The Lovecraft Code

by Levenda, Peter;

  Angell was not even sure they should be going there. This whole thing was getting out of hand. If it wasn't for the totally bizarre experience of the ritual that took place at the site of ancient Kutha and the old Iranian Imam with the map on his palm, Angell would not even credit this mission's purpose at all. But he had seen the conviction and the fear in the man's eyes as he lay dying, and it was that dying declaration that convinced Angell to give it another try.

  He could not get the image of that sickening idol out of his mind, either.

  Aubrey had the foresight to photograph the entire site with his phone, and to take close-ups of the idol as well as of the Imam. He was scrolling through the images on the ride back to the Baghdad Airport. As he did so, he came across another photo: one that he did not remember taking. It was of the teenage sniper having his head blown off.

  “Incredible,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Not many could have pulled off a shot like that.”

  Angell stirred from his reverie in the relative peace and quiet of the back of the old Mercedes and asked Aubrey what he meant.

  “The kid who was going to shoot you was shot instead, from behind it looks like. That means someone was in one of the buildings across the road from the park. Another sniper. A guardian angel, or a guardian for an Angell.” He smirked to himself. “You have friends in ‘high’ places,” he added.

  “Very funny. So what does it mean? Who would it have been?”

  “Not one of ours, actually. I know all our assets in theater, and this wasn't one of them. You know the expression, the ‘god spot’?”

  “No. What does that mean?” He absentmindedly looked at the road outside the window. Their driver was quiet, intent on watching the lead car and following in its tracks precisely.

  “It's the sniper's nest. It's the highest terrain around. He sits up there—in a tree, on a rooftop, somewhere like that—and gazes down at humanity. He picks out his target from there, and then fires a single round and ends a life. Like God, in almost every respect. If he's lucky he has a spotter with him, but that is not always the case.”

  “So this ... this sniper. He was sitting in the god spot?”

  “Sure. And he saved your life from there. Also like God.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Aubrey thought for a moment. “I guess ‘God’ has other plans for you.”

  In the back of his mind, Aubrey was entertaining another scenario entirely. One that involved Jason Miller, the AWOL remote viewer. He knew that Miller was after the same thing he was, and suspected that Miller was dogging their every move, as Monroe had suggested. This last incident only served to reinforce that idea. Jason Miller would protect them just as long as they served his purpose. After that, they were on their own.

  Angell appreciated the irony. He had stopped believing in God; or, at least, had stopped loving God, which amounted to the same thing as far as he was concerned. Like when you stop believing in a lover and stopped loving them at the same time, the betrayal poisoning love like a drop of a nasty bacillus in an otherwise limpid pool of clean water. He had devoted his life to studying religion, to traveling to distant lands and learning new and ancient—living and dead—languages just in order to understand God better. And now he figured he did understand God, all too well.

  Yet ... the belief that burned in the old Iranian's eyes as he lay dying in Angell's arms. That Imam had loved God. Some kind of God, anyway. And he had seen far more death and destruction in a single month than Angell had experienced in his entire life. Maybe God was a sociopath, a sophisticated charmer who could make anyone believe anything. And then, when it suited him, would leave you high and dry. Would ... would abandon you.

  Al-Qhadhulu. The one who abandons, who leaves. Who disappears.

  Shit, he thought. Was that what Lovecraft was trying to tell everyone?

  They arrived at Baghdad Airport in the dead of night. They passed checkpoints and drove to a hangar in the military section where a modified (for stealth) MH60-M Black Hawk helicopter was waiting for them. Its rotors were still, and Aubrey told him that they would get something to eat first and refresh their supplies for what might be a long trek inland from the border. They would leave in an hour or so, after he had a chance to talk over the mission with the team leader.

  As before, their mercenary escort simply disappeared into the background, anonymous and sober in their black uniforms and blank expressions. As before, Angell never learned their names.

  Angell was desperate for a shower and a nap. He could get the shower, and one of the members of the new team showed him where everything was. He was told not to shave, however, as the growth of beard would help disguise him and allow him to blend into his surroundings. Angell had a change of clothes with him but not much else. He had not expected to be out of the country as long as he had been, and now he wasn't sure when he would be allowed to return. He thought of himself as almost a prisoner, of Aubrey and the mysterious Monroe and the ever-shifting cast of military experts who accompanied them everywhere.

  The shower was surprisingly modern and efficient, a modular affair at the officers' quarters at the base. He switched from hot water to cold and back to hot again, just to open his pores and massage his tired muscles. As he stood in the steady pour of clean water he noticed that there was a pool of pink water forming around the drain. Startled, he looked at himself to see if he had been hurt, but there was no wound, no scratch that he could see. The blood had to be someone else's.

  Gregory Angell, Professor of Religious Studies at Columbia University, New York City and resident of Brooklyn, New York was suddenly very alone and very, very far from home.

  He rejoined the group at a conference table in an office just off the large aircraft hangar. Arrayed around the table was a bizarre sight: Starbucks coffee cups and McDonald's cheeseburgers, along with packages of French fries and bottles of Coke.

  The man in charge of the team gestured at the spread.

  “Help yourself. If you want KFC or Pizza Hut, we have that, too.”

  He was serious.

  Noticing Angell's confusion, he clarified as best he could.

  “We had one of the largest fast food installations in the world here, before the rollback. Right now, there's just us and whatever mercenary group is the flavor of the month. Blackwater, of course, in all its iterations. Halliburton. All sorts of corporate security teams. And us.

  “Welcome to the temporary home of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or SOAR. We will be your tour guides this evening. I understand that Iran is lovely this time of year. Or not.”

  “You're the ones who flew Seal Team Six into Abbottabad a few years ago.” Angell was stunned. This had been all over the news in 2011. In fact, this was the third anniversary of the attack on the Osama bin Laden compound and the execution of the mad leader of Al-Qaeda.

  Another “Mad Arab.” Something about the phrase nagged at Angell's mind. He knew that it was the creation of his nemesis, H.P. Lovecraft, but there was something else, too.

  Aubrey reached over and snagged a single French fry, dipping it daintily into a pool of Heinz ketchup in a small paper cup, before inserting it in his mouth.

  “The team doesn't use proper names here,” he explained to Angell. “That's for security reasons. And they do not carry identification, or show their rank in any way. It's all by the numbers, or the colors as the case may be.”

  “That is correct,” added the officer from SOAR. “You can refer to me as ‘Black.’ Yeah, I know, quite a stretch, right?” The man was indeed African-American.

  “You will meet the others, and they will have colors for names as well. You will probably not have to engage with them very much, anyway. We are taking you in that helo out there to a location across the Iranian border. We will be flying low to the ground, in stealth mode. We will drop you off, and then return to base. You will have forty-eight hours to make it back to the drop off location to be extracted. It's a tight schedule, I know, and
I can't discuss with you the reasons since you're not cleared for classified, compartmented details. Nothing personal. It's just our orders.”

  “I understand,” said Angell, although he really didn't. He picked up a cardboard cup of coffee and added enough cream and sugar to make a cake. He figured he needed all the caffeine, lactose and glucose he could manage.

  “You will be met by one of our people who will infiltrate you into a group of tourists that are heading to Yezd. When you get close to your target location you will be separated from the group and will be guided to your final destination. Our operative will then escort you back to the LZ.”

  Aubrey was oddly quiet during the whole exchange. Angell had the uneasy feeling that something had changed.

  The man from SOAR continued.

  “Yezd, or Yazd as it's officially spelled by the Iranians when they use Roman letters, is not an easy place to get to from Iraq. For one thing, you have an entire mountain range between here and there. For another, there is no direct highway that cuts across the interior from the border to the city. There are smaller roads, but they are not secure and would take much longer anyway. So you have to take highways that circle around the wasteland in the middle. We can't get you further than about four to five hours' drive to Yezd. Those five hours could get hairy. You have the Revolutionary Guard to deal with, checkpoints everywhere. A good thing is that Iran actively seeks to attract foreign tourists, so there are tour bus operators going from Isfahan to Yezd. They are all, of course, in the employ of the government and should be regarded as informers and spies. Hopefully that won't be a problem because you will have your own car and driver.”

  There it was.

  “You're not going with me, are you, Aubrey?”

  The old spy shook his head.

  “This is as far as I go, Professor. I would never pass as an Iranian. I don't speak Farsi and I don't know Islam well enough to pass as a Muslim from Iraq, for instance. I will be waiting here for you to get back, of course. If your mission to Yezd is successful, then we should be able to return Stateside in a few days.”

  Although Angell had never cared very much for James Aubrey, he had gotten used to relying on him. Now he was going into the lion's den without a whip or a stool.

  “You'll have full communications, courtesy of your escort and guide. You'll be fitted with a GPS tracking device so we will know where you are every step of the way. Once we know you are on your way back, these nice gentlemen from SOAR will send an extraction team and you will be on your way to this hangar. It's less than an hour's flight from Baghdad to Yezd itself, of course, so it takes about half of that for us to get you from the extraction point to base.”

  “We can't take a shorter route from the coastline inland, because that area is heavily monitored by Iranian security forces,” added the SOAR commander. “We considered bringing a dhow or sambuk close to the coast and dropping you off from there but the whole thing is too risky. Flying a helo over the mountain range at its lowest point and setting you down outside of Isfahan or Shiraz seemed like the best option. Either way, it's a good five hour drive and that's without checkpoints and other hazards. So you'll have an hour or so at Yezd and then an immediate return. All things being equal, and figuring for unforeseen delays, you should be in-country for only about twenty-four hours, max.”

  Angell was not convinced.

  “An hour at Yezd? How do you figure? I have to find the contact there, get him or her to talk to me, and then figure out the location of the book. It could take hours. Or days.”

  “Days is not an option,” Aubrey replied. “We don't have days. You don't have days. If it is not going well, you're going to have to return without the book.”

  “Then this was all for nothing?” Angell was thinking of the old man. And the exploding teenage assassin.

  “The longer you stay in-country, the greater the chance you will be discovered. The penalties for espionage—and you will be considered a spy without a moment's hesitation—are harsh. And that's if they let you live.”

  “But if I don't find the book, then we have no way of stopping this scheme from going forward.”

  He leaned forward, forgetting the fast food, the smell of French fries, the allure of fresh coffee. Forgetting even his exhaustion.

  “I saw what happened at Kutha. I saw what happened in the refugee camp. There is something very strange going on and it involves people who don't care if they live or die. It involves a religion or a cult or something that is as dangerous as anything we have faced out here in a long time, and I'm including Al-Qaeda. This is the worship of Death. And worse.

  “It's reaching a fever pitch. I know religion, and I know religious movements. This is a religious movement on steroids. That idol, that obscenity in the center of the ritual at Kutha, can only be an object of veneration by people who have lost all sense of humanity. They keep using the word qhadhulu. It's from the Qur'an. It's a demon, a jinnee. An evil spirit. It's an imprecation. A curse. And they are worshipping it. And not just Sunnis, but Shiites, too. And maybe some Kurds. Iranians. God knows who else. This could be something that unites all of these warring factions into one movement, something so crazy that it attracts the psychotics of entire nations.

  “Look. The old man, the one who died at Kutha, told me they were waiting for the First Priest. This is like the Mahdi, a kind of warrior-Messiah figure. Every time a Mahdi is declared there is widespread violence. Warfare. Bloodshed. But the Mahdi is a subject of controversy and disagreement between the Sunnis and the Shiites. The one they were calling at Kutha was a universal Mahdi. One who would satisfy the requirements of both Sunnis and Shiites.

  “You understand? There is no such thing! It doesn't exist, not even in the wildest imaginations of Islamic theologians. The Mahdi only comes at the time of the Second Coming of Jesus, and together they both cleanse the world of evil. That's the idea. But this ... this Mahdi ... is evil. Satanic. No! More than that. Other than that. Like the figure of the Mahdi among the Twelver Shiites, this one is ‘hidden.’ A Hidden Imam. Dead and buried, but not really dead. They want to summon it, call it back from the dead. They think they can hear it speak. It's ... it's talking to them.”

  Aubrey was silent but extremely attentive to everything the professor was saying, for it only reinforced the chatter that had started this whole process going. The remote viewers in their employ had seen the same thing, had communicated with it. And now Angell was saying that there were others—many others—who also were communicating with it. Young Jamila was one.

  Jason Miller had been another.

  “How do you know this, Professor?”

  Angell rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  “It was there. During that ritual in Kutha. It was like a revival meeting. Everyone was in synch, from the guys in makeup and halter tops and machine guns to the women in burqas. They all knew their roles. They moved like a single organism, thought like a single organism. The Imam was the ground, like in electricity. He was grounding the energy being raised by the ... the worshippers. Except that it really was a grounding. Literally. The energy was being sent into the ground. Underground. Into the Underworld. The rhythmic dancing, stamping of feet ... the fires lit everywhere ... I mean, that's the whole point of Kutha, right? Why else would they have chosen that spot?

  “And it was a revival. A literal revival. They were reviving a dead god.”

  There was silence around the table as his words sunk in.

  “So it was an act of necromancy, in a way?” This from Aubrey, who knew more about this than he let on.

  “Yes. Necromancy. Necronomicon, right? Dead names. It's all about reviving the dead. Dead gods. Dead religions. It's like those Tea Party true believers back in the States who are always talking about ‘taking their country back.’ Except that in this case it's the dead gods who want to take their planet back.”

  The words flowed out of him. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the experience of being in his first
firefight. Maybe it was all the death around him. Or watching the slow implosion of the world and everything good and beautiful in it. But he found himself saying things he would never have thought about so clearly, not in the privacy of his own brain anyway.

  “It doesn't matter if we believe any of this, or not. They believe it. That's what's so dangerous. They believe it. And ... look! Look at the state of the world. All those apocalyptic predictions look like they're coming true. It verifies what they think they know. Validates it. Gives it a voice.

  “All they need now is the ultimate validation. These are all People of the Book. They need the text, the scripture, to give their darkest emotions form and function. Without the focal point of the text, it all dissipates and withers away. The book is not just a text. It's a roadmap. A circuit diagram. A contract with zombies. It's the social network of demons, a telephone for talking with Satan. It's all the protocols they need to navigate the Pit. That's what they believe, anyway. It was written on their faces, on their foreheads like the Mark of the Beast.

  “Imagine a cult, a secret society, that didn't need to be secret anymore. Look what happened when Christianity came out of the catacombs and became a state religion under Constantine. Now imagine something a lot darker than Christianity. Something a lot older. Imagine an Inquisition where a Church is at war with all of humanity.

  “Susan Sontag once wrote that white people are a cancer in the world. Later she walked that back, but imagine that there is something ...someone ... who thinks that all people are a cancer on this planet, a cancer to be eradicated.”

  Aubrey stopped him there.

  “It doesn't make sense. Why would human beings go along with an agenda like that? Why are there cultists, devotees, whatever you want to call them, of this hideous philosophy and this savage Being?”

  Angell took a deep breath, and let it out slowly before replying.

  “Because they are in contact with It. It's real. Somehow it's real. It talks to them. And because they are dancing to his music. Because they have already lost their souls and their minds. They are just vehicles for It. Puppets. Pawns. Whatever you want to call it. But they still need the Book. Without it, they are just a weird, violent and deeply unsettling road show of suicide bombers and sociopaths, playing the small towns and summer stock. But with it, with that script, that scripture, they are ready for the big time. They are ready to open on Broadway.”