned, gentlemanly exchange of views.”
“Then, lieutenant, back down. Simple as that.”
“No can do, ace. Let me just say that in eight seconds I could have you on the ground, in a chokehold, unconscious. And all’s I’d have to do is maintain the pressure for a few seconds more, starve your brain of blood and oxygen, and that’d be that. Lights out. Permanently.”
“Of course you could,” said Lex. “And by the same token, I could grab you, spin your round, take hold of you from behind by the jaw with both hands, and kick your legs out from under you. You’d fall, and your own bodyweight would separate your skull from your spinal column at the Atlas bone.”
“It could happen,” said Buckler nonchalantly. “Or I could slam your head backwards against that there palm tree trunk—shatter the back of your skull. What’d kill you, though, is your brain getting hurled forward, tearing against the inside of its case.”
“Funny you should mention palm trees,” Lex replied. “My speciality is making it look as though someone has died through mishap rather than design. I use what’s around me. I often improvise. See these coconuts lying around?” There were several on the beach, smooth green seed pods the size of rugby balls. “People get killed by those all the time. They can fall from the tree right down onto your cranium, from a height of thirty feet or more, and each is a solid thing weighing up to five pounds when fresh. Wham! Instant fatality. A body gets discovered here, at this very spot, with a bloodstained coconut nearby, and the coroner will draw only one conclusion. It won’t occur to him that someone might have slammed the coconut down on the deceased’s head.”
“Cute. How about this? I pull you forwards and down into a headlock. I grab your pants belt, haul you up upside-down, and fall backwards, landing on your head. Our combined weight crushes it like an egg.”
“It would work better on firmer ground than this. Tarmac or concrete, or a tiled floor. But I take your point.”
“It’s called the Brain Buster,” said Buckler. “There’s also the Russian Omelette.”
“That’s the one where you cross the fellow’s legs, fold him over with his shoulders to the ground, pull his legs up on top, sit on them, and snap his spine at the base.”
“Yep. Those psychos in the Spetsnaz love that one.”
“Hmm. It’s always struck me as a bit elaborate. Besides, the subject has to be out cold at first, or at least stunned.”
“Easily arranged. A jab to the summit of the nose or the upper lip—that’ll have the guy reeling, not knowing what the hell’s going on. You can do pretty much what you want with him after that.”
“I agree that everything goes much more smoothly if your opponent is too dazed to resist or put up a fight,” said Lex. “So imagine that that’s happened here. My next move—this is me taking the ‘accident’ route again—would be to drag the person out into the shallows. This lovely flat beach sand extends only so far. There are rocks and reefs out there below the surface. Just last year a youngish man, only in his late twenties, was larking about with his wife in the surf not a hundred yards from where we’re standing. They were newlyweds. Honeymooners. He plunged under, whacked his forehead on a hidden rock, end of story. A terrible tragedy. So it’s not unprecedented that someone could die in that way just here.”
“It would surely be a pity if history repeated itself.”
“It would, Lieutenant Buckler.”
Lex and Buckler continued to face each other, gazes locked. A breeze stirred the tips of Buckler’s silver-flecked moustache. Waves crested and plunged, blazing in the sun.
“I believe we have arrived at a stalemate,” Buckler said.
Lex nodded. Stalemate was a good word for it. They had just played a game of verbal chess, each of them gauging the measure not only of the other’s abilities but also of his willingness to follow through on his threats. Each now knew that he was facing a serious proposition. It wasn’t only in what they said, it was in the calm conviction with which they said it. Each was left in no doubt that the other was prepared to do whatever it took to get his own way.
“Compromise,” suggested Lex.
“I’m all ears.”
“Let me talk to Wilberforce and Albertine, not you.”
“Sounds doable.”
“That way they’ll be getting it from somebody familiar, somebody they trust, rather than some random American they don’t know from a hole in the ground. And I’ll phrase the request however I see fit. No arm-twisting, no guilt-tripping.”
“I can probably go along with that.”
“But,” Lex added, “first, before anything else, I’ll need a full mission briefing.”
“Fair enough.”
“And if I don’t like the sound of it...”
“Mr Dove,” said Buckler with something like a sigh, “let me be frank about this. A Team Thirteen op is never going to be tea and crumpets on the lawn, or whatever it is you Brits like to do of an afternoon. I can guarantee you it’s going to be grim and insane and nightmarish. A total bitch. I wish it weren’t, but it always is. That said, my unit are the best there is at this job. They do what no one else could or would dare to, and they do it with the utmost courage and professionalism. You won’t like the sound of it, I can assure you of that, but if anyone’s got a chance of pulling this thing off successfully, meeting the mission aims, surviving—then it’s me and my shooters.”
“Am I supposed to feel all fired up and happy now?” Lex said.
Buckler very nearly cracked a smile. “That was my best pre-game pep talk. Sure you are.”
TEN
JANITORS OF THE UNCANNY
BUCKLER TURNED THE air con in his suite up to full. The vent rumbled into life, scaring a tiny brown lizard clinging to the wall nearby. The reptile scurried for safety into a crack in the skirting board.
Coolness sifted slowly into the sweltering room.
The American removed a ruggedized laptop from his carry-on bag and set it on a small round table by the window. While the computer booted up, he pulled a couple of beers from
the mini-bar fridge and passed one to Lex.
“Hotel’ll charge you an arm and a leg for those,” Lex warned.
“Uncle Sam’s picking up the tab. He can definitely afford a couple of beers.”
Lex twisted off the bottle cap. “So tell me. A grey op. What is that? You said ‘freaky shit.’ How freaky? Freaky in what way?”
Buckler pondered how to put it. “Okay. Take our most recent assignment. Day and a half ago we were in Siberia, can you believe it. Roughly six hundred klicks north of Krasnoyarsk, wading through swampland and taiga west of the Yenisey river. Worst fucking terrain imaginable.”
“I know. I’ve been.”
“Swarms of horseflies and deerflies so thick you can scarcely see through them, biting worse than any mosquitoes. Nothing but pine forest and sodden ground for mile upon shitty mile. Guess what we were hunting there?”
“I’m going to hazard it wasn’t pheasant. Men?”
“A man,” said Buckler. “One lone man. But like no man you’ve ever known. A man who was also an animal.”
“I’ve met a few of those in my time.”
“No, you don’t understand. Literally an animal. A bear.”
“A man who was also a bear?”
“A werebear. As they call it in Russia, medvyedchik.”
Lex laugh-snorted. “You’re kidding me.”
“I look like a kidder to you?” said Buckler. “This guy was a shape-shifter. An indigene from one of the Samoyed tribes. Some of the locals thought he might be a shaman—medicine men round those parts are supposed to be able to transform themselves into animals—but a couple of the shamans we spoke to denied it. Said no true shaman would be so destructive. He’d been roaming the area for a while, this werebear, preying on reindeer herds, scaring the hell out of villagers. Then, come winter, when the reindeer were moved south to warmer pastures, he started snatching children. The smallest of kids, sometimes even babies. Got a taste for them. He’d take them from their cribs in the middle of the night.”
“He did this in the guise of a bear?”
“Looking like a bear. Behaving like a bear. But a bear with human ingenuity and cunning. He could open gates and doors. Undo window latches. Sneak in and out of houses without a sound. Avoid traps laid for him.”
“And you’re certain it wasn’t just an especially smart bear?”
“Shut up and listen,” said Buckler. “We got to hear about what was happening thanks to a Russian air force base up in that region. Used to be, back in Soviet times, they’d send up Tupolev Falcons and Swifts from there to fly reconnaissance missions over the Arctic Circle. Tribesmen went to the base and asked the airmen for help. The airmen couldn’t do squat. Basically they’re a maintenance unit, a skeleton crew keeping the runway in useable condition and a bunch of rusting planes just about airworthy in case some big new conflict suddenly blows up. Not much in the way of weaponry. Or guts. Mostly men bored out of their minds, drinking vodka all day long and jerking off over internet porn. But the officer in charge, veteran pilot by the name of Captain Zhdanov, he’d made friends in the USAF during the post-glasnost period when Americans and Russians started doing manoeuvres together, before his booze problem got the better of him and he was packed off to this nursemaid job in the middle of nowhere. Zhdanov phoned a guy he knew at Nellis in Nevada, asked a favour, the Nellis guy passed the info on to our CIA controllers in the Special Activities Division—bingo, it’s a job for Team Thirteen.”
“So you went in, chased down the werebear, presumably killed it...”
“No mean feat. Fucker wasn’t only cunning, he was huge. Fifteen feet tall on his hindlegs. Strong as three grizzlies put together. Near invulnerable, too. Our first run-in with him, he got wind of us coming and went on the offensive. Caught us on the hop. We poured dozens of bullets into him, and it barely made a dent. That’s the trouble with mystical beasts, we’ve found. Conventional arms don’t always work. Sometimes you’ve got to upgrade, think laterally.”
“How?” Lex was struggling to believe he was even having this conversation. Buckler really expected him to take this nonsense seriously? A werebear?
“Well,” said Buckler, “we went back to the shamans and said, ‘We followed the medvyedchik’s trail, met him, shot him, frightened him off, but we know now we’re not going to kill him with just plain rifle rounds. Any suggestions?’ See, this is how we roll. We use local support whenever and wherever we can. And the shamans told us they’d tried warding charms and prayers to the sky gods and what-all-else in hopes of getting rid of the werebear, and no joy, but one of them said maybe there was a medicine that could help. He disappeared off into the woods to gather ingredients and soon he was back with armfuls of herbs and tree bark and such, and he cooked it all up in a pot, chanted over it, and what it was was a potion, a kind of gluey liquid that we were to smear over ourselves and it would make us undetectable to the medvyedchik so’s we could get close enough up to him to inflict some serious damage. Stank to high heaven, that gunk, but we stripped down to our skivvies and slapped it on all over like sunscreen and went out again into the forest to track our target.”
“Did it work?”
“Sure as shit did. We snuck up on old Barney the Mega-Bear like we were ninjas. He didn’t hear us coming, definitely didn’t smell us coming. The medicine disguised us like Harry Potter’s cloak of fucking invisibility. The reek confused the werebear’s senses, disoriented him. A couple of RPGs landing by him disoriented him a whole lot further, and then, when we had him on the ropes, Petty Officer Sampson went in to deliver the coop dee grace—an M67 fragmentation grenade. Sampson tossed that grenade straight into the werebear’s gaping mouth. Guy’s got a hell of a pitching arm on him. Could have played baseball in the major leagues, I reckon. Now, a mystical beast can withstand a lot of punishment, as we’ve already established, but the monster hasn’t been found yet that can argue with six-and-a-half ounces of Composition B explosive and a shitload of steel fragments erupting inside its head. Werebear was damn near decapitated. And as it fell...”
“What?”
“It became just a man again,” said Buckler. “Morphed, shrank, until it was this naked, puny little stringbean, kind of like you. Headless, of course. No longer a terrifying red-eyed creature. Just a dead human body with a ragged stump of neck, lying sprawled in the undergrowth. Kind of anticlimactic, that.” He looked rueful. “After so much spooky supernatural hoo-hah, to see that all you’ve done is eliminate a person, nothing more. Some guy who had the bad luck to get cursed by a gypsy or bitten by another werebear or something, as much a victim as a villain. Sort of sours the victory for you, know what I mean?”
“I imagine it does.” Lex examined his half-empty beer bottle. “Can I ask, Lieutenant Buckler—how long have you been a functioning alcoholic?”
“Oh, ha ha. Wiseguy.”
“Must be me, then. I must have hallucinated the past few minutes while you’ve been telling me about hunting Winnie-the-Pooh’s mutant monster cousin in the wilds of Siberia. I vow never to touch another drop.”
“Now you hold it right there, sport.” Buckler leaned across, thrusting his face directly in front of Lex’s, so close his moustache almost brushed Lex’s nose. “You stow that snarky bullshit. I’ve been running this boat crew for five years now, and in that time I’ve seen things. Things you’d never credit. Things that’d leave someone like you gibbering in the corner in a puddle of your own piss, just at the sight of them. Me and my shooters have confronted some of the goddamnest awful and inexplicable crap the world has to offer, and we haven’t done that simply so that assholes like you can come along and mock. Look into my eyes. Look deep. Are these the eyes of a madman? Of someone who’d make shit like this up?”
Lex had to concede that there was nothing but sincerity in Buckler’s eyes. Sincerity of the most alarming kind. Sincerity that bordered on blazing zeal.
“You think there aren’t monsters in the world?” Buckler went on. “I’ve seen ’em. Seen �
��em all. Vampires? Believe you me, I’ve killed vampires. More of them than Buffy and Van Helsing put together. They’re nothing like Count Dracula, I can assure you, and nothing like those twinkly Twilight douchebags either. Then there’s devils. You reckon devils are just something made up by the church fathers to frighten folks into being good and not straying from the righteous path? Devils are real, pal, and what’s more, they’re slippery, twisty, lethal motherfuckers. Djinns? Lake serpents? Gigantic burrowing worms in the Mongolian desert that can swallow a horse whole? All fictitious, right? Straight out of legend, or books, or bad sci-fi movies, right? Wrong! They’re as real, as tangible, as you and me. Know how I know? Because I have beheld them with my own two eyes, these eyes, and not only that but I have blown shit out of them, too. Any idea what I was doing Christmas before last, while everyone else was tucking into turkey and knocking back the eggnog and trying on the godawful sweater their Aunt Mabel just gave them? I’ll tell you. I was with Team Thirteen in Moldova—which is barely even a country, more a stain on the map—in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, in a cavern, destroying a clutch of dragon’s eggs with flamethrowers. And that’s no word of a lie.”
“Dragon’s...?”
“You heard correctly. My life is spent leading a group of people who hunt down freaks of nature and eradicate them. Name me something you think is fantasy, something you reckon can only be found in myth and folklore. I’ll tell you if I’ve come across it.”
“All right,” said Lex, bemused. “Werewolf.”
“Huh. I’ve given you a werebear. A werewolf’s nothing. My squad dealt with one in Germany, the Black Forest, about three months back. Try again.”
“Vampire.”
“I already said about vampires.”
“Oh yes. Troll.”
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