The Wolf came down like a prince bound in blood.
He lopes lordly in search of lost innocence.
He devours bottomless contempt.
Dark spruce forest sprawled for miles over an untouched stretch of the Yukon.
A full moon cast a powdering of silver over the crumpled blanket of fresh snow, the naked gnarled forms of trees that bowed on either side of a frozen river and its margin of crags and crushed rock.
A vast silence reigned over the land. But even here, the stillness of the mirthless winter was broken.
A blurry figure stalked under the canopy, flitting from shadow to shadow.
On the outside, his was a youthful aspect, still in the throes of adolescence.
Arrayed in broken patterns of winter camouflage that played tricks with the weak light and festooned with tactical gear, he could hardly be called a man.
But his gait, each movement deliberate with a predator’s violence, the cordlike muscles rippling powerfully beneath his fatigues, was undoubtedly that of the Wolf.
His steady cobalt eyes belied his terrible hunger for the feast ahead.
The Wolf stopped at the edge of the forest, into a world of fire and the smell of brimstone.
Once, it had been a town. Sprung up from the gold rush of a bygone century and passed with it into obscure history.
That town, that for so long had not heard human feet crunch the snow in its streets underfoot, was now host to the staccato of desperate gunfights, and the thunder of man-portable artillery.
Where once there was only the moonlight, now the harsh beams of flood lamps and the strobing lights of muzzle flashes and artillery blasts hunted for targets.
After so long of being left to its rest, people had come back to this town; the first, a smattering of the lost, the desperate and the insane, moved in to breathe new life, only to bring forth very old, very strange things.
Then those who followed after them, to raze it and to kill every trace of its now unnatural existence.
It was a violent death.
Camouflaged shapes darted between its decrepit buildings, brilliant tracers whizzing in and out, shattering windows and tearing into wood and brick.
Mortars thumped from somewhere in the distance, their bombs arcing in before sending up rippling blossoms of snow and shrapnel.
Flames raged through what once had been homes, livelihoods and gathering places, engulfing long-forgotten possessions and mementos.
Helicopters painted black as night hovered in and around the surrounding hills, daring to pop up and lob rockets and cannon fire into strongpoints, disappearing behind terrain before the defenders’ scant supply of missiles could get a lock.
The pall of acrid smoke that was the result of all this left visibility nil, clearing up only in patches before hanging over the battle once again.
And through all this din of incoming fire and outgoing spite, a bell tolled, and the world shimmered.
Even as the attackers brought all the firepower of modern weaponry and all the artifice of practiced killing to bear against the town’s recent occupants, its defenders were holding, at least for the moment.
They were buoyed by petty sorceries and stiffened by months of militaristic preparation, but they were still essentially civilian, and human.
But they were fanatics, and over the next few hours they would die in their hundreds.
The Wolf lowered his NODs, his night vision, to his eyes, and the world of fire was rendered in grain and hues of green.
He thumbed his radio on to transmit and confirmed his position to his allies. His breath froze even as it left his mouth.
The response was immediate.
“Snake Doctor copies all. Clock's ticking, Wolf. Execute, out.”
His role was the centerpiece of the assault– scaling a sheer cliff and skirting the surrounding forest, he now had a foot in the defenders’ backdoor.
In normal circumstances, his task would be assigned to an elite team, four to six men at minimum.
These were not normal circumstances in the slightest, and neither was the Wolf.
He reached forward to operate the infrared laser on his rifle, useful for working around the hindering bulk of his night vision and invisible to human eyes. Laser on, laser off.
He pulled on the charging handle to check the rifle’s functionality one more time, then his pistol.
Both were fitted with suppressors, lasers and reflex optics, and finely tuned for the frigid conditions.
One in each chamber. Loaded and locked.
The Wolf exploded into action, closing the space from the tree line to town in seconds, moving in and among the abandoned buildings like a specter.
This far behind the line of resistance, the only hostiles to be seen were support personnel– only a few combat troops in hurried transit, if at all.
The Wolf ignored most and slipped past, making expert use of the sounds of close battle to cover his movements.
He made use of the same sounds to cover his kills. One, three, five, one; all clueless until the very last instant.
Center mass, tight groups, then headshots close in, all on the mark, only engaging that which directly opposed the path to his objective.
No point in delaying.
As he went deeper he encountered less and less opposition.
As he went deeper the pale glow that emanated unnatural colors from the center of the settlement grew stronger. The peals of a distant bell grew louder.
Voices started to gnaw at the edge of his mind, but could not find purchase on his iron will.
Clock’s ticking, time to get a move on.
Legs pumping, his advance soon carried him to his objective, and that was when he caught sight of the target.
It had been a timber-and-brick construction typical of the region, a dozen others like it across the Yukon.
What wasn’t typical was the glow hung above its lopsided tower that veiled the true sky from view, and the light seeping through its stained glass windows that writhed like a living thing against the white noise of the snow.
Here, at its origin, the glow was strongest, and the voices from nowhere and everywhere grew to a discordant chorus.
Here, each resounding clang of the bell made the brain judder inside its case, even through ear protection.
Here was their moldering temple, a church turned in service to other, older gods.
The Wolf could sight no one around the exterior, not even guards.
Whatever the reason, it looked like only the very inner circle was allowed close witness to the culmination of their worship.
There was only one way in, easily turned into a fatal funnel if the Wolf forced the entrance.
He wasn’t going to.
The Wolf made his way to the wall facing his approach.
He set his pack down, turning out blocks of plastic explosive, detonators, wire and a “clacker” firing device, and prepared to blow his way in.
Then the Wolf saw the writhing luminescence wax frantic, and heard the cacophony building to a unholy crescendo, the incessant shriek overpowering the sounds of battle.
Spurred on to greater urgency, his work remained efficient, and silent. Set-up done, he took cover behind a low wall separating the church grounds from the street, enough not to catch blast and fragments from his own demolition.
The Wolf stowed his NODs away, and primed a concussion grenade from his vest, anticipating close-in work.
Grenade in his right hand, he made himself small and squeezed the clacker in his left–
Clack.
The wall disappeared in an a resounding cloud of shattered brick and splinters. The Wolf vaulted the wall, throwing the grenade into the breach as he did. Unnatural light from inside spilled through the blast haze. Another explosion, muffled slightly, and the Wolf was crashing into the smoke before it could settle, gun up, optics hunting–
Crash.
Blacking out for what seemed like an instant, he was greeted by the sight of the rafters cast in myriad colors, each one a shade of damnation. Sudden pain split his head, each sonorous toll of the unseen bell another red hot spike driven clean through, and he tasted metal. His training took over. Observe everything, admire nothing. He had crashed through a pulpit and now lay on a raised area of the floor.
Over what had once been the altar, obscene symbols and effigies hung on the wall that tore at the seams of his mind to look, widening into cracks–
Crack.
The sound of brittle bones snapping clean brought the Wolf back to full attention.
Recovering with the lethal grace of his namesake, he turned to face his opponent, the threat that had brought him and all this military might to this benighted town in the middle of nowhere.
What he saw strained the Wolf’s mind to comprehend.
To the Wolf’s eyes, it was a yellow mass of gurgling appendages snapping at tortured angles, dreadfully distinct even as they blurred into each other, tracing impossible patterns and exposing veins that glowed like seams of magma.
Then the heady stench of noisome decay washed over him like a raw red wave.
The Wolf never saw the blow that launched him. How could he? The Thing had thrown him clear across the church at a speed defying all sane reason.
To the average person, this Thing would be madness and dread.
To the Wolf, this Thing was all hate and fury.
For all its force, it had been a glancing blow, and he could still finish it.
The Wolf raised his weapon and took one step forward–
CH 2 DRAFT
And Theo Lovell stepped outside into the balmy subtropical air, the breeze carrying the brine of the Pacific tugging at his baseball cap and shades.
The view from the station platform was dominated by the open sea, fronted by a river that curved off to meet the ocean before running inland, the city sitting astride it.
The midday sun blazed down on everything not under a roof– tingeing the suburban sprawl and its shingled roofs as it sloped gently down onto the riverfront with a harsh bloom, and playing along the blades of wind turbines dotted on the side of town sitting flush with the glittering coast.
Seabirds flew in lazy circles overhead, their warbling squawks, mixed in with the buzz and clicks of the cicadas that seemed to never run out in this land of mirth and social ease.
He cut a conspicuous figure, even dressed in the apparel of a tourist. His cheap shirt and shorts did little to hide the hard, rangy lines of his developing frame, and the ease with which he moved betrayed his athleticism.
But to anyone looking, it was his glassy cobalt eyes that stood out most.
Theo crossed over the platform on a covered footbridge, and paused briefly to observe the train underneath as it slowly built up speed for its return trip. Traincars slid from view one by one, and he continued on to the main station building, passing through the lobby and once again outside–
And emerged to an avenue lined with office blocks and commercial buildings; what probably passed for downtown.
A trickle of pedestrian and road traffic passed through on the way to their various commitments, but nothing compared to the fracas of the big city.
Even the lone helicopter making its leisurely way across the clear sky was probably not too common.
For all the crowded metropolises of the world, there were still places like this, and it struck him as novel.
It was in that awkward halfway, and it had a relative peace about it that city-dwellers just a few dozen miles away crave for, with little of the inconvenience living out in the sticks actually entailed.
Theo lowered his dollar-store shades from the cap and put them on, the painful glare from all the car windows and glass architecture around catching the sun’s vicious rays dimming to a comfortable level.
Producing a neatly folded map from his pant pocket, he soon found his bearings.
He checked his person one more time to make sure he hadn’t misplaced anything, then started his march, unhurriedly, in and among the hustle and bustle, making good speed to his destination.
As he went deeper and deeper the less people there were, and the more the city seemed like the town it really was.
This part of town continued on a gradual, staggered incline, barely perceptible amid the tangle of winding roads, myriad-patterned walls, houses and suburban foliage.
As Theo made his way up an empty street, he spotted a hunched figure down an alley.
It was a diminutive, wizened woman reaching for the small of her back, next to a pair of baskets laid down on the pavement.
Back problems, it seemed to Theo.
He took one glance at this watch, hesitated for a moment, and resolved to help an old lady out.
There’s plenty of time.
“Let me help you with that ma’am.”, he smiled as he rocked up on the woman, and saw that the baskets were half-full with forked-tail fish with dark stripes running along their blue-silver bodies; fresh, from the way they were still squirming.
The lady looked at him quizzically, suspiciously, through cloudy eyes, and there was a pause before Theo realized his mistake. Absent-mindedly, he had spoken in English.
He repeated his offer with his limited mastery of the local language, and made to grab the baskets to demonstrate his intention–before a wrinkled hand slapped his away with surprising spirit.
She’s fast.
Theo was stunned by the seeming hostility and her unexpected turn of speed, but was quick on his feet to salvage the situation.
He babbled an apology before throwing out his hand again, deciding to make one last token effort before he deferred to the woman’s wish to be left alone.
Expecting another reply in the negative, Theo noticed the old lady suddenly perk up, as if she had thought of something, and she suddenly shifted gears.
She gestured her agreement and pointed to the previously off-limits haul of fish for Theo to make his move.
Somewhat puzzled, he hefted one in each hand and tested their weight against his confident strength. No sweat, but definitely too much for the average granny.
The thought tripped something in his head–the average granny.
Theo looked back to the beneficiary of his assistance, but she was already plodding along the street in a manner at odds with the speed she had just displayed.
A strange foreboding began to creep up his spine; the same feeling he got when something bad was about to go down.
In the short time that he had gone on missions, Theo had quickly learned to trust such inklings.
It almost seemed like the old lady was up to no goo–
“KOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!”
The blood-curdling howl made Theo face back the way they came.
There was a mob at the mouth of the alley, all of them dressed in oil-stained overalls, their sun-baked faces glistening with sweat.
Fishermen?
Then there was another yell from the biggest man in the group, who practically had steam coming out his ears from the looks of it, vigorously waving a long, long pole that ended in a spike and hook.
Is that a fucking pike?
Theo felt like the visual intent came across crystal clear, but there was a delay before he could parse the audio side of things.
Then Theo understood fully.
“MY FISH!”
Instinctively, he knew how he looked holding the goods.
He looked guilty, and complicit in their eyes to whatever mischief the old lady was involved in.
Throwing his head back at the woman he thought he was helping, Theo saw that the lady that had been walking at a stately pace was now a blur zipping around the bend.
Granny is REALLY fast!
Theo had been trained to keep his head in the worse possible situations–he had been in some of the worst possible situations, and he was still eighteen.
Now, here, in an unfamiliar place and now stuck with this sudden dilemma, that training inexplicably failed–if nothing else, he’d always been quick on his feet.
After one last look at the assembled throng to confirm the sheer menace of their aura, Theo turned his back to them with a deliberate, almost theatrical slowness–
And got the fuck out of dodge.
Theo was now running hell for leather like his life depended on it, and as far as he knew it in fact did.
Cutting the corner, he just managed to catch sight of the old hag ducking into another sidestreet.
For lack of options, Theo made the snap decision to follow Granny through her bobbing and weaving, yet even with his conditioning, she was still ungodly fast, breaking away from him after nary a few minutes and leaving Theo to contend with the wrath of the local Fishers’ Association.
What the hell kind of old lady is she!?
It wasn’t until the second intersection when he realized he still had the baskets in hand, spilling fish with every zig and zag past bewildered pedestrians, and his racing mind finally brought together enough brain cells to ask the obvious question:
Wait, why the hell am I running instead of explaining myself?
Hearing more screaming and what he could only assume to be local obscenities coming from behind, he dared to look back.
What he saw strained even Theo’s mind to comprehend.
To Theo’s eyes, it was a bronzed mass of hollering appendages gesticulating wildly, a veritable fishmonger frenzy as they jockeyed for position and he could swear that he saw veins bulging on one forehead for an instant. God knows what they wanted to do with those pikes.
I’d rather not find out.
Drawing on his reserves, Theo put more power into his stride and decided distance was his friend. Distance gave him time to think on what to do next.
The saving grace in this situation was that he could at least outpace middle-aged men hellbent on revenge, but he figured that was only a reprieve. The locals knew the shortcuts, he didn’t.
Even when he tried to cut through yards, gardens and in one instance, a living room with its justifiably startled occupants huddled around a TV, Theo was starting to think he couldn’t dash his way out of this one.
Every time when it was looking like that that he’d lost them, a shout drawing the rest in like scum to an anglerfish’s light disabused him of that. There were a few close calls where they nearly managed to hem him in at a dead end.
Legs pumping, the headlong chase soon brought him all the way down to the riverside, and that was where he caught sight of his way out.
It was a two-lane cable bridge that connected the two halves of the city. Theo read somewhere that it was a point of pride for the locals, but that wasn’t important.
What was important was the scaffolding he saw hanging over the edge and underneath; lucky him that whatever work was being done was on hold. Whatever the reason, there was nobody there.
Coming up with a plan, Theo got on the bridge’s sidewalk and made his way to about a third of its span.
With fluid movements, he vaulted over the railings and used the scaffolds to maneuver himself under the bridge, sheltering between its massive girders.
The final leap was a hard landing that made the scaffolding wobble and sway, but the planks seemed to hold for now. Most importantly, he was now completely hidden from any murderous fishermen.
Theo finally took a moment to catch his breath, for the first time since the start of the chase it felt, and heaved a sigh of relief–
Only for it to catch on his throat as something thudding on the planks behind him made him snap his head around.
It was the gosh-damned Granny, and she was talking!
Her accent was far too heavy for a novice in the language to understand, but Theo saw from her nodding that she was somehow approving. Not that he cared after all that. In fact, he had half the mind to–
Crack
The first cracks barely registered before the planking snapped and fell out from under him, sending him careening through the lower scaffolds. His foot hit something; something striking his chest; he was spinning; his shades were gone; he took a blow on the hip, another to the head, before the water came up in his vision fast–
Crash
And he crashed into the river with all the elegance of a freight train. Dazed by the succesive impacts, he struggled underneath the current for a few moments before he could bring his head above the water.
Regaining presence of mind, he swam for the river bank, the modest flow carrying him some distance along.
Then he was out of the water, gagging and wheezing, lying flat on the grass just off to the side of the embankment, head still swimming, torn between admonishing himself for the serial demonstration of stupidity he displayed today and plain bemusement.
He couldn’t even be bothered to look when he heard a car, a powerful one from the growl of the engine, roll on up to where he lay and slam on the brakes, bestowing a final indignity by pelting his face with screeching asphalt.
Clack
The sound of heels clacking on pavement and a shadow falling on his face, and this newcomer finally caught Theo’s attention.
He turned his head to the side, the flaming sun filling his vision with spots of ink and stray light, a corner of his mind wondering what could possibly be next.
The silhouette of a woman resolved itself above him.
Theo hadn’t been as exposed to beautiful women as others his age, but he knew to call it as he saw it– and the radiant halo behind her only enhanced that impression.
“You look even younger than in your picture.”, came a voice in accented English.
Feeling more and more of his energy return from wherever the Granny took it, Theo finally mustered an answer.
“Well, I feel a couple years older right now.”
The heretofore stern-faced lady smiled ear-to-ear at that, and for the first time in the past hour, Theo allowed himself to think that things were looking up.
“Welcome to Japan, kid. Not the welcome you expected coming from America, huh?”
CH 3 DRAFT
For all the convulsions of lunacy and viscera engendered by the slumbering terrors of and beyond modernity, America’s fight against a very different kind of terror was headed from a decidedly unassuming set of offices.
This headquarters was tucked away in an odd corner of a sprawling administrative complex in Virginia, a short ride away from that nest of squirming worms supped eternal on espressos, Washington DC.
Ostensibly, it was a minor branch of the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the multitude of special-access programs which so ravenously dipped into the NRO lion’s share of the black budget.
Its normal purview was the operation of the country’s constellation of spy satellites, the eyes in low orbit peering into the geopolitical, very serious, but still largely mundane affairs of men; this little corner of it looked down into the abyss, and more often than not hurled high explosives at any weird noise.
In reality, the Federal government had at its disposal a force for countering the unnatural for nearly a century.
It was Robert Olmstead’s frantic flight to Arkham, in the twilight years of the roaring twenties, and his testimony to bizzare practices in the isolated and half-deserted harbor town of Innsmouth, which would set into motion a government response that would discover the creeping corruption encroaching on the United States of America’s shores.
When the festering degeneracy in that decrepit cluster of seaside hovels was promptly eradicated, the startling revelation– that there were unnatural forces haunting the fringes of America’s shores, that threatened American interests, would form the basis for a secretive group that would go by several names, and whose fortunes would wax and wane over the decades to come.
Their remit was to begin with domestic. But born to that tempestuous stretch of time when America was still growing into its hegemonic skin and had just recently begun to stretch the fingers of its influence beyond its borders, so did the fledgling service soon expand the scope of their operations.
From the desperate back-and-forth against the Heer in Europe, the deadly games of hide-and-seek in Southeast Asia to the forever wars in the Middle East–
Whether eliminating Nazi Germany’s remnant outposts in the remote Arctic to erasing the smears of corruption that sometimes bloomed on home soil, this organization would always be at the leading edge of the eagle’s claw, unseen and unsung.
Its latest iteration went by the two-letter code name CEMETERY WIND. To its members, it was simply The Program, and its direct action element BLACK KNIGHT, its door kickers and shooters, referred to themselves as The Unit.
Ensconced in that bubble of mundanity, the Program’s leading lady sat, savoring the aroma of the coffee in-between reading the day’s briefs, when the ranking officer of the Unit barged in with his command-issue scowl and threw a sheaf of papers on her desk. The cover sheet laid out on top was dominated by the header:
OPERATION DAMASCUS
“Care to tell me what this is about, ma’am?”
“And a good morning to you too, Colonel Friedkin.”
At six foot-four, the Colonel was an imposing effigy to directed, calculated violence, and still moved with ease in his fatigues despite the long years of service carved into his hardened frame. His close-cropped hair crowned a hard-bitten visage that looked like a casting office’s model of a general. It was exceedingly unusual for an officer of his rank to hold the same position within a unit for more than two or three years, and generally a sign of a career dead in the water when that officer isn’t elevated to higher appointments. The Colonel had been CO, commanding officer, of the Unit for four, and he wasn’t planning on going anywhere.
Facing opposite, Director Lasch was just short of a generation behind her subordinate. The uninitiated could be forgiven for mistaking the Director for the very image of a new breed of Beltway bureaucrat: the pressed off-the-rack suit accentuating her lithe figure, pristinely groomed features lending her an elegant, if largely clinical beauty.
One could easily imagine this woman making the morning jog around Foggy Bottom with her Yorkie terrier in sweatpants, prior to signing off on the deaths of hundreds at quarter before lunch.
But that belied the fact that Lasch was more than a match for Friedkin in hard-won experience at keeping the darkness at bay. Lasch had been in the Program for longer, elevated to Director just last year, and she wasn’t going anywhere either.
Both had given the best years of their lives and then some to the cause, where so many had been broken down by the nature of their thankless work and the magnitude of the truths revealed to their select few.
All this meant that the two had so far worked hand in hand with mutual respect, so long as neither went over the other’s head.
“Why wasn’t I informed of this tasking? I hear about it like this, and it’s already been given the green light.” Friedkin settled on hands on hips as his no-nonsense cadence concealed an accusatory tone, towering over Lasch in her posh swivel chair.
For her part, Lasch set the coffee down on and took a cursory look at the documents intruding on her desk, though she already had a good idea of what they were.
“This is not a military operation, Colonel. The Unit’s services are not required.”
“But you are transferring one of my men.”
“Yes, our little Wolf. Friendly interests in Japan have been reaching out for his unique skill set, and we’ve tracked a number of items on our watchlist to their country. We have assessed that a joint operation would be to the benefit of both parties at this time.”
“My man is still recovering from his injuries-“
“From that little debacle up north. It’s been a month, and I have it from medical that he is cleared for light work. We do not anticipate this op to come against any significant opposition. “
Lasch punctuated those words with the squeaking of her chair, rising to meet Friedkin in the eye before continuing.
“This is a prime opportunity to train him in the discrete and investigative aspects of our mission. I think you’ll agree when I say that his talents would be wasted if we simply kept him forever with the Unit.”
Friedkin’s facial muscles relaxed by a fraction to indicate his begrudging agreement. He crossed his arms before voicing his scepticism.
“All of my men have experience in wetwork– he didn’t have to go into this solo. For that matter, why can’t your people handle it?”
“He won’t be. The Japanese will have one of theirs waiting for him. My people are already thin on the ground, with respect to our current commitments.”
Lasch cocked her eyebrows like she’d caught on to something.
“Are you not confident in Wolf’s ability to accomplish this mission?”
That made Friedkin pause for a split-second before replying.
“Not for work around civilians, not after his upbringing with us. He’s a born killer.”
There was a curt pause as Lasch paced across the room and measured her response.
“He is not as balanced as he should be, but then again most boys his age are. All the more reason for him to learn to connect with ordinary humanity, then. Since the Program took him in, he’s been trained by the best, and he’s already proved himself splendidly as an asset in combat. Now it’s time to develop him further. “
The Director shifted direction to the door, signalling an impending meeting by gesturing to her watch and ready to show herself out.
“The Japanese are already making arrangements on their end. This really is as routine as it gets– a simple asset retrieval, in and out, back before the end of next month. Think of it as RnR for the boy, Colonel. It’s not often that you get a taxpayer-paid vacation to the Land of the Rising Sun.”
Lasch smiled at some private joke, making the beginnings of creasing on her face apparent.
“Who knows, he might just learn a thing or two about himself.“
Wolf was waiting just outside, on Friedkin’s order, and stood at attention on seeing Lasch open the door. She greeted her subordinate before moving on her merry way.
The soundproofed walls only let him catch the tailend of the pow-wow, but he already had the gist. It was him who had approached his CO, after all. Friedkin came out after and gestured for him to follow, and they took off on a range-walk. The corridors buzzed to the occasional sound of telephones and chatter.
It was Friedkin who spoke first.
“Draw up your wish list, solo op.”
“Yes sir, I’m fine with running solo. I simply don’t understand how my skills apply to this mission.
And you know how I am with civvies.”
“You’ve been given the run-through on tradecraft, same as everyone else. And there’s more to life than the sword, Wolf.”
“You and the Unit have taught me that. But those are the only bunch I want to hang around with. Otherwise, I think I’d rather just keep to myself, sir.”
Friedkin slowed to a stop, then about-faced on his protégé.
“If one wants to live alone, one’s got to be an animal or a god.”
A little over three weeks later and that little Wolf, christened Theo Lovell, was gagging on saltwater and microplastics as what he was assuming was his Japanese contact stood to the side.
Still reeling from the unlikely series of events, Theo had to rummage a bit before he could recall what the sign and countersign was.
“Lucky”
“Lilac”
ARROWROOT, the codename for Theo’s Japanese liaison and counterpart, spoke her Ls well, if marred still by that accent that few Japanese could seem to get rid of.
Theo’s mind whirred back up to speed as his memory finally matched the mature beauty in front of him with her appearance from the file photo.
After one last cough, he finally managed to rise to his full height and regain his military bearing, standing vis-à-vis with the woman.
Looking to be in her 30s, she was dressed pristinely in the dark two-piece suit, white button-up shirt and slacks of a plain-clothes officer of Japan’s National Police Agency, her sole departure from the standard being the neat long, low ponytail that almost came down to her waist. Definitely too long.
Wolf still stood over her, but she was surprisingly tall for an Asian lady, and he could tell the way her suit settled on her figure that she was fit and well-proportioned. He met her dark almond eyes before offering a greeting.
He referred to her by the name provided to the Program, which was probably a cover too.
“Kirishima-san, I’m Agent Lovell. I’d reach out for a handshake, but I’m not exactly clean for it.”
Theo was close to adding that his given name would be fine, but caught himself when her remembered what the cultural dossier said about the Japanese and first names.
“Agent Lovell, it is good to finally meet you. You can call me Maho-san.”
Maho Kirishima wasted no time proving Theo’s cultural preparation wrong. She answered with a bright and easy confidence, and Theo felt a modicum of embarrassment creep in at his current dripping state as a representative of the USA.
“It’d be better if we didn’t have to meet like this, Maho-san, but it is my pleasure.
Before anything else, I’m gonna have to ask if you have a change of clothes on you– I don’t reckon you’d like me messing up your car seats. “
“I have clothes in the trunk– there might be something your size.”
She nodded to the car she came in with: an unassuming mid-size sedan that Theo thought couldn’t possibly have accounted for the engine noise he heard.
“Right, ‘might’ as the operative word– excuse me.”
Luckily for him, there was a shirt and jeans his size stuffed in a duffel bag . He did not fail to notice the set of implements that just happened to be useful for breaking into property– what some in ‘in the business’ would call HUMINT, and the big medic bag tucked between.
Change of clothes acquired, he made for an alley situated right by, sandwiched between two walls where he could change out of view.
Raised as he was to the military life, one didn’t get too shy about stripping down in front of others; but he didn’t want to embarrass himself on first contact with the local liaison anymore then he already had.
Not to mention that it might offend the lady’s sensibilities.
He was just about done when he heard Maho call out from the road.
“I advise you to hurry before we draw unwanted attention. Police radio is starting to talk about the man who fell off the bridge.”
Radio, must be how she found me. Guess that chase was a little conspicuous.
Theo emerged out of the alley in skinny jeans that were a bit too tight and a shirt that didn’t quite fit right, but at least now he could probably get around without eliciting untoward reactions.
Maho gestured to the sopping ball he changed out of, then to the back while she moved to enter the car.
“Just toss it in. We have to go.”
Theo complied, finding a plastic sack to dump it in then made his way to the front passenger side, already getting in when he was reminded of another oddity of this country: right hand driving. He looked to his new acquaintance as he put on his seatbelt, still looking a little bit too fresh.
“Much obliged.”
No sooner had he strapped himself in that he learned why exactly he had the impression of an engine mismatch. Maho put her foot on the gas, and the inline-four roared. Not stock at all, it would seem.
With a final squeal of tortured rubber, the suspicious pair by the riverside sped away from the scene.
Not far away, a camera belonging to a local was set up to record a few hours of the bridge, and just happened to catch audio of the their departure intermingled with the tumult of urban life and road traffic.
Same as any other day, except for the commotion of bridge workers coming back to work to find their scaffolding in tatters, and a short stretch in the afternoon where somebody seemed to be setting off fireworks out-of-frame for about twenty minutes.
The hobby videographer, made busy by a day job that didn’t let him inspect every minute of his footage in detail anyway, couldn’t rightly answer what compelled him to shoot these timelapses. He’d mumble to friends, something about being fascinated by the endless traceries of metal and meat captured in the forty-five millimetres of light-sensing silicon.
He himself would never know it, but his daily ritual had captured some very interesting things indeed, even as it would go on to record the last true day of peace and normalcy for the sleepy seaside city of Hokishi.
CH 4 DRAFT
“We will stop by the safehouse first, but only to pick up your gear. Local law enforcement has a lead for us. Reach the safehouse in ten minutes, and another ten to our contact.”
Already? Things were moving fast. Good thing too, if he could be done with this bullshit mission sooner, Theo thought.
And just as quickly it seemed, they raced through the town at breakneck pace.
But Theo was surprised to see the speedometer needle straddle but never quite go past the fifty mark. Something about the way Maho drove was batshit-crack addict-crazy, and perfectly in line with the rules of the road at the same time.
The sights of the town– knots of commuters silhouetted against bare concrete and painted facades, gleaming decorated displays and shuttered overgrown lots, tangled power lines twanging over markered intersections, glimpses between buildings of a twin-stemmed tower in the distance, all streaked by the car window in a disjointed collage.
“So what was that about, back there?” she asked to the young man bracing himself against the dashboard.
“Maho-san, your guess is as good as mine– tried my hand at helping some granny out, and next thing I know I had the entire fisherman’s collective after me. That woman was stealing fish for whatever goddamn reason.”
Without taking her eyes off the road, Maho continued talking.
“Whatever the reason, you have made quite the commotion – nobody made you, did they? It will complicate this operation if I have to explain why my American friend was making trouble.”
“No, I don’t think so. I was wearing shades, and nobody was ever close enough to get a good look. And I’ve had to change out of the threads I came in with, as you can see.”
“In any case, it’s in the past now. Any updates I should know?” Theo managed to belch out between swerves. Been a long time since he got motion sick.
Maho casually replied in-between gear shifts.
“We have a possible hit on the vehicles used to transport the collection, but nothing beyond that. More from our police contact.”
Just as Theo’s head was starting to spin, Maho swerved one last time into a residential street and came up on a two-story detached dwelling.
From the stories told to him in the Unit, Theo knew that most safehouses amounted to a dingy apartment in the slums or somewhere out of the way. What passed for a middle-class Japanese domicile would resemble a mansion compared to the usual fare, and it prompted a low whistle from Theo.
Maho brought out a remote and keyed the garage gate open.
“It’s a new construction. The original owners could not finance it to completion. We finished it for them.“
Maho deftly backed it up, and then they were parked inside. Theo came out into the sparsely furnished garage, nothing more than a shelf laden with basic tools and some storage cases.
“And you managed to swipe it up for a good price, huh?” Not that Theo actually knew much about real estate, he was just trying not to throw up.
Maho showed him in and Theo saw that the interior was just as utilitarian.
Where there ordinarily would be a living room, instead a couple of tables and workbenches, filing cabinets, a standee whiteboard with a map of the city, hardcases, rucksacks and other equipment with canvas draped on top, all sitting on a linoleum floor and cloaked in the pale wash of barebones lighting. All the windows were blacked out with blinds, shutting the inside out from the rest of the world. Theo followed along one side and tapped a probing fist on the drywall.
“Neighbors?”
“The house and surrounding ground is clear– no special measures. This part of the city is mostly elderly. Not always enough to get them to mind their own business, but I have had no trouble with them in the week I have been here.”
Theo nodded. They couldn’t seriously expect two-bit criminals to be masters at counter-intelligence, but the Japanese were so far living up to their conscientious reputation.
Give my hosts the benefit of a doubt.
Satisfied, he finally shifted back into his element to take stock of the inventory while Maho stood by the wall.
Theo himself had come into the country in the ordinary manner, but his gear necessarily had to come into the country a different way.
He went straight for the hardcases. The Program, and the Unit especially, enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom to hand-pick its kit, but it would surprise some to find out that the elite-of-the-elite trained with plain-jane M4s and HKs.
He had packed the standard-issue too, but Theo was still in many ways a teen, and teens tend to have a contrarian streak. His selection for this mission attested to that.
First, his personal pistol: a custom Hi-Power, tritium front sight, trigger job, 4-inch threaded barrel with the compact ‘Detective’ slide, and dehorned and melted to feel like a piece of heaven in the palm of your hand, the dim fluorescent light playing along its blued finish.
Then the rifle: a special treat for him courtesy of the Japanese government, a Howa Type 89, its rounded matte black plastic furniture juxtaposed against the sleek steel frame and serrations of the Hi-Power.
Theo beheld the weapon with a covetous leer. These things were borderline impossible to get hold of abroad; the Unit members he could pry stories out of had only gotten to fire it on multinational training ops. Distinguishing it as even more of a rarity, this was the folding-stock version. Theo hoped that he would get a chance to put this baby through its paces and run it with green-tip 5.56 before this op came to a conclusion, but going off recent developments that might not be on the table.
Theo heard Maho make a remark off to the side.
“You are very enthusiastic about this.”
That obvious, huh? Theo still had a thing or two to learn about not getting lost in his own head.
“The world-famous American enthusiasm for guns, yeah? ”
“You are American by birth?” Referring to his vaguely Asian appearance, no doubt.
Theo weighed the needs of operational security before replying. It was obviously a test.
“In any case, I’m here not so much as a representative of America, but an organization much like yours. Let’s leave questions of nationality to the common folk.”
Maho arched her eyebrow at that.
“And you are not ‘common folk’?”
“To others it is permitted; to you it is not permitted.”
“Excuse me?”
Theo paused briefly from his task to meet Maho eye-to-eye.
“With our line of work, some of us have to be different.”
One by one, he unpacked the weapons themselves, working switches and slides, catches and controls, triggers and hammers with muted clicks as Theo verified that all were condition four, placing them down on the workbench– ready for action, but no magazine, nor round in the chamber.
Then it was on to the ammunition which had to be loaded to the magazines. Being an activity he could do blind-folded, Theo decided to again acknowledge his Japanese host while he filled them to capacity.
“You speak good English, Maho-san.”
At this point, Maho had stopped observing, and was pulling files out of cabinets.
“It is far from perfect. And my accent is still very apparent, I know– but thank you.”
Working with practiced hands, it only took Theo a couple of minutes to finish readying an appropriate load-out; he was reluctant to leave the rifle behind for this one, but going in light with a pistol and four magazines seemed to be the order of the day. That kind of firepower was going to draw attention he didn’t need, and modern Japan was not very fond of bonafide firearms to begin with.
He sifted through the rest of the storage for a miscellaneous mission-specific gear: grey combat shirt, carrier rig, ballistic plates, mid-ride holster, among others, before laying them out next to his weapon.
There was still an entire armory’s worth of equipment to unpack, but anything more thorough would have to come later, if ever.
Maho had finished her task as well, and Theo realized caught on to what was happening when she handed him a light binder identical to hers.
There was one last go-over of the OPORD, the operations order. Theo skimmed through the not-too-many pages typefaced in both English and Japanese, but he already had the gist of it, like his counterpart. It was a basic write-up. This was just to make sure they were on the same page.
Maho called off the four parts of the document in order, and Theo responded.
“Situation?”
“A undetermined number of potentially unnatural objects have been tracked to Hokishi. No indications at this time that the collection has been moved, assume still within Area of Operations. “
Theo started to pace around the room as she read through to the next part. Maho’s eyes followed after him, but the rest of her stood in place.
“Mission?”
“Assess exact count of NESTEGGs in AO. Verify method of transportation. If unnatural, determine threat level. Secure for later pick-up and containment.
Identify group of interest involved in transport, assess level of organization.
Host country SOP applies to civilians exposed to unnatural phenomena.”
Maho picked up after him to explain.
“Administration of amnestics by qualified personnel– that is me. Liquidation is strictly a last resort.”
Theo looked up from reading to voice another concern.
“Secure NESTEGGs? My organization has a general torch and burn policy with regards to the unnatural.”
“You will find that my organization has different views on that matter, Lovell-san. We will proceed as per the opord.” Maho made to advance to the next section, but noticed Theo’s further reluctance as he stopped his pacing and faced her squarely.
He demurred to let the issue go; demurred is to put it mildly. In his experience with the Unit, there was nothing to be gained from tinkering with the unnatural.
“Your people should’ve learned from the Brits and their pet vampire, know how this ends.
The unnatural ain’t just some sword you can just swing around, stick in some closet when you don’t need it, and melt down to figure how it works – that damn sword will swing itself right back at you, hang right over your head while you sleep, and throw your stupid asses into the furnace!”
Maho had been all smiles up to now, but Theo knew that if she was anything like most Japanese she would value seniority and doing things by-the-book.
With Theo’s deliberate faux-pas, any pretension of cordiality faded from Maho’s demeanor as she closed her binder. When next she spoke, it was pure ice and stillness.
“Let’s make one thing clear Lovell-kun. “
Even being a novice in the language, Theo caught on to the new honorific, if the change in the air hadn’t already clued him in and raised every hair to his neck.
“I will not have a kid who cannot even avoid trouble on his first day here doubt my instructions.”
As though to accentuate her authority, she thwacked the binder on a tabletop with a snap of her wrist.
Eyes unflinching, she stared right through the foreigner, as if to read him from head to toe.
“While you are in my country, you are under my command. You will respect my authority, and you will not impugn Japanese sensibilities. Is that clear?”
Cocky with youth or not, Theo was brought up military, and responded to hierarchy accordingly.
And he well knew that jurisdictional squabbling was counter-productive to the mission. He wasn’t going to die on that mountain, much less a mole hill like this.
He figured he’d only have to put up with Japanese sensibilities for a week at most, anyway.
Mechanically assuming the position of parade rest with his feet, Theo replied smartly, if a bit forcefully.
“Crystal, ma’am.”
Maho’s face returned to the impassive geniality of before, but her voice didn’t quite make it back as she picked the binder back up to recite the last few lines.
“If SHELLBACK is within the AO, and positively identified?”
“Apprehend for extradition, if possible.”
“If not?”
“Terminate, with extreme prejudice.”
Evidently satisfied, Maho put the briefing down on a table with precise care, and took the measure of her partner¬– who, she thought after that stunt, was an American through and through after all.
She picked up another binder and set it out in front of him.
“Our cover– investigation into illicit antiquities trade, Operation Andromeda. Our police contact is completely uninitiated, so as far as he and the locals are concerned, this is the truth, and nothing but the truth. How is your Japanese?”
Theo changed with little effort to Maho’s native language.
“Twenty-four weeks of B-SOLT a while ago, and more recently two weeks of refresher training. I can manage a conversation, but the writing still eludes me.”
“Not bad. For now, leave the talking to me and pretend you have only a rudimentary grasp.”
Maho made that reply in Japanese, but changed back to English to end the briefing.
“Your papers, and the phone you’ll be using for the duration of this operation.“
Taking the offered manila folder in hand, he quickly sorted through the IDs and found their craftsmanship satisfactory.
He next checked out the other item: a cheap burner phone with exactly one contact entered in, Maho most likely. He slipped it into his right-hand pocket.
“Time to go.”
Maho said that as she picked up a few more papers and her own, much lighter kit: a kevlar vest and her own duty pistol. Theo followed suit as she switched the lights off and stashed the gear in the car.
As he settled back into the shotgun seat, he chose one of the IDs and slipped it into the badge holder it came with.
He was Special Agent Theo Lovell, completely ordinary, if a little bit wet behind the ears, representative for the Department of Homeland Security’s reductively titled Homeland Security Investigations arm.
At the time, he was sure he would be reining in the Wolf for the time being.
CH 5 DRAFT
Theo ran the details through his head one more time on the way, and as an added bonus it helped him keep his bile down.
Everything about the op suggested a milk run; an international, joint Japan-US really, crackdown on the antiquities black market. They’d be tracking down artifacts, alright, only these might just do a hell of a lot more than look pretty behind glass. Though knowing that they didn’t cause any trouble in transit, they might just be that– inert, fake, or plain mundane.
He doubted if the traffickers behind it even knew what they were handling for that dumbass with more money than sense. Theo also doubted that they’d find him here.
More likely they’d pick him up trying for asylum in some authoritarian shithole down south or up north. Japan wasn’t a very good choice for a white guy looking to disappear.
It wasn’t long before Maho eased up on the gas as they came up to the apparent rendezvous, a narrow side street lined with what looked like shops and restaurants with a few milling townsfolk. Something about it seemed vaguely familiar, like Theo had just seen this exact vista in a fever dream. Just as he began to wonder where the contact could be, an unkempt man in similar attire to Maho appeared from behind the entrance of a nearby building, an entrance that looked to Theo like someone had taken scissors to a curtain.
He was tall for a Japanese, about as tall as Theo and well-built, and about the same age as his liaison. The ungroomed ruggedness of his features still bore traces of what once might have been a young up-and-comer in the force.
Maho rolled the windows down, and the scents of a restaurant and a whiff of tobacco stole into the car, before gruff tones of Japanese issued from the man’s lips.
“Inspector Kirishima?”
The cop flashed his badge, and made a lazy attempt at a salute as he leaned down to talk.
“I’m Assistant Inspector Tokura.”
Identity confirmed, Maho presented her own ID before motioning her head for the man to take the backseat.
“Get in, Assistant Inspector.”
Tokura entered the car without further fuss, reaching inside his suit and producing a few photographs, and immediately launched into a monologue.
“Sorry you had to pick me up here instead of the station, but the whole department’s abuzz. We got old lady Hongo up to her usual tricks, some joker getting chased round town and another one throwing himself off the bridge. The boss practically threw me out the door to get witness statements– goes to show you just how exciting it usually gets around here, huh?”
Before he could continue speaking, he at last acknowledged the foreign company in attendance.
“Can he understand Japanese?”
“Nevermind him.”
“He’s a real youngster isn’t he?”
He nodded enthusiastically at Theo, offering a hand and a greeting in broken English.
“Herro! Werukomu tsuu Japan!”
Giving away nothing of his cognizance, Theo simply nodded back, smiled, and shook his hand.
“Special Agent Theo Lovell, HSI.”
Doubling back to the photos, Tokura slipped back to Japanese as he handed them over to Maho.
They were a set of grainy shots, showing a number of trucks as they passed through a tollgate.
“Kirishima-san. These are taken from CCTV on the highway off-ramp– we believe these are the trucks that you’ve been tracking off of Yokohama. They went straight for a warehouse on the waterfront. They’re still there.”
Reaching into his pocket again, Tokura folded out a set of papers and handed them over.
“Warehouse– leased by a legitimate shipping concern, America based. As far as we can tell, there are five individuals inside.”
Theo zeroed on the only Latin text in the sea of Japanese: Glauber Holdings, one of SHELLBACK’s shell companies. These were their trucks.
Maho kept up the charade by repeating Tokura’s rundown in English and sharing the photos with Theo, before turning back to Tokura.
“And what actions have the Hokishi police taken so far?”
“I have two men with eyes on the warehouse some distance away. Don’t want to spook them.”
“Good. Can you make preparations to serve a search warrant by tomorrow?”
“I’ll have to clear it with my boss. It’s a bit too early to go in, isn’t it?”
“We already have all the evidence we need. Better we make our move before they displace again.”
Tokura assumed a sceptical countenance, like Maho was asking him for something unreasonable.
“Inspector, we’re dealing with some serious globe-trotting criminals here. The most action these town’s cops have seen is chasing air conditioner thieves. Hell, if we leave it be, the yakuza would probably do a better job of running outsider smugglers off their turf. ‘Expel the barbarians’, eh?“
This cop’s irreverence was another surprise to Theo.
Every example that he’d encountered so far, going straight from the airport and navigating the rail network before arriving at Hokishi, gave him the impression that this country’s police were the most conscientious and deferring bunch of lawmen he’d yet seen, and most of them so timorous they couldn’t hurt a fly.
He was acting more like a sheriff in the Alaskan backwoods. Theo could tell it was rankling at Maho, by the way she took exception to her subordinate’s objection with a glare.
Tokura shrank back to his seat in resignation. “But America wants its museum exhibits back. Like I said, I need to talk to my boss first, who has talk to his boss, the mayor.”
Theo stared as he brought out one last thing: a pouch that turned out to be full of pistachios. As the cop fiddled with his nuts, Theo’s initial impression solidified.
This guy was a spent force, a burnout– a victim of personal tragedy, a casualty of department politics, or simply a guy who took things too seriously, who knows?
If he and Maho could agree on anything, it was for the best to keep him in the dark.
“Will there be a problem with that?”
“No, ma’am, not when the national police is throwing its weight around. Certainly, the old man up in city hall won’t let issues of jurisdiction sully his respectable name.”
“Right, then that’s done. Before we finish for the day, take us to your stakeout point, Assistant Inspector.” Maho finally said.
“Set that navigation thing to take you to the port area, I’ll talk you in when we’re close.”
With that done, Maho handed back the files and settled back to her seat. As she slammed on the accelerator and started, Tokura could count himself the second guy that day to get a taste of her unique driving style as they rolled out of the side street and into one of the main thoroughfares.
Tokura recovered quickly enough, and it seemed that he was actually pleasantly surprised at this discovery when he smirked to initiate another chat.
“You know, this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten to work with a woman, but I could’ve sworn I’d tagged every beauty in the force this side of Tokyo.”
Maho’s eyes spared Tokura little mercy, reflected on the rearview mirror.
“Is it your first time trying to hit on a superior?”
“Hitting a superior, no. Won’t be the first time one’s taken me on a ride too.”
Maho about to snap back when a call came through on their contact’s cellphone.
He excused himself to pick it up, and nonchalantly greeted the caller.
The tinny voice on the other side was fraught, and a look of alarm crept into Tokura’s features as he told them to stay put.
When he hung up, his easy-going act was gone, as if the other party’s agitation had infected him. He fired off a curse followed by a blunt command, momentarily forgetting that he was with a superior.
“Shit! Shots fired. We’ve got an officer down by the target warehouse. Inspector, step on it!”
As Tokura called it in up his chain of command, Maho instructed Theo to flick the emergency light on. On the roof, a small hatch swung open to reveal the washbowl shape of the rotating redlight. Released from the speed limit, it was all the two men could do to hang on for dear life as Maho willed the vehicle to tear ass and asphalt all the way to the waterfront.
In what was probably record time, the trio made it to the scene of the shooting, rocketing down an access road that ran along the outskirts of the port to a series of warehouses and storage areas.
When the sedan rocked up to their destination and came to a stop, they were just a few meters away from two cops in suits, kneeling next to one in the bloodstained uniform of a patrol officer.
Once she’d parked the car, Maho got out to take the medic bag from the back and scrambled to the cop’s side to begin first aid. Theo moved to assist, and Tokura made a beeline to his two men, who were looking like fish out of water, and started demanding an explanation.
“What the hell happened here!?”
It had been a coincidence, really. A beat cop on patrol had been called in for a noise complaint. Unaware of his comrades on the adjacent building, he’d gone down from pistol fire as he accosted the warehouse’s inhabitants before they could wave him off.
That’s how Tokura’s men ended up here down on the street, having dragged their fellow cop mewling behind a wall that separated the warehouse yard from the street. They could attest to at least one shooter, but there was nobody on the outside of the warehouse now.
Good news was that the unlucky patrolman was probably going to make it after a quick patch-up. Bad news, he’d stirred up the pot, and now whatever it was they were up against would be hunkered down, waiting and ready. If they didn’t play their cards right, this could get real ugly.
“Maho, have Tokura ask his guys for an updated body count, and for any alternate ways in or out of that warehouse.”
Tokura passed the question on to his men before coming back with a response.
“Five individuals on last count. My man says that all entrances and exits are facing the street, unless they’re up for an afternoon swim.”
Time to change tact. So far he’d tried to act exactly as the cultural dossier had wanted him to, but nothing about the personalities he’d encountered so far had so much as come close to what he’d been expecting. Damn the torpedoes, then. He was going do it his way.
Theo stood and assessed his options.
“Stand your guys down Inspector– just make sure nobody slips past me. I’m going in.”
Maho ran those instructions off in Japanese, but cut off abruptly as she wrapped her mind around what Theo had said in closing.
She followed after Theo’s back in protest, yelling in English.
“What do you mean go in?”
“Twenty minutes– if I’m not back by twenty, you throw all caution to the wind and let these cops and their backup have a run at storming this place.”
Maho was about to retort when Theo cut her off with a knife hand gesture.
“Look– If any of these guys even have the slightest clue, you can be damn sure they’re already burning the evidence right now, or worse, if they do know what they got.”
Theo got his kit from the car. Working with practiced ease, he was loaded for bear in one minute flat, listening to Maho go on about waiting for backup. He moved back to the wall and followed it to the wide-open entrance gate. One last time, he performed a press check on his weapon.
Should have brought a rifle after all.
“Your guys have fucked this up, and you’re in my world now. If this takes any longer then this is only gonna get out of hand.
Worst-case scenario, this entire city is about to find out what the inside of a star looks like. Or something like that.”
Theo looked back one more time. “Don’t translate that.”
“Agent Lovell!” But Theo had already turned the corner, and Maho’s irate shouts met thin air.
On the other side of the wall, gears were already clicking in place inside Theo’s head, preparing him for the savage intimacy of close combat.
Turns out he was wrong after all; he would get to be Wolf for this one.
CH 6 DRAFT
The warehouse in question was a low-set structure of rusting corrugated steel, pockmarked concrete and chipped paint, its heavy ribbed cargo doors shuttered and looking for all the world like its neighbors. The yard was empty, except for packing materials and trash scattered here and there.
Wolf advanced through the open danger area. No gunfire sought him, and his dash carried him to the far side of the building to a smaller white-painted entrance for personnel.
He bent down to inspect the gap below where the door met the threshold. Detecting no tripwires, no booby traps, he tried for the knob and was rewarded with a click as the aluminum door cracked open. Wolf backed up and held his breath as he waited for the doorway to get riddled with bullets– but none came.
Whatever they were up to inside, nobody had thought to lock the doors, nor cover the obvious access point with fire.
Panicky amateurs? That was a good sign. Or they had something more urgent to deal with. Could also be a bad one.
Good thing too. I just remembered I don’t have a tensioner on me.
Swinging the door out, Wolf “pied” the corner with his pistol, swivelling on its edge to carefully sweep the view behind, one slice at a time.
He kept low, resting his pistol on the door frame, and scanned the scene that opened up to him: a single drab hallway lined with a few doors to either side, it looked to be the office annex to the actual warehouse.
Five doors in total, three on the left, two on the right, staggered so that none of them faced the other, and one man-sized opening on the far right.
From somewhere inside, a fan chugged away in tune with the low hum of fluorescent overheads; not a sound otherwise.
Confirming the immediate sector all-clear, Wolf rose to a better firing stance and elbowed the door before the return arm could bring it back, slipping into the building and leaving an empty bottle he found lying just outside to stop his exit from closing fully, just in case he needed a quick out. Moving at a dogtrot, he followed along one side of the hallway, careful to not stick too close to the walls.
First door on the left, that was where he’d start his clearing the building, one damn room at a time.
It was closed, and Wolf had to do the whole check -and-test shebang again. Clear. He turned the door handle, charged straight into the room as soon as it creaked open, gun up, scanning for threats – nothing. Nothing but storage room.
He did this one room at a time, again and again.
Door check, center check, check deep, flow into the room. Again and again, the first few rooms were empty office space, and all he’d done so far was burn daylight.
Damn it, there was nobody to hold the hallway, and the seconds it took to recheck it every time he went in and out of a room were adding up.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast my ass.
Just as he approached the fourth door, there was a thumping of something falling and a muffled exchange of distressed voices from the other side.
Smelling blood, he didn’t bother to check the doorway and stormed the room– check center, check right–
Bingo, right through his sights. There were two males deep into the room, both in shirts and jeans, probably what passed for blue-collar wear here. Curiously, one of them was holding the other in front and pointing a gun to his head. Gun guy was furiously gesticulating and braying something at Theo. With the way he was moving it would have been difficult even for the most steady-handed operator to get a clear shot at the T-box without hitting the ‘hostage’.
Wolf shot the hostage, who jerked with enough force to shake himself free, then took advantage of the wannabe hostage taker’s shock to put two in him center-mass, whipping his sights up to aim up top– but he was already down.
The chain of click-booms resounded in the cramped space, and pounded at the eardrums to enough to hurt.
Shuffling across knocked-over office furniture to stand over the body, Wolf put one more into its head.
Dead-check.
The ‘hostage’ was on the floor, cussing and wailing. Wolf rendered aid with a plunging hook that knocked the man out cold before crouching down to ziptie his hands to a pipe running along the corner of the far wall, and to give him a pat down– nothing suspect on his person.
It was a grazing hit, a flesh wound at worst. He’ll live, if he really was innocent.
Then a new round of gunfire stitched a ragged line of holes along the wall where Wolf had just been standing, peppering his back with insulation and bits of plaster.
Shit. Either these walls are made of papier-mâché or these guys are rocking something heavy.
The fire was coming from warehouse-side, and he decided there was where he needed to be, keeping his head down and scurrying out of the room.
But he wasn’t the only one that got rattled. As he pied his way back into the hall, the door to the last room he hadn’t checked flew open, and a guy wearing a sweater and jeans sprang like a flushed rabbit for the cased opening leading to the warehouse proper. Wolf, point shooting, pumped him with nine millimeter until he dropped in a heap.
The vented gas from the Hi-Power lingered over his sight picture; the runner’s torso stirred with ragged breathing, even as bloodstains bloomed against the man’s clothes.
Turning to cover the opening, he reached for a fresh magazine on his vest , thumbing the mag release and deftly slipping it in home with a snap. He replaced the now-empty pouch with the spent magazine.
Quickly checking the last room and finding it clear, he stepped over to the twitching runner to finish it before Wolf got an idea.
Only one way in that opened into the warehouse itself, and something about that last burst of fire told Wolf that this access point was going to be covered.
Manhandling the half-dead groaner to the door, Wolf stopped just short of the threshold.
And threw him round the corner.
Not very far, but it was enough to get the attention of the guys watching the door, who would probably getting real antsy just about now.
Wolf confirmed they were on a hair trigger; they opened fire at the first sign of movement and chopped their erstwhile comrade up into a bloody mess.
Wolf low-ran right through the wake of the now thoroughly-dead hostile, scraping by the withering hail of chancy-close fire, gun up and firing snapshots at muzzle flashes, catching glimpses of shipping crates, corrugated boxes, and overhang lights– before sliding for the nearest cover, a set of barrels on a pallet half-covered in tarp.
It worked!
A body wasn’t going to stop fire from punching straight through, but it could give them something else to shoot at.
Suddenly a bullet punched straight through thin barrel metal and whizzed by Wolf’s ear, bullets tearing gnarled holes on the wrong side– concealment is NOT cover, and Wolf had to frantically drag his ass, rounds missing him by inches, to a pair of crates which held up better against the onslaught of lead.
Wolf settled behind them with an audible phew.
Now, behind actual cover, Wolf finally had time to assess the situation.
They were on the raised part of the warehouse, next to the smaller loading bay where the trucks, three of them, were parked. Looks like he’d caught these guys in the middle of unloading, with a mess of crates, containers and equipment scattered around. The warehouse in its entirety was large enough to accommodate the trucks with space to spare.
Two separate sources of fire from what he could hear, both from the far end, adding up with the twin blurs of muzzle flash he fired at when he dashed into the room. One was a ways closer, and clearly firing something heavier.
Wolf designated the two hostiles Submachine Gun and Rifle.
Submachine Gun was holed up behind a loaded trolley, and Rifle was firing from a bipod on a stack of pallets next to one of the trucks. They had him in a textbook crossfire, and he was on the wrong side of fire superiority.
At least they couldn’t hit for shit, firing in cyclic. These guys were amateurs, alright.
If they were trained, Submachine Gun would’ve maneuvered on him with Rifle suppressing and ruined his day by now. He could hear them argue between themselves to get him, but neither of them could muster the balls to yet.
He was still in a tight spot, stuck between two automatics with just a pistol.
For all his training, there was only so much one man can do to clear a whole building of alert and uncooperative characters with superior firepower.
One last trick up the sleeve, then.
Wolf reached for the flashbang on his vest. After a certain incident, he made it a habit to carry one everywhere. He hadn’t counted on being forced to use it today, since DHS agents didn’t just carry one of these around for kicks.
Pulling on the pin, letting the lever go, then throwing the banger over the crates, Wolf waited for the tell-tale flash–
and BANG.
Wolf went over the top and levelled his Hi-Power on the bigger threat to his right.
With Rifle stunned, clutching at his burst eardrums with one hand and stubbornly refusing to let go of his weapon with the other, Wolf easily lined up the shot and put one right between the eyes.
Instantly dead, Rifle slumped back out of sight, leaving his weapon rested on the stack of pallets.
Wolf shifted targets, expecting to find another one to the left– no joy; he’d nailed the other guy, but Submachine Gun apparently had the mind to shelter behind his trolley.
Wolf rushed to get an angle on, but it was too far and he wasn’t going to make it before the bastard recovered–
He dove behind another set of crates just as Submachine Gun sprayed blind-fire over the top of his trolley.
Wolf leaned out of cover to let loose a few shots out of frustration, but was only rewarded with superior volume of fire. Looked like Submachine Gun had gotten his wits back. Can’t expect too much from a flashbang in a semi-open space.
After another change of magazines, Wolf inexplicably thought back to one specific movie night with the Unit, to chisel-jawed action hero men dual-wielding guns and all kinds of acrobatics in slow motion.
Normally, that was a good way of getting yourself killed in a firefight.
But normally, you’d take a building like this with a squad of ten guys, not one with just a sidearm. And if you didn’t have to worry about civilians, you’d just chuck frag grenades into every room.
He’d already had to get creative just to reach this point, and now it looked like he’d have to get outright crazy.
Fuck it. Ten meters.
What Wolf did to break away from cover could only be described as a sideways dolphin dive, his absurd flying figure firing his single pistol all the way, something in his pocket crumpling as he slammed onto the pavement. Submachine Gun clearly hadn’t anticipated this galaxy-brain move, but shots still nipped desperately at Wolf’s heels as he leapt to his feet and sprinted the last leg to his goal; then he was there on one side of the pallets; pulling the rifle, turned out to be a RPK, muzzle-first and down behind cover– no time to grab any mags off the dead guy on the other side before the fire caught up to him, splinters and sparks flying around him; mag check–
Topped up, lucky!
Wolf flipped the fire selector, pointed the business end downrange, and popped up to fire back with single shots, sending Submachine Gun scrambling back behind cover and firing blind.
Wolf let the bipod settle to brace against recoil and adjusted his point of aim, before switching to full auto and emptying the magazine in one long burst. The light machine gun bucked like a bronco as it went cyclic. Raging licks of flame shot out of its muzzle, and a hail of lead smashed into the plastic storage boxes on the trolley in quick succession, slicing right through its innards to smack against the soft meat on the other side.
Concealment is not cover. Not against the intermediate caliber.
Simultaneously, two of Submachine Gun’s wild shots finally found a target, and Wolf got the wind knocked out of him twice in rapid succession, first from the rounds’ impact, and second when he met the floor ass-first.
Oomph. Got shot anyway.
Reaching a hand behind his carrier, he felt around his chest for any bleeders, and was relieved to find everything dry and intact, all limbs where they should be. Looks like the ballistic plate had done its job.
Definitely would’ve gotten smoked by the Colonel for pulling that stunt.
Then Wolf felt a sting, but not where he expected, along with a crackling when he moved his leg. Something had been digging into his thigh in the heat of the action, unnoticed until now.
Wolf reached into his right pocket, dredging up fragments of plastic and glass.
It was the pieces of the burner phone Maho gave him.
Shit.
CH 7 DRAFT
Taking a few to recover before getting up, Theo finally felt the tension in his gut wind down after the pell-mell assault.
He found Submachine Gun breathing his last, bleeding out from a beehive of ragged-red holes and splayed out behind his erstwhile cover. He noted with detachment that the weapon was an Israeli model.
Theo locked his unflinching eyes with the man’s fading orbs– what thoughts lie there in his final moments? As those last few seconds of life dripped away from this man he’d riddled, the morbid intimacy between killer and killed charged the air with an incommunicable significance.
He watched in silence as those eyes glazed over into emptiness.
Four suspects neutralized, one apprehended. A good accounting.
He took in the rest of the warehouse, finally free to inspect the collection of shipping containers, crates and boxes scattered around the warehouse haphazardly – his reason for being here in the Far East.
As he undertook one last sweep of the interior, he felt the adrenaline seep out of his extremities and leave him feeling drained– a familiar post-action experience.
Confirming the all-clear, he made his way to the front of the building to a set of controls installed by the heavy doors, and smashed his fist against what looked like the open switch.
The cargo shutters rolled up with an electric hum, the widening slit letting in muted orange light interspersed with pulses of blue and red. Outside, the afternoon had given way to the long shadows of civil twilight. Where there was only Maho’s single car parked out when he went in, now there wasn’t a stretch of concrete out in the yard and the street that wasn’t occupied by police cruisers, their lightbars flashing dazzlingly.
Theo thought it implausible that any of the ruckus they must have made at arrival hadn’t registered in his hearing. Funny how hyperacutely you could put the smallest details into focus during combat, and drown the rest of the world out like you were underwater the whole time.
Shadowed figures, forced to listen to the ungodly racket inside for near a half-hour, nervously levelled guns as the opening doors revealed the lone profile of a man dressed in tactical casual, and Theo held his badge up in response.
A shout, and he spotted his liaison waving them off and thundering towards him with lethal intent.
Still, it seemed like his Japanese friend had calmed down by just a bit since he last saw her.
Theo resigned himself to telling her what she already knew, and let the results speak for the rest, as the woman stopped just shy of knife range.
“Shots fired. They resisted arrest.”
Maho’s glare at that moment could probably melt polar icecaps. It looked like she was about to spit venom, but thought better of it. When she did finally speak, it was all business.
“Report.”
“All clear ma’am. Five suspects, like your man said– had to take down all but one of them. Your boys can come in and secure the premises. “
Maho signalled to a figure that resolved itself out of the light as Tokura, and gave a rapid-fire series of orders before turning to face Theo once again. Around her, a swarm of local law enforcement swept into the warehouse.
“You said there is one alive? We might just salvage this operation still. Take me to him.”
Maho’s mask of anger twisted to one of horror when the magnitude of the carnage became clear.
There wasn’t a continuous surface below eyeline in the warehouse that hadn’t been scarred by the encounter, and it soon became clear that a proportion of their target containers were, in the words of one lawman, “shot up to all hell”, several of his colleagues using similar strong language when they almost lost their footing on the blood-slick on the floor.
Now they were all over the place, policing corpses, searching for documents, prying open the storage crates and containers to get at the contents. There was always a risk of an unnatural reaction, but it was acceptable in balance with the need to speed their confirmation as being the ‘antiquities’ they were after, all the more to start getting them shipped out of town.
If the men lying dead on the ground hadn’t managed to see what their insides looked like on the outside in the process of transit and handling, then the chances of that happening to some poor schmuck was low, as long as they didn’t spend too long around them.
“How is his condition?” Maho asked Theo as they made their way through the fracas.
“Stable, last time I checked. I have him in one of the annex rooms. Grazed him with a bullet when his buddy tried to make a shield out of him– he should be able to talk, but it’s another thing entirely if he will.”
“Let me do the talking. Stay by the door.”
“Roger.”
The live one was conscious by the time they’d reached the room where he had left him, and in accordance with his instructions, Theo didn’t proceed any further in after Maho than to lean on the door frame.
Now that he got a better look at him, the overall impression was strictly unremarkable, aside from the the part of his shirt drenched in drying blood. Put him in some fresh clothes, and he could just as be the hundreds of other Japanese Theo had passed by on the way to Hokishi. That was except for one thing– his eyes.
They were lit with a fire that Theo had seen at the other end of his muzzle flash many times before.
It wasn’t necessarily unnatural. Veterans from the desert wars could readily attest to having seen it before in the real fanatics.
True believers in whatever creed compelled them to strap a six-year-old with his weight in homemade explosives and send him out into a crowd of their own countrymen.
Theo was familiar with the look, but something told him that Maho was about to be in for an education.
On noticing the new arrivals, the man shrank in fear at the sight of Theo, scrabbling uselessly with his legs to get away like a beaten mutt from a whip.
Maho gave him some side eye on seeing the captive’s reaction, to which Theo shrugged.
“I didn’t hit him that hard.”
Maho turned one of the chairs over upright and set in front of their captive.
Not sure if he was just an unfortunate innocent caught up in the flow of events, or someone with real allegiance to their group of interest, Maho started soft.
She leaned forward to calm the man down with gentle exhortations in their native tongue, only for the the wretch to attempt to spit in her face. The glob of rheumy phlegm fell far short of its target, but it did convince the two agents that this guy wasn’t interested in a friendly talk.
Theo stayed where he was, not letting the attempt go without a retort.
“He is one of them.”
Bloodshot eyes looked to him, then back to Maho. The man evidently found his reserve of courage, and his eyes took on a sullen defiance, speech building up in intensity and flecks of spittle flying from his lips with each sputtering statement in slurred Japanese.
Theo could barely make out what the man was saying, but what he lacked in diction he certainly made clear with his sheer vitriol.
“Fools all of you, batting at the inescapable truth that lies at the edge of your flickering torches. Foolish you are, truly, to throw yourselves at such meager light!“
“When that miserable flame is finally snuffed out, starting here, with our very future, the truth will engulf us and show us our true place in the cosmos.”
“…and its visage will sear away the feeble minds of the unworthy!”
His tirade had a lot more to it than that, but his talk was thick with constructions that Theo couldn’t parse with his classroom grasp. If Maho was more comprehending, Theo couldn’t tell through the back of her head.
The captive was bristling now, his increasingly furious spasms threatening to tear at the fixture holding him back.
Theo couldn’t ignore that, and he moved to intervene before anything could happen to his liaison.
“Right, I clearly didn’t hard him enough.”
“Enough!”
That ringing cry in Japanese was from Maho, and it was enough to startle even their captive out of his fit.
Theo was baying to finish what he started, but he held back when Maho held up her hand. She turned back to the man, wanting to keep him talking.
“With normal smuggling, you can expect at least four years. You and I both know that there is nothing normal about those things you and your friends were keeping here.
You’re still young. It would be a shame for you to waste it away behind bars.
Cooperate with us, and I’m sure we can arrive at an agreeable resolution.”
The man suddenly blanked all expression from his face, as though he were already dead.
“You have nothing to offer me.”
A crunch. Theo, finally figuring out his mistake, rushed to grab the man. He’d patted the guy down before moving on, but he hadn’t anticipated that these bastards would have suicide capsules–
Too late, he’d already swallowed it, even as Theo, swearing profusely, grabbed him by the head with one hand and dug at his throat with the other.
Foam began to bubble out of the captive’s mouth, his eyes began to roll up in their sockets–
There was a final horrible gurgling noise, and the man’s death rattle lingered long after his body had grown still.
Theo let go when it became clear that he was a goner. When he turned back to Maho, he realized why she hadn’t done, said anything to stop him in those last moments.
Maho’s earlier executive bearing was gone, scintillating between different shades of anger and disbelief, fighting to master the melting pot of emotions that threatened to boil over.
Theo caught her by the shoulder when she stumbled in an attempt to get up from her chair.
Great. Either the Japanese had sent a rookie, someone only with the shallowest understanding of what they were up against, or their organization as a whole were even more naïve than he anticipated.
To Theo, the reaction only confirmed his beliefs. This was the problem with recruiting from civilians, or even law enforcement, with a country as ‘peaceful’, given to normalcy bias as this.
They’d let the prosperity make them weak and soft, blissfully unaware of anything downstream of their shining city on a hill. Dancing on the edge of chaos, and few ever thought to look down and see how close everything was to plunging right down to anarchy.
When shit hit the wall, most of them weren’t much better than cattle.
Still, this one might have more fire in her than the rabble, if the Program had sent him here to work with her organization.
Maho started to regain her composure, and Theo let her stand on her own feet.
“My country is no stranger to cults. Aum was murderous, but even at its worst they were never…” She said, in a voice that sought to be steady but failed.
“Dime a dozen in our line of work, fanatics.” was the non-committal reply from Theo.
“What he said, do you think it had any significance?”
“Typical crazy talk, ominous, vague. Can’t exactly back it up now that their collection is in custody. Don’t think too hard on it. I mean that.”
But Theo himself was thinking back on what the fanatic said. Typical ominously vague crazy talk, he assured himself. Something shapeless scratched at the back of his skull, but he couldn’t make it out.
“Come on. Let’s go see our contact.”
Stepping over one of the suspects, he glanced at the dead eyes set in the dead face, and was thankful that it wasn’t anybody that he knew.
Assistant Inspector Tokura was catching on to something afoot with his guests, even as he coordinated the police on the scene.
He thought back to their exchange just before the foreigner had, ridiculously, went in by himself.
The DHI agent had understood Tokura before Kirishima could even finish translating– the American could translate just fine for himself after all.
Even more ridiculously, he managed to clear the building, looking none worse for the wear afterwards.
Going it alone, and coming out without a scratch! Whatever was up with those two– it was definitely beyond his paygrade. Snooping in on your betters, things you shouldn’t. Never again.
If Tokura had any suspicions or doubts, he wasn’t about to voice them anytime soon.
Some of his men were tasked with organizing the evidence – hoisting, lugging and shifting the various containers. Two of them were lifting a smaller wood casket to their shoulders, but one of them misjudged and let his side slip. The unbalanced crate careened to the scarred floor, and Tokura scolded the fools with a slap to their top of their heads, in the Asiatic style.
“Be careful, morons!”
That was when he spotted the spook pair striding toward him, and Tokura suddenly felt that he had to take an extra-long drag of his cigarette.
One thing was for sure– it was going to be a long night.
For Theo, it was the tailend of his long night. Getting debriefed by Maho, cataloguing their haul, and sweeping the scene, at the end of what had seemed like a very, very long first day.
The tunes of some Japanese pop song drifted from the stereo, and small tracts of rice paddies passed by the window as Theo enjoyed a distinctly more relaxed pace of driving with him in the seat, a piping hot bucket of fast food chicken set to relieve his long-suffering stomach wafting its stench all over the inside.
Guess I should pick up some air freshener on the way.
Maho was still occupied with a few more matters of procedure, so she sent him on ahead with the car, telling Theo that’d she’d catch a ride with the locals once she was done. Local police could handle the rest, and he was long overdue a little lie-down. Theo let the purr of the pulsating four-cylinder wash over him, as he looked forward to a warm bath and a bed to sleep in – such exorbitant luxury!
Mission accomplished. All indications so far pointed to a standalone group, given the documentation, or lack thereof, recovered from the warehouse. A bunch of occult enthusiasts getting a bit too enthusiastic with the hobby, and taking care of their American friend’s collection while he layed low. That was enough to settle the SHELLBACK connection.
The only goon who could be identified was the one he hadn’t killed, it just so happened. One of the lawmen had recognized him as a nurse for the local high school. All the rest were out-of-towners, and they would take longer to make.
Fortunately, perhaps miraculously, most of the artifacts had escaped damage, some suffering superficial scarring, and only a few pieces broken off outright; enough to chalk up to the suspects’ rough handling on Theo’s report. They’ll be passed on to the care of the Program’s Japanese friends without incident. Chances are that a lot of them would be false-positives. Even the storage boxes that Theo had shot up to get at the last hostile turned out to be all packing material.
Theo was twisting on a control knob to change the station on the radio when the thought hit him like a sledgehammer.
If it was all packing material, then where were the things that had been packed inside now?
CH 8 DRAFT
By the time Maho made it back, Theo had long since dried off from his ameliorating ablutions and taken full advantage of the lull in the operational tempo.
She found him snoozing, sank into one of the rare accommodations for comfort in their pragmatic setup, a factory-fresh leather chair that still reeked of earth and tanning oils previously hidden under a tarp.
Maho elected to grant him a few more minutes before starting on their final debrief.
She tread lightly, the boots she’d changed into whispering on the bare floor. Her stride soon carried her to the bare kitchen counter on one end of the room, and she rummaged through the cabinets for two cups and cheap coffee while she waited for the heater to finish.
Water boiling, she brewed a pot for herself and for her American counterpart. The scent of joe began to drift along the ceiling.
“What’s the word?”
Maho was startled for just an instant before she registered the voice coming from behind.
“Do you enjoy surprising people?” Maho snapped, evidently irritated at his lack of decorum.
She stood up, and saw Theo lean forward on the chair like a crouched panther, like he hadn’t just woken up, or like he hadn’t been asleep at all.
“Sorry. Bad habit of mine, I guess.”
“Now that you are awake, we need to wrap this up.”
Maho brought the two steaming mugs to the largest table, setting hers down and sliding Theo’s to the other side with exacting precision. Laid out on the tabletop were dossiers and photos, the bureaucratic byproducts of their raid.
Theo arose from the couch, jouncing a chair to face Maho’s opposite and dropping down on it in one fluid movement. He ventured a taste of the coffee while he waited for Maho to start.
He was more of tea guy, which meant that he’d be burned as a heretic in some circles, but this brand of hot caffeine will do.
When it did come, Maho’s voice was calm but firm.
“My superiors have reviewed the situation. They believe we have dismantled the core cell– what remains is merely cleanup. Accordingly, they have decided to bring the joint operation to a close.
They see no further need for your participation.”
Theo let his elbows rest on the table.
“And the stragglers?” His gaze pinned hers with stubborn intensity.
“Irrelevant. Whatever is left will go underground or wither away. Your efforts should be enough to deter further activity.”
She paused to let that sink in.
“They asked me to convey their gratitude for your part in this operation’s success.”
Theo let out a hollow laugh.
“Gratitude won’t chase them down. You’re really just going to let them go?”
“That is none of your concern now,” Maho replied. She snapped the dossier shut and began to rise.
“We will finalize your departure arrangements by tomorrow. Until then, rest.”
Maho hesitated, catching the tension tightening his jaw.
“What is bothering you?” she asked gently. Seeing as they wouldn’t be working together for much longer, Maho seemed determined to close this out on a cordial note and resumed her seat.
He nodded toward the opened dossier and the photographs.
“When I took out that last guy,” he said, “I shot through several storage boxes– only packing peanuts and bubble wrap inside.” He tapped a finger against his mug. “If they only held packing material, then whatever was inside– where did it go?”
Maho leaned back, tucking her legs in to a more comfortable position.
“That in itself tells us nothing. Those boxes might have been sourced locally. Most likely, they planned on unpacking artifacts from their original containers and moving them to those.”
She wasn’t buying it. To her, the case was open and shut, and she probably wanted him out of here.
But Theo wasn’t about to leave until he’d assured himself that the mission was well and truly finished.
His mind raced, browsing through the facts of the case to give his niggling hunch a semblance of reasoning.
Staring at the cedarwood ceiling, he looked down, realization flickering in his blue eyes.
“That ranting lunatic, he was the nurse for a local high school.”
”Hokishi High School. What of it?”
“That part he was saying about ‘starting with our future.’ “
“There’s that old saying – ‘The children are our future.’ If they have plans tied to the school, you can’t possibly ignore it.”
Maho exhaled, revealing her exhaustion from the night’s efforts. “A preliminary check revealed no connections. He was not even more than couple of months into the job.”
“If we were to act on the ramblings of every cultist, nothing would be accomplished. We have more pressing concerns at this time, higher priorities. My organization’s resources, unlike yours, are limited. And like you said– what can they do without the collection?””
“Even if letting a few slip through the cracks to save on your budget ends in highschoolers getting caught up in this? You saw what I saw. These might be dilettantes, but they’re not lacking in motivation.”
Now he was breaking through. He could tell Maho was coming around, could see the first cracks in her certainty.
Theo squared his shoulders.
“You have me and my skills here. My superiors have placed me at your disposal, and you haven’t even begun to milk your money’s worth out of me. If you’re worried about resources, I can pitch a plan that won’t cost much more than bit of audacity.”
Maho gave him a glance. “And what exactly do you propose?”
He half-smiled as he dropped to a conspiratorial undertone.
“You said the dead nurse was set to work at that high school, before he put himself out of the running. You clearly have a medical background– why not replace him? Go in as the new school nurse.”
Her eyes widened . “Undercover? If there are any more, as you say, I would be suspect from the moment I stepped foot in that school.”
“Precisely,” Theo countered. “Their eyes on you, that gives the real asset room to work.”
“And who would that be?”
Theo’s smile widened.
“I seem to remember you pointing out that I look young enough to be a student.”
Maho uncomprehending stare slowly turned to one of incredulity as she worked out the full scope of his proposal.
“You are crazy. You already stand out a foreigner, let alone your little escapade on arrival. And you cannot conduct an undercover operation like this off the cuff. It is impossible.”
“And that’s exactly why it’s possible. Someone my age working for their enemies? Our little friends would never dream of it.
Eyes blazing with bloodlust, Theo rose and leaned forward on the table.
“Listen, the more time for them to go to ground, the harder it will be to root them out. The cancer is still there, it’s only a matter of killing.”
Maho nearly jumped at Theo’s sudden energy, and her lip curled. “You are crazy.”
She stared at him in the dim light, weighing his fervor against her doubts. In the end, she apparently wasn’t inclined to leave town before she finished cleaning up this mess either.
At last, she nodded once. “I will run it by my superiors in my morning report, but I cannot promise anything.”
She stood and brushed off a stray strand of hair. “But first comes rest. Get some sleep of your own.”
Maho turned to leave, but was reminded of another order of business.
“One last thing. Whatever happens, I need you to turn in that phone I gave you. S-O-P.”
Theo winced internally.
“About that.”
Uncharacteristically, almost sheepishly, he dug into his pocket to comply with Maho’s request.
Producing the phone, minus large parts of the screen and its housing, and its functionality.
Theo thought he saw Maho’s eyebrow twitch. Without another word, she climbed up the stairs to head for her room.
Left to his own shattered device, Theo thought it prudent to wait a few minutes before gathering the gear he needed and making his own way upstairs. He found himself in a long bare corridor with rooms on one side and at the far end.
Thanks to a handy message written with marker and taped to the door, he identified the spartan bedroom that served as his quarters. By his standards, it might as well be the penthouse suite.
There, he placed a hardshell laptop on the bare desk.
He activated an encrypted satellite link and typed up a rapid update to Lasch. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he relayed the details of his new plan in shorthand, ending on the enter key to send the message to bounce off through space.
While he waited on the response, Theo could hear the shower turn on through the walls, then turn off some time after. The sounds of rustling and jostling that followed suggested that his partner was turning in for the night in the room next to his.
Theo was close to dozing off again when the reply came through.
Her initial replies crackled with skepticism– and frustration that Theo had expanded the mission scope without approval. But caution won out over reproach. By the end of the hour she’d granted him permission, but no extra time– “in and out,” the grand poobah commanded. She’d make the necessary overtures to their Japanese partners.
Theo had a little under a month to produce solid results, before the operation was concluded according to the original timeline.
As the satellite connection blinked off, Theo stared at the blank screen, conviction settling into his bones. New tasking: find proof of any lingering cult activity, root out the remaining members – and, if there were missing artifacts, track them down.
As suddenly as a squall, the day’s exertions seemed to finally catch up to him.
Moving on wooden legs to the cot, he let himself fall down onto the bare sheets.
His eyelids began to feel like lead weights, and it was a relief to let them fall.
He settled into a deep sleep to ratcheting crickets and other night sounds of this strange eastern land, and dreamed of a tolling bell and a burning temple at the edge of the world.
End of Act One
Interlude
CH 9 DRAFT
SENSITIVE//HCS-P/SI-G/TK//FGI/RSEN/ORCON/CANTF/RLWTZ/FISA
TRANSLATED TRANSCRIPT // VIDEO RECORDING OF HOKISHI CITY GOVERNMENT PRESS CONFERENCE // 281932Z MARCH 20XX
SPOKESMAN: I would now like to open the floor for questions.
FIRST REPORTER: What is the spokesman’s comment on Dr. Dankichi Yuki’s statement that the methane hydrate deposits off the coast are twenty-five percent smaller than the initial projections assumed?
SPOKESMAN: I have not read the statement.
FIRST REPORTER: Assuming it to be true, what could be responsible for such a discrepancy?
SPOKESMAN: The question calls for conjecture. Perhaps Dr. Dankichi’s calculations are based off a particularly poor deposit. No, strike that out. I have no comment.
FIRST REPORTER: Does the spokesman regard Dr. Dankichi as a competent and responsible scientist?
SPOKESMAN: He has never been employed by this government.
FIRST REPORTER: That is not a responsive answer.
SPOKESMAN: It is quite responsive. Since he has never been employed by this government, I have no way of knowing his competence or responsibility. I am not a scientist.
( A second reporter raises a hand )
SECOND REPORTER: Is it true that the police encountered suspects on the waterfront raid?
SPOKESMAN: As you well know, the Hokishi police department conducted a successful raid against a warehouse used to hide foreign antiquities earlier this month. Does that answer your question?
SECOND REPORTER: No, spokesman, it does not. I did not ask if a raid had occurred. I asked whether there were suspects or arrests.
SPOKESMAN: Our policemen found no individuals in the warehouse at the time of the raid. If there were, do you suppose that this government would be informed of it by the perpetrators of the crime?
( Polite laughter. )
SECOND REPORTER: But what of the sounds of gunfire reported by witnesses?
SPOKESMAN: The so-called gunfire was an unrelated near-miss incident involving stored fireworks at a nearby warehouse, which fortunately did not result in sympathetic detonation, the same reason why the police cordon had to be expanded. If you have any further questions, please wait for those details on our press release on it tomorrow.
( Spokesman waves reporter down, discouraging further inquiry )
FIRST REPORTER: Spokesman, the Fisherman’s Association has charged Mayor Yonoi with favoring the corporate initiative to exploit offshore methane hydrate deposits over their concerns with overlapping fishing zones and environmental impacts. They say that Mayor Yonoi knows about their aggressive lobbying tactics and does nothing about it. Is that true?
SPOKESMAN: I believe that it is the Fisherman’s Association that made such ridiculous allegations, yes.
FIRST REPORTER: Why is it ridiculous? Because the corporate interests are not lobbying for favorable treatment in legal arbitration, or because Mayor Yonoi is doing something about it?
SPOKESMAN: Ridiculous on both counts. I must reiterate this government’s position, Mayor Yonoi’s position, that we shall stand by the decision of the District Courts. Mayor Yonoi maintains his impartiality in this matter.
( Another reporter rises to continue the exchange )
THIRD REPORTER: But there is no such final decision at this time, is there not?
SPOKESMAN: No, and as such this government has no comment on the unilateral actions of the concerned parties. The courts’ decision will be respected and enforced, when it does come.
THIRD REPORTER: The possibility that the deposits do not contain as much as originally hoped will have a major impact in the decision, yes?
SPOKESMAN: That is not for me to say. It is my understanding that the deposits discovered are touted as particularly promising, but Hokishi has always been proud of its fishing industry and its rich historical heritage in this trade. Our fishermen have surmounted big challenges before, and we are actively working with them to develop alternate fishing zones.
THIRD REPORTER: Is the spokesman suggesting that exploitation of methane hydrate deposits cannot be accomplished without infringing on the fishing zones?
SPOKESMAN (irritably): No, no. My statement had no suggestion of the sort. Of course, it must be made clear to everyone that this government is committed to the growth and development of both the energy and fishing sector, and that neither has higher priority than the other. Rest assured, this city government will act according to what is best for its constituents.
THIRD REPORTER: If there would be a decision soon, which do you think is more probable– an arbitration favoring energy and a pivot towards a new direction for Hokishi, or one siding with a time-honored city tradition?
SPOKESMAN: Sir Reporter, your question is so conjectural that you force me to say– no comment.
THIRD REPORTER: I was only echoing the preeminent opinion of figures such as Dr. Dankichi.
SPOKESMAN: They are free to indulge in wild speculation. I am not.
SECOND REPORTER: Forgive me if this question seems impertinent– what is the spokesman’s opinion of this season’s catch?
SPOKESMAN: Rather good time for skipjack, isn’t it? I understand their having a shortage of them this season. We may catch some of that hereabouts.
THIRD REPORTER: What is Mayor Yonoi’s position on the recent rash of ijime (bullying), spokesman?
SPOKESMAN: Mayor Yonoi is sternly opposed to it. The culture of bullying exerts a malign influence on youth. Our society would be much better off if we manage to inculcate an attitude of harmony and acceptance in our young boys and girls.
THIRD REPORTER: May we quote Mayor Yonoi on that?
SPOKESMAN: Certainly– but only on his next public appearance, and not any sooner.
THIRD REPORTER: Thank you. It seems I’ll have plenty of time.
EYES ONLY // BK-25-0057 // 03/05/20XX
OPORD // OPERATION DAMASCUS
Situation:
Shipping magnate Charles Curwen was brought to the attention of Program assets after several items in his personal collection were flagged for markers of unnatural origin (artifacts) over the course of an IRS investigation into accounting discrepancies.
Program assets embedded in the Treasury Service and USMS moved to serve an arrest warrant for Curwen in his country estate in the early hours of February 22 and found him and an undetermined number of artifacts missing.
Estate staff testify to increased activity in the days prior. Further investigation uncovered a logistics trail and identified the general cargo ship Red Cosmos, next port of call Yokohama, carrying cargo not listed on its bill of lading.
Japanese partners were notified for proper coordination of resources and intelligence. Crew detained for violations of customs law before completion of unloading. Artifacts were already off-loaded at the time of arrest. Latest intelligence tracks the artifacts to the coastal city of Hokishi, Japan.
Japanese assets are currently maintaining observation on all traffic in and out of city limits. No indications at this time that the any of the artifacts have been moved.
Program asset WOLF will deploy to Japan to conduct investigative action in support of Japanese to disrupt further transport of collection and secure the artifacts for containment.
Mission:
Identify exact method of transport.
Determine number of NESTEGGs.
Determine if NESTEGGs are still within Hokishi city limits.
Secure NESTEGGs and ensure handover to Japanese partners.
Assess Group of Interest’s threat level.
Disposition of SHELLBACK is unknown at this time. If presence in area of operations (AO) is definitely established, apprehend if possible.
Execution:
ARROWROOT inserts at D - 10 to shape AO.
ARROWROOT oversees consignment of equipment, develops local contacts, establishes safehouse.
WOLF inserts into AO no later than (NLT) D-day using existing civilian transport infrastructure.
Upon arrival at area of operations, WOLF moves to rendezvous with ARROWROOT and confirms safe delivery of mission equipment.
WOLF will employ all available means to support Japanese efforts.
WOLF will accomplish mission objectives NLT D + 30.
Support:
Japanese liaison already in place.
All support requests route through liaison.
Command and Signal:
WOLF - Primary Program asset on ground.
ARROWROOT – Maho Kirishima, primary Japanese liaison, medical specialist.
SHELLBACK – Charles Curwen.
NESTEGG – object from Curwen’s former collection, operational objective.
FRAGORD // OPERATION DAMASCUS D + 1
Situation:
Majority of NESTEGGs recovered and secured, cross-referenced with records confiscated from SHELLBACK’s possession. Due to incomplete nature of records, possibility for remaining NESTEGGs cannot be discounted.
Indigenous suspect connected to Group of Interest was affiliated with local secondary school, possible indicators of a deeper conspiracy around this specific institution.
Possibility of schoolchildren under threat of exposure cannot be ignored, but paucity of resources at this time limits our response.
Operation will continue as per the original timetable and conducted with existing support assets.
Mission:
Secure remaining NESTEGGs, if any.
Identify remaining membership of Group of Interest, apprehend if possible.
Clarify Group of Interest’s organizational structure.
Execution:
WOLF infiltrates target secondary school under assumed identity.
ARROWROOT conducts diversionary activities in support.
TOP SECRET/KK/105002-25 DG-25-0022 XX/XX/20XX
NOTES // CONFISCATED VIDEO RECORDINGS OF HOKISHI RESIDENT [REDACTED] // 0302.MP4/02:54:53/XX/XX/20XX
02:54
Static wide-angle shot of Hokishi Ohashi Bridge taken from its southern side. Camera is positioned from the bridge close enough to discern individual vehicles. Camera mounted on tripod.
Minimal motor vehicle traffic, no foot traffic visible for duration of video.
02:55
Three humanoid figures (henceforth referred to, left-right, as Subject A,B,C) suddenly appear on the bridge tower closer to the camera.
Analysis of previous frames and frame 516 (the first frame showing the three subjects) indicate no detectible means of transportation. No reaction evident on any motor vehicles on bridge.
Three subjects display no motion for next five minutes. At this distance, only large movements are apparent.
3:00
Signs of movement. Close inspection shows the three subjects making indiscernible gestures simultaneously. (Subject C is slightly behind)
No changes in subjects observed for next three minutes.
3:03
Heavy distortion centered around Subject B observed. Video artifacts multiply by an order of magnitude.
Slight vertical oscillations apparent in bridge deck at this point. No visible structural damage. Total time of phenomenon: 22 seconds.
Motor traffic reactions now apparent. Several vehicles stop mid-span, others accelerate to depart bridge limits. Still no reaction to three subjects. Subjects A and C return to initial position.
03:05
Three figures disappear from view, again with no indications of conventional movement. No further anomalies recorded after this point.
Incident officially explained as a freak occurrence. Hokishi Ohashi Bridge inspected after and cleared in short order for continued use with stricter weight limits imposed, in light of its vital logistical role to the city. Remedial construction work moved up far in advance of previous schedule.