Then he saw the answer to his prayers out the starboard windscreen, practically glowing like a beacon in the morning light.
A hospital ship. There was no missing the bright white hull and the massive red crosses painted on its top. Noonan remembered something from the base bulletin about a humanitarian mission passing through the gulf.
In his joy, he whapped the pilot on the side of the helmet. “There! Dude, right there! Set us down! They can help!”
The pilot looked at him, eyes cold. “Not my orders. Colonel Graves said the carrier.”
“Are you nuts?” Noonan shouted. “We won’t make it to the carrier. He’s circling the drain right now! You’ve got to—”
The pilot turned in his seat and shoved Noonan back. Noonan stumbled and landed on his ass.
“I told you: not my orders,” he said. “Now sit down and shut the hell up.”
Noonan noticed the pilot had the holster of his sidearm unsnapped and ready. Bewildered, he took off his headphones and headed into the back.
Noonan, as a corpsman who went into the field with a red cross on his back, could not carry a weapon on active duty. One of the burdens of being the good guys, playing by the rules.
As soon as he explained what the pilot had said, the guard was ready to back him up.
He stepped into the cockpit again, put on the headphones once more. He heard the pilot growl in frustration.
“Look,” Noonan said. “I’m not threatening you. I can’t. It’s the first thing they teach us. ‘Do no harm.’ I swore an oath to preserve all life.”
The pilot turned, opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t speak.
Behind Noonan, the guard had his pistol aimed right between the pilot’s eyes.
“But here’s the thing,” Noonan said, “
he
didn’t.”
The pilot closed his mouth.
“What do you say, Archie?” Noonan asked with a grin. “Want to land this bird?”
IT WAS SUPPOSED to be her day off. The USNS
Virtue
had assisted with emergency relief operations after a massive quake in India. Dr. Nina Prentice had been working around the clock for two weeks on victims pried from dirt and rubble. Now they were supposed to be headed home to Virginia by way of the Suez.
But her pager sounded and Prentice ran for the casualty reception area. Someone outside gave her the bare-bones details. A chopper carrying a Marine from Lemonnier, hit by a stray bullet. He started to go into convulsions and they were still a long way from their destination.
Virtue
was closer. Just a stroke of luck.
Nobody could tell her what exactly was wrong with the kid. Basic facts: nineteen, in good health and dying from a minor GSW. Great. Nothing like flying blind.
The Marine had already been off-loaded and a nurse and two orderlies were trying to get him prepped. At first glance, just another day at work. But she could already feel it. Things were sliding out of control. This wasn’t the amplified rush of an ordinary trauma. The edge in the room felt uncomfortably close to panic.
Unlike most of her colleagues, Prentice wasn’t on board because she owed the government for her tuition and fees. In fact, her student loans were accruing interest at a truly impressive rate while she worked as a civilian trauma specialist with the Navy. She was here because she’d seen the devastation in New Orleans, Haiti and in the Middle East on TV. She’d decided these were the places that needed a doctor the most, and the
Virtue
would get her there.
There wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t wonder what the hell she’d been thinking.
But she didn’t have many moments for reflection. She got called for the worst cases: victims delivered by helicopter with burns over 60 percent of their skin; people nearly bisected by flying blades of shrapnel; others so mangled by war or disaster they resembled bags of meat holding broken bones.
Prentice’s job was to keep them alive and stable until others could do the more delicate work. Everything was critical; everything was an emergency. She had to freeze her emotions, because if she stopped to think about the small child stuck on the length of rebar she was trying to remove, she would never be able to do it.
She assumed she was numb to horror by now. But when she saw the Marine, she discovered she could still be shocked.
“What the fuck—?” she said.
(Prentice had learned that the cliché “swearing like a sailor” wasn’t at all true. The sailors on board had better manners than a Southern deb. But after the twentieth time some jackass had called her “Nurse,” she began using “fuck” as her all-purpose noun, verb and adjective. Somehow, that convinced people she was a doctor. Or at least someone with authority.)
“I thought this was a gunshot wound.”
“That’s what they said.”
This was no gunshot. The kid looked shredded as he thrashed on the table. If Prentice had to name what was happening to him, she’d say “skin failure.” His flesh was splitting and peeling in great strips, and he was swelling like a Ball Park frank on the grill.
Despite all that, it took two orderlies to hold him. They couldn’t even get an IV line.
“Haldol—” she snapped.
“Five and two Ativan already,” the nurse shot back.
Seriously? Prentice thought. That was enough to knock most people cold. “Hit him again,” she said. “Ten and two this time.”
The nurse gave her a look but had the syringe ready to go. She spiked it into his arm. The orderlies managed to strap him into four-point restraints, which allowed Prentice and the nurse to finally get the instruments on him.
The nurse slipped the heart monitor on the Marine’s finger. It began screeching as soon as she turned it on.
“That can’t be right. Seriously, what is
going on
with this equipment?”
“I’m just telling you what it says. Heart rate two-fifty BPM.”
“Temperature—what the fuck, what’s with the readouts? Temperature one-forty? BP
three-twenty
?”
“Hey, I just work here,” the nurse said. She slapped a couple of X-rays onto a nearby display. “He was near comatose when they brought him in. I don’t know what happened—”
“Fine, whatever, let’s just get it down before he strokes.” Prentice ordered her to run sodium nitroprusside and examined the film. Hard to tell, but it looked like the bones were intact, just . . . bent. Like something was inside the Marine, pressing out.
“We need a CAT scan. I’ve got no idea what’s going on in there.”
One orderly laughed. “Good luck with that.” Despite the restraints, he was still twitching like a third-grader without Ritalin.
Before she could look at the X-rays again, he opened his mouth. It sounded like he was choking.
“O
2
’s dropping,” the nurse said.
“Intubate,” Prentice ordered.
The nurse had the kit out of its sterile wrapping in a second. Prentice tried to slide it down the Marine’s throat. No good. It stuck. No time for another try, not with his blood pressure that high and his heart running like a jackhammer.
“Got an obstruction. Trach kit.”
She put the scalpel to his throat. Then she noticed something. The Marine’s eyes were open.
That happened, even when people were under heavy sedation. But she couldn’t escape the feeling he was looking at her. Tears were gathered at the corners of his eyes.
She saw the blood vessels in his sclera as they began to burst, popping one after another.
He was still choking, but it sounded to her like he was trying to talk.
She hesitated before she put the scalpel to his flesh.
It could have been her imagination, but she was sure he tried to say something.
She thought he tried to say, “No.”
And then he erupted, skin bursting, bones shattering, his body exploding into a fountain of blood and meat.
SIXTEEN
Many authors—John Keel, Loren Coleman, Jim Keith—have noted that the so-called “Men in Black” who claim to work on behalf of some mysterious government agency share many traits in common with folk tales of witches and other satanic emissaries walking the earth. The Salem witch trials mentioned a mysterious man in black, as did many of the witch hunts of Europe. Legends in Ireland and England refer to strangers wearing all black who either threaten the people they meet, or offer them wealth and power. Some tales claim these earlier versions of the Men in Black are representatives of a lost and ancient culture that predates humanity by millennia.
—Cole Daniels,
Black Ops: The Occult-CIA Connection
B
ell walked into her own apartment near three A.M. She’d left Zach sleeping at his place. She’d never used her clandestine training to sneak out of a man’s apartment before. But she doubted Zach would have woken even if she’d slammed the door behind her. He was exhausted. Frankly, so was she. The boy clearly had some tensions to work out.
She stretched and yawned.
She didn’t notice the shadows lengthening behind her on the walls. She went into the kitchen of her tiny apartment and thought about making coffee, or possibly some eggs. She was starving.
The dark shadows stretched from the wall, moving through the empty air, reaching out toward her.
She turned, gasped and nearly dropped the carton of eggs in her hand.
“You
morons
,” Bell spat. “Knock it off, right now.”
The Shadowmen folded and shrank. The darkness melted away, and suddenly Hewitt and Reynolds stood in the middle of the room.
“Sorry,” Hewitt mumbled, looking at his feet.
“You’re just lucky Graves isn’t here,” Bell said. “He’d toss you in the Red Room for a week.”
They both cringed. “Sorry,” Hewitt said again.
Bell sighed as they kept staring at their feet, sullen and blinking in the light.
It was getting worse, she thought. It took more and more effort to drag them into the light, and there was less and less of them when they got here.
They were even starting to look alike, out in the real world. Skin pitted with zits, bodies they no longer bothered to wash. Not too surprising: they rarely ate, and when they did, they preferred candy bars and Cokes from the vending machines.
She would have to keep an eye on them. They still had time, but pretty soon . . .
“Never mind,” she said. “Just tell me how Book and Candle managed to do tonight.”
THIS IS A MATTER of public record: in 1981, the U.S. Army, at the direction of General Albert Stubblebine, then the head of Army Intelligence, tried to tap psychic abilities for use in warfare.
Code-named “Project Stargate,” it was considered a laughable failure. No real evidence of ESP was ever found in any of the recruits. Stubblebine retired. The psychics were all let go, their budget allowed to lapse.
For some reason, the CIA took over Project Stargate in 1995. That’s where the public record ends.
No one heard much about Project Stargate again, which was just the way the Shadow Company wanted it. Since the end of World War II, the Company had hired a long list of occultists, psychics, hoaxers, magicians and even a few lunatics. The Company knew Stubblebine was on to something. And it wasn’t about to let anyone else reap the benefits.
But it wasn’t until the Company assumed control of Stargate that it finally saw a result.
The details were classified above Bell’s pay grade, but she’d heard rumors.
The experiment, carried out in a condemned building at the edge of Fort Meade, Maryland, was a standard parapsychological test. Two psychics sat on either side of a soundproofed divider. One would try to send pictures of what he saw in a book. The other would try to draw those same pictures by extracting them from the other man’s mind.
They were observed by a third man, who tallied the results.
The rumors varied a little here. Some of them said the observer was bored. Others said he was desperate. They said he tried adding some occult symbols to the experiment, and they randomly fell into an order that turned out to be a summoning spell from an old book by Aleister Crowley. The other rumors said the observer added LSD and other chemicals to the mix, like the Company did for its MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments in the ’50s.
Whatever actually happened, the rumors were all consistent on how the experiment ended. When other Company operatives finally broke down the door, they found three bodies.
Both psychics were turned inside out. The observer had used his sidearm on both men before he put it in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.
There was something else, too. According to Bell’s most reliable source, it was as if something tried to use the psychics’ bodies as handholds into our world, on a climb from someplace else, someplace deep. It
fed
on them, using them as raw material to build itself a body to live in our world.