Ghouls

PROLOGUE

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 1978

The colonel measured time with cigarettes.

He smoked one every fifteen minutes, so by the accumulation of butts on the step panel, an hour and a half had passed.

An hour and a half?

His mouth opened slowly and he blinked, touched by the faceless reality. It seemed he’d been sitting here in the Jeep for days, waiting for them to come back. Dementatus proximus, he thought. Only an hour and a half. He felt caught on the grapnel of a convulsive, tilting nightmare, where time ticked backward and the world revolved in reverse.

He tried not to think about the screams.

By his watch it was 0314 hrs. Had the battery run out? He was sure he’d replaced it recently; Sanders had made him replace it, had made them all. Still, something warped the colonel’s perceptions of time and proximity. The night and so much waiting had wrung his senses to distortion, leaving nothing real. The moon pulled at his brain. He looked down at the submachine gun across his legs and wondered what the old Army levermen must’ve felt while tying thirteen perfect knots into the hanging noose. The gun lay in his lap like something stillborn; he scarcely touched it. “M3A1,” Sanders had earlier explained to him. “Simple, sensible, few moving parts. It’s the least expensive weapon in the Army inventory, and the most reliable.” To the colonel, though, it seemed flimsy, cheap; its finish looked and felt like dull gray wax. “And it never jams,” Sanders had added. “Dent it, bury it, piss in it, pour sand in the chamber, but it never jams.” The colonel hoped he didn’t get the chance to test the validity of that particular claim.

He wondered if Sanders and his men were dead.

There had been sounds of battle, not twenty minutes before. The slow, pathetic sputterings of their greaseguns, anguished shouts in the distance, and then the grenades (six of them, the colonel had counted) exploding through the dead night air amid a trail of fracturing echoes. Had everything gone as planned? He was to consider the grenades a signal, a certain cue to be ready to move. “If you hear the grenades,” Sanders had said, “then you’ll know we’ve made it out of there. But if you don’t hear them, don’t wait for us. We won’t be coming out.”

The grenades were a good sign, an indication of success; but only minutes later there had been more sounds, more heated gunfire. And then the screams.

Screams of pain, of terror—human screams, but in unison with screams that were significantly less than human.

The colonel knew then that something had gone wrong.

He thought about starting up the Jeep and driving out of there while he still had time. Maybe the plan had failed. Maybe he was sitting there waiting for dead men to return. Or worse, maybe—

A gunshot rang out. (A pistol, he thought. Sanders took a pistol, too.) It was something, anyway, a shred of promise. The shot meant that at least one of Sanders’s team was still alive.

The colonel decided to wait ten minutes more.

He lit another cigarette and nearly smiled, remembering how Sanders had warned him not to smoke. Some nonsense about light discipline. Always wear a watch with a cover. Never wear a watch that ticks. Bury all garbage and empty C’s. Anything that shines, paint it black. Paint your face black. Paint your hands black. When you pull your dick out to piss, paint it. Then cover the piss. And never, ever smoke at night.

Was Sanders really just a fanatic, an Army nut? The colonel thought about that. He’d seen Sanders’s credits, though: embassy armorer with a classified MOS suffix, training schools he couldn’t even talk about, combat service stripes to the elbow. Once, he’d shown the colonel what he amusedly referred to as his “junk.” “Take a look at my junk,” Sanders had offered. DoD training certificates, boxes of them. Qualification braids, aiguillettes, a year’s worth of Soldier of the Month awards. Expert badges for weapons no one had heard of. Commendations from generals, division and group commanders, and even a letter of recognition for outscoring the rest of NATO at some Redeye range in Germany. The name signed at the bottom was Bernard W. Rogers.

Next, he’d shown the colonel a shoebox full of medals from Vietnam. Sanders had always displayed a neutral embarrassment toward that particular war, and the contents of the shoebox. “A lot of fruit salad and chicken shit this is. They shouldn’t give medals for wars we don’t win. All this shit you hear about delayed stress and torture and how bad Vietnam was. Tell that to the guys who went to Korea and Stalingrad. Tell that to the guys who had to fight the Waffen SS on D-Day. Makes me want to throw up. Better to melt all this shit down for bullets.” He’d tossed the boxes back into his locker. “Junk.” Purple Heart. DSC. Silver Star.

No, Sanders was the best he could find. But was that good enough for this? The colonel wondered.

Just wait. It’s no use worrying about it now.

Through the steel-frame windshield, he viewed a stretch of the night’s zenith. The desolation of this place always left him slightly on edge; he’d never seen nights so clear and infinite. The moon was egg-shaped, a pallid, misshapen face in the sky, backed by a depthless void of stars. To his right, the Tuwwaiq Ridges broke the line of the horizon like the rim of an endless crater. These were the hills, Arabian hills, crestlike hillocks thrust forth from the earth’s crust, barren, dead. Yet the Saudis called them hills. They didn’t know what hills were. This sacred Islamic world of theirs was little more than a wasteland, plain after plain of scorched volcanic rock and a sea of sand. February now, midwinter, and the temperature was about sixty. The average summer day brought heat that sometimes reached 125 degrees.

He tilted his head out of the Jeep’s canopy, squinting into the night, straining for the sight of a cloud, if just a wisp, but there was nothing. He hadn’t seen a decent cloud formation in three years. Here, the yearly average of precipitation was about four inches. Some areas of the Great Empty Quarter, the Rub’ Al Khali, had rainfall every three to five years. It struck him then that this place was not of his world at all, as remote as another planet, and he thought that if it weren’t for the oil pools, the Saudis could take their heat-baked living hell of a home and shrivel in it. Yes, the earth could crack open right here and suck everything down…

The clap of more pistol shots gave him a start like a bolt of current. Someone was coming. The shots had been closer this time, much closer. He pitched his cigarette out, touched his weapon.

He listened.

A scuffling to his right. Panting. Boots scraping over the jagged stone ruts of the ridge. He jerked at the crack of still another pistol shot, and automatically he turned over the Jeep’s engine. Leaning out, he raised a pair of IR monoculars to his eyes, focused, then combed the strange green field across the slopes through which Sanders and his men would make their escape.

Top of the ridge, a tiny, desperate figure appeared, at first just an insect-shape in the IR’s circle. It was a man scuttling down the incline.

Then came a scream, bestial, hell-bent. A howl of rage.

The figure coming down the ridge was Sanders, his automatic pistol in one hand, a green metal ammo box in the other. He was scrambling, then leaping into the Jeep a blurred instant later, yelling, “Go! Go! Move!” and as the colonel ineptly jammed the Jeep into gear, Sanders snapped another clip into his pistol, hung out off the roll bar, and began firing more shots behind them. The colonel sped down the crude road, slammed back and forth in his seat; he prayed they didn’t lose a wheel or break an axle over this trench of a road. Brass flew as Sanders pumped off his remaining shots. The colonel locked his eyes ahead; he was grateful not to have to see what Sanders was shooting at.

Five miles later, the colonel stopped the Jeep, parked with the motor running. The headlamps dimmed in the sudden deceleration. He gasped when he turned. Limned in moonlight, Sanders sat back stonily in the passenger seat, face staring up. His chest heaved to take in air. He’d lost his steel pot, lost his submachine gun, his clip satchel, and his light. He let the empty Colt .45 clatter to the floor. Lashed to his calf was a Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife, and one WP grenade still hung from his web belt like a powder-gray cola can with white stencil letters. From a gash in his arm, blood soaked blackly into his field shirt. Bright-yellow earplugs stuck out of his ears, a ludicrous contrast to his eyes, which were rimmed by the white of trauma.

The colonel’s gaze flicked from Sanders’s face to the metal box on the floor.

“Bastard,” Sanders breathed. He stared up, not at the colonel.

“What?”

“Goddamn bastard. You said there’d only be three or four.”

“So?”

“There were a dozen.”

Silence. The colonel gulped as if swallowing gravel. Fatal misinformation. “O’Brien, Kinnet. What hap—”

“They’re dead,” Sanders’s voice leaped, a suppressed shriek.

“How can you be sure? Maybe they’re still back there waiting for us.”

“They’re dead,” Sanders said, breath returning. He spoke like a man just saved from drowning. “Both dead. I saw them. Ripped apart.”

The colonel looked away, feeling the inert cold of the M3 submachine gun still cradled in his lap. These men, he knew, were Sanders’s friends. “Sergeant, I’m sorry. I didn’t think there would be more than three or four… A dozen, you say?”

“At least.”

The colonel found this hard to believe. “But the guns, the grenades—you had enough to wipe out a company of men.”

“They’re not men,” Sanders said. “And the guns, the grenades…all useless. We’re lucky if we killed five of them.” Sanders patted at his wound, unconcerned at the amount of blood. “And they’re fast. My God, they’re fast. I think—I think they were actually dodging the bullets. When we finally got out of there, I lobbed in enough willy-peter to stop a convoy… A wall of fire, and they still came. They were on us again in minutes… Everything went wrong. I still don’t know how I got away.”

The colonel could say nothing. He diddled unconsciously with the bolt-flap on his M3.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen now,” Sanders said. “I can explain the missing weapons to the CO. I’ll say some ’Rabs busted into the gun vault or something.”

“And the rounds? The grenades?”

“I’ll list them as expended for training. It’s easy, no questions asked.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“O’Brien and Kinnet. Sooner or later someone’ll find their bodies. What then?”

Sanders obviously had not yet surfaced from the aftermath of his panic; he’d forgotten the fine (and the excruciating) details. “Sergeant,” the colonel said. “Evidently it’s slipped your mind.”

“What has?”

“The bodies will never be found.”

Sanders looked abstractedly into the windshield, thinking. Then, he said, “Oh…right.”

“So you can see, we have nothing to worry about; it will look like O’Brien and Kinnet went AWOL. There’s nothing to tie us to them; no one will suspect us of having anything to do with their disappearance.” Again the colonel stole a glance at the ammo box on the floor. He couldn’t stand another second not knowing. “The box,” he said. “Did you get—”

Sanders nodded, closed his eyes. “I got ’em.”

The colonel clenched his teeth—the world stood still for him. His very life stood still.

Sanders reached down and picked up the box, stiff from the pain in his arm. “This is all that would fit; take ’em or leave ’em,” he said. “It’s better than nothing which is what you almost got—” and then he passed the box to the colonel.

Could this really be? The box felt heavy and unevenly weighted. Blood slickened the handle. The colonel unsnapped the lid. No, no, he thought. It’s a dream, it’s a dream. When he raised the lid and looked in, his mind effused a thousand visions. He saw the glory of kings in the box, the power of alchemists, wisdom, fortune, greatness: all his, and more. In the box he saw history.

“You got what you wanted,” Sanders said.

Still aglow in the vision, the colonel said, “Yes,” in a voice that was dry and long as the desert. Trembling, unbelieving, he resecured the lid and gently placed the box in the back. “You did it, Sergeant. You pulled it off. Outstanding.”

“So you got something for me now, right?”

The colonel reached again to the back. “It’s unfortunate, of course, about O’Brien and Kinnet. Your grief is mine… But at least you won’t have to split any of this with them.” He passed Sanders a brown, scuffed briefcase with frayed corners. “As promised, Sergeant. Twenty-five thousand.”

A grin like a cut tightened Sanders’s face. Had he forgotten his dead friends this easily? He placed the briefcase across his knees, opened it—

—and turned, glaring. “What’s this shit, you motherfucker? I stuck my neck out a mile for you back there, and now you’re gonna shaft me?”

The briefcase contained not money but old copies of the Army Times, some Arabic newspapers, and several recent issues of British Penthouse.

Now the colonel was holding his M3 chest level, pointing the dull, eight-inch barrel at Sanders’s heart. “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m very, very sorry. But for this to work, no one can know. Not even you.”

And before Sanders could plead or even move, the colonel squeezed the trigger, and ten .45 hardball rounds slammed into the middle of Sanders’s chest and literally blew him out of the Jeep.

Gun smoke eddied up, unfurling. The colonel coughed. He was surprised at the weapon’s sluggish cyclic rate and imprecise action. The air around him was hot and filled with grit.

He waved the smoke away vigorously, then slotted the vehicle into gear and drove off.

— | — | —