U.S. Army Mage Corps: SWORD

by John Holmes

  Houchins waited for the argument to end. “Now, do you understand? You were dead, and I called on a Dryad to help. Do you know her? Can you feel her now?”

  A small, timid voice answered her. “Yes, her name is Erato. She … she wants to help me, but …, but she says she doesn’t know how long she can stay in my body. Oh my god, Chief, I am so scared!” and she burst into tears. The older woman unfastened the straps and gathered her up in her arms.

  “Me too, Jaime, me too; but you’re alive.”

  Chapter 23 Mount Rainer, Washington State

  At twelve thousand feet, the air had a remarkable chill. Colonel Scarletti muttered a small heating spell, feeling his skin warm. The wind chill from forty mile per hour gusts quickly whipped it away, and he hoped that this would be a short meeting. He pulled up the zipper on his Gortex coat and shoved his hands deep in his pockets.

  Glancing around, he looked to quickly find what he had come to the top of Mount Rainier to see. At first, with the sunlight reflecting off the glacier, it was hard to see anything at all. He pulled out a pair of sunglasses and settled them on his face, then lit a cigar, hoping the heat would draw out his quarry. A small grin settled on his burned face when a deep bass voice rumbled from ten feet away, and long sinewy neck lifted an ice blue head up from behind a snow covered boulder.

  “That will kill you, you know” rumbled the dragon. A leathery wing tip arched over the rocks and flicked the ash off Scarletti’s cigar, putting it out.

  “Áed, I need your help.”

  “Of course you need my help. Why else would you be here?” The dragon climbed slowly over the rocks, almost two hundred feet of steel colored scales and horn. He lowered his head until he was gazing directly at the human figure. Scarletti was very careful not to look him in the eye as they spoke, lest he wound up locking gazes and slowly freezing to death. He also took care to avoid the Steel Dragon’s breathe, wanting to avoid a serious case of frostbite. Áed Dóiteáin himself was over three thousand years old, and had come to America almost two hundred years ago, following the Irish people as they migrated out of their homeland during the famine. His breath was bitter cold, and his name, “Áed” or “Fire” in Old Irish, was his idea of a joke. His original home had been in the far north of the Scandinavian Peninsula, above the Arctic Circle, but his curiosity had driven him to follow Viking raiders as they plundered their way through England and Ireland.

  “I might be here to bring you a virgin to eat!” laughed Scarletti, and Áed rumbled mirthfully himself. It sounded like an avalanche.

  “At your age, you should keep the virgin for yourself; it might help your sex drive, old human.”

  Scarletti grinned. “I see you’ve healed nicely” he said, looking at the scar on Áed’s side. It ran just under his wing, scales twisted together in a ragged line.

  “I have eaten many, many Russians to pay them back for that.” On the same bio-weapons lab raid where Sergeant Agostine had lost his leg, Áed had been wounded by a wire guided Russian Anti-tank missile that had exploded just as he twisted away. The shaped charge had torn through his scales and burned the soft flesh underneath. Scarletti had packed snow and ice into the wound, healing the dying beast after a maddened Áed rampaged through a company of T-80 tanks, ripping off turrets to get at the crewmen inside, and spilling blue blood over the Siberian tundra. A tank sabot round had punched a hole through his wing, and a Kevlar patch held it closed now.

  “Good. Now I need your help. Your country needs you.”

  The dragon snorted, exhaling frost out of his nose and coating Scarletti with a cloud of ice that quickly melted. “Piss off. My country owes me. I even get VA compensation. One hundred sheep per month. The Washington National Guard helicopters drop them off on Nisqually Glacier and I have fun hunting them down. Nothing better than frost burned mutton, except man-flesh.”

  Ignoring the dragons’ sarcasm, Scarletti held out his hand, and a holographic image sprang to life, showing the ambush on Smith’s convoy. Áed squinted, watching the small figures fighting. Scarletti stopped when the Brass Dragon came on screen.

  “Oh, I see you, Junayd Nizar Abdul-Hamid Sa’ab. Yes, I see you.” The dragon’s deep blue eyes grew hard and his wings moved up over his head. Between the two claws a bolt of cold lighting blazed, crackling brighter than the glare from the snow. His rumble of anger shook the rocks around them.

  “It’s been more than twenty years.”

  “That is the blink of an eye to a dragon. I thought I had killed him.” Scarletti knew he was remembering a dark night in the mountains on the Iraq / Iran border, when Junayd and Áed had matched fire and ice, and the older dragon had ripped out the younger Brass Dragon’s heart out, leaving his corpse on the side of a cliff. The roar of triumph from Áed had shattered the HUMVEE windshields of the Strike Team, even as they battled an Iraqi Republican Guard Company.

  “I’m pretty sure you did, even though I wasn’t there. That’s the problem. Between a dragon who should be dead, and a Death Knight, and a possessed Durkistani Wizard, there is a lot going on here that I don’t understand.”

  “Where is this?”

  “The Gorengal Valley, Durkistan. Right on the Pakistani border.”

  Áed arched backwards, settling on his rear legs, his scales glittering in the sun, his pointed tail entwining with his neck. He closed his eyes, thinking back over the years. Scarletti waited, despite the cold.

  The dragon’s eyes opened, and his voice came out as a low rasp. “They are seeking something. I was there, in the Hindu Kush mountains, a thousand years ago. Yes. I remember.” His eyes open wide, the slitted pupils opening also, showing deep black.

  “The Sword of Mohammed. Yes. They are going for the sword.”

  A chill that no spell could touch ran through Scarletti, and he answered “All the swords of Mohammed are in the Topkapi Museum in Pakistan. They may have great symbolic value, but nothing more than that.”

  “No, not all swords. Not the ONE. Not the sword that Mohammed wore in the presence of Allah, not the one he used when he re-took Mecca, after the exile. It was an extremely powerful weapon, able to give the user the ability to sway thousands to Islam.” He uttered a guttural word in Arabic, “Saifullah”, which meant literally, “Sword of God.”

  “But that was lost, a thousand years ago, when the Ghaznavid Empire ruled that area, and raided Baghdad…”

  “Yes, it was lost, on its way to Saidpur. Apparently, someone knows where it is. I will meet you in the mountains above the Gorengal, Colonel. With something like the sword in the hands of a Marid, this could be the end of the West.”

  The dragon stood on his hind legs and stretched to his whole length, wings spread wide, and then leapt off the cliff, heading eastward and climbing high into the sky. The setting sun made the steel and chrome of his scales catch fire, and Scarletti watched as he disappeared.

  “Well, damn” muttered Scarletti. “at least he could have offered me a ride.”

  Chapter 24 Ten Thousand feet above the Gornegal Valley, Durkistan

  The tail gate of the C-130 dropped, causing the big plane to start bouncing around, the slipstream being disrupted. One of the crew members stood at the ramp, looking demonic in the green lights, oxygen mask strapped to his helmet. He held up his hand, showing five fingers, then started closing them, one by one.

  Xavier Smith was almost hyperventilating in his own oxygen mask. Outside, the wind whipped past at almost two hundred miles per hour. At the two minute mark, he had clumsily, with the help of one of the crewmen of the MC-130 Special Operations Combat Talon aircraft, stood up and shuffled to the ramp. Now he stood, watching the fingers go down. Five, four, three, two, one and he heard a muffled “GO! GO! GO!” from the crew chief.

  Smith stepped to the end of the ramp and stopped cold. Below him, a full moon illuminated snow covered, jagged edged peaks, with the Gorengal Valley running like a knife slash through it. His knees seemed to have locked in place, and, as he looked down, his vision s
wam before him. Try as he might, he couldn’t move.

  A size twelve combat boot hit him in the ass, and he fell forward, immediately pulled away from the aircraft by the slipstream. For a few seconds he tumbled through the sky, until he remembered to spread his arms and legs to stabilize himself. Wind tearing at his uniform, he managed to reach up and put the Night Vision Goggles strapped to his face back in in place. Immediately, far below him, an Infrared Strobe Light was blinking green on the small screens of his NVG’s.

  “No magic, no magic” he chanted to himself, although the urge to cast a feather spell and float gently down to earth was almost overpowering. The wind whipping quickly numbed his exposed skin.

  Behind him the MC-130 banked hard and headed away from Pakistani airspace. It had almost completed its turn when a bolt of pure energy lanced up from the ground and intersected itself with a wing. The craft, filled with thousands of gallons of aviation fuel, exploded into a fireball that lit up the night sky around Smith.

  “HOLY CRAP!” yelled Smith into his facemask, as he rolled over in midair and watched the burning wreckage fall towards the ground in an arc of fire. He rolled back over, checked his altimeter, and at ten thousand feet, only one thousand feet above the IR strobe, he pulled the ripcord on his chute.

  The shock of the parachute opening was transmitted through his body, the straps of his harness digging into his crotch and shoulders. He looked up to check and see if his chute had filled properly with air and checked that the risers weren’t tangled. Looking back down, he slowly steered the chute in the direction of the IR beacon, which was a little off to his left.

  The ground rushed up at him, seeming to accelerate at him as he descended, until he collapsed in the snow with a heavy THUMP.

  Around him, figures appeared out of the trees, and Smith’s heart stopped. Instead of the American uniforms of Strike Team Seven that he had expected to see, they wore traditional Durkistani clothes, supplemented with mixed camouflage.

  One slight figure held a Druganov Sniper rifle on him, while another traced lazy circles on his chest with a laser sight. Smith held his breath and prepared to light some hellfire, position be damned.

  “Should we kill him?” asked the sniper, in heavily accented English.

  “I dunno, he’s kinda cute, all puffed up, ready to do magic and shit. I say we keep him.” The one with the AK cut the laser off, and pulled down her scarf to reveal a pale face and green eyes. A strand of hair slipped out and looked blood red in the moonlight, and her laugh cut through the frosty air.

  “Jesus, Specialist O’Neil, you scared the crap out me.” Smith started to gather in his chute, and the sniper, Ahmed Yasir, slung his rifle and helped him.

  “We were expecting Bognaski, and where is Chief York?”

  “The Chief will be here tomorrow, if she’s OK. I’ll tell you all about it when we get to your hide site.”

  They moved off through the woods, Smith falling in between O’Neil and Yasir. They moved as quietly as possible through the snow, stopping at a cliff face.

  “Flash” whispered Brit.

  Jonesy’s voice rumbled back “Thunder” and a giant shade stepped out of the trees.

  “Good to see you again, Xavier. We been humping up these hills ever since we HALO’ed in two nights ago. I lost five bucks on you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I bet that you were a gonner on that plane. I don’t supposed anyone else got out?”

  “Not that I saw. They hit it after I jumped.” He thought back to whatever crewman had kicked him, propelling him out of the plane and saving his life. Another one to pay back.

  “Good thing. Doc tried to tell them that a plane would be a sitting duck, but no one wants to listen to Mage Corps. Redheaded stepchild.”

  ‘Hey!” said Brit, punching Jonesy on the shoulder. The giant black man shrugged it off like a mosquito.

  “You head inside, the rest of the team is waiting.” He turned and melted back into the shadows.

  Inside meant a fairly deep cave, deep enough to have several rooms, and a fire going. The team leader, SFC Agostine, stood up and shook his hand. “Glad to see you, but I thought Bognaski was coming, not you. You were supposed to be infiltrating the valley. Where’s Chief York?”

  Smith spent the next ten minutes filling them in on the change of plans. Doc whistled low.

  “Poor old Nasty. I wonder where he is now?”

  Chapter 25 The ruins of FOB REIGOUX

  Colonel Scarletti and Sergeant Major McGhee put some finishing touches on the ruin in front of them, shifting a piece of roofing to hid the corner of the room where Bognaski lay. A small whirlwind erupted from McGhee’s fingers, sweeping away their footprints and covering the unconscious Bognaski with a layer of dust and dirt. Then, with a pop of displaced air, the two disappeared.

  Staff Sergeant Bognaski woke to a tremendous headache, and a crushing pressure on his legs. He lay on the floor of what had been his team office, and heavy wooden timber sat across his legs. Something was also covering his body, some kind of plywood. The first thing he tried to do was a spell to lift the beam off his legs, but his mouth was dry and he couldn’t form the words. Feeling around in the darkness, his hands came across a bottle water, conveniently, and unknown to him, left there by SGM McGhee. He downed the whole thing, and then twisted his fingers, projecting force that made the piece of roofing fly off of him. Then the beam lifted itself off, leaving a nasty bruise on his leg.

  A ball of light flickered out and hovered over his head, illuminating the room, or what was left of it. The walls leaned at a crazy angle, and the roof had fallen in, or been blown away. Blood splattered all over the walls, and pooled on the floor. Drag marks showed where bodies had been removed. The last thing her remembered was throwing up a shield around the rest of the Mage team, warned by Smith’s behavior. Then an incredible pressure, and nothing else.

  “They left me. They fucking LEFT me here to die! Holy shit.” His thoughts were in a jumble, but the main thing that kept coming through was a sense of betrayal and abandonment. He rested for a minute, then got to his feet and made his way out of the wreckage and onto the base, or what was left of it.

  In front of him was a still smoking crater, with trailers and vehicles scattered all around. The sun was just starting to rise over the Hindu Kush mountains, and he could make out no movement whatsoever.

  “They did leave me. Mother of God. I’ve had it. I swear I am done with getting dicked around by the Army. Didn’t even LOOK for me. Fuck Bognaski, that’s what they said. Screw it. I’m done. I give in. Dark side, here I come.” Looking at the sky, he gave the finger to any US unmanned drone that might be hovering overhead, and disappeared from anyone’s view.

  A line of footsteps appeared in the dust, moving here and there as Bognaski scavenged equipment. Water, a rifle, a couple of MRE’s jammed into a rucksack, and he set out eastward towards the entrance of the Gorengal Valley, to the village of Ah-Shukut that lay at its’ entrance. He would have no problem getting in touch with the local fighters who worked for the Shaman.

  As he walked, he muttered to himself “No more shitting on Corporal Bognaski. I’m tired of all the bullshit. I’m done. From now on, I’m looking out for number one, and I’m going to learn whatever this Shaman dude can teach me. Frigging left me there. Probably didn’t even look for me.”

  He trudged steadily onward, stopping every now and then to renew the spell that kept him invisible. He paid more attention after a Jingo truck, the Durkistani equivalent of a combination VW Bus, Circus, and Taxi, almost drove over him. When an American patrol rumbled by in uparmored HUMVEE’s and MRAP vehicles, he almost showed himself. What stopped him was the sight of a turret gunner throwing a bottle at a group of kids that were chasing the convoy, begging for MRE candy. He knew the bottle was full of piss and that in a few seconds the kids would be throwing rocks at the trucks, and informing the local bad guys that the Americans were back in the area. He sighed and kept walking
eastward.

  The invisibility spell was exhausting, so he dropped it a kilometer past the village. Instead, he drew a shield spell in the air around him and continued walking down the road. He was rewarded for this precaution when a burst of fire splattered off his shield, leaving ripple marks in the air around him. He dove to the road before someone shot something more serious at him, like an RPG or even a thrown hand grenade. The amount of energy necessary to absorb the impact of hundreds of pieces of shrapnel was more than he wanted to think about.

  On the ground, he worked out a quick translation spell, changing the words that came out of his mouth to the local dialect of Durkistani, and rendering theirs in English. He shouted at the top of his lungs to get their attention.

  “HEY DICKHEADS, I SURRENDER, STOP SHOOTING!”

  There was a confused murmuring of voices from where the burst of AK – 47 fire had come from, then someone yelled back “SHOW YOURSELF, INFIDEL!”

  Bognaski stood up, and three guns opened upon him at once, the kinetic energy knocking him down to the ground again.

  “You stupid shits, I’m trying to surrender!” he muttered, and then raised his hand. A lance of pure hellfire jumped from his fingers, setting the brush they were using as cover on fire, driving the three tribesmen out. To their credit, they came out firing, emptying their magazines at him. Most of the shots went wild, and Bognaski, ready this time, leaned into the impacts of the ones that did hit.

  “Before you reload, I SURRENDER. How hard is this, you morons?”

  Their leader, a broken toothed greybeard, yelled back “Show us your hands, Mage! Keep them high in the air, and walk towards us!” While Bognaski did as they asked, the three carried out a hurried consultation. The youngest took off running down the road, back down the valley, manskirt flapping as he ran. He disappeared around a corner as Nasty approached.

  “What do you want, Mage?” asked the older man.