Callsign: King II- Underworld (6 page)

“Consider it done.”

When King ended the call, Pierce asked: “Phoenix?”

“Yeah. Sorry, it looks like we’re going on a different kind of fishing trip.”

“If you’re talking about Arizona, and not the mythological bird which is reborn from the ashes of its own immolation, I’m not sure how I can help. The American Southwest is a little outside my area of expertise.”

King opened the file of the still photo Aleman had earlier sent and handed over the phone. Pierce studied the picture for a moment, then stared gravely at his friend. “So it’s true. The Wookies are massing for an invasion.”

King didn’t laugh. “The medallion, George.”

Pierce looked again, and this time his reaction was sincere. “Oh, that
is
interesting.”

9.

“It’s a silver
tetradrachm
coin,” Pierce told King as they finally settled into their seats on an American Airlines 737 bound for Denver, where they would catch their connecting flight, “It’s hard to make out with the screen resolution, but that’s the likeness of Athena stamped onto it. As the namesake goddess of Athens, she was arguably the most important deity of the era—the embodiment of wisdom and intelligence, but also military strategy. The reverse side probably has the image of an owl, another symbol of Athena.”

“Is it rare?”

“Today? Well, you aren’t likely to find it in under your sofa cushion, but there are quite a few surviving examples. It was the most commonly used coin in the world going back to the sixth century BCE, and right up to the time of the Romans. With the spread of Hellenistic culture under Alexander the Great, the coins were used as currency as far away as India. They show up pretty frequently at digs, particularly at burial sites.”

“Burials? I didn’t think the Greeks followed the Egyptian custom of burying their wealth along with the body.”

“They didn’t. But it was a common practice to place a coin in the mouth of a dead person as an
obol
. A payment to Charon, to bear the soul of the departed to the afterlife.”

“Pennies for the ferryman,” King murmured. “So how did this coin end up in Arizona?”

“As a fashion accessory for a Wookie, no less,” Pierce added.

“It’s not a Wookie, George.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

King shrugged.

Pierce pondered the problem a moment. “Okay, let’s look at this objectively. That picture shows what appears to be some kind of bipedal animal. At first I thought it looked similar to Red.” While Pierce wasn’t part of the mission to Vietnam that took the team up against a pack of devolved Neanderthal women, he’d been told the story, shown pictures and knew exactly who Red was; Rook wouldn’t let them forget. “But the more I look at the image, the more the hair doesn’t make sense. There are different lengths. Different colors. It doesn’t look natural. But it’s definitely some kind of hominid. It’s also wearing that coin as a medallion, like an amulet, and that most certainly is not typical primate behavior.”

“So, maybe someone else…a human…put that thing around its neck. Like dog tags?”

“Possibly, though why they would choose an ancient Greek coin is beyond me. I think it’s more plausible that the animal is exhibiting a higher degree of intelligence than its appearance suggests. It could be a living example of the fabled ‘missing link’ in the fossil record. Of course, that still doesn’t explain the coin.” Suddenly, Pierce’s eyes grew wide as the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. “You think this is something like the hydra, don’t you?”

“We know for a fact that Hercules—Alexander—traveled to South America in ancient times. What I want to know, and I’m asking you in your professional capacity, is if you can give me a better explanation for how that coin wound up in Phoenix, Arizona?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jack. It’s a lot more than that. You think that coin might be evidence that Ridley has found another monster from Greek mythology.”

King heard the anxiety in his friend’s voice when he spoke of Ridley. Only a couple years previously, Manifold Genetics’ experiments with the remains of the hydra—a creature with the ability to instantly heal from any wound, and which unfortunately had not been simply the stuff of fairy tales—had resulted in Pierce being taken prisoner by Ridley, and subsequently used as a guinea pig in unspeakable medical experiments. Pierce had made a full physical recovery from the ordeal; whether he had recovered from the psychological trauma was another matter entirely.

King wondered if he hadn’t made a grave mistake in dragging his old friend along on this outing. “George, right now I know as much as you do. Yeah, it could be Ridley. Or it could be something completely unrelated. That coin is our only clue, and that’s why I immediately thought of you. But if you have even a hint of a bad feeling about this, we’ll call the game.”

“I may not be in your league,” Pierce said, trying to sound confident, “but I know how to duck and cover when the bullets start flying. If this turns out to be a chance to take down some still functioning project of Ridley’s, then I definitely want in. And if not…well, then the explanation for that coin’s presence in the Americas might rewrite the history books. Just one thing, though.”

“Name it.”

Pierce grinned. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you call me ‘pawn.’”

10.

East of Phoenix, Arizona — 0520 UTC (10:20 pm Local)

Nina Raglan stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned environment of the Toyota Land Cruiser and embraced the warm desert night. The temperature was still in the high eighties, but cooling as the rocky soil radiated its stored energy away into the cloudless sky. A life-long resident of the southwest, she thought of this as comfortable weather; in just a few short weeks, the daily low temperature would be closer to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the highs would regularly exceed one-hundred and ten.

She was parked at the Campaign Trailhead, in the northeast part of the Superstition Wilderness. The Land Cruiser had nimbly negotiated the eight-mile long stretch of unimproved Forest Service roads connecting to state route 88, but from here, she would have to proceed on foot to reach her goal.

She circled the parked SUV and opened the rear hatch to reveal her gear, all carefully laid out in the storage area. She shrugged into her 1.6-liter CamelBak hydration pack, taking a perfunctory sip of tepid water from the bite valve—a water supply was the single most important factor in surviving a night in the desert, even in mild conditions. She then picked up the handheld video-camera, clicking it on to verify that the batteries were fully charged. She switched it to low-light infrared mode, and the dark display screen came alive, revealing the darkened landscape in an eerie green glow. Satisfied, she turned the device off and stuffed it in one of the large pockets of her lightweight windbreaker. She performed a similar function test on the Garman GPS device, noting her location on the backlit liquid crystal display, and the distance to the waypoint she had earlier entered into the device: just over six miles in a straight line, though it was unlikely the terrain would let her travel the shortest possible route. To get where she wanted, she would have to follow a series of trails weaving along the flanks of the Pinal Mountains.

Nina had only one more piece of equipment to add, something she hoped she would never have to use. She glanced nervously at the other two four-wheel drive vehicles parked at the turnaround; their owners were nowhere to be seen and presumably already in a camp somewhere down one of the trails. Confident that she was alone, she picked up the Glock 27 9-millimeter pistol, inserted a fifteen-round magazine with a grip extender, and then actioned the slide to chamber a round. The pistol went into the nylon holster, already threaded onto her belt, partially concealed underneath the windbreaker.

She didn’t much care for guns or their potential to destroy life, but it was patently foolish to hike in the desert without a gun. That was a lesson her father had taught her very early in life, one of many, and she held his wisdom in high esteem. He was the reason she was what she was.

And what she was, at least in a professional sense, was one of the foremost scholarly researchers of everything covered by the vaguely defined term ‘paranormal phenomena.’ There were a lot of people involved in paranormal research, owing in no small part to the proliferation of reality-television programming that featured enthusiasts armed with cameras, audio recording devices and sundry other equipment, hunting for ghosts, monsters, aliens and pretty much anything that seemingly defied rational explanation and titillated the imagination. It was the “scholarly” part that Nina felt set her apart from the crowd. To be sure, many of the professional celebrity-caliber researchers—she did not think of them as colleagues—gave the appearance of applying the scientific method to their investigations, but just enough to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Most of their “findings” were a hodge-podge of mutually contradictory bits of errant data, pieced together into a mosaic that hinted at still greater wonders to be revealed and kept the ratings up.

Nina had been labeled a skeptic by her detractors, and to the extent that any scientist worth her salt tries to put aside preconceptions and think objectively, she was. Her mind was open to all the possibilities, but she had thus far seen no compelling evidence to make her a believer. Like her father before her, she earned her living writing the facts about so-called paranormal phenomena, free of sensational speculation, often exposing frauds and charlatans in the process. It wasn’t exactly lucrative; people didn’t like having their illusions exposed. But her books sold marginally well, and because she was—as one producer had told her—telegenic, she was often invited to appear on cable television programs, ostensibly as a skeptical foil to the raving pseudoscientists. Tall and slender, with long black hair and a face that seemed to have taken the best of both her father’s Irish and her mother’s Native American genetic traits, she was, as too many of her fan letters often pointed out, an exotic beauty. If not for her intractable refusal to play to the crowd, she probably could have had her own show, but her integrity to scientific principles was non-negotiable.

Deep down however, she wanted nothing more than to discover that there really was more in heaven and earth than science had thus far revealed.

Nina didn’t expect to make such a discovery tonight.

She closed the door on the Toyota, extinguishing the only source of artificial light, and she was plunged into the near total darkness of the desert night. After a few moments however, her eyes adjusted and she saw a wondrous landscape, painted in the faint silver of starlight. The craggy peaks of the Superstition Mountains stood in stark relief against the velvety night sky. There was a tiny LED squeeze light on her key-chain, and a much larger MagLite under the seat of the Land Cruiser, but she resisted the impulse to light her way by such means. She was, after all, trying to sneak into an area that had been designated by the authorities as an exclusion zone.

In the last twenty-four hours, the nationwide paranormal community had been set on fire by the strange reports coming out of Arizona. After filtering through the paranoid tangents and discarding probably erroneous exaggerations, Nina had been able to piece together the facts—if they could be called facts—that had triggered the current conflagration.

According to the most reliable sources, an unknown bipedal creature had caused the multi-vehicle accident that had temporarily shut down a section of Highway 60. On the national scene, it was being called ‘Bigfoot’ or ‘
sasquatch
,’ a term derived from the Salish word for ‘wild man,’ which originally had applied only to the legendary ape-like creature that roamed the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Stories of a similar creature were to be found in almost every part of the world, from the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas, to the Skunk Ape of the Florida Everglades, and Arizona was no exception. According to locals, at least the few of them attuned to the chatter, the accident had been caused by the Mogollon Monster.

Nina had followed the Internet discussion forum threads back to the earliest posts, which contained links to a video that had evidently been removed. Later threads angrily decried the removal as censorship, but several of them focused on what had been on the video: a fierce hominid, or possibly a primate, attacking a young woman in a car, immediately following the highway accident.

Nina had grown up with stories of the Mogollon Monster. It was reputed to be a hominid, ranging from six to eight feet in height, covered almost entirely in long dark hair. Some people who claimed to have encountered it reported a strong smell, similar to the odor of a skunk, and said that the generally shy creature produced whistling and shrieking noises. The only remotely violent behavior associated with the creature was a tendency to throw rocks at campers from a distance. The idea that such a reportedly peaceful creature would attack a car seemed as unlikely as…well, as unlikely as its existence in the first place.

Cryptozoology had always represented a troubling sub-class of paranormal research for Nina. It was ostensibly nothing more than a search for new animal species, and as such, firmly rooted in the principles of science. Cryptozoology didn’t require you to weigh in on heavy philosophical subjects about what happened after death, or whether the possible existence of extraterrestrials was at odds with religious beliefs. There were even a few examples of cryptids—mostly animals thought to be long extinct—that had been verified.

But science cut both ways. For an animal species to avoid extinction, it had to play a functional role in its ecosystem—it had to eat to survive, and that kind of biological impact produced tell-tale evidence. Even more importantly, animal species required a minimum population size to avoid the negative effects of inbreeding. The existence of the ubiquitous lake monster, for example, seemed very unlikely because for the species to remain extant, there would have to be, at a minimum, a dozen or more breeding pairs at any given time. Decades of searching had not revealed a shred of evidence to verify the existence of a single monster swimming in the depths of Loch Ness, much less the remains of the thousands that must have lived and died over the course of several millennia. Such details however rarely seemed to bother the true believers.