Ravenous Dusk

Copyright © 2002 Cody Goodfellow

Cover art by Scott Riggs

ISBN 0–9704000–1–2

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form. Brief quotations may be used for review purposes.

All accounts and characters described in this book are fictional. Any resemblance between the events and characters described herein and any actual event or person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

For more information about this author or to order this and other great works of speculative and weird fiction, please contact:

SAN 253–3987

First Edition

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Note: This is a work of fiction set within the Cthulhu Mythos first devised by HP Lovecraft, in the same manner that Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
used the pantheon of Greek mythology and folklore or that most modern vampire novels are set in the milieu of Bram Stoker's
Dracula
. In his lifetime, Lovecraft encouraged other authors to delve into his Mythos and build it into an artificial myth cycle that incorporated the existential dread of the post-Darwin, post-Einstein universe. Though the book you hold in your hands is rooted in fascination with the Cthulhu Mythos–particularly
At The Mountains Of Madness
–it uses Lovecraft's cosmology as the mythic tradition that best reflects the evolutionary themes of the plot. It is hardly necessary to be familiar with even the rudiments of the Mythos to enjoy Ravenous Dusk, but if you're not, your education has some serious gaps in it that this book will, hopefully, persuade you to fill in.

For my creators–

My mother, my wife and my daughter

–
The Hidden Words of Bahá'u'lláh

–Virgil,
Eclogue

October 30, 1999 Tigris River Valley, Maysan Province, Iraq

When the speakers crackled out the call to pray, they knelt to Mecca on the rim of the canyon.

Setting in the broken lands to the west, the sun seemed to flatten and smear against the horizon, the fierce convection currents conspiring with the sulfur-hued air to make an angry red god of the disk in its final minutes. Even nine years after the shameful retreat from Kuwait, the legacy of Saddam's scorched-earth policy lived on in the world's most magnificent sunsets.

Major Hundayi did not concern himself overmuch with God or gods, because whatever gods there were did not concern themselves at all with Iraq. Only the sun had not deserted them, but it rose each day only to beat them down or harden their resolve, and set only to let them freeze.

He listened to his men chatter among themselves when they had made their prayers.

"—I tell you it is true! Damned American vampires slant-drilling the oil out from under us from Kuwait! On the radio—"

"—Chinese hacked version of Windows is more safe. They cannot read your e-mail. I will have my cousin at the Istachbarat burn a copy for you."

"He ate steak Tartar and fresh peaches for dinner at his southern palace in Basra last night. I'm told there were even Cuban cigars."

"Do not be so cynical, Ali. If he eats so well, it means that we are still strong."

He did not expect any more from them than he did from God. Like the sun, a commander in Saddam's army had to shine down on his men so they could not look directly at him, bludgeon their brains into mush and drive them to duty. In the night of combat, they would follow his reflection in their minds into certain death, or so the manuals said.

His men had little use for Major Hundayi's brand of discipline. Most of them were only boys huddling in the shelters with their mothers in the Mother Of All Battles, and could not truly understand the life-or-death value of readiness. For them, it was a joke, because they were in the middle of nowhere, guarding a hole in the ground, a hole filled to the brim with cement.

The Major felt the shame and the absurdity more keenly than all of them combined, but it was his place to keep up appearances, for it was all they left him.

In the War, Hundayi's unit of the Nebuchadnezzar Infantry Division of the Republican Guard had been one of the last out of Kuwait City. In the fierce street fighting, he had himself scored thirteen confirmed kills. Saddam had personally pinned a medal on his chest in a ceremony shortly after the war, praising his courage and loyalty and saluting him as the model of a Republican Guard officer. All this because eleven of the thirteen were shot in the back, and all of them were his own men.

The ceremony had not been televised or written up in the papers, but Saddam used it to send a message to the troops. Hundayi had thought he was destined for great things. He was promoted to Major and took charge of six Special Republican Guard Rapid-Intervention brigades. It was a respectable post, where one could be covered in blood and glory on a daily basis, even if it was always Kurdish or Iraqi blood, and the glory never made the newspapers. Hundayi's diligence won out, and the weekly assassination attempts on Saddam, the Kurd bombings and brigandry, tapered off to a trickle. To become any more of a hero, he'd have to be either dead or Saddam.

Then, three summers ago, he was pulled out of the field and transferred to a division of the SRG he'd never heard of, and buried under a command that could only be some kind of insane test, because he had done nothing to merit punishment. Besides, Saddam's army did not punish officers. It replaced them.

As the commander of the Tiamat unit of Marduk Division of the Special Republican Guard, Major Hundayi oversaw one hundred men who took potshots at American fighter jets enforcing the UN No-Fly Zone, practiced sniping goats and goose-stepping in full parade dress around a filled-in hole in the bottom of a box canyon that was not on any map the Major had ever seen.

In his time at Tiamat, the Major had never given them any excuse to replace him, had never uttered a word aloud to the effect that he might fail to see the honor and validity of his posting. Major Hundayi was not merely a soldier; he was a survivor. Of all the men he'd trained with in his basic training with the Republican Guard, only two others still lived. Nearly half were killed in the War, the rest disappeared in purges. Major Hundayi lived because he had no ambition higher than to survive, and because he was a dogged solver of puzzles. When he had solved the puzzle of what was expected of him in this place, he would be promoted out of it.

The puzzle of the place itself had never interested him, and so he had never paid much heed to the stories his men told each other about it. He knew that Marduk was a very important chemical weapons facility until the War, when it was bombed by the United Nations of America. Despite the maddening economic siege and the unending UNSCOM inspections, Tiamat was rebuilt underground and resumed operations in still-greater secrecy, under the shield of Marduk.

The previous Tiamat unit was rife with religious fanatics, heretics who believed the place was a holy site of some kind. They conspired with Western agents within UNSCOM to destroy the facility and touch off some kind of catastrophic disaster. They were foiled, but UNSCOM inspectors became embroiled in the affair, and the facility was filled with concrete and bombs to placate the New World Order. Marduk was purged and rebuilt with the most staunchly loyal officers, but the youngest and most worthless of the RG infantry and artillery.

There was no monument to the sacrifice of the scientists and soldiers who died at Tiamat, no ceremonial significance that Major Hundayi could fathom to explain the place, but there they were. He did not believe, as some said, that Tiamat was an entrance to Hell, or that the poisons the Army produced there were extracted from its stygian seas. Nor did he believe, as still others whispered when they thought he was out of earshot, that it
was
a holy place, not just to Islam or to the Jews, or even the stupid Christians, but to a faith older than them all.

He did believe that someday, he would be relieved of this wretched duty, and would go back to where there was action and perks and power. Today, just after breakfast, he had received a sign that that day, if not here, might be coming fast.

The call had come in on the hard line, because, like always, the radios and cellular phones were out of order. The hole in the ground didn't want them to talk to the outside world, so all wireless communications, even radar, hit a wall of invisible fog. Even the hard line to An Nasiriyah gave them frequent problems, but the high command almost never called them, and usually only gave a few code numbers to be translated into orders from a slim book in a safe beside the only telephone.

Today, there were no codes, no cryptic messages mired in static, only the terse order to stand ready to receive a convoy of trucks crossing the border from Iran. They were to receive supplies and ordnance from the convoy and stand ready to assist them with their project. Questions were not invited.

It was not a promotion, but it was something. In three and a half years, not one official visitor had come to Tiamat. The truck that brought their supplies came only in the dead of night, and barely stopped to push their food and rare replacement equipment out the back. UN inspectors had come out semiannually to test the soil and insure that the hole was still filled. This was something else again. Major Hundayi cared about Tiamat only enough to know that it was as secret as it was worthless, and in the murky limbo of this godforsaken command, this sounded like as close as he would get to action.

The trucks could be seen for a while as they climbed the road out of the marshy lowlands towards Tiamat. Clouds of rust-red dust rose up and merged with the looming violet dusk, marking their path all the way back to the Iranian border, twenty miles to the east. Major Hundayi stood on a rocky ridge overlooking the road from the west and puzzled over the size of the convoy. Twenty-plus heavy military trucks lumbered around the mouth of the pit to park in tight formation before his camp. His soldiers had orders to stay clear, but they were restless and stupid, and flocked around the visitors like barefoot peasant children in a backwater village. With rifles pointed, they begged for cigarettes and candy. No one got out of the trucks.

Major Hundayi jogged down from the ridge to the camp. Because his lieutenants were nowhere to be seen, he called muster himself with three shrill blasts from a whistle. The men fell in for review, looking more like the survivors of a prison uprising than an elite military unit, despite his orders. Disgusting, and more, a conspiracy to make him look bad. His officers would be punished. But they would have to take turns flogging each other, or he would have to do it himself.

He approached the trucks with one hand on his holstered pistol, feeling more apprehensive than he should, and hoping it didn't show. The windows of the cabs were tinted and scummed with dust, but he saw a ghostly shape stir within. The door of the nearest truck opened and a man jumped out, strode up to him with his hand extended. Major Hundayi took the hand by reflex, but his mind was spinning so hard, he couldn't remember later if he said anything.

The visitor was tall and thin, in his late fifties, with white hair and riveting gray eyes. He was a civilian, in light brown fatigues and muddy black boots. But what stopped Hundayi was the fact that he was white, and by his accent when he spoke, it became clear that he was an American.

"Major Hundayi, I presume?" the American stranger said, in passable Arabic. "Dr. Cyril Keogh, pleased to meet you at last. I've been looking forward to this for a long time, and it's an honor, sir, a real honor."

The man's hand was warm and dry, his grip brutally firm. He handed Hundayi a large envelope sealed with wax marked with crossed scimitars above the sigil of the al-Tikriti clan. Hundayi shuddered and took it, feeling a static charge shoot up his arm at its touch. This had come directly from Saddam.

"Everything inside is self-explanatory, Major, but if you have any questions I can't answer, you're welcome to call the SSO Headquarters in Baghdad, but I would encourage you to use discretion. This project is known only to the innermost circle of government, and if word got out, there could be terrible repercussions."