*
Everything proceeded in strict silence. Donnie saw Corporal Wiggins champing at the bit to say something but the captain kept him in check with a stern gaze. They were served, almost ceremoniously, with bowls of saffron-scented rice topped with dark succulent berries and drank from high-polished wooden cups filled to the brim with crisp, clear—and almost icy cold—water that seemed to fill all the dry places inside Donnie at once. Even the camel seemed pleased with the offerings. It let out a loud bray of happiness that had the monks smiling again even as the sound echoed and rang around their silent temple.
They left the beast in the care of a red-robed monk while they were given a tour—a silent tour—of the temple itself. It was mostly empty; the two huge upper rooms built from more of the dark polished wood with panoramic views over the desert were obviously sleeping quarters but seemed to have no other purpose. There was no lighting apart from what daylight made its way inside, but it was enough for Donnie to see that the interior walls, every part of them, were intricately carved. He stepped over for a closer look.
In the main, it was a telling of the life of Gautama Buddha —Donnie had seen the likes of these in other temples on his travels in this country but where this differed was in the added depictions of what he could only describe as some kind of monstrous apocalypse.
The story ran along the wall opposite the main window on the uppermost floor. Both Donnie and Gillings traced the carvings with their fingers. The soldiers meanwhile stood by the window, looking out over the view.
Donnie was captivated, although he couldn’t make too much sense of what the carvings were trying to convey; there was obviously meant to be some kind of disaster besetting the monastery on the outcrop—perfectly depicted in miniature in the wood but the nature of the attacking force was confusing. It looked to be a combination of some kind of stylized dragon and great worms, scores, hundreds of them. Donnie heard the professor whisper beside him, a question, speaking to himself, repeating words Donnie had heard him speak earlier.
“Olgoi-khorkhoi?”
The room seemed to pick up and amplify the words, echoing them around and back on themselves. Donnie saw, too late, the dismay on the faces of the monks accompanying them in this chamber. The purple-robed monk—Donnie assumed him to be the elder—came over at a run, put a hand to his mouth, and then pointed at the professor, who had the good grace to look ashamed of himself. Gillings managed to indicate that he was sorry and that, and a conciliatory bow, seemed to placate the monk.
But it looked like the tour was over. Captain Banks pointed at his watch and the door, his intent clear. They descended the stairs to the main hallway of the temple below them—only to find the doors being closed to prevent their exit. Donnie wondered whether they might have given some kind of offence with the professor’s whispering upstairs but the monks continued to smile, although when Banks made for the door, six of them stood in his path, palms up in front of them, their intent also clear.
The purple robed monk took charge of what seemed to be a request—a polite request—for them to stay and see something of great importance. Donnie saw Captain Banks struggle to contain a growing frustration but he allowed the squad, the professor, and Donnie to be led back into the center of the room. One of the monks took charge of the camel again, keeping it quiet near the door while the purple-robed monk gathered them around the well.
Half a dozen monks arrived, each carrying a pottery vase. The pots looked to be uniform in size, terracotta clay in an oval shape around a foot high, their lids sealed with wax, each trailing a metallic cord. The monks arranged the pots equidistant around the outer edge of the well and spliced the cords together so that the pots were linked in a chain.
The purple-robed monk took a wooden pail of water from alongside one of the walls, returned to the well, and with a flourish poured the whole contents down into the dark.
*
The monks went still, their posture telling Donnie that they expected something to happen but for several seconds, there was only more of the heavy silence. Donnie looked to Banks and saw an irritated expression cross the captain’s face. Then the hairs on the back of Donnie’s hands rose upright as did those at the nape of his neck and he felt his fingertips tingle.
Something crackled and sparked down in the depths of the well and blue flashes lit up the wall like strobe lights. The crackles got louder, the lights flashed faster. The chain that linked the vases glowed, faintly at first then ever brighter, a soft, almost golden glow in counterpoint to the blue lightning flashes coming up the well. A humming vibration—Donnie thought it was coming from the now golden chain—filled the room, setting his teeth tingling, rising through him from feet to skull.
One particularly bright flash caused Donnie to close his eyes against the flare and when he opened them again, he looked into the well to see that it was filling up, not with darkness but with a writhing mass of what looked at first glance to be giant earthworms.
Blue static charge sparked and flashed around the squirming bodies that were far thicker in the body than garden worms, barrel-shaped and ridged, varying in size from a foot long to monsters of at least six feet. Their skins were moist and blood-red, almost crimson. When a large one opened its mouth, Donnie realized his comparison to earthworms wouldn’t hold up. These things were fanged, their circular mouths full of twin rows of ivory-white, pencil-thin teeth.
The creatures seethed and roiled in the well, filling it to the brim but not advancing past the golden glow from the chain of vases. The blue flashing continued to spark and clash around the chamber but only seemed to intensify the yellow glow from the vases, the gold battling the blue as the humming vibration set the walls to thrumming in sympathetic vibration.
The worms tossed themselves against the rim of the well but each time were repelled by whatever thing it was that the circle of vases had created. The gold was winning. The surging, squirming mass of worms slowly subsided back into the deep, the gold glow filled the room in one final flare then it too faded away as slowly as an autumn sunset. The hum receded, lost in some far distance, and the temple fell as quiet as it had been before the performance.
The purple-robed monk clapped his hands once and gave them a wide smile.
*
This time when Captain Banks decided to go, the monks made no move to prevent their departure. Using just hand gestures, Banks got them all moving, having to wait only for the monks to open the doors. The purple-robed monk accompanied them down the alley of dark houses, out of the gateway, and off the outcrop as far as the point where it met the desert floor. He bowed, smiled, and somehow managed to convey the fact that he wished them a safe journey. He also had one more thing to show them. He jumped up and down on a rock and pointed at the squad. Then he jumped down onto a piece of softer sand and jumped again before speaking the only words they would hear him say. He pointed at the sand to emphasize it.
“Olgoi-khorkhoi.”
He wasn’t smiling now and with that he turned away and scuttled back up the pathway, as if in a hurry.
“What the hell was that all about?” Wiggins said, lighting up a cigarette.
Banks said what Donnie was thinking.
“I think it was a public service announcement of a kind,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve seen a demonstration and a warning for strangers to the area.”
“What, stay on the path, keep off the moors kind of thing?” Wiggins replied.
“Exactly,” Banks replied. “And I think we know now what happened to the poor camel.”
- 5 -
Banks took the lead as they headed north away from the monastery and, heeding the monks’ advice, attempted to keep where possible to rockier ground. Hynd came forward to join him, offering him a smoke.
“You really think it was a warning, Cap?” the sergeant said.
“I can’t see how it could be anything else, do you?” Banks replied. “It was a fine piece of showmanship, I’ll give them that.�
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“But big electric worms? In the desert? It’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? The spice must flow and all that crap?”
Banks laughed.
“You mean like big bugs in the arctic, giant snakes in the Amazon, big fucking spiders in Syria…that kind of far-fetched?”
Hynd laughed.
“Fair point. So the water—the rain—is bringing them up to the surface?”
“Aye, at least I think that’s what they wanted to tell us. That and keep to rocky ground. Keep an eye on yon camel, will you, Sarge? It seems to ken when there’s trouble about.”
“There’s one other thing, Cap,” Hynd said. “Young Wilkins is struggling. He’ll not admit it but that bad leg is giving him gip—you can see it in his face and his limp’s getting worse.”
Banks looked across the plain to where another outcrop sat squat on the horizon.
“Two more hours, then it’ll be getting dark anyway and we’ll camp down over there for the night. Keep an eye on the lad and if it looks to be getting too bad, we’ll get him up on the camel.”
*
The afternoon passed uneventfully. The professor fell asleep on the camel, Wiggins kept Davies and the young doctor Reid amused with stories, some taller than others, of the squad’s previous missions. Banks kept an eye on both the camel and young private Wilkins, who was sweating profusely and now had a distinctly pronounced limp.
“I’m okay for a few more miles yet, Cap,” he said when Banks dropped back to check on him.
“Good man,” Banks replied. “But don’t overdo it and that’s a bloody order, do you hear me?”
Banks knew that the lad, like any member of the squad, was trained to suck up discomfort and work through it but this wasn’t a combat situation. If it came to it, he’d do as he said, cut the lad some slack and allow him a rest on the camel, but it looked like they were going to reach the outcrop before any such respite would be needed.
*
As they approached their goal, Banks saw that this latest lump of rock was just that—there was no sign of any habitation although as they got closer still, he saw there were remnants of campfires on some of the lower ledges, which he took as a good sign.
If the locals think it’s safe, it’s good enough for me.
He had Wiggins and Davies set up camp on the largest, flattest of the ledges, not bothering to look for an overhang. He’d deal with more rain if any showed up but for now the sky was completely clear, stars beginning to show as the sun went down in the golden west. The water they carried tasted flat and warm after the liquid they’d been given in the monastery, and their field rations were no match for scented rice and fresh berries but the monks hadn’t had coffee and for Banks that trumped just about everything else. As the last of the sun went out of the sky and full dark descended, the squad were sitting around a campfire with a mug each, sharing smokes.
“Prof,” Wiggins said, “you’re the man with experience in these parts. What’s with the big red worms?”
Gillings shrugged.
“I only know what you know.”
“No traveler’s stories? No local legends?”
“Apart from the two words we all heard, words I first heard from a badly frightened man, I know nothing. I’m a paleontologist, not an anthropologist.”
“So, that’s a no then?” Wiggins said, grinning. “Not even a theory?”
“Oh, I’ll idly speculate all you want, especially back home with some whisky inside me, but I saw just what we all saw. They look like big, red, overfed earthworms, with teeth. Whether they’re carnivorous or not remains to be proven but judging by the fate of the other camel, I think we have to assume that they are meat eaters.
“With regard to what they are, where they came from… Donnie and I had a closer look than you at the carvings in the top room. That frieze on the back wall showed what I presume was the worms swarming but I have no idea if that’s something that’s ever actually happened or whether it was purely allegorical.”
The younger man piped up.
“Aye, and the ones in the carvings looked more like dragons than those thick red squirmy things we saw.”
Wiggins laughed.
“Thick red squirmy things? That’s the scientific term for them, is it?”
“I don’t know how we’d go about classifying them without a closer look,” Gillings said. “They might be little more than a mouth and an arse, or they might be vertebrates, some kind of legless lizard. We’d have to get up close to one to find out for sure.”
“Aye, well good luck with that,” Wiggins replied.
The professor laughed in reply.
“It’s not something I’ve got in my immediate plans.” He turned to Banks. “How far do you think we came today?”
“Twenty-five miles at a guess. I’ll check later with the GPS. If we get an early enough start in the morning, we should manage to get to the pickup point by this time tomorrow. It’ll be a fair hike, so I suggest we all rest up as much as we can.”
He addressed the squad.
“Wilkins, you take first watch, a two-hour stint then get your head down, that’s an order. Then it’ll be Davies, Wiggins, the sarge, and then I’ll take the early shift and kick all your arses out of bed in the morning.”
*
For most of the first watch, they were all still awake, sitting around the fire and trying to come up with a coherent explanation for what they’d seen in the monastery.
“It was all some kind of magic trick—ABRACADABRA, look at the wee white rabbit I’ve had hidden up my jacksie—that kind of shite,” Wiggins said.
“If it was, it was the best one I’ve ever seen,” Professor Gillings replied. “I’ll agree it was certainly staged like one, a bloody good show as you said earlier, but I’m pretty sure those worms were real. Did it look like a hologram to you? And how in God’s name would a bunch of monks in a remote desert monastery get hold of hologram technology in the first place? No, I prefer to use Occam’s Razor—the simplest solution is the first one to consider and given what happened to Donnie’s camel, I’d say we have to assume it was all too real.”
The conversation went on for a while but it kept coming back to the same simple fact: everyone agreed that what they’d been shown was a warning and one that they should take seriously.
One by one, they drifted away to find a spot where they might if not sleep at least rest. By the time Davies replaced Wilkins, Banks was the last man sitting by the fire.
He dampened it down with the dregs of his coffee and flicked the butt of a last cigarette out over the ledge of the outcrop. He retrieved his sleeping bag from his kit, wandering to the south away from the others mainly to try to get out of range of the stink of the camel.
He chose a spot near the edge of the ledge with an open view along the previous day’s route and tried to pick out the monastery on the horizon but there was only darkness. The stars were obscured now by wispy fast-moving clouds that he guessed must be the last remnants of the storm. He checked the GPS to confirm what he already knew—they had a long walk ahead of them again on the morrow if they were to reach the extraction point by nightfall. He considered placing a call with the colonel but knew one wasn’t expected until they were ready for pickup and put the phone away inside his jacket before lying down on top of his sleeping back, gazing out over the desert. There was nothing to see but gray and black shifting shadows and he fell asleep to visions of squirming red, flashing blue, and golden wire all shifting and dancing behind his eyelids.
He woke some time later to the sound of raindrops pattering heavily on his clothes and came fully awake when one struck his forehead above his eyes. He checked his watch—not quite 4 a.m. so dawn was still some way off. The rain wasn’t heavy, more of a constant drip, but he noticed it had been enough to wake everyone from their sleep apart from Hynd, who was upright and standing guard at the edge of the ledge, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
“Wiggo, stoke the fire and get a brew o
n,” Banks said, catching the corporal in the act of lighting his own first smoke of the day. “Sarge, you’re with me. Let’s get up someplace high and scope out the day’s walk if we can.”
It didn’t take them long to scale the outcrop and stand facing north but even in that short time, the patter of raindrops had become steadier and more persistent. Banks’ heart sank at the sight as they looked out over the desert. The plain below them was dark and in shadow for the most part but although it was not yet dawn, it was plain to see that there were obstacles in their path if they wanted to head north. Huge swathes of ground had blue electric flashes running in sheets across the sands. Before yesterday, he might have imagined it to be a natural phenomenon, some product of the previous day’s storm, but having seen the writhing worms in the monastery, Banks feared that this was exactly what the monks had been warning them of.
“Bugger me, Cap,” Hynd said. “How do we make our way through that?”
Banks kept his gaze on the plain, trying to visualize a possible route.
“Bloody carefully. We stay on the rocky bits if we can,” he replied after a while. “And as Wiggo would say, we beware of the moors. We have no idea how many of the buggers there are or where they are or even whether they’re interested in us. All we can do is start walking and hope that this drizzle eases off and calms things down a tad.”
- 6 -
Donnie had seen the blue flashes for himself when he stood to relieve himself over the ledge. Wiggins came to stand beside him and join in the morning ritual.
Operation Mongolia (S-Squad Book 8) Page 3