I bought a giant, expensive, airport cinnamon bun and waited for Holly to catch up. Earl might not want me to break too many expense accounts, but I figured this one was on Management.
* * *
It was Go/No-Go day.
That meant I got to give a briefing, present a plan, and then all the clever Hunters would try to poke holes in it. Nobody would hold back. Hunters don’t get points for nice, and better to get the stupid ideas out of the way now than later, when they’d cost lives. After everybody had their say, Earl would make his final call. Since he’d been keeping up on all my findings so far, I was pretty sure he had already made his decision, but I also suspected Earl liked watching us argue just in case somebody brought up a point he hadn’t thought of. Or maybe he just enjoyed a good fight.
The conference room was packed. Boss Shackleford sat at the head of the table, because even though Earl was the Director of Operations—and his dad—Raymond Shackleford the Third was still a big freaking deal and his opinion mattered more than the rest of the non-Shacklefords put together. Julie’s grandpa had aged a lot over the years since I’d met him, but his mind was almost as sharp as the point on the hook he had for a hand. His health had gotten degraded enough that he was all but retired, but on paper he was still the official head of MHI, and had forgotten more about this life than most of us would ever know.
Julie was sitting to her grandpa’s right. That was appropriate, and everybody knew she’d be taking the Boss Shackleford seat when he was gone. I knew she had my back, but when we were in this room talking company business, she was going to be the hard-ass businesswoman. She loved me and was carrying my child, but that didn’t mean she was going to cut me any slack when her company’s future and the lives of its employees were at stake.
Earl was up front telling everybody that this was important enough that they needed to shut up and pay attention to what I had to say. Julie and her grandpa were watching me. Those three were the votes that actually mattered, because when Earl made a call, his son and great-granddaughter were the only ones who had any hope of persuading him otherwise. Julie gave me a confident wink. With all the scars and the eye patch, the Boss’s expression was too hard to read. I think he tolerated me, maybe even liked me a little bit, but had probably been hoping Julie would marry somebody better.
The rest of my team was there, too: Milo Anderson, Trip Jones, and Holly Newcastle. Plus Albert Lee was there as our chief researcher. All of them had been helping me gather information. They knew what was up.
Everybody else Earl had invited was still in the dark about my proposal, but each of them was here because they had some form of expertise that might prove useful. Several team leads and other experienced Hunters had been flown in and sworn to secrecy. Trying to read my audience, I could tell their moods ranged from curious to grumpy, but that was pretty normal for this crowd.
I had requested an elf and an orc representative. They were probably the only elf and orc in existence who could stand to be in the same room without murdering each other, but I’d learned that when you were dealing with ancient monsters, it helped to have some nonhuman perspectives. Edward was masked and hiding in the back corner. Since Tanya was a Newbie, I’d made her promise to keep her big elf mouth shut unless spoken to, so she was in back making flirty eyes at Ed. I never could tell if poor Ed was even aware of that or not.
While I mentally prepared, Earl was explaining that this proposed mission was my bright idea, specified that if we went ahead with it, participation would be voluntary, wrapped up his intro, and then turned it over to me. I took a breath. Here goes. All eyes were on me as I got up and walked to the front of the room. Earl sat down next to Julie, obviously enjoying my discomfort. The lights were turned down so we could use the projector.
“Thanks for coming all this way.” I’d bribed Dorcas to pick up several boxes of doughnuts from a really good bakery in Montgomery. It’s hard to get angry at a bad briefing when you’re full of quality bear claws. “Everybody get a doughnut? There’s plenty.”
“You know, the last time you briefed the whole company was right before DeSoya Caverns.” Ben Cody looked like a graying Grizzly Adams, but he was our big brain science genius, all-around badass, and was in charge of our team that handled our Department of Energy contracts. “How screwed are we this time?”
There was some general laughter at my expense. Which was good. When you’ve got a job this bloody you’ve got to have a sense of humor about yourself, and besides, when you’re the guy who blows up time, you kind of deserve it. I waited for the laughter to taper off. “Yeah, there’s a big threat, but this time we can get out in front of it. Rather than giving it a chance to get set, we’re going to go kick its ass in its own house. I want to launch a surprise attack on the most dangerous monster currently active on Earth.”
That sure got their attention.
“During Vegas we found out there was a mastermind behind the recent monster attacks around the world. His minions always leave his symbol behind. Trip?”
Trip was handling the AV portion, and on cue he hit the button. The now-familiar symbol of Asag swooshed onto the screen. This one was a photo from Yemen, finger-painted in blood. Yes, believe it or not, our war against an evil supernatural being was getting kicked off with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation.
“When we started our investigation into this threat, none of us realized how widespread his reach was.” While I kept talking, Trip kept clicking through the pictures, and there were a lot. Symbol after symbol, usually surrounded by torn bodies and burning wreckage. “This is the signature of our high-value target. We now know of at least two hundred incidents, in thirty different countries, where people have died or vanished, and this sign was left behind to taunt us. From the evidence and the few times when Hunters have responded in time, we know we’re dealing with at least a dozen different kinds of monsters, all working off the same general set of orders.”
All the carnage shots out of the way, Trip paused at the picture Julie had taken of the map on Poly the Cyclops’s wall.
“When Earl saw an early version of this map in Las Vegas he called it a mobilization. Our high-value target is pushing, testing us. Getting ready for something big. We don’t know what his end game is, but it’s obvious that it is bad.”
“HVT is nice and all but this asshole got a name?” Jay Boone asked. He was the Atlanta team lead. I suspected Earl had picked him because, as one of the first boots on the ground in the war in Afghanistan, Boone knew a thing or two about the logistics of a big operation.
“Bunches of names. That’s what happens when you’ve been a bad guy in myths for thousands of years. The Nachtmar called him He Who Ends All Things. But the most common name used is Asag or Azag, and though he’s been mostly dormant over recent centuries, he has been around for a really long time.”
“If he’s that long-lived, are his origins Old One, Fey, or something else?” Priest asked. He’d been a South African soldier, then a man of the cloth—which was how he’d gotten the nickname—before becoming a Hunter. He was Boone’s former second-in-command, and had been our Colorado team lead since Sam Haven had died.
“The MCB has Asag filed under other , as in I don’t think they have a clue. As far as we can tell, he’s got his own gang. We’ve got evidence that those factions fight against him, which tells us he’s powerful, because otherwise they’d ignore or steamroll him. Asag shows up in the legends of several cultures, always as a demon, and always as a force of chaos. That name literally means Disorder. I’ve got a packet for each of you with everything we’ve dredged up on him so far, but the short version is that he’s some kind of demonic force that exists to cause trouble, and hates mankind’s guts.”
Priest was already flipping through his packet. “Good work, Albert,” he told our researcher.
“Thanks, but I had help.” Lee stopped there, because out of respect for Management’s privacy and safety, we needed to keep the dragon’s in
volvement on the down low.
“What does Asag want?” Cody asked.
“What do any of these wannabe world conquerors ever want, Ben?” Earl responded.
“Fair point.”
“I’ve got people working on that still. I owe the Van Helsing Institute detectives some hefty bonuses if they come up with anything good. We do know that various different kinds of monsters are flocking to his banner and causing trouble on his behalf. Even the Condition answers to him now.”
That caused some murmurs. The Sanctified Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition held a special place in MHI’s heart for being the dickheads who’d been bold enough to attack the MHI compound directly. Many of the assembled leads had been here for that event.
“I really don’t like those guys.” Milo stated the obvious. “It’s been a long time and I still occasionally catch a whiff of zombie elephant in my workshop. You’ve got no idea how hard that was to clean up.”
“Try some Febreze,” Paxton suggested. “Works wonders on undead stink.”
“Does Asag have a body, and can it be killed?” Priest asked, and that was a very good question.
“Not sure, but the legends say yes. He’s been defeated here before.” I signaled for Trip to change the picture, but he was way ahead of me. This one was of an ancient stone sculpture of a bull with a man’s head. “According to an ancient poem called the Lugale, Ninurta defeated Asag with Sharur. I promise none of those words are made up.”
“Hold on. Back up.” Esmeralda Paxton was a petite lady who ran our Seattle team, and she kept up on folklore far better than the rest of us. “First off, all words are made-up. Second, Ninurta was a legendary hero, and if I recall correctly Sharur was his magical talking mace. Does Milo have one of those lying around I don’t know about?”
“No,” Milo said after a moment of mental inventory. “But that would be super cool!”
I held up my hands apologetically. “I’m still working out the details.”
“Ninurta was the Akkadian god of war,” Paxton continued.
“And hunting,” I pointed out. “So basically the same as us…theoretically.”
“It’s commonly believed that Ninurta is based upon the same historical figure as Nimrod, the mighty hunter.” Priest wasn’t as up on that stuff as Paxton, but he was no slouch, especially when things took a biblical turn. “Only he grew so prideful in his might he challenged God by building the Tower of Babel.”
Boone chuckled. “Hunters are a cocky bunch.”
“Okay. However it actually went down, Asag was terrorizing Earth before, and some great hunter came along and knocked him out for a few thousand years. Now he’s awake.” I left off because of me. “If he didn’t win then, it means there’s a way to beat him now.”
“Are we sure this being has actually returned?” That was asked by Maria Mayorga, who ran our New York City team. She was a solid, no-nonsense woman, who to me always looked really angry , but Earl liked her. New York City was practically a supernatural zoo and she still managed to keep a lid on it. “Maybe all that monster graffiti is something else.”
“What, like a gang sign, and all of these nasty critters that are usually fighting each other have suddenly teamed up for shits and giggles?” Boone asked. “Come on, May.”
“I’ve compiled the evidence for you to go over yourselves, but trust me, this is no coincidence. Asag is back. He’s the one who released the Nachtmar, so he knows all about us. We either hit first, or we wait around until he’s ready to hit us again.”
Judging by the expressions I could read, it felt like most of them were with me. We were a territorial, protective bunch, and Asag had messed with us too many times. Give a Hunter a target, and the wheels were going to begin turning. Good. I kept pushing.
“Trip, show them the map.” The picture changed to an image of the northern coast of Russia. “This is where we believe Asag’s home base to be.”
Cody recognized it immediately. “That’s Severny Island.”
“We got us a geography wizard,” Holly said.
“I handle all our mad science contracts. It pays to know everywhere they did nuclear testing.”
“Correct. That’s Severny Island off the north coast of Russia. They set off a fifty -megaton detonation there back in 1961. The Tsar Bomba they called it, the biggest explosion ever made by man.”
Cody sighed. “Let me guess…Not actually a test.”
“According to our sources, threatening America was great propaganda and all, but their real goal was to destroy an active supernatural site that they considered a danger to their national security. They’d already sent in an expedition to clear it out, but it failed. When that didn’t work, they bombed it.”
“They went to the Dwayne Myers school of conflict resolution,” Lee said. That got a few chuckles. Special Agent Myers hadn’t exactly been the most popular guy with this crowd, and to be fair, he had tried to nuke Alabama, but he sure knew how to get shit done.
Earl was scowling. “Let me cut in for a minute. According to the rumors Z has dug up recently, the man the Soviets originally sent in to handle that place was a KGB assassin by the name of Nikolai Petrov. Now, I knew Nikolai personally. If any of you are doubting the severity of the situation, let me just say that Nikolai was the absolute hardest motherfucker I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. He was my equal in capability, only he never got slowed down by little things like mercy or avoiding collateral damage. He was the best of the best, and I do not say that lightly. If a man like Nikolai threw in the towel and said it’s easier to just drop the world’s biggest bomb on the place rather than fight, it’s bad .”
The smiles died. If a place could outmatch somebody Earl rated that badass, it was grim.
“They call it Gorod Chudovish,” I told them. “The City of Monsters.”
Ed grumbled something. Holly asked him to repeat it. “Known to urks. Most…evil.” Ed was an orc of so few words, that really had a chance to sink in. “Evil.”
“Sounds lovely,” Paxton said. “What level of activity are you expecting?”
“They didn’t call it the suburb of monsters for a reason. Local intel makes this place sound like their version of Natchy Bottom on steroids. Three quarters of the island are permanently covered in a glacier, but there is one region, not too rugged and free of ice, and it just happens to have an old pyramid on it.”
“How old are we talking?” Boone asked.
“Best guess? It was under the last ice age.”
Boone groaned. “Old shit’s the worst.”
“The local people are the Nenets, the Russians called them Samoyeds. Their god of death, Nga, lived beneath the earth, and you get one convenient guess where they say the gateway was. A few explorers went there over the centuries, but all the expeditions turned out badly. Stories about the pyramid even showed up in turn-of-the-century American occult books, mostly nonsense about the pyramid being built by Atlanteans or it was a gateway to Mu, or the Hollow Earth, and crap like that. The big bomb quieted the place down for generations, but the ruins of the city are still there, and according to the Russian Hunters, they’re teeming with monsters again. They built a military base on the island to keep an eye on things, but as long as the evil doesn’t wander too far out, they leave it alone.”
“Any chance you can get the report from the Petrov expedition?” Priest was leaning forward, intensely focused. He had been messing around earlier, but it was like he’d shifted gears, and now he was deadly serious. “That could be vital intel.”
“We’re working on it.” Meaning Krasnov was trying to bribe some FSB employees. “I guarantee it is bad though, both in quality and quantity. We’re talking every otherworldly creature you can think of, black magic, evil spirits, the works. I’ve already secured permission for us to conduct a large operation there, and by large, I mean an army of Hunters. We’re going to need them.”
“Napoleon and Hitler took armies into Russia too,” Boone said. “Refresh
my memory how that worked out?”
“Only this time the Russians are on our side. Sort of.” There were a lot of groans and sighs at that. “I’ll cover the details later, but we’ve come to an agreement with the local contract holder that will let us stage out of that military base. There’s a harbor, an airstrip, and it is a straight shot up the coast to the ruins.”
“I’ve heard how those Russian Hunting companies work. I’d rather go into business with the Yakuza,” Paxton said.
Priest shook his head. “I respect the audacity, Owen, and I love the idea of striking first for once rather than just responding, but that is one of most inhospitable places on Earth. A million things could go wrong.”
“Okay, if the Russians agree with us, how come we can’t just get them to go all Tsar Bomba on the place again and save us the trip?” Cody asked. “They keep invading their neighbors anyway. A little saber-rattling nuclear testing would be easy enough to explain it to the world.”
“Good point,” Mayorga said. “I’m all in favor of letting other people blow shit up in their own territory rather than freezing my tits off at the ass end of the globe.”
“We need to be there in person, in force, because there’s another catch.”
“We couldn’t get paid, ” Holly stated.
“Worse.” I could tell I was losing the leads. My only hope of swaying them was to let them know what was at stake, what had started it all. “You need to know what brought this place to our attention to begin with. Julie?”
The crowd turned toward my wife, who was happy to oblige. She’d field this part because Poly had talked her ear off. They had stayed in contact ever since we’d met. The MCB still didn’t know we were on a first-name basis with their remote viewer, but Poly was such a Julie fanboy that he told her everything. I was pretty sure Poly had even friended her on Facebook.
“There is supposedly a gateway inside the City of Monsters. It opens to various other dimensions on different days of the years depending on how the stars align. In one hundred and thirty-seven days it will allow travel into the same Nightmare Realm the Last Dragon got sucked into.”
Monster Hunter Siege (Monster Hunters International Book 6) Page 12
