The Spook House (The Spook Series Book 1) (7 page)

Paco told stories that rivaled Dubois’. In fact, his were often more interesting. They involved fights and running from the cops and tripping on drugs. I believed him, because he wasn’t trying to be cool. Once he got to know us, he told us that his little brother had been shot by the cops. You just don’t make up stories like that. He had too many “dead homies” from “livin’ the life,” and after getting busted for carrying a gun, a merciful judge had given him a light sentence.

He had been given a second chance. He found Jesus and restarted his life. He had a big tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his left calf, which he would proudly show off as proof of his faith. It was as if, in his mind, the light of the religious icon on his flesh counteracted the darkness of the gang tattoo, returning him to neutral.

Paco had chosen to clean up his act. He admitted that if he hadn’t, he probably would have died by the time he was 21. It sounded like he had tried almost every drug, with the exception of the really expensive stuff. But if it was cheap and could be bought in the barrio, he had done it.

According to him, that shit was all behind him. It was a part of his youth, in the distant past. He was

23. Paco did have a sense of humor about his life. He liked showing photos from his life at home. His car was a classic low rider. If he had driven it over grass, it could have been a giant, pimped-up lawnmower. He also showed us a picture of his girlfriend. She was a Hispanic girl. She was kind of hot. She had a big booty, which I’m not really into, but Dubois really approved of that. It was balanced out by big boobs, so that was good. She had really big hair.

Paco described her as a “fine-ass hair bear,” and we all busted up. Dubois said, “Paco, you’re such a Mexican. You like low-riders. You like hair bears ...”

Far from offended, Paco proudly said, “I like hair bears.”

Yeah, I liked these guys. They were all so different. Ironically, the guys I didn’t relate to were the two remaining white guys – the same guys I flew in with.

One of them was a big farm boy from the Midwest named Barnes. I didn’t know enough about him to like him or dislike him.

The final was a big white guy, bigger than Barnes, which was pretty damn big. His name was Stillman. Big guy from Texas. I don’t know what his deal was, but he obviously didn’t like being part of our group. He didn’t want to be there. He insisted this was some type of punishment and we didn’t realize it yet. He said we had all been shafted by being transferred here “to the ass-end of nowhere.”

–––––

Shortly after we first met, our handler came and ordered us to fall in line. We were about to meet our new CO. We snapped to attention. We heard the heavy boots stomping towards to our barracks. The door flew inwards as if it had been kicked in. The sergeant entered, his wide-brimmed hat covering his face. His “vibe,” or whatever you want to call it, overpowered the combined might of everyone in the room. Even the big guys like Boudreaux and Stillman seemed to shrink before him.

His voice sounded familiar, but I might have been imagining things. I guessed all yelling sounded the same. I kept my head and eyes locked forward. A hard, chiseled face came into my view. It was my turn to endure the violation of personal space and the tirade of verbal abuse. I tried to keep my eyes forward, but I had to look the sergeant in the eyes. They were a piercing blue. I saw the eyebrows narrow, steeling for the fight that I had invited, and then, for a nanosecond, it saw it – recognition, followed by puzzlement. Then it was gone. The gargoyle face returned.

Maybe Stillman was right. Maybe all of us, including the CO, had been sent here as a punishment. Maybe it was going to be worse for me. You see, I knew the knew the Commanding Officer. It was Sergeant Coles.

11

Sergeant Coles and I looked at each other, each of us silently asking ourselves the same question: “What the fuck is he doing here?”

I wasn’t intimated by him anymore. He tried to give me his “I could kill you” stare, but I met it with equal force. I was mentally stronger now.

He was guilty and he knew it. I was in the power position now. He hadn’t participated in nighttime attack on me, but he had been held responsible for it anyway. It was his unit, after all. He hadn’t been able to control his troops. Turns out Command transferred Coles to the ass-end of nowhere too. Maybe Stillman was right. This was some sort of punishment.

Training over the next week consisted mostly of sweeping buildings to clear them of insurgents.

There was a small, fake “town” in the desert near the base. It was supposed to look like a typical village in the Middle East, so in other words, it looked like a jumbled collection of crap built in Biblical times. It reminded me of the similar drill site in Texas.

 I admit it was fun kicking doors down and rushing into the rooms. I would get a big adrenaline rush entering the buildings, never knowing what we might face on the other side. It sure beat working at a computer.

Sometimes, the village and the buildings were rigged with “pop-ups.” Posters of people mounted on wooden targets would pop up when we tripped some sensor or motion detector or something. When one would pop up, we would have to instantly identify whether it was a bad guy or civilian. I usually did it by looking for weapons in their hands. We shot the targets or held our fire accordingly.

We got low scores if we shot civilians. A lot of times, it was really hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, which I guess was the point.

Overall, what I was doing here wasn’t that different from what I’d been doing in Texas, which made me wonder, Why fly me all the way out here to do the same thing? What do I have in common with the other guys? Why us, and why here?

I had a feeling I wouldn’t like the answers.

–––––

Three weeks later, Sgt. Coles told us we were going to a new training site. We packed into three Jeeps. One of the “bosses” was in each one. Sgt. Coles was in the lead vehicle, Major Jones was in the middle, and Chandler was in the rear one. That’s right. The same Major Jones from the interview was out here. And this was the first time Chandler was coming out to a field exercise, so the day was already starting out strange. I had no idea how far that would go.

 MPs drove the Jeeps and we headed toward the Rock. At the base of it, the road forked around the outer rim of it in either direction. We took the road on the right.

This is cool, I thought. I’ve never been this close to it. Now I’m going to get to see the back side.

We only got about halfway around the natural tower when the convoy took a hard left and headed towards the rocky wall. There was no road. As we drew closer to the face of the closest cliff, I saw a fissure. The crack in the cliff was so narrow it was nearly invisible. It was barely wider than the Jeeps. The caravan entered the chasm. It was freezing in there. I gazed up at the thin strip of blue sky high overhead, and then looked forward.

“It’s … It’s hollow!” Paco said excitedly. He was right. I could see the light of the sky overhead joining a narrow, growing slit in front of us. My imagination ran wild. I felt like I was in a James Bond movie, and I was seriously expecting to seeing something spectacular inside, like a rocket, a giant radar dish, or a doomsday device.

Kaz’s imagination was activated too. He leaned toward me and said (not too loudly), “I told you Abe! This is it! We’re going to see aliens and flying saucers and shit!”

I couldn’t call him crazy. Fantasies bloomed in my head too, and although they were different from his, who was to say who was wrong? In a few minutes, he might be proven right.

Our small convoy exited the canyon of rock and entered an enormous open area surrounded by the towering rock walls. As impressive as this natural arena was, it was nothing compared to what was in the middle of it.

“Oh my God,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Chandler, who was riding in my Jeep, turned around and looked at me with a wicked smile. “Oh, this is nothing,” he said. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

There was a gleam in his eyes that seriously freaked me out. I imagined it was the same look Dr. Frankenstein had right before he threw the switch to animate his monster.

The Jeeps stopped. As we all got out, I tried to read everyone’s faces. The MPs showed no emotion, as usual. Major Jones looked deadly serious. Chandler could barely contain his excitement. Sgt. Coles looked worried. All of the troops (including myself, judging by the wrinkles I felt in my forehead) looked nervous.

Before us, in the center of the space, was an enormous fortress. It had shear walls of smooth cement that were at least two stories tall. Guard towers stood tall at the four corners of the square structure. Spotlights and mounted machine guns pointed inward and downward from the turrets. This wasn’t a fortress to keep people out. It was designed to keep things in.

“What the hell have you got in there?“ said Dubois. “King Kong?”

“Shut up!” shouted Major Jones.

“It’s like, a secret prison,” Dubois said, absent-mindedly echoing what I was thinking.

“It is NOT a prison!” barked Jones, as if personally insulted.

Chandler looked over at Jones to make sure the man was finished, and then said, “It is something else all together … something … special. You want to see it don’t you?”

Amazingly, the answer that came to mind in my head was both yes and no at the same time. I think everybody else was thinking the same thing. Nobody spoke.

“Well good,” Major Jones said, “because we’re going in. Now.”

We entered a door and went through a series of sealed chambers - airlocks, actually. Security was so tight I doubted a spider could scurry through without being detected. The innermost chamber had four doors: the one we came in, one in front of us, and one on either side. One of the side doors opened with a hiss, revealing a long, sterile hallway. We were about to step towards it when Jones shouted, “Halt! That door is for me only! This is as far as I go.”

“Of course it is,” the handler said snidely, giving Jones a look that would have gotten any of us troops beaten for disrespect. In fact, he was practically calling him a coward. Jones’s face fell, and for a second, I thought there was going to be a brawl right there. Then Jones’s eyes narrowed and the corners of his lips curled up to make a smug smile.

“Good luck with your … exercise,” he said. His eyes drifted from Chandler to Sgt. Coles. The sergeant was not smiling.

With that, Jones looked at all of us. I might have imagined it, but I think I saw him shaking his head knowingly when he smiled. He stepped through the door and it sealed shut behind him.

“Asshole,” Chandler said.

Sgt. Coles said nothing. He was acting weird, making a deliberate effort not to look at any of us in the eye. What was going on here?

The door in front of us opened to short hallway. At the end of that was another door that opened to daylight.

“Right,” Chandler said, remembering the mission and getting back to business. “He were are, kids. It’s time to see what the Rock is all about.”

This is it! I thought. I’m going to learn some of my country’s biggest secrets!

I was almost trembling. I was about to see what the government was hiding from everyone. Maybe America was running a secret space program out of here with top secret spy satellites or orbiting lasers or something. Or Kaz could be right. Maybe we were going to see an alien spacecraft or a time machine or some sci-fi thing like that. At this moment, anything was possible.

We stepped out into the courtyard surrounded by the wall. I heard gasps. Somebody said, “What the fuck?”

Expecting to see something big and bizarre, I wasn’t disappointed. My imagination had been conjuring up images of every possibility and it still couldn’t come up with what I saw before me. Let me tell you what it was.

12

“It’s a house,” Kaz said, sounding a little disappointed but mostly uncertain. I was with him. I wasn’t sure of what I was looking at either. A flat, barren strip of “no man’s land” about 50 meters wide spread before us. Stretched between us and the clearing was a high chain link fence topped with razor wire. Inside of this pen lay another 50 meters of wasteland. At the center of this stood a house. It was a big, two-story Victorian relic. It looked old – ancient, even. Its skin of paint had long ago flaked away, revealing the bleached, bone-like boards beneath. Wood covering the windows also looked weathered. What this thing was doing in the center of a volcanic vent was beyond me.

The weirdness didn’t end there. There were SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles) positioned inside of the fence. They weren’t pointed skyward. They were aimed at the house.

“Welcome to the Spook House,” Chandler said, staring at the monstrous dwelling in front of us.

He turned around and smiled at us. The weird gleam in his eyes was back, along with a wicked glint in his smile. I swear, the look on his face was almost as freaky as the sight in front of us. He didn’t even try to hide his delight. He scanned our faces, savoring the looks of awe and fear he found on each one of them.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, deadly serious.

“Sir. What is it, Sir?” Boudreaux said quietly, as if afraid he might wake a sleeping giant monster in front of us.

“This,” said the handler, “is a test. Consider it your final exam. Your mission is to clear the house. You do that, and you pass.”

“You want us to go in there?” Dubois said incredulously. He didn’t verbalize his next line, which I think we all silently heard: “No fucking way.”

The handler’s smile dropped. He was obviously irked at the break in protocol. Still, he sensed a rebellion brewing, and he acted quickly.

“Up until now, you’ve been doing house-to-house searches in the mock Iraqi village. As a unit, you’ve have shown promise. But this is something completely different. This environment is big and it’s dark. You clear this, and you graduate.

The use of the word “graduate” sounded deliberate and thought-out well in advance. What would happen if we didn’t pass and “graduate”?Why, we would fail. We would be “drop-outs,” and nobody wanted to be that.