Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

  Sergeant Newland headed back from the Abrams Battle Tank where she'd been flirting with a dark-skinned Captain, and Smith carefully composed his face. Although most Mexicans were Catholic, real Christians continued to work hard to spread the true word to those corrupted by the Roman Whore of Babylon. Maybe the Captain was one of the lucky ones who had escaped the Pope's grasp. Christian or not, though, Smith didn't approve of mixing the races and Sergeant Newland's Nordic-blond hair and blue eyes awakened a protective chord inside him.

  "Everything under control, Sergeant? I should receive the excavation equipment within the hour."

  "Excavation? If it needs excavation, surely it can wait until tomorrow."

  Her blue eyes searched the horizon, studying the ugly desert sun as it descended toward night. Even under the bulk of her body armor, Smith couldn't miss the movement of her breasts, the rounded shape of her rear. Temptation.

  "The forces of Satan are most powerful at night, but we must fight them nevertheless."

  She gave him a strange look and he cursed the insane liberal political correctness that didn't even let the military databases hold vital information like religion. He'd picked the female, despite her sex, because she looked Germanic and came from rural America, as he did. Newland had assured him she was a Christian, but Satan was the father of lies.

  "Be prepared to guard against the pagan attackers,” he told her. Satan and his demonic host would dearly love to attack as well, but Satan had no power over those who have accepted the Word. Especially not if this place was truly sanctified by what Smith, and the entire Foundation, had been seeking for so many years.

  "Captain Herrera suggests that you authorize additional troops, sir."

  He considered, then shook his head. He was taking too many chances as it was. Jones had failed him and Sergeant Newland already knew too much. He had ample authority to do whatever it took to do his job, but too many unexplained disappearances could cause problems back home.

  "We'll have to make do with what we have on the ground. I'll arrange air support on alert in case the Satanists try a mass attack."

  "Right, sir. What else do you need from me?” She looked disgruntled, but she was ready to follow orders. As was proper in a woman, of course.

  "Have you ever worked a jackhammer?"

  He meant it as a joke. She was a woman after all. Instead, Ivy nodded. “Summer job for the city one year in college. Worked the road crew."

  "Great. You can break through the masonry here. He gestured to where he'd doused the source of power. “The jackhammer should be here soon."

  It'd already taken longer than it should have—they'd known there might be excavation involved since before the war began. Eventually, though, one of the big Foundation helicopters floated down, its huge rotors sending clouds of dust into the sky, its black matte paint a shadow of darkness against the dusk.

  Bright searchlights flashed down as the helicopter neared the ground, blinding anyone who might have been looking through night vision equipment while dust blew everywhere.

  "A pillar of smoke by day,” he murmured. “And a tower of fire by night.” It wasn't blasphemous to see the hand of God in the activities of the Foundation.

  "Huh?"

  He'd forgotten the woman. That wasn't like him, even if she was merely a female.

  "Just admiring the way the chopper is setting down,” he explained.

  The Foundation had sent equipment, but some of the men with it were mercenaries rather than of the faith. Not even true Foundation men could be completely trusted—not with this treasure. They unloaded the jackhammer and the mini-bulldozer he'd specified, but then he sent them back into the helicopter, leaving himself and the Sergeant to do the heavy lifting. After all, the Bible had said that a single man, beaten and wounded, had carried this treasure once. Girded by the strength of his faith, Smith could do no less.

  He handed the jackhammer over to the woman and then took control of the mini-dozer, using it to clear away the pagan rubble from the exact center of the mosque.

  "You want me to just punch a hole in the paving stones here?” Newland asked.

  He nodded. Why did people have to have everything explained to them?

  "I hope you know what you're doing."

  He'd had his own doubts when the Foundation had sent him into Iraq more than a year before the invasion. What he'd discovered then had convinced him, and convinced the Foundation Elders, that this was no goose-chase. The artifacts his teams had already uncovered were the real thing—and the ultimate prize would be no less. And it was so close he ached with need to touch it.

  "Just do it."

  Sergeant Newland finally started hacking through paving stones and mortar that had been placed six hundred years earlier, during the reconstruction of the city after Hulegu Khan's pagan Mongol armies had delivered a fierce blow to the pagan Moslems. That war between Satanists had been a glorious opportunity for the West to fight back, to free the Holy Land from pagan control.

  Christendom, under the misrule of the Popes, had squandered that opportunity. As they'd squandered so man others, including the British occupation of Iraq eighty years earlier. Just as this Christian invasion of Iraq, and the most complete Christian conquest of Babylon since the days of the Roman Emperor Heraclius, would be squandered if the Foundation were not successful.

  Smith kept one eye on the Sergeant as he completed clearing the area, shoving away each heavy paving stone as she broke up the mortar holding it in place.

  Unlike many of the American women he'd seen on this campaign, the Sergeant modestly kept her clothes on, the bulky armor partially disguising the deceitful curves and charms her body certainly held. But he knew they were there.

  Smith never lost sight of the true enemy, the ultimate center of true Satanism. Satan might be referred to as ‘he,’ but the core of his worship had always come from followers of the mother-whore goddess, Ishtar—an evil faith in eternal enmity with the one true God, an abomination that had originated in this very, wholly damned, country.

  "Something down here.” The Sergeant stepped back from the hole she'd created, pulled off her helmet, and wiping sweat from her eyes.

  "What sort of something, Sergeant?"

  "Hollow spot. Big. Maybe a crypt. Did those old-time Moslems bury their dead in churches like Medieval Christians?"

  He neither knew, nor cared. What he did know was that his dousing Cross hadn't pointed him to some Pagan's skeleton. “Let me shine some light on it."

  He drove the mini-dozer all the way the edge of the hole and turned on the headlights. The sun had finally set, plunging the city into a darkness lit only by occasional distant flashes that could be heat lightning, but that Smith suspected were something more ominous. Satan had guarded his stolen treasure for nearly a thousand years. He would recognize the threat to His power, see the coming end to His time of rule over this Earth. He would do what He could to stop the Foundation. And His power, that of a mighty angel, could not be dismissed.

  "Can't see anything,” the Sergeant reported. “Looks like just a couple of old beams and more rocks."

  Cold sweat poured from his body. “Tell me about the beams."

  "Big ol’ hunks of wood,” she reported. “Both notched, for joining, maybe.” She paused a moment. “Hey, know what it is? It's the two sections of a Cross. What would Moslems be doing with a Cross buried under the foundation of one of their oldest mosques?"

  What indeed?

  Smith stepped down from the mini-dozer and dropped down into the hole next to the woman.

  This close to her, he couldn't avoid breathing air she had contaminated. A normal person would smell of sweat after a day in the hundred-and-thirty-degree sun. But Sergeant Newland smelled of some exotic perfume, just as the Priestesses of Ishtar had adorning their bodies at this very spot, thousands of years ago—at the cost of their souls.

  "Don't touch it."

  He lowered his head in prayer, then reached a hand to caress the holie
st object in the world.

  Whatever the ancient Hebrews had believed, God did not dwell in a gopher-wood box carried through the desert—as in Indiana Jones's Ark of the Covenant. God had lived, died, and been reborn on this wood, though. This artifact, like the pagan Atlas, had carried the weight of the world on its shoulders, had seen the sun darken at the Son's sacrifice, had watched as the Demons of Hell celebrated the brief damned moment when they had been allowed to believe that death could triumph over eternal life.

  Smith had achieved the goal of his life. He had found the One True Cross.

  He reached his hand for the crossbeams, touched the spot where the Lord's hands had once been held, and felt the surge of power well through him.

  "Stand back, Sergeant. I'll lift it out."

  "War booty is my guess, sir,” the Sergeant said. “Something the Medieval Arabs captured from the Crusaders or whoever else they were fighting, maybe. Here, let me give you a hand with that."

  "Don't touch—” but he was too late. Once again, that damned curiosity and willful disobedience of women, the sins that had led Eve to entrap Adam with the apple, proved to be Satan's path to a place He could never reach without human contrivance.

  "Wooh! Some kind of electrical charge or something. What's that about?"

  Too late. “I told you to back away, Sergeant. But since you insist on interfering, you can help me lift The Cross from its temporary grave.

  "You don't think this is...” the Sergeant essayed a chuckle. “I mean, there's no way it could still be around."

  The ugly sin of Pride tugged at him, tempted him despite the many hours he'd spent at prayer. Smith wanted to tell Newland how his own research had traced the Medieval accounts of how the Crusaders had lost the rediscovered Cross to Saladin, of how Saladin had taken it back to Kurdistan, his home, before losing it in the supposedly honorable pagan's failed siege of Mosul.

  Smith was not immune to the power of Pride, but he was armored by his faith, and fully aware that the creeping fingers of Lust had something to do with his desire to impress the female.

  "It certainly would be a miracle if the True Cross had survived the millennia,” he observed dryly. “Now lift."

  The cross was surprisingly heavy. Without the energy he gained from the artifact itself, he doubted he would have been able to lift it, even with the woman's help. But then, his Lord had been vastly more than human and even He had fallen under its weight.

  One of the tanks flashed its searchlight past him and he suppressed a curse—taking the name of the Lord in vain had been one of the hardest sins for him to break.

  Could the tank crew have recognized what he held? He couldn't be certain. The Foundation had made their requirement clear. Until the time arrived, there would be no witnesses.

  He set the ancient relic in the cart behind the mini-dozer, then jumped back into the hidden crypt and lifted the crosspiece.

  "Felt heavier than I'd think wood would be,” the Sergeant said. “Father O'Brien will be fascinated when I tell him about this, though.” She unbuttoned a couple of buttons on her uniform blouse and swabbed between her breasts.

  Smith felt the tightness of temptation in his groin. Satan was fighting dirty now that His back was to the wall.

  "Get behind me, Satan."

  "Huh?"

  He thought fast. “Sergeant. Insurgents. Watch out."

  She spun around, her automatic rifle coming up against the perceived threat.

  He'd pray over her later, hoping that the Lord would accept her sacrifice to His greater glory.

  Drawing the knife from the pocket where he kept it always, he drove it into her back.

  It bounced off the body armor.

  He blamed the distraction that brief sight of her exposed chest had caused in him for the stupidity and poor-aim of his attack, but he reacted instantaneously, redirecting the energy from the knife's bounce to drive it upward, toward the carotid artery in her neck.

  He'd been through the CIA schools. Before he'd been given this assignment, he'd trained in every weapon, every method of killing. And he was filled with the grace and power of the savior.

  "Lord, aid me as I smite your enemies,” he prayed.

  His sharp knife parted her skin as easily as if it had been cotton candy, exposing tendons, veins, and arteries.

  He jumped back as blood spurted from her neck. Sergeant Newland was dead already, although she was still standing. It would just take a moment for the message to reach her body.

  Reacting on training, instinct, perhaps strengthened by the demonic power of Ishtar, Sergeant Newland spun around, the muzzle of her M16 flashing death in a broad circle of automatic fire.

  One bullet from that vast swarm caught him in his stomach, its power throwing him back, as if he had been caught up by a giant hand and discarded as wanting.

  But even Ishtar cannot control a corpse for long. The sergeant stumbled and fell, her body splashing blood like a drunkard spilling cheap wine.

  Smith looked down and saw the hole in his midsection, then felt his mind begin to drift. He'd done his best, been a soldier in the army of the Lord. Satan had taken him down, but Smith felt no sorrow. He was assured of his place, certain of the Lord's promise of eternal life. Surely the Lord would accept him despite his many failures. Amen.

  Chapter 2

  Captain Zack Herrera had been facing away from where Smith and Newland did their excavation, using the tank's sophisticated night vision equipment to watch the subtle movement of the locals as they crept around, tried to approach the bombed-out mosque without coming in range of the Abrams’ deadly machineguns.

  The sudden burst of an automatic weapon sounded too close, but didn't have the characteristic low rattle of the Kalasnikov.

  "Soldier down.” His gunner, Billy Jensen's voice bumped up an octave. “Jeez. Looks like Newland and Smith both."

  An Iraqi sniper could had gotten past the perimeter. With only Zack's company and the few soldiers in Newland's squad available, their perimeter had been porous at best. But something about this didn't smell right and he'd heard only the rattlesnake snarl of an M16.

  "Full reverse,” he ordered. “Other units, cover our vector. And button up Newland's infantry. We may have to make a run for it."

  Almost invisibly in the moonless darkness, the chopper's cannon traced the path of his tank. What the hell?

  "Sonders, see if you can raise the helicopter on wireless. Tell them I'll blow their cannon right off the chopper if they don't point it the other way."

  "Yes, sir."

  An Abrams can move when it needs to, and it only took the massive engine's turbines a few seconds to bring him alongside the bodies of the two Americans.

  "Searchlight,” he ordered. It would make them a target for every insurgent within ten miles, but he needed to see and he couldn't believe what his eyes seemed to be showing him.

  "Off,” he ordered a second later. He didn't know what it meant, but he didn't need a million candlepower to see the carnage.

  Newland lay across a couple of huge logs with her throat slit. Smoke still trickled from her M16. And Smith held a bloody knife in one hand and his guts in another.

  The civilian had killed her, but she'd gotten last licks in before dying. What the hell was this about?

  "Unbutton. I'm going outside."

  "Captain, the chopper started its rotors and they're still targeting us. Not sure I like the looks of it."

  It didn't make sense, but then, nothing about this mission had made sense.

  "Put them in the sights of the 120 millimeter and let them see how they feel about turnaround. And for God's sake, button up again once I'm out."

  "Right, Sir.” The idea of shooting back cheered Jensen right up.

  Herrera knew it was hopeless, but he jumped out of the tank and knelt down by the CIA agent, pressing his fingers to the man's neck.

  Nothing.

  "Call for another Medevac,” he shouted. “We've got at least one dead."

>   He was moving toward Sergeant Newland's body when all hell broke loose.

  The huge black helicopter lifted about five feet off the ground and fired at his tank.

  The explosion blasted over the tank, shook the remains of the old mosque like an earthquake, and knocked Herrera to the ground.

  But an Abrams is a hairy beast and Jensen had been watching for exactly that move. The tank's 120 fired back almost instantaneously and the helicopter went down in a ball of fire that made the earlier searchlight glare look like nothing.

  The second explosion shook the mosque like a dog shaking fleas and knocked Herrera the rest of the way to the ground. If he'd been on the other side of the tank, unprotected by its huge bulk, he would be a dead man. As it was, he was shaken, disoriented, and pissed.

  Herrera pushed himself to his knees, then realized he'd been pushing on something soft.

  "What happened?"

  It took a moment for reality to penetrate. Dead women don't talk, right? Which meant Newland wasn't dead. What had appeared from a distance to be a huge slash across her neck was simply a scratch.

  Or was it. The pool of blood around her didn't come from any scratch. To all appearances, she'd bled out. But she was alive, and talking. The situation was clearly impossible.

  Before he could answer Sergeant Newland, the tank's hatch popped open. “Captain, we've got trouble. Our IFF shows multiple aircraft incoming. They're signaling Friendly, but the signature doesn't look right for Air Force.” Sonders was practically babbling now. “I think we may have some more where this black helicopter came from.

  Herrera thought fast. Whatever he decided, there would be no going back. He didn't need to be a genius to know that taking on the CIA or whatever other secret government agency was behind Smith and his black helicopters was a fool's game.

  "Understood, Sonders. Good shooting, Jensen. Cancel that Medevac order and clear out. I want the entire company to head back to base at full speed. And for God's sake take Newland's squad with you. Don't stop for anything but a valid chain-of-command order."