Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (23 page)

The breath they caught smelled strongly of the gin that Berry had seen and swiped off a catering booze table. They were just tipsy enough to feel it, but tipsy they certainly were. Steele thought Hampton’s Cthulhu obsession was all insane bullshit, but he was a man who got where he was—and now that was at the very top of the world—by making sure all his bases were covered at all times. If alcohol kept him safe, then, by God, he would keep it in his system.

Berry looked out the window at the screaming men and women both inside and outside the White House gates. “What do we do now, sir?”

“Hit the canteen downstairs, get every bit of booze. Then we give this shit an hour to burn itself out and we haul ass back to the Sit Room, where we lay it all out for the Chinaman, the Russian, and the rest of them. I assume you still remember your audio-visual duties even after 24 hours and a million promotions?”

Berry allowed himself a smile at that. “Yes, sir, I do.”

“Just what I wanted to hear! Now let’s get a drink and call up some buddies …
Major
Berry,” Steele said, and slapped him on the back.

“Sir, I appreciate it greatly, but why do I keep getting promoted? I don’t have any men or women under my command. Why am I a Major now?”

Steele cracked a smile. “You need that clearance, son, as we move up in intelligence reports. A Major can hear things a Captain can’t, let alone a lieutenant, forget about an E3,” he said. “Also, if this situation keeps going FUBAR, you
will
have men under your command as we fight this thing.”

The new Major closed his eyes and hoped (maybe even prayed) that he had made the right decision by throwing in his lot with the madman Steele. He had a sinking feeling that President Hampton, star-struck by Martin Storch or not, was right about this really being, somehow, impossibly, Lovecraft’s Old One.
Fight
Cthulhu? Or even just something that seemed like Cthulhu? Maybe 1,000 megatons of nuclear warhead would rid the Earth of whatever this entity was … but he had no reason to think it would.

He followed Steele to the Situation Room, which was where, Berry couldn’t forget, it was he himself who started all of this
“It’s Cthulhu!”
insanity. His overexuberance—not to mention that it was highly unprofessional conduct as a Marine staffer in front of the President, Vice President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and most of the Cabinet—had just now brought down the gone-bonkers President of the United States.

But what if she’s
not
insane?
Berry couldn’t help but ask himself.
What if I just backed the wrong horse, mistaking Judy Hampton’s zeal for insanity instead of seeing it as someone having an ecstatic religious experience?

What if, indeed.

Steele and Berry were flanked by Secret Service agents, more than just a few short hours earlier, since this man was no longer the hawkish Vice President—this warmonger
was
the President now. They entered the Sit Room and saw just one other person seated at the long conference table.

“Major Berry, I believe you have met General Patterson?”

Suddenly coming face-to-face with a Major General of the Marine Corps almost automatically snapped Berry to attention as he whipped his hand up into a salute.

Patterson stood and returned the salute with a small smile. “At ease …
Major
, is it? It seems like only yesterday you were a sergeant in change of slide shows and sound boards,” he said, but it was friendly and made the President and Berry share Patterson’s smile. He waited for them to sit and for the Secret Service to arrange themselves in the doorways. “Mister President, as you know, the NSA is a data collection agency, not so much for data
sharing
.”

Steele repeated an old joke: “NSA: It stands for ‘Never Say Anything.’ ”

That brought a nod and a smile from Patterson, who then got serious. “The only time that epithet doesn’t fit us is when we have information to share with the President”—he looked at Berry with a
you’d better take this seriously
expression of stone—“and his
chosen advisors
during a crisis of potentially republic-destroying magnitude.”

Millions, maybe billions now, dead, Berry thought. He hadn’t looked at it as something endangering their very existence—
in the story, Cthulhu went back to sleep!
His mind screamed, but then he remembered he had abandoned Judith Hampton when
she
went all literal fundamentalist on him. Now, however, he saw this was very probably the tipping point for humanity’s extinction. As in game over. As in intelligent beetles being the next race to populate the Earth in man’s absence. As in cosmic horror.

As in the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

“So, Algernon, now that I am dealing with a Commander-In-Chief who can make use of this information. So please allow me to tell you about OPERATION FATCHANCE.”

Steele smiled at this. He always enjoyed how the military and intelligence communities had to name their projects something that had nothing to do with the actual plans—OPERATION MINCEMEAT and OPERATION PAPERCLIP being two of the most famous from World War II.

“You have heard of OPERATION STARGATE?”

The TV show?
Berry wanted to say, but didn’t.

“Of course,” the President said. “Psychic program, remote viewing, clairvoyants, all that bullshit. Came to nothing in the end and funding was pulled in 1995.”

“True, except it didn’t
exactly
come to nothing.”

Steele sat silently, his expression now grave. “Is that so?”

The head of the NSA wasn’t cowed by anyone, but Algernon Steele had been a staunch supporter since his days in Congress, and he had Patterson’s respect. Thus, treading lightly, he continued: “The funding was cut, but it was reinstated secretly after 9/11, when some in the halls of power thought bringing in alleged psychics to help predict future attack attempts.”

“A slush fund to pay mind-readers.”

Patterson smiled at the comment. “Even with this continued funding, OPERATION FATCHANCE could never find an iota of evidence that ESP or clairvoyance or telekinesis or any of that … as you called it,
bullshit.
However.”

“However?”

“However. What we were looking for didn’t materialize in the way we had hoped or expected, but several of our monitored ‘psychics’ simultaneously got
huge
spikes in their gamma brain waves, higher in fact than any we had ever recorded in any subjects, no matter how ‘accurate’ any of their visions seemed to be.”

Berry very hesitantly spoke up. “General, sir, did these spikes correlate with a greater incidence of disturbing dreams among service members? Or complaints of unusual paranoia or aggression, especially in those soldiers and sailors in the South Pacific?”

“How would we measure anything like that, son?”

Berry swallowed and said, “Sir, with all due respect, I believe that the NSA or other intelligence agencies must have scoured the medical records of military personnel and civilian contractors for any reports of unusual mental complaints to see if they coincided with the period of the spikes in your monitored subjects. Any unusual creative or obsessive tendencies during that time. I mean it as a compliment, sir, that the National Security Agency has eyes everywhere and has full access to military and contractor health data. Was there a correlation?”

Patterson looked to the President with an expression of surprise. “Algie, you’ve got a live one here,” he said, and then again addressed Berry: “There certainly was, Major. In fact, that’s what prompted this meeting—the President needs all the facts before any attacks commence.”

“Am I that transparent?” Steele said with amusement.

“Judith Hampton would have us all sitting in a circle and sending healing thoughts to the anomaly,” Patterson said, “but you’ve already said you want to bomb it to Kingdom Come.”

“And I do.”

“In any case, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, and Coast Guard base hospitals as well as VA behavioral health wards all reported their therapists and psychiatrist fully occupied with urgent cases of mental distress and agitation. For 11 days—completely in sync with our OPERATION STARGATE subject seers’ and psychics’ spiking gamma brain waves, which accompanied mental distress on their part as well—the beds filled up and
many
personnel were given light duty or none at all. Then, as soon as it arose, the phenomenon ended and everyone affected returned to normal.”

“Eleven days?” Berry squeaked, again his mouth getting ahead of his brain. “Please excuse me for interrupting again, sirs—but General, it was exactly 11 days?”

“Not 10, not 12.
Eleven
. Is there something you’d like to share with us, Major?”

No, nothing I’d like to share
, Berry thought as he tried not to show anything on his face.
Just something that tells me how fucked I really am.
“No, sir,” he said. “Just trying to calculate in my mind how long this might last. May I ask what the dates of this earlier event were?”

“Sure, but I don’t know why it …” Patterson said, but trailed off as he checked the records he thought would be relevant for this meeting. “Huh. March 23 to April 2, last year.” The date today was March 24, and Patterson couldn’t help mulling over this coincidence.

“Maybe it’s some kind of space-based issue, like solar flares, that we run into at this point in our orbit?” Berry offered, even though he knew exactly what it meant. It meant that former President Hampton’s literalism was looking more and more sensible. And he had run to the Vice President because he felt ignored by Hampton in favor of Storch.
Jesus Christ, you called the
President
a celebrity-fucker?
he muttered inside his brain.
You just doomed the world because your widdle feelings got hurt.

“So Jack, what am I supposed to do with this information?” the President asked, looking at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got less than an hour until I see the faces of the Security Council on these screens. Speaking of which—Major, I know it’s way below your pay grade now, but would you be willing to get the AV set up for the meeting? I don’t know if they’ve been able to round up the sergeant who replaced you at the controls. Good man, thank you.”

Berry tapped away at his phone.

Patterson said, “Here’s the information that ties it all together, Algie—we triangulated the strength of the effect on personnel based on their medical and mental evaluations and found that if there were a source causing this perfect correlation, it would be located at—”

“Don’t tell me: Point Fucking Nemo.”

“True, that is exactly where—that is, within a degree or two of the coordinates of the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility.”

“This is looking more and more like the crazy bitch was right.”

It was unnecessary for Patterson to acknowledge his agreement with the President.

“That goes no farther than this room, okay?”

“Algie, I’m the head of the
NSA
. We don’t tell anybody anything we don’t have to.”

Berry also nodded and checked his new CIA-issued smartphone. He said, “Mister President, the invitations have been accepted and the leaders will join the videoconference within the hour.”

“You did all that on your phone?” Steele asked with an amazed smile. “Jesus. Anyway, good work, Major. Time to get out the ol’ motivation stick.” The new President savored this moment, one for which he had waited so long.

Patterson asked Berry, with the new President’s permission, to close the Sit Room door so that the two NSA men—her Secret Service detail had vanished—while keeping their mandated proximity, could not listen to what he was about to say.

After a moment, Patterson continued quietly: “There is more.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, the President, Major Berry, and the surviving members of Steele’s security detail all understood why the sober and solidly sane NSA head and four-star General Jack Patterson had not lost his shit along with most of the rest of the world. Each of them was taken, one by one, into a dark side room, where he was led through the process of deep self-hypnosis.

Patterson did not hypnotize them, as he and the others with any connection to OPERATION FATCHANCE had not been hypnotized by others, but instead had been given the tool so they could inure themselves against the worst case scenario. The new President and the Major, as well as Steele’s Secret Service men, had all gotten by with drinking and altering their brains that way as protection against the occult developments that had happened thus far, but no one could stay drunk 24 hours a day or function even if he could.

The NSA chief reinforced his own hypno-ward against the psionic events as he led the men individually—Steele first, then his two-man security detail, and only then Berry—through silencing their minds long enough to insert a suggestion and then cover it with their thoughts like a dog burying a bone. It would be there when needed by the brain, the mind, but it was shielded from conscious thought where it could be challenged or even overthrown.