Age of Voodoo (11 page)

“He did this in the guise of a bear?”

“Looking like a bear. Behaving like a bear. But a bear with human ingenuity and cunning. He could open gates and doors. Undo window latches. Sneak in and out of houses without a sound. Avoid traps laid for him.”

“And you’re certain it wasn’t just an especially smart bear?”

“Shut up and listen,” said Buckler. “We got to hear about what was happening thanks to a Russian air force base up in that region. Used to be, back in Soviet times, they’d send up Tupolev Falcons and Swifts from there to fly reconnaissance missions over the Arctic Circle. Tribesmen went to the base and asked the airmen for help. The airmen couldn’t do squat. Basically they’re a maintenance unit, a skeleton crew keeping the runway in useable condition and a bunch of rusting planes just about airworthy in case some big new conflict suddenly blows up. Not much in the way of weaponry. Or guts. Mostly men bored out of their minds, drinking vodka all day long and jerking off over internet porn. But the officer in charge, veteran pilot by the name of Captain Zhdanov, he’d made friends in the USAF during the post-
glasnost
period when Americans and Russians started doing manoeuvres together, before his booze problem got the better of him and he was packed off to this nursemaid job in the middle of nowhere. Zhdanov phoned a guy he knew at Nellis in Nevada, asked a favour, the Nellis guy passed the info on to our CIA controllers in the Special Activities Division—bingo, it’s a job for Team Thirteen.”

“So you went in, chased down the werebear, presumably killed it...”

“No mean feat. Fucker wasn’t only cunning, he was huge. Fifteen feet tall on his hindlegs. Strong as three grizzlies put together. Near invulnerable, too. Our first run-in with him, he got wind of us coming and went on the offensive. Caught us on the hop. We poured dozens of bullets into him, and it barely made a dent. That’s the trouble with mystical beasts, we’ve found. Conventional arms don’t always work. Sometimes you’ve got to upgrade, think laterally.”

“How?” Lex was struggling to believe he was even having this conversation. Buckler really expected him to take this nonsense seriously? A
werebear?

“Well,” said Buckler, “we went back to the shamans and said, ‘We followed the
medvyedchik
’s trail, met him, shot him, frightened him off, but we know now we’re not going to kill him with just plain rifle rounds. Any suggestions?’ See, this is how we roll. We use local support whenever and wherever we can. And the shamans told us they’d tried warding charms and prayers to the sky gods and what-all-else in hopes of getting rid of the werebear, and no joy, but one of them said maybe there was a medicine that could help. He disappeared off into the woods to gather ingredients and soon he was back with armfuls of herbs and tree bark and such, and he cooked it all up in a pot, chanted over it, and what it was was a potion, a kind of gluey liquid that we were to smear over ourselves and it would make us undetectable to the
medvyedchik
so’s we could get close enough up to him to inflict some serious damage. Stank to high heaven, that gunk, but we stripped down to our skivvies and slapped it on all over like sunscreen and went out again into the forest to track our target.”

“Did it work?”

“Sure as shit did. We snuck up on old Barney the Mega-Bear like we were ninjas. He didn’t hear us coming, definitely didn’t smell us coming. The medicine disguised us like Harry Potter’s cloak of fucking invisibility. The reek confused the werebear’s senses, disoriented him. A couple of RPGs landing by him disoriented him a whole lot further, and then, when we had him on the ropes, Petty Officer Sampson went in to deliver the coop dee grace—an M67 fragmentation grenade. Sampson tossed that grenade straight into the werebear’s gaping mouth. Guy’s got a hell of a pitching arm on him. Could have played baseball in the major leagues, I reckon. Now, a mystical beast can withstand a lot of punishment, as we’ve already established, but the monster hasn’t been found yet that can argue with six-and-a-half ounces of Composition B explosive and a shitload of steel fragments erupting inside its head. Werebear was damn near decapitated. And as it fell...”

“What?”

“It became just a man again,” said Buckler. “Morphed, shrank, until it was this naked, puny little stringbean, kind of like you. Headless, of course. No longer a terrifying red-eyed creature. Just a dead human body with a ragged stump of neck, lying sprawled in the undergrowth. Kind of anticlimactic, that.” He looked rueful. “After so much spooky supernatural hoo-hah, to see that all you’ve done is eliminate a person, nothing more. Some guy who had the bad luck to get cursed by a gypsy or bitten by another werebear or something, as much a victim as a villain. Sort of sours the victory for you, know what I mean?”

“I imagine it does.” Lex examined his half-empty beer bottle. “Can I ask, Lieutenant Buckler—how long have you been a functioning alcoholic?”

“Oh, ha ha. Wiseguy.”

“Must be me, then. I must have hallucinated the past few minutes while you’ve been telling me about hunting Winnie-the-Pooh’s mutant monster cousin in the wilds of Siberia. I vow never to touch another drop.”

“Now you hold it right there, sport.” Buckler leaned across, thrusting his face directly in front of Lex’s, so close his moustache almost brushed Lex’s nose. “You stow that snarky bullshit. I’ve been running this boat crew for five years now, and in that time I’ve seen things. Things you’d never credit. Things that’d leave someone like you gibbering in the corner in a puddle of your own piss, just at the sight of them. Me and my shooters have confronted some of the goddamnest awful and inexplicable crap the world has to offer, and we haven’t done that simply so that assholes like you can come along and mock. Look into my eyes. Look deep. Are these the eyes of a madman? Of someone who’d make shit like this up?”

Lex had to concede that there was nothing but sincerity in Buckler’s eyes. Sincerity of the most alarming kind. Sincerity that bordered on blazing zeal.

“You think there aren’t monsters in the world?” Buckler went on. “I’ve seen ’em. Seen ’em all. Vampires? Believe you me, I’ve killed vampires. More of them than Buffy and Van Helsing put together. They’re nothing like Count Dracula, I can assure you, and nothing like those twinkly
Twilight
douchebags either. Then there’s devils. You reckon devils are just something made up by the church fathers to frighten folks into being good and not straying from the righteous path? Devils are real, pal, and what’s more, they’re slippery, twisty, lethal motherfuckers. Djinns? Lake serpents? Gigantic burrowing worms in the Mongolian desert that can swallow a horse whole? All fictitious, right? Straight out of legend, or books, or bad sci-fi movies, right? Wrong! They’re as real, as tangible, as you and me. Know how I know? Because I have beheld them with my own two eyes,
these
eyes, and not only that but I have blown shit out of them, too. Any idea what I was doing Christmas before last, while everyone else was tucking into turkey and knocking back the eggnog and trying on the godawful sweater their Aunt Mabel just gave them? I’ll tell you. I was with Team Thirteen in Moldova—which is barely even a country, more a stain on the map—in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, in a cavern, destroying a clutch of dragon’s eggs with flamethrowers. And that’s no word of a lie.”

“Dragon’s...?”

“You heard correctly. My life is spent leading a group of people who hunt down freaks of nature and eradicate them. Name me something you think is fantasy, something you reckon can only be found in myth and folklore. I’ll tell you if I’ve come across it.”

“All right,” said Lex, bemused. “Werewolf.”

“Huh. I’ve given you a werebear. A werewolf’s nothing. My squad dealt with one in Germany, the Black Forest, about three months back. Try again.”

“Vampire.”

“I already said about vampires.”

“Oh yes. Troll.”

“Sjunkhatten National Park, Norway. Living beneath a road bridge over a fjord, snatching hikers who went trip-trapping across. Try harder.”

“Okay, then. Chupacabras.”

“We’ve fragged the odd South American goat-sucker.”

“Ghoul.”

“Bahrain, two years ago.”

“Abominable Snowman.”

“Well now, he’s not exactly what you’d call a clear and present danger to anyone, stuck way up in the remote Himalayas like that, all by his lonesome.”

“But you’ve seen him?”

“I’ve seen some pretty convincing spy-satellite footage of him,” said Buckler. “Is that it? The best you can do?”

“Honest politician,” said Lex.

Buckler couldn’t help but chuckle. “Now you’re being ridiculous. Everybody knows there’s no such thing.”

Lex sat back. He didn’t like to admit it, but he was halfway to thinking that Buckler was telling the truth. If not, then the man was delusional or a phenomenally good liar, and the impression Lex had so far formed of him suggested he was neither.

“But it would be front-page news, wouldn’t it?” he said, scrabbling for a rebuttal. “Trolls in Norway, werewolves in Germany...”

“Would be if the CIA and the Pentagon ever allowed it to be,” Buckler replied. “We got people, Langley data analysts, employed full-time covering up any and all reports of Team Thirteen activity. We do covert like no one else does covert. You’d know a thing or two about that yourself, career history like yours. Tell me if there’s one journalist who even got close to publishing a story about your involvement in a high-profile assassination.”

“We have ways of making them not talk,” Lex said. “And that’s assuming I was ever careless enough to leave a trail of evidence in the first place.”

“Precisely. Same here. Folks want safe, orderly lives, don’t they? They want to know their jobs are secure, their kids are getting taught properly at school, the bills are paid, the car works, they can go fishing at the weekends or catch a movie or have a burger at McDonalds or whatever. They
don’t
want to know that there’s people like you who go around offing the bad guys so that those safe, orderly lives can continue for them.”

“‘People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’”

“Yeah, I like that quote. Orwell, right?”

“Attributed to him. There’s some dispute. It could be Kipling, or Churchill. But it’s been a mantra of mine since as long as I can remember.”

“The principle applies equally to Team Thirteen,” Buckler said. “You think the world would stay calmly spinning on its axis if suddenly there was absolute, definitive proof of, say, the existence of vampires? Scrawny, slimy bloodsucking motherfuckers with the blackest tongues and worst breath imaginable? We’re here to tidy them away without the general population finding out, sweep them under the carpet so that global sanity can continue. We’re the janitors of the uncanny. It’s a thankless task, but someone’s got to do it.”

“Okay,” said Lex. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I accept everything you’ve just told me.” He couldn’t, not quite, but he was getting there. “I suppose the next logical question is, what’s going on around these parts that demands the attention of Team Thirteen? What sort of ‘freaky shit’ have you come to our shores to shovel up?”

B
UCKLER TYPED SOME
commands into the laptop, then spun it round so that the screen faced Lex.

“What you’re about to see is classified ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information’—above top secret,” he said. “It’s footage streamed from the helmet camera of a member of a unit of US Marines who were inserted into a location not far from here some thirty-six hours ago. The location is a US military research installation, and the leathernecks were sent in because there’d been a sudden and catastrophic loss of communications. All radio traffic and satellite uplinks went dark two days ago, and SOP in response to such a turn of events is to launch a recon-and-rescue party. The Marine commandos were helo’ed over from Hurlburt Field in Florida, and all’s they expected to find on entry was that there’d been a power outage, uplink on the fritz, something of that sort. Nothing to get your panties in a bunch about. The research scientists and their military supervisor would all be fine and dandy, and everyone could go back home and have a drink and laugh about it.”

“I’m guessing that wasn’t how it turned out.”

“Watch and see.” Buckler clicked on the Play icon, and a video clip started up onscreen. It was night-vision footage, flickery and ambiguous. Vague green figures were running and yelling. Guns rattled. Hot white lines of tracer round flashed. Tight echoes suggested the firefight was taking place in close confines, indoors. The image jerked this way and that. Lex found it difficult to follow, or fathom.

“It’s chaos,” he said. “Who are they shooting at?” He kept glimpsing figures in the background, pale and elusive. “And why’s there no return fire?”

“Hah. Spotted that, did you? The answer is, they appear to be shooting at an unarmed enemy. Which is not the Marine corps way, not normally. What’s also anomalous is that the enemy seem to have the upper hand. Marines are dying. You can hear it on the soundtrack.”

Lex could. Screams interspersed the gunfire, and they were screams of mortal terror—and mortal pain.

Finally there came a lull, and then a lone, hoarse voice calling from a distance: “Bondye! Bondye! Hear me, Bondye. I am coming for you.”

Buckler pressed Stop.