Four Summoner’s Tales

by Kelley Armstrong, Christopher Golden, David Liss

  Soft laughter. Mocking and ironic.

  “What do you mean? What did you take?” But Finn thought he knew what had been taken. “Wait, do you . . . do you have my men?”

  “They are with us,” said the voice.

  “No!”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “W-what?”

  “This tunnel . . . long ago this was where vendors set up their tables. Spices hung from these walls; the rocks echoed with the cries of sheep and lambs and goats. Men and women dickered and sold and bought. This was where bargains were made for all of the things that offered sustenance and comfort and pleasure.”

  “No . . . this is just a bunch of old ruins.”

  “ ‘Ruins,’ ” echoed the voice, and for a moment there seemed to be a flavor of sadness there. “I can still hear the voices of the thousands who came here. Them . . . and those who lived here after the old times had passed. This place has had a dozen names. A hundred. Even in times like these when the desert sands and the fires of war turn these caves and caverns into a realm of ghosts, I can hear those old voices. Such . . . deals were struck here. For a string of camels. For lambs to sacrifice. For a knife in the dark. For the return of something lost.”

  Finn waited, muscles tensed, not sure how to respond, or even if he should.

  He could feel the person bend closer. A rustle of clothes, the creak of joints. “And now, here in my town, a town I saw built, a town I saw carved from the living rock, we are well met to bargain once more.”

  “What . . . kind of bargain?” he asked cautiously.

  “What will you give me for what you want? What bargain will you make for what you want?”

  It made Finn suddenly furious that this fucking thing—man, woman, whoever or whatever it was whispering to him in the dark—had his men. Had them and wanted to trade them like beads at a bazaar. Like sacrificial lambs.

  God.

  It made Finn so furious. He summoned all of his flagging strength and, with one vicious growl, twisted around and lashed out with a balled fist.

  His hand found nothing, struck nothing.

  As if there was nothing there. But Finn could hear it breathing. He could hear it laughing softly to itself.

  That laugh . . . that was the worst thing of all.

  2

  ECHO TEAM

  My name is Captain Joseph Ledger. Former Baltimore PD, former Army Ranger. Currently drawing pay from one of those alphabet organizations that the public never hears about.

  Ever.

  The DMS. Short for Department of Military Sciences. Only we’re not military. Not in any way I could explain.

  We’re certainly not regular army.

  Guys like me aren’t regular anything.

  We’re not even regular Special Forces. You won’t find a single mention of a DMS field team on any list of JSOC crews, not even on those eyes-only black-ops lists. We operate off the radar because there are times someone has to. Plausible deniability will only take you so far and the president has to either lie or tell truths that—believe me—nobody wants to hear.

  You know that saying, about how the truth will set you free.

  It’s true most of the time.

  It’s not that we’re out there being bad guys. Nothing like that.

  It’s just that there are some things that will never fit into a newsfeed. Some things would make very bad TV. Disturbing TV. The kind that wouldn’t just shake Joe Public’s faith in the political powers that be but that would put serious cracks in his fundamental view of the world.

  You can’t sum up an after-action report with “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” and nobody can stand behind this stuff in a press conference.

  I know it’s fucked, but it is what it is.

  Some of this stuff has really screwed with my head. I’m not the same guy I was when I was recruited by the DMS.

  How could I be?

  How could anyone?

  We were in a Black Hawk cruising low and fast through a series of rocky passes that looked like the ruins of some ancient castle. Afghanistan is like that in areas. It’s a bleak, broken, and desolate place. I know of at least two video games that used scans of the landscape as the design basis for inhospitable alien worlds. Personally, I think the surface of Mars would be cheerier and more welcoming.

  I didn’t have my whole team with me. Most of my guys were taking some R and R after a cocksucker of a firefight we had in North Carolina. Yeah, that’s right. The homeland itself. The DEA had been working a joint op with the FBI, something about a rumor that terrorists were backing meth production. Meth is not really an export drug—it’s mostly screwing up people at home, and in increasing numbers. The joint task force got themselves into a firefight with a distribution team, and in the process, a lot of bags of crystal got torn apart by live rounds. Worst case should have been contact highs. Instead, every single man there—DEA, FBI, and the bad guys—died within twenty-four hours.

  Cause?

  A brand-new strain of synthetic anthrax that had been mixed with the meth during the cool-down stage. Stuff had a contagion factor of 94 percent and a 100 percent kill rate. The Feds shut down the hospital and the site of the gunfight, and my guys were called in. I’m top-kick of Echo Team, a crew of first-chair shooters based out of the Warehouse in Baltimore. We took over the operation from the DEA and backtracked the meth to a major supply depot in a hangar of a bankrupt private airfield. Forty guys on the deck, mostly Russians with a few Cubans there for variety. They were in combat hazmat suits and everyone was armed for bear. We had our own protective gear—the latest generation of Saratoga Hammer Suits, which are designed for combat in the age of extreme bioweapons.

  Echo Team was joined by Riptide Team out of Florida and Bronco Team out of Atlanta. We hit the place in a coordinated strike that started with a total lights-out thanks to a low-yield e-bomb that fried all their electronics. Then, with our night vision online, we raided from three points and cut them down.

  They made a fight of it. Not sure if I admire that or not. Soldiers are supposed to respect their enemies, but that math gets skewed when your enemy is a terrorist who’s trying to unleash a plague on a big chunk of the nonmilitary population. Junkies aren’t the only ones who smoke meth. Lots of kids do, too. And lots of ordinary citizens. With that synthetic bacterium in there, it only needed one puff for a death sentence.

  Of the forty bad guys and the eighteen of us, there was a big butcher’s bill. Twenty-six thugs went to the morgue. I’ve blocked out two seconds sometime next year to give a shit about that. Three DMS guys went down, all from Bronco, when they raided a Quonset hut our intel said was cold storage and it turned out to be a lab. The bad guys were in the middle of a cook and everything blew. The three shooters from Bronco never knew what happened. Apart from that, there were nonfatal gunshot wounds and some shrapnel cuts. Anyone whose Hammer Suit got so much as a nick in it was washed down with antimicrobial soap and medevaced to a quarantine facility at a hospital a few blocks from the CDC in Atlanta, where they were given a cocktail of antibiotics. The only bright spot was that the synthetic anthrax responded really well to treatment.

  So, that left me with two gunslingers—First Sergeant Bradley Sims, known as Top, and a giant of a kid from Orange County whose real name was Harvey Rabbit. No surprise that everyone called him Bunny. Top and Bunny had been with me since I joined the DMS. They’d been through almost everything I’d been through, and even between us, there were things we didn’t talk about. Even though I had no way of knowing it, an itch between my shoulder blades told me that the situation we were flying into was going to be one of those.

  I looked out the window and saw the Black Hawk’s insectoid shadow fly up and down the sides of the austere Afghan mountains. Here and there, I saw a few small flocks of sheep, and in the hollow between two almost-vertical mountains was some burned-out wreckage.

  “Dead crocodile,” murmured Top.

  I nodded. Th
e debris was that of an old Soviet Mi-24 assault helicopter, known as a “crocodile” because of the scale-like camouflage paint job.

  “Thought the Russians always recovered their downed birds,” said Bunny.

  “When they can find ’em,” said Top. “Too damn many places out here to get lost.”

  That was true enough. These mountains were so remote and in many parts inaccessible to anyone but a goat or a goatherd.

  “Besides,” said Top, “sometimes an area’s too hot for a recovery, and I can see at least fifty pocked-out cave mouths up the sides there. Taliban could have put a single shooter in each, and maybe two or three guys with RPGs, and half the damn Russian army couldn’t smoke them out. It’d cost too much.”

  Bunny and I nodded, knowing that Top wasn’t referring to a price tag in dollars.

  That was really the story of the Afghan wars right there. The landscape favored hit-and-run guerilla fighters and was a total pain in the ass to a heavily mobilized ground force. Air support was good when the winds were right, but one eighteen-year-old kid with a rocket-propelled grenade and a six-foot-deep cave to squat in could turn the five-million-dollar fully armed and loaded UH-60L Black Hawk into flaming debris as useless as the old Russian crocodile that was now dwindling into the distance behind us. In the modern age, unmanned Predator technology was giving us a marginal edge. Yeah, marginal, against guys in sandals and robes. War wasn’t war anymore.

  I knew that if my team went down, someone else would pick up the mission, but no one would come looking for us. Our helo was equipped with a telemetric response system, which is a fancy way of saying that if the entire crew and all authorized passengers died, the cessation of our telemetry from the chips we all had under the skin would trigger a self-destruct package. Boom. No evidence bigger than a paper clip. Our bodies? Vultures would pick us clean and the desert winds would strip the clothing from our bones. It was a chilling thought. If we died out here, our transport would die with us and all official records would be deleted. We’d cease to exist.

  The men we were looking for were almost at that point.

  It spilled out like this . . .

  We were on an off-the-books search-and-rescue for an even deeper off-the-books infil team composed of four members of Rattlesnake Team. That team was one of four DMS groups on semipermanent loan to the CIA for operations here on the Big Sand. Rattlesnake Team was hunting a very special Taliban convoy that was reported to be using opium transport to cover a much nastier cargo. Some kind of new pathogen that either had been weaponized or was on the way to a lab to be weaponized. That was about as precise as the intel got, but it rang the right bells all the way up the chain of command. The CIA deals with WMDs, but when it comes to bioweapons, they pick up the phone and call us.

  Here’s where it got complicated in a freaky kind of way.

  The CIA had gotten a tip about the caravan from a village headman named Aziz, who was a known Taliban sympathizer. And the tip was not the result of a bribe, threat, or any enhanced interrogation. Aziz went into Kabul, bought a disposable cell phone, and called a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who was in the CIA.

  Yeah, chew on that for a moment.

  Why’d Aziz make the call? Turns out that, despite digging the money the Taliban paid him to smooth some details for the drug caravans, this guy’s regular gig was facilitating archaeological digs all through this part of the country. He knows who to bribe to get permits, and he makes arrangements with the local bad guys not to shoot the university types who risk their asses to collect Sumerian potsherds or ancient dinosaur poop. In the middle of a war.

  I know, right?

  Understand, most Muslims, especially those with college educations, are fiercely protective of anything historical. They treasure and preserve culture, partly because most of them are civilized folks who don’t have their heads up their asses, and also because Islam contributed a hell of a lot to art, science, and math. After all, “algebra” is an Anglicized version of the Arabic word “al-jabr.” They invented it.

  However, there’s this small group of total fundamentalist dickheads who think that Allah wants them to blow up anything that wasn’t created for or by Muslims. They already destroyed some of the most profoundly beautiful Buddhist temples and statues. They want to destroy the Sphinx and the pyramids, too. The kind of stuff that would make Indiana Jones go totally postal.

  Well, apparently some of the local Taliban have been messing with dig sites, shrines, and old ruins that predate Islam. People of one kind or another have been living in the region since the Middle Paleolithic era—call it fifty thousand years, give or take a long weekend. Islam’s been around since the seventh century. These bozos wanted to erase any evidence that a civilized or enlightened culture existed before Muhammad founded the religion.

  Aziz dimed the Taliban partly because, from the CIA intel reports, he was more of an opportunist than a villain, and partly because the destruction was cutting into his main source of income, which was greasing the archaeology network.

  Or so we thought at the time. We found out more later, but I’ll get to that.

  So, Aziz contacted the CIA to tell them that the Taliban had royally screwed the pooch in two very distinct and related ways. First, they had taken control of a series of caves that were scheduled for excavation by a twenty-man team from the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives in France, thus preventing Aziz from exacting his inflated fees to provide on-site safety for the team. And, second, in their downtime between ferrying tons of opium through the region, they were amusing themselves by destroying one of the world’s most pristine lilitu, a kind of female Semitic desert demon related to the Lilith legends of the ancient Jews. Part of the shrine’s uniqueness was that it was in Afghanistan at all—the lilitu were Mesopotamian monsters, and Afghanistan was not part of that empire.

  Point is, the desecration of the site—and the clear loss of income for Aziz—turned him into a CIA informant. He’d have rather seen this band of Taliban get whacked than lose the university trade. The next link in the chain was that the CIA determined that this was the same Taliban group running the caravans that were likely hiding the bioweapons.

  Nothing in the Middle East is ever simple and straightforward. Not a goddamn thing.

  So, my boss, Mr. Church, sent Rattlesnake Team in to take out one of the caravans and kick-start the process of reclaiming those caves. None of this was in the name of archaeology or the preservation of antiquities.

  In retrospect, maybe it should have been. Don’t ask me. I’m just a shooter.

  Ten days ago, Rattlesnake Team went dark.

  No telemetry at all.

  The team leader, Sergeant Michael O’Leary—combat call sign “Finn”—was a friend of mine. We’d walked through fire more than once since we joined the DMS. Finn was a stand-up dude and a certified badass, but he was one of the good guys. He’d walk on his knees through broken glass for his friends and his team. And though he was patriotic, he wasn’t one of those empty-brained “my country, right or wrong” assholes who are an embarrassment to genuine patriots. Finn was smart and resourceful, too. So were all three of his men.

  Rattlesnake went in, using intel from the CIA and some additional stuff from a friendly among the villagers. The Taliban convoy was due to pass through a dry valley that used to be a town way back when. Great place for an ambush, so Finn wanted to get there first. The job should have taken nine hours if it all went like clockwork, and maybe double that under worst-case scenarios.

  They’d been missing now for three whole days.

  I opened my tactical laptop, which was the size and weight of an iPad, but with a much stronger router and battery. The thing was snugged into a ruggedized case that clipped to the front of my chest. The screen still showed the same thing.

  Four telemetric signals. Three here in this valley, and one eighty klicks away. That one was bright and green—theoretically proof of life—but it was in a fixed position an
d hadn’t moved since the anticipated time of engagement, ten days ago. The other three signals were weird. Every operative in the DMS has a radio-frequency identification chip the size of a rice grain surgically implanted in the fatty tissue under the triceps. Unlike the passive chips used to store medical information, these RFID chips are true telemetric locators. They’re late-generation models manufactured by Digital Angel, and as long as GPS tracking satellites circle the earth, the chips will locate the wearer and send a continuous feed to establish location and proof of life. The battery is charged by blood pressure. If the heart stops, the chip immediately begins losing its charge. That diminished signal is read as what it is—the death of the wearer.

  Now, here’s the kicker—the other three chips went dark for almost ten hours. Totally dark. Then they started back up again. None of them were transmitting at anything like full strength, but they were sending signals that made a case that the wearers were alive.

  Both our computer geek, Bug, and Dr. William Hu, head of our science division, say that this would only be possible if the three soldiers wearing those RFIDs were so deep inside the earth that the collective iron-rich rock of these mountains blocked the signal—and that was a hard scenario to construct. Or all three of the RFID chips malfunctioned in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. The likelihood of that was somewhere around .000087 percent. Bug did the math.

  The only scenario that was more plausible was the presence of an EMP. That might have explained why the chips all went out at the same time. Unfortunately RFID chips don’t simply “get better” after an electromagnetic pulse. If they were blown out, then they should still have been dead.

  That’s the point at which we stopped speculating. No other scenario made a lick of sense.

  Not one.

  We flew on.

  3

  RATTLESNAKE TEAM