2 Casu­al­ties Of War

Jack looked out the wind­screen of the Black­hawk as the build­ings of San Fran­cisco sped below them in dark­ness. He was glad Daniel was finally get­ting a chance to find some clo­sure over what hap­pened to his fam­ily, but he hoped the guy would be able to focus on the mis­sion. Rufariel was ruth­less, even for a demon. Jack had known the FBI team that had tried to take him out. Well, he knew them by rep­u­ta­tion. They were pros. None of them made it home.

For­tu­nately, his team had an ace in the hole. The machine was bolted to the floor of the Black­hawk between the cock­pit and where Daniel and Dante sat. It looked like a large indus­trial tur­bine and Jack had no idea how much it had cost. But if Dante’s the­ory about the nan­otech­nol­ogy that made the immor­tals immor­tal worked, it would even the odds considerably.

“30 sec­onds to LZ,” Sandy drawled over the inter­com sys­tem in their head­sets. Through the noise can­ce­la­tion that pro­tected their hear­ing from the rotors, he sounded like he was call­ing up from the bot­tom of a deep well. “Hang on to your butts.”

“Dante,” Jack called. “Be ready to flip the switch the sec­ond we land. We have to catch him while he’s still in range.”

“Yes sir,” Dante said. The hacker had tough­ened con­sid­er­ably since leav­ing his job as an FBI tech ana­lyst, but he was still in the habit of address­ing Jack as a supe­rior, even though every­one on the team were nom­i­nally equals.

“Gonna need you to step up, Jack,” Sandy said, still sound­ing like he was on a lazy fish­ing boat. Jack had been Bob “Sandy” Sandarski’s com­mand­ing offi­cer in Iraq, and he knew that the hairier the sit­u­a­tion, the more relaxed Sandy seemed to be. The oper­a­tive word was “seemed.” Men had dif­fer­ent ways of cop­ing with the stress of bat­tle, and Sandy’s extreme calm was not uncommon.

“Don’t wait for me,” Jack said. He pre­pared for an emer­gency shut­down of the chopper’s sys­tems. They’d have only a few sec­onds, and he didn’t want to ruin their ride.

“Five,” Sandy said. “Four, three, two, touch­down, the crowd goes wild.” The chop­per dropped hard on the roof of a ware­house, and Jack and Sandy were both madly flip­ping switches and shut­ting down every­thing they could as fast as they could.

“Do it, Dante!” Jack said.

From behind him, Jack heard a sharp elec­tric hum and then a WHUMP as the lights went out for blocks around.

Jack was already out of the chop­per. “Go! Go! Go!”

The men ran across the roof in a well-​​drilled line, their weapons ready. Jack fired a round into the door of the rooftop stair­well and kicked it open. They descended into dark­ness lit only by the Maglites strapped the the bar­rels of their H&K submachineguns.

Inside, they fanned out. The ware­house was filled with cargo con­tain­ers, some stacked four high. The tar­get could be between or even inside any one of them. They were on a nar­row metal cat­walk that ringed the ware­house floor below.

“You know the drill, peo­ple,” Jack said. “Look for move­ment, any sign that he — ”

Jack was cut off by the report of a rifle and a bul­let prang­ing off a pipe not six inches from his hel­met. “Down!” he shouted. The men dropped prone on the catwalk.

“Any­one see the muz­zle flash?” Jack asked.

“Neg­a­tive,” Sandy said. “Must have it sup­pressed.” He sounded like he was relay­ing a base­ball score for teams he didn’t par­tic­u­larly care about.

“Shit,” Jack said. They weren’t off to the best start, already pinned down by an as yet unseen enemy. Still, he’d had worse.

He reached into the front pocket of his fatigues and pulled out two flash-​​bang grenades. “Fire in the hole,” he said, his voice echo­ing off the con­tain­ers and ware­house walls. So much for sub­tlety, he thought.

He pulled the pins and flung the grenades in oppo­site direc­tions. They’d just about hit the floor of the ware­house when they went off, loud cracks of sound and blind­ing white phosphorous.

Sandy fol­lowed his lead and dropped flares, cast­ing the ware­house in a flick­er­ing yellow-​​green glow. Wasn’t as good as night vision, but it would do.

Jack started to get up when another shot pranged over his head, fol­lowed almost imme­di­ately by a rifle crack that echoed back and forth until it was impos­si­ble to deter­mine where it had come from. “Dammit!”

Rufariel was smart, far smarter than Asemiel, the demon they’d killed in the sum­mer. He had been, as it turned out, a rel­a­tively low-​​level func­tionary, and had been undone as much by his own over­con­fi­dence as any­thing Jack or Daniel had done. Now demons had the ben­e­fit of warn­ing, of know­ing that humans could actu­ally kill them if they got lucky. It had already hap­pened a few times, cru­saders in Italy, Africa and Korea. Rufariel hadn’t got­ten this far by being stupid.

“Spread out,” Jack said. “Try to sur­round him before we descend to ground level. And hold on tight.” The rest of the team nod­ded, intu­it­ing what he had in mind, and began belly-​​crawling along the catwalk.

Jack pulled another two grenades out of his fatigues. These weren’t flash-​​bangs, though. He pulled the pin on the first one and flung it straight out, let­ting it fall roughly in the mid­dle of the ware­house. It dis­ap­peared behind the cargo con­tain­ers and det­o­nated with a deaf­en­ing thun­der­clap. The con­tain­ers shook and a mix­ture of dust and smoke bil­lowed out the nar­row metal canyon.

Jack read­ied his rifle and squinted through the haze. He was look­ing for any sign of move­ment, any­thing that might be Rufariel try­ing to get away from the heat and con­cus­sion of the blast. He saw nothing.

Take two, then, he thought. He checked to see where the team was. Sandy, Daniel… and there was Dante. They all had set up near long metal lad­ders in the cor­ners of the build­ing that led from the cat­walk down to the floor. He made eye con­tact with each of them in turn, then held up the sec­ond grenade. They nodded.

He pulled the pin and flung it out a bit far­ther, try­ing to drop it down into the next row out from the one he’d hit. The grenade bounced and skid­ded across the top of the con­tainer and det­o­nated just as it veered out over the edge, maybe forty feet above the floor. The explo­sion wasn’t as buffered by the con­tain­ers this time and Jack was flat­tened down to the cat­walk by the overpressure.

He craned his head over the cat­walk and tried to see any sign of move­ment below. The flares were start­ing to sput­ter, and would have to be replaced. He was reach­ing for his last grenade, another flash-​​bang, when he saw just a hint of movement.

Directly below him.

Jack rolled to the side just as the auto­matic fire strafed the cat­walk where he’d been. He saw a glimpse of a fig­ure run­ning in the smoke under the cat­walk, hug­ging the wall of the warehouse.

“I’ve got him!” Jack shouted. “He’s here!” Granted, he couldn’t even hear him­self over the echoes of gun­fire and the ring­ing still in his ears. He pulled him­self up to a crouch, and duck­walked across the cat­walk in pur­suit. Ahead of him, he saw Sandy con­verg­ing on the same cor­ner. He glanced quickly over his shoul­der, just to ver­ify that Daniel and Dante were already on their way down to the floor to cut off the demon’s escape route. This was going bet­ter than expected.

Sandy fired a quick burst down the lad­der, then started to descend, care­fully and with his weapon trained and ready to return fire if nec­es­sary. Jack had him cov­ered, but could no longer see the demon. Some­thing fur­ther into the ware­house had caught fire, and the smoke was obscur­ing his vision.

Sandy reached the bot­tom of the lad­der, and swept around him in a Weaver stance mod­i­fied for the snub-​​nosed MP-​​5 they used, front hand hold­ing the ver­ti­cal grip of the weapon in front of his trig­ger hand. He did a com­plete 360, but didn’t fire. He looked up at Jack and shrugged.

Jack had just started down the lad­der him­self when he heard bursts of weapon­fire on the other side of the warehouse.

---

Daniel heard the shots, almost deaf­en­ingly close, but didn’t see the shooter. It sounded like one of their H&K’s, but he couldn’t be sure it was Dante. He crept slowly along a row of con­tain­ers, his vision flick­er­ing in an out with the dying flares. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flare, struck it against his leg and tossed it high over­head, look­ing away from the green arc of light until it landed. Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t do much more than illu­mi­nate the smoke.

He was just near­ing the cor­ner when he heard Dante shout, “I’ve got him!” and fire off a quick burst from his MP-​​5. Daniel ran for­ward and saw Dante crouched behind a wooden crate. The hacker popped up and fired again.

Daniel tracked to where Dante was fir­ing and saw the demon Rufariel, wear­ing sim­ple work clothes rather than the designer suits Asemiel had favored. The bul­lets from Dante’s gun raked up the body of the demon, and Daniel added his own pair of three-​​round bursts right to the demon’s cen­ter mass. Rufariel fell over back­ward from the kick.

Dante jumped out from behind the crate. “We got him!” he shouted. Daniel was about to tell him to get back behind cover when he heard the demon’s voice behind him.

“My turn.”

Daniel dove behind the cargo con­tainer as Rufariel sprayed auto­matic fire first at him, then back towards Dante. Daniel saw Dante duck back behind the crate.

The demon smiled. He aimed at the crate and opened fire. The bul­lets tore through the wood and Dante cried out before he fell scream­ing to the ground.

Daniel returned fire towards the demon, tried to cross to Dante, was who was wail­ing in pain. The demon held his ground and fired a burst at Daniel, who was forced to retreat to the cover of the steel cargo con­tainer, stur­dier cover than Dante’s wooden crate.

He heard a whoosh and saw a bright flash of orange light over the sickly green flares. He peaked out and saw that Sandy had hit Rufariel with the minia­tur­ized flamethrower he kept strapped to his back. The demon screamed and retreated, but didn’t fall.

“Tend to Dante, doc, I got this,” Sandy said, with a bit less than his usual drawl.

Daniel darted over to Dante. “It’s okay. I’m here, we’re going to get you patched up.” He started check­ing Dante for injuries, but it only took an instant to see where the biggest trou­ble was. A size­able pool of blood had already spread on the dirty con­crete floor under Dante’s left leg.

“Hurts…” Dante said between clenched teeth. Even in the yellow-​​green glow from the flares, he looked notice­ably pale. Already going into shock, Daniel thought. Not good.

He pushed Dante back as gen­tly as time allowed and straight­ened the leg, which set off another round of scream­ing. “Stay with me, Dante,” Daniel said, and reached in his pack. He pulled out a small nylon bag which he unzipped to reveal basic sur­gi­cal tools. He first grabbed a single-​​use injec­tor and pressed it to Dante’s neck.

Pfft. The mor­phine went into Dante’s carotid artery. It didn’t seem to make much dif­fer­ence, but that was what Daniel had to work with.

He grabbed some shears and sliced open the leg of Dante’s fatigues with a quick, well-​​practiced motion. The bul­let hole pierced cleanly through the upper thigh, through and through. So on the upside, no slug to dig out. But blood was spurt­ing out of both sides with every beat of Dante’s heart. Red, oxygen-​​rich arte­r­ial blood.

Shit, Daniel thought. Nicked the femoral artery. He didn’t have much time. Dante had a hole in one of the largest arter­ies in the body, and would bleed out in min­utes if Daniel couldn’t stop it.

Daniel reached for a retrac­tor, the steel teeth gleam­ing green. “This is gonna hurt, buddy,” he said to Dante. He got an inar­tic­u­late moan in return. Daniel jammed the retrac­tor into the wound and spread it, open­ing a chan­nel down to the artery. Dante screamed and pounded the con­crete with his fists.

Daniel peered into the wound, wish­ing he had some lig­a­tion to clear the blood out of the way. It looked worse than he thought. The artery wasn’t nicked at all, it was sev­ered and had retracted up the leg. There was no way to get to in the field. “Shit shit shit…” Daniel said as he reached for a tourniquet.

He wrapped the band around Dante’s upper thigh, hip to crotch. It didn’t fit, the dam­age was too far up the leg. He tight­ened it down any­way, which slowed, but didn’t stop the blood flow. Dante passed out, so at least he didn’t have to deal with a thrash­ing patient.

Mak­ing sure the retrac­tor was secure, he reached for (tong thingy) and reached into the wound. He heard Jack’s voice behind him, but couldn’t tell what he was say­ing, and both Jack and Sandy had seen enough bat­tle­field triage to know not to inter­rupt the medic with stu­pid ques­tions like, “Is he going to make it?” They knew ask­ing those ques­tions vastly increased the chance of a “no.”

Try­ing to fol­low the warmth of the blood, Daniel pushed the (thingy) fur­ther up Dante’s leg as he grabbed a clamp with his other hand. There it is, he thought, feel­ing the end of the gush­ing tube. Slip­pery bastard…

He got a grip on the end of the artery and pulled. Even uncon­scious, Dante moaned. The pain had to be unthink­able. He almost lost it, tight­ened his grip, and finally fished out the artery into the open. He clamped it shut, which both stopped the major bleed and kept the artery from retract­ing up the leg again. Hands drip­ping blood, Daniel grabbed his sutures and a nee­dle. Another minute, and he had the artery sewn shut, good enough to move him to a proper ER, anyway.

He quickly checked for other wounds, but mirac­u­lously, only the one bul­let man­aged to hit Dante through the crate. He’d been lucky, all things considered.

Still on his knees, Daniel said, “We’ve got to get him to a hos­pi­tal. Now.”

“Ambu­lance is already en route,” Jack said.

“And Rufariel?”

“He got away. The EMP didn’t work. He was still immor­tal when we hit him.”

“So all of this was for noth­ing,” Daniel said. He slumped, still kneal­ing in Dante’s blood as the sirens approached.

---

Half an hour later, Jack stood with Daniel and Sandy in the wait­ing room of the ER. Dante had been wheeled in for surgery, but they thought they’d be able to save the leg. So far, that was the only good news of the evening.

All three of them were quiet. The two war vets knew any­thing they said would be trite, and Daniel was lost in his own thoughts. Jack felt for the guy, but was also immensely proud of him. He’d saved Dante’s life back there. He knew Daniel had been a gifted trauma sur­geon until a mis­take cost a woman and her unborn child their lives and him his job. And Jack had seen first­hand on sev­eral occa­sions how Daniel car­ried him­self in a fight against immor­tals. He knew the kid would do great, but what he couldn’t pre­dict was how he’d take such an intense setback.

And they hadn’t even lost Dante. Bat­tle­field medics had to be pre­pared to lose patients. You couldn’t save them all. He’d seen this in some medics in Iraq. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, com­bat docs had one of two looks about them. Steely eyed con­fi­dence because they knew they were the best at their jobs and saved the lives of their com­rades, or a glassy, thou­sand yard stare because they’d seen too many of their own die under their hands. Daniel seemed to be tip­ping to the latter.

“Daniel,” Jack put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

“Not now, Jack!” Daniel shook it off and stormed out­side. Jack followed.

“Daniel, you saved him. Dante’s going to be okay.” Jack said, keep­ing his dis­tance, but mak­ing it clear he wasn’t going away, either.

Daniel spun to face him. “What if he didn’t? He almost bled out, Jack. They had to replace over half his blood vol­ume on the way here. Another few sec­onds, even, and — ”

“And noth­ing. You saved him. You did your job.”

“And what is that job, Jack? We’ve been play­ing G.I. Fuck­ing Joe for three months, while those things have been run­ning around free, and the first time we try to take one down, he almost kills one of us. What the hell are we doing, Jack?”

“The EMP didn’t work as we expected — ”

“That’s a fuck­ing understatement.”

“ — but that’s okay. We know not to waste any more time try­ing to attack the nanites them­selves. We’ve just learned one more way not to make a light bulb. Trial and error is part of this job.”

“Except that when we fall on the ‘error’ side some­one almost gets killed. We don’t have time to fuck around like this, Jack, and we def­i­nitely can’t afford to spare the bodies.”

“Dante’s still with us, Daniel. He can do most of his job out­side direct com­bat anyway — ”

“Were you even there, tonight, man? Rufariel could have slaugh­tered all four of us and then gone to get a burger. We didn’t even slow him down. He was toy­ing with Dante, Jack. I saw it. He was hav­ing fun. If the demon had really wanted us all dead, we’d be just like your bud­dies in the FBI.”

Jack said noth­ing. The com­ment stung, but Daniel was right. It could have been much, much worse. Instead Jack stood there in the cold night wind, and waited for Daniel to get the rant out of his system.

“This is fuck­ing stu­pid,” Daniel said. “Try­ing to kill the demons one by one, in direct com­bat, what the hell were we thinking?”

Jack didn’t respond.

“No, really, Jack, I’m ask­ing. What were we think­ing? We’d nar­rowly avoid­ing get­ting killed by Asemiel, sev­eral times over, and since then we’ve learned he was the fuck­ing Bar­ney Fife of demons. How in hell did we ever believe that we could take on demons play­ing their A game?”

“Because we don’t have a choice, Daniel. If you have a bet­ter idea, I’d love to hear it. But until you come up with one, fight­ing them one on one is all we can do. We try, we take our chances, be as smart about it as pos­si­ble, and learn from our mis­takes. No one has ever, in recorded his­tory, fought them directly before. We’re the first. So we have to learn as we go.”

“And get peo­ple killed.” Jack noticed that Daniel still had Dante’s blood all over him. We need to have changes of clothes handy, he thought.

“Yeah, Daniel. Some­times we will get peo­ple killed. Some­times inno­cents, some­times one of us. But that’s the price we pay.”

“There has got to be another way.”

Jack was reach­ing the edge of his patience, but hadn’t gone over yet. Every new­bie went through this. To Daniel’s credit, they usu­ally threw up too, after their first real action, but Jack fig­ured Daniel got past that part when he’d been an ER doc.

“Daniel, this is the only way we have. And I don’t need to tell you how vital our job is. You know why we’re here. What’s at stake. You know bet­ter than any­one. With­out the demons, your fam­ily would still be alive and you’d still be try­ing to be invis­i­ble in D. C.”

“Fuck you, Jack. They make you do a psych rota­tion, you know. I know what you’re doing bet­ter than you do. Want me to explain how that kind of manip­u­la­tion works on a neu­ro­log­i­cal level?”

“If it will get you past this and back on track, sure. Go right ahead.”

“So that’s it? You want to just go right back to work in the morn­ing like this didn’t hap­pen? Like Dante didn’t almost die?”

“No,” Jack said. “I want us to go back to work tomor­row morn­ing like Dante didn’t die. Because he didn’t. He’s still alive, and that’s thanks to you. But if you can’t get past this, if you can’t put a close call — and that’s all this was — aside and do the job, then maybe we can’t use you. You’re a gifted medic and a good fighter, and no one has more expe­ri­ence with immor­tals than you, but we need your head in the game.”

“I’ll see you in the morn­ing, Jack,” Daniel said, and stalked away into the night.

1: New Beginning

[Dante Hicks is now Patrick Russell.]Daniel Cho stood in the frigid bay wind and stared at the graves of his par­ents and his sis­ters. It was Sep­tem­ber, three months after their deaths at the hands of the demons. Their estate han­dling had been done remotely because he’d spent the last three months prepar­ing to avenge them. Today was the first day he’d actu­ally been free to visit their graves.

He hardly rec­og­nized the man he’d been when they died. In the last three months, Jack and Sandy had run him and Patrick through a bru­tal “boot camp” to pre­pare non-​​combatant civil­ians for the bat­tle ahead. They’d been whipped into the best phys­i­cal shape of their lives, taught how to sur­vive in wilder­nesses from the Appalachian moun­tains to South­East Wash­ing­ton DC.  They’d been taught how kill with guns, knives and their bare hands. Daniel was the equal now of the best US Army Rangers, and had also refreshed his skills as a trauma sur­geon. Those were skills his team was likely to need, con­sid­er­ing what they’d be fighting.

Demons. Not the horned and pitch­fork vari­ety, but real, flesh and blood peo­ple who, as the result of nan­otech­nol­ogy no one had fig­ured out yet, healed almost instantly, never got sick, never aged. They’d been liv­ing among humans for cen­turies – mil­len­nia – and inter­fer­ing in the devel­op­ment of soci­ety, cor­rupt­ing and poi­son­ing things for their own ends. Wher­ever there was blood, strife, humans killing each oth­ers, there were demons behind the scenes.

Daniel had stum­bled upon their exis­tence and they’d tried to kill him for it. When that didn’t work, they’d killed his fam­ily. But in the end, Daniel and his friends had been able to get the truth out. The demons weren’t a secret anymore.

But nei­ther were they acknowl­edged fact. The demons had caught the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion of the pub­lic, but the United States gov­ern­ment, along with most of the United Nations, still declared them a hoax. Daniel knew that this was because the demons had influ­ence deep within the gov­ern­ments of the world. Even Jack’s for­mer boss at the FBI had been work­ing for them. Offi­cially, an ancient con­spir­acy of immor­tals med­dling with human his­tory was every bit the wacko con­spir­acy the­ory it sounded like.

Only it was real. Jeff had died to bring the story to light, one of many wacko con­spir­acy the­o­ries he had favored. Only this one was real. The demons existed, whether they were acknowl­edged offi­cially or not.

And they would be hunted. Jack’s team but just one of many the angels had started up in the last few months. The angels still hadn’t, for the most part, shown them­selves. Only Uriel had been seen in pub­lic. But they’d thrown their con­sid­er­able resources behind the human effort to seek out and destroy the demons, once and for all.

Daniel knew the mis­sion was impor­tant. He believed, as Jack did, that human­ity needed to be free. But really, he just wanted to destroy the crea­tures that had taken his fam­ily away from him. He wanted jus­tice. If he couldn’t get it from his gov­ern­ment, he’d take it himself.

“Are you ready?” Jack said behind him.

Jack turned and saw his new boss, both of them wear­ing jeans and leather jack­ets against the fall chill. They didn’t look much like sol­diers. But Jack had fought in Iraq, along­side Sandy, before he joined the FBI. And while Patrick hadn’t been tested under fire yet, Daniel had fought the demon Batarel five times before finally killing the bas­tard, the last time just hand to hand, flip­ping the demon off a cat­walk in a steel plant into a vat of molten metal. So far, he was the only human to kill an immor­tal in all of recorded his­tory. That had to count for something.

Daniel didn’t look back at his family’s graves. “Yeah, boss. I’m ready.”

“Let’s sad­dle up, then.” Jack turned and led Daniel to the UH-​​60 Black­hawk they used to move around. They hadn’t come to San Fran­cisco just so Daniel could say good­bye to his fam­ily. They were hunt­ing. After Susan released the data­base given to her by Uriel with all the names and aliases of every demon, includ­ing their cur­rent iden­ti­ties, most of them had gone to ground, assumed emer­gency backup iden­ti­ties. It had taken a lot of leg­work and Patrick’s com­puter skills, but they found one, liv­ing in the bay area. It was time to take him down.

*

Jack sat in the cock­pit of the Black­hawk, going over the mis­sion details one more time. Sandy was pilot­ing, and Daniel was in the back with Patrick, try­ing to get Patrick’s lit­tle sur­prise ready. While he and Sandy had been teach­ing the young ana­lyst to fight, they’d also been pick­ing his brain about how to kill demons more effec­tively. They couldn’t very well carry around a vat of molten steel every­where they went, so they needed another way to kill some­thing that could heal almost any injury in sec­onds. Patrick had come up with a lot of ideas, includ­ing the one they were going to field test today. Just as soon as they found the demon.

Accord­ing to their sources, the demon, true name of Oznael, was holed up in ware­house down in Hunter’s Point. Seemed as good a place as any to test out their tactics.

Sandy sig­naled him. They were almost at the LZ. Out the port side he saw the blue of San Fran­cisco Bay, gray indus­trial build­ings below and to star­board. They were com­ing in fast.

Jack turned and sig­naled to Daniel and Patrick. They moved to turn off all their elec­tron­ics. Jack started shut­ting down every­thing he could in the cock­pit with­out inter­fer­ing with Sandy keep­ing the bird in the air. They’d have to be quick.

Sandy pointed at a build­ing, started a count­down with his hand. Five, four, three…

The instant the Black­hawk hit the roof, Jack and Sandy scram­bled to shut down the remain­ing elec­tron­ics. They had three sec­onds. Two, one…

Dante hit the EMP and Jack heard a loud pop from the back of the Black­hawk. All the con­trol screens were black. He glanced at Sandy. “Did we make it?”

“Won’t know until we try to start it again.”

Jack shrugged. They had other con­cerns at the moment. “Let’s move, everybody!”

The men jumped out of the Black­hawk, rotors still swing­ing above their heads from sheer momen­tum. They ran for the roof access door, Jack spray­ing the door­knob with bul­lets from his MP5. He kicked the door down and they rode it like a surf­board down the first flight of steps before jump­ing off in the land­ing and con­tin­u­ing down. The stair­case opened out into a cat­walk above a ware­house floor. The lights were off, a side effect of the eletro­mag­netic pulse they’d set off. If they were lucky, the nanites in the demon’s blood would be dis­abled as well.

They fanned out across the cat­walks along the north and west sides of the build­ing. Each man was dressed in black cov­er­alls, com­bat boots and bul­let­proof vests. They wore kevlar hel­mets and could have passed for SWAT offi­cers but for the lack of the word POLICE in bright white let­ters on their vests. Each car­ried an MP-​​5 sub­ma­chine gun, plenty of ammo, grenades, and a light back­pack con­tain­ing the tools of their spe­cialty. Sandy car­ried hand­held napalm bombs and other ordi­nance. Daniel had their med­ical kit, Patrick a com­puter that could con­nect to just about any­thing any­time some­one hadn’t just set off an EMP. Jack’s back­pack held sur­veil­lance gear, and he reached into that pack to pull out a light­weight set of night vision gog­gles. He put them on.

The ware­house flared into a mono­chrome gray, brighter and bet­ter detailed than what he’d been able to make out by eye. He was the spot­ter in this sce­nario, direct­ing the other men towards the tar­get. If they could find the tar­get. The ware­house was full of eighty foot ship­ping con­tain­ers, some stacked five high. A sin­gle demon could hide in here for a long time with­out being spot­ted, espe­cially if he could get into one or more of the containers.

Jack saw some­thing dart off to the side on the ware­house floor. He whis­tled to the men, and pointed. “South­east cor­ner!” he said.

Care­fully, they all started down the metal stair­ways towards the floor. Patrick had formed up with Jack, Daniel was cov­er­ing Sandy. With any luck, they’d catch the bas­tard in a crossfire.

Jack turned and glanced at Patrick. “You sure this is going to work?”

The for­mer FBI ana­lyst shrugged. “In the­ory, it should work,” Patrick said. “The nanites are too small to have any appre­cia­ble EM shield­ing. The EMP should have turned Oznael into just another human being, at least for a while. If we shoot him, he should stay dead.”

“That’s an awful lot of “shoulds”, Patrick.”

“I know, sir.”

They crept down the floor. As soon as Jack stepped down to the con­crete, he heard the dis­tinc­tive chat­ter of an AK-​​47. He grabbed Patrick by the scruff of the neck and threw them both to the floor. Bul­lets ric­o­cheted off the metal stair­case behind them.

“I think he’s on to us, sir,” Patrick said.

“Fig­ured that out, did you?” Jack said as heard answer­ing MP-​​5 fire com­ing from the left. Good, Sandy was already try­ing to pin him down.

He slapped Patrick on the shoul­der. “Come on, Patrick. We have a job to do.”

Patrick cov­ered Jack as Jack care­fully side­stepped around the ship­ping con­tainer where he thought the AK shots had come from. Sandy and Daniel were no longer fir­ing, so they must have lost Oznael too, assum­ing they ever saw him and weren’t just shoot­ing at the sound to drive him back.

“Oznael!” Jack shouted, echo­ing in the vast ware­house. “We know who and what you are. There’s no way out of here except through us!”

“Sir is that wise?” Patrick whis­pered. “Taunt­ing him?”

“If he hides,” Jack whis­pered, “and we have to search crate by crate, it’s much more dan­ger­ous and we have a higher risk of los­ing him. He thinks he’s invul­ner­a­ble still, and is only avoid­ing us because it’s eas­ier to pick us off one by one. If we can make him angry enough to charge us…”

“He’ll run right into the bul­lets, think­ing they won’t harm him.”

“That’s the plan,” Jack said. “Now we just need to flush him out.”

Jack turned on the com­link hooked over his right ear. “Sandy, report,” he said as qui­etly as he could.

“Noth­ing here, boss,” Sandy said. We con­verged on where it sounded like the AK fire came from, but there’s no sign of him.”

“Roger that,” Jack said. He waved for Patrick to fol­low and moved down the aisle between the mas­sive con­tain­ers. Bas­tard had to be here somewhere.

“Oznael!” he said. “You’re not get­ting out of this.”

Jack heard the demon speak behind them, a rough Aussie accent. “I beg to differ.”

Oznael opened fire, and Jack felt a cou­ple of the rounds hit the plate on the back of his vest. Patrick cried out and went down immediately.

“Shit,” Jack said and returned fire. He hit the demon square in the chest with at least five rounds. The demon fell down under the hail of gunfire.

“Medic!” Jack screamed. “Daniel, get over here!” Jack saw a pool of blood spread­ing under Patrick, and it was get­ting way too big.

As he heard Sandy and Daniel dou­ble­time over to him, he saw the demon get­ting back up.

*

Daniel saw Patrick slumped against the side of a con­tainer as Jack leaped over him and opened fire on the demon again. “Sandy, I need some help here!” Jack said.

As Sandy and Jack drove the demon back, Daniel whipped off his pack and tended to Patrick. “Stay with me, buddy,” he said. “We’re gonna get through this.”

“F – First time out,” Patrick said. “And I get tagged.”

“Could have hap­pened to any of us,” Daniel said. He saw that most of the bleed­ing was com­ing from Patrick’s left leg. Daniel took a knife and sliced open the leg of Patrick’s pants. The bul­let had gone deep into his thigh, and the blood com­ing out was bright red, arte­r­ial. Prob­a­bly nicked the femoral, Daniel thought.

“Okay, Patrick, this is going to sting a bit,” Daniel said. He grabbed a clamp out of his pack, and a retrac­tor. “Got to do a lit­tle spelunking.”

“In my leg?”

“Just lie back and think of Eng­land,” Daniel said. “Don’t pass out if you can help it.”

“I’m get­ting dizzy, Daniel.”

Daniel reached in with the retrac­tor and pulled the wound open. Patrick screamed and thrashed.

“Patrick! Keep still!”

“Fuck!” Patrick said through clenched teeth.

There was blood every­where, pump­ing hot over Daniel’s hands. But he could see where it com­ing from. He reached in with the clamp, and closed it over the artery.

“Shit!” Patrick said. “Fuck­ing Christ, that hurts!”

Daniel broke an ice pack and put it over the wound. “Hold that there as long as you can. I’ve stopped the life threat­en­ing bleed­ing, but we need to get you to an OR as soon as pos­si­ble.” He wrapped some ban­dages over the ice pack. “I’ll be right back.”

Daniel grabbed his weapon, jumped up and ran towards the gunfire.

*

Jack emp­tied his clip, ejected it, and slammed another one home. Oznael was off bal­ance from the con­tin­ued gun­fire, but he was heal­ing vis­i­bly. They had him backed up and pinned down, but Jack didn’t see how they were going to keep this going. As soon as they ran out of ammo, the demon would coun­ter­at­tack and it would be over. They needed a lot more prac­tice before try­ing to take one of these things down.

Jack heard another SMG open up behind him, and saw Daniel adding his fire­power. He was fir­ing in three-​​round bursts, focus­ing on the demon’s knees.

“Good think­ing!” Jack shouted. “Sandy, we need some heat!”

Sandy pulled back and reached behind him. He pulled out what was essen­tially a small flare attached to a plas­tic con­tainer of jel­lied gaso­line. It was a slightly more sophis­ti­cated ver­sion of a Molo­tov Cock­tail, in that it used napalm instead of gas or kerosene, but it would do the job. Sandy lit it and tossed it just above the demon. The flare ignited the napalm, which melted the plas­tic and rained down on the demon, In an instant, the demon was cov­ered in fire. Oznael turned and ran, faster than Jack thought pos­si­ble, for one of the ware­house exits.

“Won’t kill him,” Sandy said, “but it will take him out of com­mis­sion long enough for us to evac.”

“Let’s do it, then,” Jack said. Daniel already had a col­lapsi­ble stretcher unpacked and unfolded. They set about mov­ing Patrick to the stretcher as gen­tly as pos­si­ble, and then car­ried him to the near­est staircase.

The first bat­tle in the war against the demons hadn’t exactly been a rous­ing success.

28: The Bur­den of Proof

“How the hell are we sup­posed to get out of here?” Jeff said. Daniel didn’t know, and the hel­met wasn’t show­ing him any other secret doors, assum­ing it could do that. He couldn’t even read the ancient text on the display.

“Maybe we’re not sup­posed to get out,” Susan said.

“Look, missy, I know the sounds of com­bat when I hear it. And Mohammad’s lit­tle pea shooter and gonna do did­dley against mil­i­tary firepower.”

“I think we’re safer where we are.”

“Because an angel sent us here?” Jeff asked. Susan didn’t have to answer; they could see it in her face.

“Great day in the morn­ing,” Jeff said.

“Let’s not panic,” Daniel said, notic­ing how both Susan and Jeff jumped a bit at his ampli­fied voice. “Jack and Sandy are upstairs, I’m sure they have this under control.”

#

This is out of con­trol, Jack thought.

They were at the end of a long stone cor­ri­dor, just above an ancient stair­well. Every time they tried to enter the stair­well, some­one below shot at them. And it had to have been a demon, because it didn’t seem to care about the grenades they dropped past it. Two of Sandy’s men were also engaged in a rear hold­ing action against a band of — Jack wasn’t sure what they were, really. They were assist­ing the demons, but they were human. Sandy’s men had shot enough of them to ver­ify that. But they still had Jack pinned down with no way for­ward and no way back until rein­force­ments arrived to take care of the demonic sym­pa­thiz­ers. What a world.

“Well, Cap­tain Sandarski — “

“Sure,” Sandy said, “throw that back in my face now.”

“ — what do you, in your infi­nite tac­ti­cal wis­dom suggest?”

“Well, we could pour napalm down the stair­well,” Sandy suggested.

“A. You don’t have any napalm,” Jack said. “And B. Even it worked, it would either kill my friends down there or trap them behind a wall of fire we couldn’t get through.”

Sandy nod­ded. “Yeah, it’s not what you’d call a per­fect plan.”

“Any­thing useful?”

“Well, if you’re gonna tie my hands like that…”

“Right,” Jack said. “We need a decoy, some­thing for them to shoot at while we descend.”

Sandy looked back behind them. “Like, say, a dead body?”

Jack looked where his friend was look­ing, back towards the sym­pa­thiz­ers. “Yeah, that might work. Damn, son, all this time in the desert’s made you a cold-​​blooded son of a bitch.”

“I’ll take that as a com­pli­ment,” Sandy said. On his orders, his men forced the issue with the sym­pa­thiz­ers, push­ing them back as though the sol­diers were retreat­ing. The enemy resisted, but not much. Jack fig­ured they thought they were win­ning, that the sol­diers were going to leave their demon mas­ters alone. Once they got as far as the first body, Jack darted in and dragged it back to the stair­well. The sol­diers fell back, cov­er­ing him.

“Okay,” Jack said. “We only get one shot at this.”

“You don’t think they’re dumb enough to fall for it twice?” Sandy asked.

“Would you be?”

“Hey, I was dumb enough to join the Army, so I’m prob­a­bly not a good test case.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “Okay, as soon as Habib here moves, we chase him. Let them shoot the body, and then we over­whelm the shoot­ers. You guys have zip ties, we can use those to dis­able them. Got it?”

“Have I told you,” Sandy said, “just how much I missed work­ing with you?”

“No, you didn’t.”

Sandy nod­ded. “There might just be a rea­son for that.”

“Go!” Jack shouted, and pushed the cadaver down the stairs, start­ing it off as ver­ti­cally as he could.

Jack and the sol­diers fol­lowed the body, scream­ing at the top of their lungs. As expected, the body was pinned to the wall by gun­fire, and as the lone demon guard­ing the stair­well stepped for­ward, Jack hit him with a fly­ing tackle that would have made his high school foot­ball coach beam with pride. He smashed the demon into the stone wall, and in sec­onds they had it face-​​down on the floor and hog-​​tied with zip ties. They also ripped a rag off the increas­ingly bloody cadaver and shoved in the demon’s mouth as a gag. Jack had to admit, Sandy’s men were well trained.

“Okay,” Jack said, absurdly qui­etly con­sid­er­ing the cacoph­ony of the gun­fire and strug­gle. “Any­body dead?”

All the sol­diers checked them­selves, and they con­firmed that they were not dead.

“Good,” Jack said. “Let’s keep it that way, shall we?” He grabbed the assault rifle from the floor, and reversed the taped together banana clips to ensure he had fresh rounds. He’d count them later, if they lived.

“Let’s move.”

#

Daniel was start­ing to worry about his air sup­ply. He didn’t know how long the bat­tery in the hel­met was going to hold out. But no mat­ter how hard he pulled on the sides of the thing, it wouldn’t budge.

“Here, let me take a look at that,” Susan said. “Jeff, hold the camera.”

“While we’re at it,” Jeff said, “why don’t we just put on a pup­pet show?”

Daniel saw Susan reach up and take hold of the hel­met. She yanked upwards. “Whoa whoa whoa whoa!” Daniel said. “You’re gonna take my head off!”

“No I’m not, you big baby. Pipe down.” She felt around on the hel­met, on top, around the back, down the front. When she ran her fin­gers just under the jaw­line, Daniel heard a faint pop, then felt the padding recede. The dis­play pan­els retracted and his hear­ing returned to normal.

Susan lifted the hel­met off his head, then held it in one hand while she straight­ened his hair. “There. Not so bad.”

He took the hel­met from her and looked into her eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

She was just inches away. “Any time,” she said.

“Ahem!” Jeff said. They both jumped, back­ing away from each other. “I’d sug­gest you kids get a room, but the prob­lem is, see, we have one. And we can’t get out of it.”

“Right,” Daniel said. “Well, let’s look around again. Maybe there’s another way out of here.”

Jeff handed the cam­era back to Susan. “I think I got some great footage of the stones in the ceil­ing, just now,” he said. “Just sayin’.”

#

Jack crept through the dark cor­ri­dors under­neath the mosque. The place was a labyrinth, and he had no idea where this Mul­lah Moham­mad had taken Daniel, Jeff and Susan. He knew they were down here, and he knew demons were down here. It would be bad enough if he was play­ing hide and seek with enemy troops, try­ing to find Daniel before they did. But given that if he found the demons first he couldn’t kill them while they could pretty eas­ily kill him…

“You hear some­thing, LT?” Sandy whis­pered behind him.

“No. Why?”

“You’re slow­ing down.”

“Sorry.” Jack picked up the pace again, creep­ing towards the next inter­sec­tion in the stone cor­ri­dors. It was just about pitch black down here, and they’d avoid­ing using the sol­diers’ lights so as not to give away their posi­tion. They were lit­er­ally blind. He ran his hand along the wall, try­ing to move as qui­etly as pos­si­ble and fil­ter out the minis­cule sounds of the sol­diers clos­ing ranks behind him from what could be demons in front of him. He was also on the look­out for any light sources that—

His hand reached the end of the wall and touched warm flesh.

Jack snapped his hand back and whipped his rifle around, hit­ting the light he held along­side it.

“Turn that off, you fool!” a robed cleric hissed in thickly accented Eng­lish. Jack killed the light. The man seemed to have come from a side tun­nel that branched back the way they had come. Given the half a sec­ond Jack had been able to see it, anyway.

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

“Jack Har­ris,” Jack said. “I’m look­ing for — “

“Daniel Cho, yes, I know. I’m actu­ally look­ing for you. The archangel said you’d be with them. Quickly, fol­low me.”

“Sir, I can’t see you.”

Jack felt the cleric’s hand grab his, and guide it to flow­ing fab­ric. “Grab my robe. Quickly, now!”

“Yes,” another voice said. “Quickly. We’re all very eager to meet your guests.”

Lights snapped on and Jack was momen­tar­ily blinded. As his vision cleared, he saw three demons in Bedouin robes, all hold­ing AK-​​47s on them. Before he could say any­thing, Sandy opened fire on all three, straf­ing them with him M-​​16. The demons returned fire, and Jack dove for the mul­lah, hear­ing the man cry out as Jack drove him to the floor.

“Go, Jack!” Sandy said, and con­tin­ued fir­ing on the demons. He couldn’t kill them, but the bar­rage of lead kept them from advancing.

Jack scooped up the mul­lah and ran the way the man had come. The mullah’s voice was ragged, and Jack was pretty sure the guy had been hit, but they had no time to stop and check. He could hear Sandy and his men cov­er­ing their retreat, falling back behind them. As the mul­lah directed him first one way, then another, Jack quickly lost track of where he was, the sound of Sandy and his men buy­ing them time grew more indis­tinct. This bet­ter be worth it, Jack thought.

Finally the man stopped Jack by a door, and fum­bled for a key. Jack took the key, slick with the mullah’s blood, and fit­ted into the door. It swung open on a dimly lit room con­tain­ing his friends.

“Get inside,” the mul­lah said. “Now!”

Jack heard foot­steps clos­ing on their posi­tion and swing his light and rifle up, but it was only Sandy. He was bloody and limp­ing from what looked like a hit to the thigh.

“They’re right behind me,” Sandy shouted. “Go!”

Jack bolted into the room, push­ing the mul­lah in front of him, Sandy right on his heels. He turned and helped Sandy move the heavy door.

“Don’t close that!” Jeff said. “It — “

The door slammed with a hol­low thud, and Jack almost imme­di­ately heard pound­ing on the other side.

“can’t be opened from this side,” Jeff said.

“As long as they can’t open it from that side for a while,” Jack said, “I’ll take that.” He turned to Sandy. “Your men?”

Sandy shook his head. It was all they needed to say.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Looks like we have a few minu — “

Susan screamed.

Jack looked over and saw that the mul­lah had slid to the floor, leav­ing a wide, wet streak of blood on the wall behind him. He was hit bad, much worse than Jack thought.

Daniel was already kneel­ing down next to him, try­ing to stop the bleed­ing. His hands moved with steady assur­ance and expe­ri­ence, the prac­ticed motions of a trauma sur­geon. But Jack had seen enough bat­tle­field casu­al­ties to know it was already too late.

“Behind — “ the mul­lah said.

“Save your strength,” Daniel said. “Don’t talk.”

The mul­lah grabbed Daniel by the shirt. “Behind the altars,” he said. “The vision of — “ he coughed, blood spat­ter­ing from his lips, “of angels will point your — “

The man slumped over. He was dead.

“The vision of angels?” Jack said. “What the hell does that mean?”

Daniel ran across the small room and grabbed an ancient hel­met off one of two small altars set off in an alcove. “This,” he said. He put the hel­met on and Jack saw the eye holes close off, replaced by two flat black con­vex lenses.

“Holy shit, what is — “

“Quiet,” Jeff said. “Danny, go look behind the altar.”

Daniel walked over to the alcove and began exam­in­ing the walls behind the altar. “I see it,” he said. His voice was loud and deeper than usual, almost boom­ing. “The read­out in the hel­met is show­ing me a hid­den door, super­im­pos­ing it. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it.”

Daniel pushed in on the stones and a small sec­tion behind the altar moved away, maybe two by three feet. It wasn’t much of an escape hatch. “There’s a tun­nel here,” Daniel said.

“Daniel,” Susan said. “It’s pitch black. I can’t see a thing.”

“I can,” Daniel said. “Clear as day as far as the helmet’s concerned.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Daniel goes first, since he can see what’s going on. Then Susan, then Jeff.”

“No,” Jeff said.

Jack turned to the old man. “What do you mean, no?”

[In the sec­ond draft, have this hap­pen after they find they can’t shut the door behind them]

Jeff took the AK-​​47 away from Jack. “Get a move on,” he said. “I’ll hold them back as long as I can. I remem­ber a thing or two about fir­ing from cover.”

Daniel took the old man by the shoul­ders. “Jeff, you don’t have to do this.” The soft words sounded odd with the helmet’s boom­ing amplification.

“Yeah, I do, Danny. You have to get this story out. It can’t be lim­ited to con­spir­acy nuts like me. You have to make peo­ple believe. You can do it. I know you can.”

The door cracked, and Jack could tell the demons were break­ing through. Jeff started shoo­ing peo­ple into the tun­nel. “Go on, get mov­ing! I’m gonna hole up behind these altars and buy you all the time I can. But it won’t mat­ter much if you don’t get the hell out of here!”

Jack watched as Daniel, then Susan, then Sandy climbed into the tun­nel. He clapped Jeff on the shoul­der. “Thank you.”

“Just look after him, okay?” Jeff said.

Jack nod­ded and scut­tled into the tun­nel. He’d gone maybe ten meters when he heard Jeff open fire.

26: The Lost Gospel

Daniel snapped awake again when the Humvee hit a bump in the road. Look­ing back over his shoul­der, he saw it wasn’t so much a bump as a hole. Or a crater.

He’d been try­ing to sleep as they moved south, but the road con­di­tions, lack of any mean­ing­ful shocks or sus­pen­sion on the mil­i­tary vehi­cle and the heat kept wak­ing him up. He was pretty badly jet­lagged. To him it was still the mid­dle of the night, not late morn­ing. And he really hadn’t had a good night’s rest in a week, so that made it even worse.

And of course, there was also the fact that Jack wouldn’t stop talking.

“Hey, check this out!” Jack said from the front seat of the Humvee. He’d put a copy of Susan’s data­base on Jeff’s lap­top, and had been dig­ging through it while Susan did her own dig­ging in the other Humvee.

“What’s that?” Daniel said. He noticed the sol­dier sit­ting next to him in the back seat looked far less uncom­fort­able than Daniel felt. How do they do that?

“Sandy, you know how we keep report­ing Said Hamza dead, and then find him alive again have to retract list­ing him as dead?”

“I told you, call me Cap­tain. Yeah, he’s the Al Qaeda in Iraq num­ber two guy.”

“Turns out there’s a good rea­son,” Jack con­tin­ued. “He’s a frig­gin’ immor­tal. We prob­a­bly are killing him each time, but the bas­tard just won’t stay dead!”

“Shit, LT, you mean to tell me some of the bas­tards in Al Qaeda are these immor­tals of yours?”

“From what I can see, they’ve got demons placed in the IRA and Tamil Tigers, too. A lot of work in Cen­tral and South Amer­ica. And yeah, they get around the Mid­dle East.”

“They always did, accord­ing to you.”

“Wait a minute,” Daniel said, lean­ing for­ward. “You’re say­ing the demons have been key play­ers in — “

“In every war, rev­o­lu­tion, junta and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion down through the ages. They were in the Cru­sades, on both sides, it seems. They were in Nazi Ger­many. They were in Stal­in­ist Rus­sia. Hell, it says here Rasputin was a demon. No won­der they couldn’t kill the bastard.”

“All this time, they’ve been walk­ing among us — “

“Stir­ring up trou­ble,” Jack said. “Any­where you find blood and death at human hands, they’re not far off. You stum­bled into the biggest secret of all time, Daniel.”

San­darski swerved the Humvee to avoid one of the larger craters, then said, “And you really believe this, LT?”

“Cap­tain Sandarski — “

“Thank you, sir.”

“Cap­tain, I’ve seen one of these things with my own eyes, and met one of the angels per­son­ally. Accord­ing to Susan, the angel that stood at the gates of Eden with a flam­ing sword. I’ve tried and failed too many times to kill a demon to think they’re any­thing other than real. You saw the videos I sent you.”

“A lot of the men thought those were a joke, LT. Hol­ly­wood spe­cial effects.”

“Untouched, Cap­tain. You saw on those videos what I saw with my Mark One eye­ball. They’re real. The one we fought, Batarel, was impaled, beheaded, blud­geoned, elec­tro­cuted, blown up, shot — and I mean I emp­tied a whole clip into the bas­tard, should have died from lead poi­son­ing at the very least — and it wasn’t until Daniel there tossed him into a vat of molten steel — “

“Holy shit, that was real?”

“That’s the kind of dam­age it takes to kill these things, Cap­tain. Napalm might do it, or white phos­pho­rus. The lab rat back in DC told me they’ve got tiny machines run­ning through their bod­ies, fix­ing dam­age down to the cel­lu­lar level as fast as it hap­pens. They can heal from almost any­thing. You have to hit them so hard there’s noth­ing left to rebuild, and you have to do it fast.”

“Well, shit,” San­darski said. That about summed it up for Daniel.

“And this tem­ple in Najaf?” San­darski asked.

“The Mosque of Imam Ali,” Jack said. “One of the most holy Islamic sites. Shia think Noah and Adam are buried there next to Ali, the third caliph.”

“Adam. As in — “

“The book of Gen­e­sis Adam, yeah,” Jack said. “Sad­dam damn near destroyed the place back in ’03 — “

“Yeah, I remem­ber hear­ing about that.”

“And it’s been rebuilt a few times over. But accord­ing to Uriel — “

“The angel you were talk­ing about? Won­der if he remem­bers Adam.”

“Accord­ing to Uriel, there’s a secret soci­ety inside all the Abra­hamic churches that knows the truth about the immor­tals, but believes them to be what they say they are.”

“You mean,” San­darski said, “you believe in these things, but you don’t think they’re demons?”

“Would a bib­li­cal demon have had trou­ble with molten steel?” Jack asked. “Should have been like going home, brim­stone and all that. I never saw horns or a tail, and Uriel didn’t have any wings I could see. They’re immor­tal, and I don’t doubt they’re where the leg­ends of angels and demons came from, but I don’t think they have any­thing to do with God.”

“Huh,” San­darski said.

“So any­way, huh!” Jack said has they hit another hole in the road. “Can’t you keep this thing level?”

“At the speed you want, LT? Con­sider your­self lucky the ride’s as smooth as it is.”

“Any­way, this secret soci­ety has hid­den arti­facts all over the world. In the mosque, there’s sup­posed to be a scroll with proof of immor­tal exis­tence. It’s been kept there for cen­turies, and kept a secret even though the place had been destroyed and rebuilt a bunch of times even before Saddam.”

“It’s a rough neigh­bor­hood, I’ll give you that,” San­darski said. “So who do you talk to when we get there?”

“Mul­lah Has­san Moham­mad,” Jack said.

“Hope he’s still there, LT. Not a place you want to hang out if they decide they don’t like us.”

Daniel sat back as the two men stopped talk­ing. The desert and small vil­lages sped past his win­dow. He was in Iraq. On the way to a holy mosque. I don’t even have a pass­port, Daniel thought. He looked again at the sol­dier in the back seat, who still hadn’t said a word, and San­darski. Jack trusted them, and he trusted Jack. He hoped they were good hands.

He tried to go back to sleep.

#

“Okay, LT, here we are,” Sandy said.

Jack looked out the Humvee win­dow at the Mosque of Imam Ali. They were just west of the city of Najaf, and the sun was behind the mosque, scat­ter­ing light around the golden dome that tow­ered above the two story struc­ture. It was a lot big­ger than Jack expected, and there were dozens, maybe hun­dreds of peo­ple scat­tered around the complex.

“Let’s go,” Jack said, and opened the door.

Daniel hopped out after him, and he saw Susan and Jeff get out of the other Humvee with the rest of Sandy’s men. The locals looked curi­ously at the sol­diers, but Jack didn’t see much hos­til­ity in their eyes. He sup­posed after seven years, they were used to Amer­i­can troops.

Not sure I’d ever feel the same were our posi­tions reversed, Jack thought.

“You want us to go in with you?” Sandy said.

“No, just hang tight out here. I don’t want to insult them by bring­ing guns into a mosque.”

“Sad­dam did it,” Sandy said.

“And look how things turned out for him,” Jack said. “We’ll be right back. It shouldn’t take long.” He motioned to the other civil­ians and they walked into the mosque.

Jack walked up to the first per­son he saw inside who looked like they worked there and said in Ara­bic, “I’m look­ing for Mul­lah Hus­san Mohammad.”

“I am sorry, there is no one here by that name,” the man replied.

“Please, I beg your par­don,” Jack con­tin­ued in Ara­bic. “We have come a long way, and were told to seek a Mul­lah Hus­san Moham­mad here.”

“I am most sorry. I can­not help you.” The man walked away.

“Well,” Jack said in Eng­lish, “that didn’t get us anywhere.”

“You speak Ara­bic?” Susan said.

“Badly,” Jack said. “I picked it up the last time I was here.”

“Use­ful skill to have,” Jeff said.

“Only if we can find some­one who knows some­thing. Come on.”

He walked down the cen­tral aisle of the main cham­ber, look­ing for a mul­lah who might know more. He saw a man in mullah’s robes talk­ing to the man Jack had just spoke to. They both looked over at him, and then the mul­lah clasped the man on the shoul­der and dis­ap­peared down a side cor­ri­dor. The man fol­lowed him.

Jack picked up his step and tried to fol­low, only to watch as the door to that cor­ri­dor shut just as he got there. He tried the knob and found the door locked.

“Something’s going on,” he said. “They’re duck­ing us.”

Jack looked around, and it looked like there were fewer wor­ship­pers than there had been before. He had to be imag­in­ing that.

“Can I be of ser­vice?” a voice behind them said in accented English.

They turned and Jack saw an old man in a thread­bare suit. He didn’t look like one of the priests or their sup­port staff. “Maybe. We’re try­ing to find Mul­lah Hus­san Moham­mad. We’ve come from America.”

“So has every­one else, these days,” the man said. “My name is Afif Ibn Ghalib. I’m the for­eign attaché for the shrine. I help aca­d­e­mics and other vis­i­tors who are not wor­ship­pers. And since none of you appeared to be here to pay your respects to Ali, I thought per­haps I could help.

“But I’m afraid there is no Mul­lah Hus­san Moham­mad here. I’ve been work­ing for the shrine for decades, and I can’t remem­ber such a man ever work­ing here. Are you cer­tain you’re in the right place?”

“We’re pretty sure,” Jack said.

“Why do you seek this Mul­lah Moham­mad, if I may ask?”

Before Jack could answer, Daniel stepped in. “We were sent to retrieve a scroll. A very old artifact.”

“I see,” Ibn Ghalib said. “And you are?”

“My name is Daniel Cho. This is Jack Har­ris, Susan Richard­son and Jeff Frankel. I was under the impres­sion we were expected.”

“I see,” Ibn Ghalib said again. “Well, I’m not sure how I can help you. Who did you say sent you?”

Just loud enough for Ibn Ghalib and the other three to hear, Daniel said, “We were sent by the Archangel Uriel, Mul­lah Mohammad.”

The man nod­ded, and seemed to age another twenty years before Jack’s eyes. “I see,” he said again, with far more grav­ity. “I knew this day would come, but I prayed to Allah that I would not live to see it. Come with me.”

He turned and led them down another hall­way to a stone stair­case, and then pro­ceeded down. As they fol­lowed, Jack whis­pered to Daniel, “How’d you know he was Mohammad?”

“While you were talk­ing to him,” Daniel whis­pered back, “the other wor­ship­pers were qui­etly ush­ered out. Even though he seemed calm, his pulse rate, which I could see by his jugu­lar, was rapid, indi­cat­ing he was much more agi­tated than he appeared. And he only showed up after you asked for him by name. Seemed like a solid guess.”

“You must have been hell on wheels in an oper­at­ing the­ater,” Jack said.

Daniel just looked at him. It occurred to Jack that he still didn’t know why Daniel quit being a surgeon.

“Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m deaf,” Moham­mad said in front of them. He led them out into a nar­row, low-​​ceilinged stone pas­sage­way, thick with dust.

“Sorry,” Daniel and Jack said in unison.

Moham­mad led them into a small room, which appeared to be empty. He walked over to the stone wall and pushed in on a stone, mov­ing it about an inch. Then he stepped over a few feet and pushed another. He pushed seven total when they heard a deep rum­bling. Dust shook loose from the walls as the far wall receded as one piece, then moved aside, expos­ing a small alcove.

“Behold,” Moham­mad said. “The Lost Gospel of the Angels.”

#

Sandy was stand­ing guard out­side with the men. He saw the usual traf­fic pat­terns, pretty much what you’d expect to see at a holy Mus­lim shrine. It was start­ing to get dark, and he knew the heat of the day would fade quickly. He was going to have a hard time keep­ing warm if they didn’t hurry—

Some­thing tripped an alarm in his mind, some­thing in his periph­eral vision. He looked over and saw a group of men who didn’t seem to be all that dif­fer­ent from any of the other tra­di­tion­ally dressed pil­grims to the mosque. They wore long flow­ing robes, and—

And if you didn’t know what to look for, you might not see the weapons and explo­sives they were concealing.

“Sergeant, radio Camp [what­ever is clos­est to Najaf] and have them send rein­force­ments,” Sandy said.

“Sir? How many?”

Sandy did a quick cal­cu­la­tion on what the men he saw could do if they really had as much sem­tex as he thought they did. “All of them.”

[In this chap­ter, make Jack wait out­side and observe the approach­ing demons. Inside, give Jack’s dia­logue, minus the Ara­bic, to Susan or Jeff. That way we avoid mak­ing Sandy a POV char­ac­ter. Never see­ing a scene from inside his head is vital to his reveal in the third act of Cru­sade to be one of the Grig­ori. Also, have him ask Jack in the Humvee if the data­base lists all the immor­tals, and have Jack explain that there are 200 demons, part of some­thing called the Grig­ori, that are listed only by their true names, but with no human identities.]

25: Turn­about Is Unfair Play

Kyung-​​Soon Cho smiled and nod­ded as the last cus­tomer left for the night. Shin was stand­ing by the door, smil­ing as well, and locked the door behind the man. He gave a lit­tle wave through the glass, and Kyung-​​Soon almost laughed. Her hus­band seemed so child­like, sometimes.

“Come now!” she said, turn­ing to face her two daugh­ters. They were clean­ing up, Leah was sweep­ing each aisle of their small gro­cery store, and Mary was fronting the shelves, mak­ing the stock look neat and orderly. “We need to get upstairs,” she said. “The news will be on soon.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Leah said. “If they’d posted another video, I would have got­ten an alert on my phone.”

“Pah!” Kyung-​​Soon said.

“What?”

“You rely too much on your phone. You need to look around more often.” Kyung-​​Soon closed out the cash reg­is­ter and put the drawer in the safe. There would be time to bal­ance it in the morn­ing. She had to get upstairs.

“Come now, you heard your mother,” Shin said. “Let’s go upstairs and see what trou­ble your brother has got­ten into now.”

Kyung-​​Soon didn’t care much for her husband’s flip­pant tone, but she knew it was just his way of deal­ing with the issue. They’d only heard from Daniel that one time, and every other bit of infor­ma­tion about how he was came from the tele­vi­sion news, as they rebroad­cast the videos posted by that woman from Wash­ing­ton. Kyung-​​Soon didn’t care much for her, either, but at least the videos showed that her son was still alive. Right now, that’s all that mattered.

She and Shin shep­herded the girls upstairs, along the rick­ety stair­way that ran along the back wall of the build­ing. They got up to the top floor and flowed into their home. Kyung-​​Soon was proud of what she and Shin had been able to build for their fam­ily. Daniel, Leah and Mary hadn’t had all the newest toys and designer clothes grow­ing up, but they knew they were loved and they got solid edu­ca­tions. Leah was about to start law school in the fall, and Mary was on track to grad­u­ate high school with hon­ors. So how had things gone so wrong with Daniel?

“Turn on the tele­vi­sion,” Shin said, “I want to — “

Mary screamed.

“What is it?” Kyung-​​Soon said just as she saw the answer for her­self. Two men stepped out of their kitchen into the liv­ing room. They were wear­ing expen­sive suits as well as gloves.

“Who are you?” Shin demanded. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re here to send a mes­sage,” one of the men said. He walked up to Shin, reached out his hands and put them around Shin’s neck.

No…

With a crack far too loud for the room, the man let go and Kyung-​​Soon watched her hus­band of thirty-​​two years col­lapse to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

“No!” she screamed, and ran to the man. He back handed her across the face and she fell back.

“Girls!” she said, tast­ing blood, “Run! Downsta — “

The other man, who had walked behind her when she rushed the man who had ki — who had — her mind couldn’t com­plete the thought — the other man had walked behind her and locked the door.

“It wouldn’t be the right mes­sage if we let you go,” he said.

Mary started to cry, and Leah hugged her, telling her it would be all right, even though it was clear she knew as well as Kyung-​​Soon did that it wouldn’t be.

“If your son had stayed out of our busi­ness, this all could have been avoided,” the first man said.

Daniel…

“But now it’s too late,” the sec­ond man said. He took some kind of elec­tronic device out of his pocket, pointed it first at Sh — Shin, then at her, and finally at the girls. It’s a cam­era, Kyung-​​Soon real­ized. He’s film­ing us.

“Any last words?” he asked.

She held her hands together in front of her and began to pray.

“Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hal­lowed be thy Name.

Thy king­dom come.

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And for­give us our trespasses,

As we for­give those who tres­pass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil — “

“Yeah, about that,” the man said.

#

Daniel pulled the small carry on he’d brought over his shoul­der and trudged out of the Iraqi Air 737. He was already exhausted. They’d flown from JFK to Frank­furt, Ger­many, and then switched planes to fly down to Baghdad.

And now they were here. Almost halfway around the world from his par­ents in San Fran­cisco. Jeff and Susan fell in behind him, and he saw Jack strid­ing ahead like he just got up from a mas­sage and a nap. Daniel had noticed that while he and the other two “civil­ians” had grown more and more ragged over their jour­ney, Jack became more directed, more deter­mined, the closer they got to Iraq. They hadn’t been able to sit together on the flight, so Daniel hadn’t had a chance to ask the FBI man about his excitement.

No, Daniel thought, that was the wrong word. Jack wasn’t happy to be here. If any­thing, he was grim­mer than the rest of them. But there was some­thing there. A focus.

He also noticed that Jack was already on the phone. He remem­bered a com­ment in Frank­furt about Jack call­ing his “con­tacts” when they landed, but who did he know in Baghdad?

None of them had checked bag­gage, so they skipped bag­gage claim and went straight out to the street. Daniel expected to have to take a bus or some­thing to Najaf, where the Mosque of Imam Ali was located. It was a lit­tle over a hun­dred miles, accord­ing to Susan. Too far to take a cab.

Daniel saw Jack stop and exchange salutes with some US ser­vice­men in desert camo. Then Jack hugged one of them, and motioned them over.

“This is Cap­tain Bob San­darski, United States Army. He and his men will be escort­ing us to Najaf.”

San­darski, a burly man in his mid-​​thirties, reached out to shake Daniel’s hand. “You civvies can call me Sandy,” he said with a trace of south­ern drawl. “I’m only going to insist LT here calls me Cap­tain Sandarski.”

“LT?” Daniel said.

“Sandy was a but­ter bar back in ’03, when I was a First Lieu­tenant,” Jack said, adding with empha­sis, “and his com­mand­ing officer.”

“You get one. From now on it’s Cap­tain San­darski, G-​​Man.”

“Let’s get loaded up,” Jack said. “Hand your bags to the sol­diers, and we’ll get a move on. How’s traf­fic today, Captain?”

San­darski adjusted his cap. “Insur­gent trou­bles in Al Hillah,” he said. “Got High­way 8 blocked off both ways. We’re going to take 9 through Kar­bala, should be about three, maybe four hours ride to Najaf.”

“Let’s get a move on, then,” Jack said, ush­er­ing Daniel, Jeff and Susan to the two wait­ing Humvees. “I want to get there before dark.”

#

Stan Winchell switched tabs and checked his site stats again. Frig­gin’ amaz­ing. There was just no sub­sti­tute for vio­lence and con­tro­versy. Espe­cially if peo­ple had to come to his site to get it. He’d had to file a few DMCA take­down notices in the past week, keep the moochers from copy­ing his con­tent and using it to drive traf­fic to their own damn sites. He even made sure to water­mark the video with his site URL so it showed up even with the TV net­works rebroad­cast it, which they just couldn’t resist doing. His site traf­fic had sky­rock­eted this week and it just kept get­ting bet­ter. Ad buys were through the roof, and as soon as he could find some good off­shore tax shel­ters to keep the dough away from Uncle Sam, he was going to have a very good year.

He made a men­tal note to buy Susan a token of his appre­ci­a­tion. A sweater or something.

His other reporters were feel­ing the heat. He could tell. None of them had ever brought him any­thing this juicy. Well, the bar was raised, boys and girls. New Amer­i­can Cen­tury had hit the big time, and if they didn’t—

His com­puter beeped at him. It was his instant mes­sen­ger going off. I thought I had it set to Do Not Dis­turb, he thought. Weird.

He checked the flash­ing win­dow in his taskbar. It was from some ran­dom com­bi­na­tion of let­ters and num­bers, frig­gin spam­bot. He was just about to close it when he saw the message.

We warned you.

“Warned me? What the fu — “ He stopped. Some­thing was dif­fer­ent. Stan spent nearly all his time in his house. One of the ben­e­fits of work­ing from home, at least to him, was that he didn’t have to rub elbows with all the idiots out there unless he chose to, and he rarely chose to. But by nature of spend­ing that much time in his home, he’d grown finely attuned to it, would notice the slight­est change. He’d even put in a bunch of sound­proof­ing so he wouldn’t have to lis­ten to his idiot neigh­bors. And he knew some­thing was wrong. He didn’t need sci­ence poindex­ters to tell him the air pres­sure had dropped slightly, or that the tem­per­a­ture had gone up half a degree. He knew.

Some­one was in his house. Some­one other than him.

He looked at the screen again.

We warned you.

Nah, he thought, I’m just get­ting spooked by my own suc­cess. There’s nobody—

He heard a foot­step, behind him.

Stan turned around and saw a man stand­ing in his liv­ing room. The man wore a designer suit, cus­tom tai­lored from the looks of it. Snazzy, but not osten­ta­tious. And the man was wear­ing sur­gi­cal gloves.

Oh, this can’t be good.

“You don’t take direc­tion very well, do you, Mis­ter Winchell?”

The ques­tion was so out of left field Stan didn’t know how to answer it. He should have told the guy to get out of his house. He should have gone for the gun he kept under his desk. But all he could say was, “Um…”

“Well said,” the man said, and took a step forward.

The move­ment jarred loose what­ever had Stan’s brain in neu­tral. “Get back!” he said. “I have a gun!”

“Yes, your sec­ond amend­ment rights. Please, by all means, get it.”

What the fuck was this guy smok­ing? Stan reached down and grabbed the Smith & Wes­son he kept, loaded, of course, in a desk drawer. His bud­dies at the range pre­ferred Glocks, but he’d be damned if he was going to buy an Aus­trian gun. A good old-​​fashioned Amer­i­can Smith & Wes­son was good enough for him.

“Do you feel bet­ter?” the man asked. “More in control?”

Stan noticed the guy had an accent. Not much of one, but it was there, just behind the words. Sounded… what, Euro­pean? No. That wasn’t it.

“Yeah, now get the fuck out of my house!” Stan said.

The man smiled. “In good time, Mis­ter Winchell. After you are dead.”

“Fuck!” Stan said. He rec­og­nized the accent! It was fuck­ing Ara­bic! He fired the pis­tol, but the first shot went wide, over the guy’s shoul­der. Fuck­ing camel jockey didn’t even flinch.

“Your elo­quence astounds me, surely,” the man said. He still hadn’t gone for a weapon of his own. Didn’t this idiot towel head know what he was deal­ing with? Why is he still fuck­ing with me? Stan wondered.

“Would you care to try again?”

“You bet your ass, Abdul,” Stan said and fired again. This time he hit the bas­tard square, right in the cen­ter mass. Would have been a bull’s-eye on the range.

The fucker didn’t fall down.

In fact, he smiled. The bas­tard smiled! And then it dawned on Stan. Holy shit, this is one of them things Susan’s been film­ing! A…

A demon.

“There it is,” the demon said. “I can see it in your face. You know what I am, now?”

Stan nod­ded.

“And you know why I’m here?”

Again, Stan nodded.

“And, of course, you know you’re already dead.”

Stan nod­ded and dropped the pistol.

“Good,” the demon said. “Then we can begin, and take our time. You have much to atone for, Mis­ter Winchell. One of our kind hasn’t been killed in mil­len­nia. And now you will pay the price.”

His neigh­bors heard noth­ing when Stan started to scream.