Jack of Ravens

26

Vietnam, 31 January 1968

A heat haze hung so heavily over the thick jungle vegetation that Vietnam appeared to be boiling in the afternoon sun. In the sweaty, oppressive atmosphere clothes became sodden in minutes and Church’s brain thudded inside his skull with every beat of his heart.

As he looked out across the treetops from the open door of the chopper, Church accepted that while he thought he had come to understand despair on the long, weary road from the Iron Age, he hadn’t really come close. Below him, soldiers were being slaughtered, blown apart, tortured, burned alive, turned into quadriplegics. Civilians were being murdered, their livelihoods destroyed. Troops turned against their own leaders. Countrymen killed each other by the thousand. And as the sickening death toll mounted day by day, and the waves of escalating violence washed out across the region, across the world, it was clear there was no point to it at all. Vietnam was a machine fuelled by human suffering and it would go on for ever if they let it.

Church knew from the hindsight of history that it wouldn’t. Instead, the Enemy would get smart and simply shift the conflict to new venues around the globe, from Africa to the Middle East, a perpetual world tour of misery.

‘Are you ready for this?’ Gabe was checking his camera equipment in the next seat.

‘As much as I’ll ever be.’

They’d only been in Vietnam a few weeks, but already Church could see the horrors they’d witnessed etched into Gabe’s once-innocent face. His fears for Marcy had turned him into a different person. No longer the laid-back hippie with the JFK fixation, he made contacts, wheeling and dealing and bribing military men jaded by the rigours of war, doing anything he could to find leads to the Libertarian’s whereabouts.

The intelligence had been sketchy, but there had been a few references to spiders in Vietcong transmissions coming out of what had been known as the Iron Triangle, a highly dangerous area of forty square miles bordered by the Saigon River to the west and the Thi Tinh River to the east.

And so Gabe had spent several hundred dollars buying them places on a small incursion into the heart of the area: just twenty-seven soldiers and a handful of men from the 1st Engineer Battalion to investigate some of the 1,000 miles of Vietcong tunnels that crisscrossed the area.

‘The mirror’s still working?’ Gabe asked quietly.

Out of sight of the soldiers in the helicopter, Church showed Gabe the artefact he had retrieved from the Market of Wishful Spirit. A bright light glowed in the centre.

The choppers came down one by one in a clearing in a dense part of the jungle that had not been razed to the ground during Operation Cedar Falls the previous year. The troops piled out, keeping their heads low beneath the whirling blades. Church and Gabe were amongst the last on the ground.

‘Dust-off in six hours!’ the captain yelled before the helicopters took off into the haze.

The captain was college-educated and had a decent nature, but couldn’t mask his belief that he was out of his depth. Like many officers, he hadn’t had the chance to build up any experience before being thrown into the thick of combat. ‘Stay close. Don’t wander off the track,’ he said to Church and Gabe. ‘This area is rife with booby traps. We’re supposed to have cleared out the VC, but nobody believes that. There’ll probably be snipers.’ He eyed his men, the majority of whom were not yet out of their teens and as green as he was. ‘We’ve been tasked to head south. There’s been some kind of vague intel that Hanoi’s planning an offensive. That’s all crap. It’s Tet. There’s a ceasefire every year so the Vietnamese can observe their holiday.’

Church kept a poker face: he couldn’t reveal that the Tet Offensive in 1968 would be the turning point in the war. The all-out military assault by the North Vietnamese Communists finally showed the American public they weren’t winning the war and brought despair to the US homeland.

‘If they’ve been told to head south, we need to go north,’ Church said to Gabe.

‘You think the Enemy knows we’re here?’

‘I don’t think the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders cares where we are any more, but their surrogates in the military and the CIA aren’t going to let anybody get too close to their operation.’

The point man led the way into the bush and the rest of the troops fanned out behind, rifles at the ready.

‘If I get out of this alive with Marcy I’m going to ask her to marry me,’ Gabe said.

Church looked away so Gabe wouldn’t see his belief that it was a futile hope.

‘Will you be the best man?’ Gabe asked.

‘Sure.’ So his answer didn’t sound too flat, he added, ‘I’d be honoured.’

It was hard going through the thick undergrowth. The heat was merciless and the tension from constantly searching the shadowy vegetation for enemy soldiers was intense.

After a long period of silent contemplation, Gabe said, ‘I still don’t get why we’re here.’

‘Tom has a theory. The earth energy has nodes where it’s stronger — Avebury and Stonehenge in England, Krakow in Poland. The Fabulous Beasts are drawn to these sites.’

‘Why? Because they feed on the energy?’

‘They feed on it … they are it, to a degree. It’s difficult to explain. There’s a powerful tradition of dragons in the Far East, linked to the lines of force that run through the Earth. Tom thinks there might be some kind of source here — a place where the Blue Fire is created, or comes into our world, or something.’

‘So it would be more powerful, or pure, and it would attract more of those things?’

Church shrugged. ‘It’s a theory.’

After a few miles they broke for a rest. The soldiers sat around smoking and talking. Church and Gabe passed the time with the captain and a couple of engineers, the so-called ‘Tunnel Rats’. They had the worst job in Vietnam, making safe the booby-trapped, vermin-infested tunnel system of the Vietcong.

One minute the jungle was filled with only the sound of insects and birds, the next it was torn apart by machine-gun fire and explosives. Panic hit instantly. The soldiers were up and firing randomly into the trees while their friends were cut down around them. The captain yelled for order, but there was too much gunfire for him to be heard.

In the nozzle bursts amongst the trees, Church could see the Vietcong, like ghosts. They were everywhere. The captain saw them too and gave the order to retreat. Some heard, some didn’t. In the disarray that followed, a grenade blast tore apart three men.

And then everyone was running, Church and Gabe amongst them, heads down, pounding wildly into the thick bush. Sizzling lead streamed all around. Men fell, though it was impossible to tell if the shots came from friend or foe.

Finally they reached a place where the gunfire sounded like distant rain. Gabe was there, the captain, an engineer and two soldiers. The captain was shaking. ‘We have to regroup,’ he said uncertainly.

Church checked the mirror. The light in it was blinding.

‘Over here.’ One of the remaining soldiers, a grizzled veteran of twentytwo, was indicating something hidden in the undergrowth. Church pulled aside the fronds to reveal ancient stonework covered with weather-worn carvings. Half-buried at the foot was an image of a snake eating its own tail.

‘Some kind of ruins.’ The captain pointed out other stonework scattered amongst the underbrush.

They found large pieces of rubble that appeared to be the remains of a complex of buildings: an arch, a column carved with ferocious faces with snakes for hair and the stumps of walls now overgrown with creepers.

‘This place is spooky,’ said the veteran who had found the site.

Amongst the ruins, no birds sang and no insects buzzed. The air was flat and sound deadened. It wasn’t an unpleasant atmosphere, but it was eerie enough to put everyone even more on edge.

‘Got a tunnel,’ the engineer called from the skeletal remains of a large room. He pointed out a cover made of interwoven branches and creepers.

‘Okay,’ the captain said, distracted. ‘Do it.’

The engineer checked around the trap door for booby traps and then threw it open. A short drop of around four feet opened into a tunnel running east-west. The Tunnel Rat dropped in, flopped to his belly and wriggled along one of the branches, which was barely a foot and a half high.

They waited around the entrance as the shadows grew longer. In the silent atmosphere, time stretched interminably. After an hour and a half, the captain said, ‘He’s not coming back.’

The words hung heavy in the air until the veteran soldier said, ‘Captain, maybe we should head towards the dust-off point? Any other survivors might already be there.’

The captain nodded wearily; in the growing twilight he looked twenty years older.

It was Gabe who first heard the movement in the undergrowth. He tugged on Church’s arm. ‘There’s someone out there.’

The captain and the two soldiers had their rifles at the ready. ‘Don’t shoot until you get identification. Might be our guys,’ the captain said.

Church peered into the gloom and saw what appeared to be a long shadow lengthening towards them.

‘What the hell is that?’ the captain said in a dead voice.

The shadow rolled over bushes, around trees, submerging the stones of the ruins. Church realised what it was before it washed over the lip of the wall closest to them and was already pushing Gabe towards the tunnel entrance.

‘Spiders?’ the captain said.

They came in their thousands from every part of the jungle, a wave of scurrying blackness that hit the captain with the force of a breaker. Church hung onto the lip of the hole for a split second, watching in horror as the spiders reduced the captain to nothing. Wherever their tiny, ripping mandibles touched, strips of blackness appeared across his body; looking into them was like staring into the depths of space. And then, in a whisper, he was gone.

The other two soldiers were firing and screaming. Church thrust Gabe into the hole and piled in on top of him, and then they were scrabbling for their lives along the suffocating tunnel. Soil rained down on Church as he dragged himself forward, filling his mouth and eyes. The roughly dug tunnel was close to collapse. It was like crawling through a sauna, and the claustrophobia pressed down hard.

Gabe was whimpering. ‘Are they coming? How close? How close?’

Church tried to reassure him, but it was pointless. They both knew that if the spiders were flooding into the hole behind them, they would not be able to crawl fast enough to escape.

They rolled into a small room shored up with planks. A table and radio equipment sat to one side and two further tunnels led off from it. In a desperate panic, Gabe threw himself into one randomly. Church followed, aware they were now in danger of getting lost in the extensive tunnel network.

They crawled for five more minutes, and then Gabe suddenly cried out insistently, his voice quickly growing muffled. Before Church could ask what was wrong, he was assailed by a wave of undulating, greasy fur. Rats by the score forced their way past him, sharp claws tearing the flesh of his hands, tails lashing his face as they wriggled into any space to get past him, pressing tight against his head and face, forcing their way through the small gap between his back and the tunnel roof.

When they had finally passed and his queasy, primal fear had subsided, Church wondered what had driven the rats away.

Another room lay just ahead, with several others leading off it. Gabe was shaking and Church put an arm around his shoulders to comfort him.

‘Are they gone?’ Gabe brushed imaginary spiders from his arms.

‘The fact they’re here shows we’re exactly where we should be,’ Church said. ‘You sure you’re up to going on? It could get worse.’

‘Worse?’ Gabe laughed hollowly. ‘Yes. ’Course.’ The thought of Marcy drove Gabe on. Church wondered sadly how Gabe would cope when he discovered the inevitable.

In the next room they discovered the engineer’s body. The random brutality of the slaughter suggested the trademark of the Libertarian. In the room beyond, there were more signs of the ruins that lay a few feet above their heads. Someone had been excavating. Intricately carved columns had been uncovered, twisted faces and curling snakes hinting at ancient belief systems. Between the columns was a flat stone wall.

‘Now what?’ Gabe said.

Church stared at the blank wall. Amidst all the detailed carvings, it appeared out of place. As his adrenalin buzz subsided, he became aware of another sensation, out of place in the dank, oppressive tunnels: the electricity that was an unmistakable sign of the Blue Fire. He narrowed his eyes and focused intently. Gradually thin tracings of blue fell into relief on the floor and walls that reminded him of the first time he recalled seeing the effect at Boskawen-Un. The lines of power became stronger, converging on the blank wall at a point in the centre where they formed a continually revolving circle. Church pressed his hand into the centre of the circle. He felt the fire crackle around his fingers, almost a greeting. Instantly there was a shaking in the earth and more streams of soil fell from the ceiling. With a judder the wall pulled itself apart to reveal another tunnel behind, big enough to walk along upright. Gabe gave Church an uncertain look and then they both entered. The wall closed behind them with a worrying note of finality.