“It won’t come to that. Harcourt has been very considerate of our feelings,” Church said dryly. “He’s using one of the spare offices and has said, many times, that he will work with us. He didn’t ask for this assignment and I believe he feels embarrassed. It’s possible he even resents being put in this position.”
I nodded. Nobody was winning right now. I said, “You’re old friends with Bolton?”
Church took a moment. “We have worked together in a number of cases that ended satisfactorily.”
“Wow, you couldn’t have been less enthusiastic if you were actually asleep. Why? What have you got against Bolton?”
“Against him? Nothing.”
“But—?” I prompted.
“Captain, this isn’t high school. It’s not required that everyone in our line of work be close friends or confidants. It is enough that Harcourt and I have found a certain rhythm for effective collaboration. He has his way of getting things done and it works for him.”
There was a lot left unsaid and I could read a bit between the lines, but it wasn’t the right moment for a confessional conversation. Not that I thought my chances of prying details out of Church were any good.
“For now,” he said, “please understand that I am not running the ISIL investigation. That is entirely under the directorship of Harcourt Bolton. The president has asked me to finalize our official report on Gateway and then to focus on another matter.”
“Which is what? Some kid stealing lunch money?”
He smiled thinly. “Gateway first.”
“Sure. Fine. Let’s do that. Because as we all know, a pile of rubble is far more important than the threat of a global terrorist organization.” When he made no comment I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes like a Valley Girl. “Where do you want to start?” I asked quietly. Almost demurely, damn it.
“We need to understand what happened down there, and there are a few factors to consider. You described an underground city as well as some of the other elements, notably the oversized albino penguins.”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that there is some precedent to some of what you described?”
I stiffened. “What are you talking about? What kind of precedent?”
Mr. Church said, “Certain elements of your account — and those of your team — parallel elements of a story that is very popular among devotees of a certain kind of pulp horror fiction. Have you ever heard of, or possibly read, the short novel At the Mountains of Madness by the writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft?”
“Sure, I heard of Lovecraft, but I don’t read much horror. Never read that book. Was there a movie?”
“The novel was written in 1931 and published in 1936 in a pulp magazine called Astounding Stories. It was very popular and has been reprinted in book, e-book, and audio form many times since. Circe tells me that the story helped popularize the concept of ‘ancient astronauts’ as well as Antarctica’s place in that cycle of myths.”
I lunged at that. “Well, maybe they’re not myths. We saw that city, and, let’s face it, we’re not exactly as skeptical of little green men in spaceships as we used to be.” I gave him a hard look. “Are we?”
I wasn’t making a joke.
A few years ago we in the DMS had been forced to adjust our thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We no longer had the luxury of being knee-jerk skeptics. Not anymore. Church and I both knew that our world had become substantially larger during the Majestic Black Book case. We’d stumbled onto a covert arms race between a secret cabal within our defense department called Majestic Three and their opposite numbers in China, North Korea, and Russia. They were all trying to reverse engineer exotic technologies from crashed vehicles. And by “vehicles,” I’m not talking about anything with a local license plate. Start with Roswell and work from there and you’ll climb into the same boat. Majestic Three, or M3 as they were more commonly known, were so far off the radar that even the DMS thought they were only some kind of pop culture conspiracy myth.
Not so much a myth, as it turned out.
The three “governors” of M3 were top-grade scientists who were preparing to launch a fleet of triangle-winged super-speed T-craft that they wanted to use to start, and win, a war with the other superpowers. They had lots of weird science culled from those crashed ships, and it gave them a real edge for a while. Echo Team went up against M3’s own special ops guys, a group of — no joke — men in black. Called themselves the “Closers,” and they had all sorts of nasty gadgets including these nifty little microwave pulse pistols. Not exactly rayguns but close enough.
The kicker was that the original owners of that tech — who we never got to actually see — made it clear that they wanted their toys back. Specifically they wanted the design science for the T-craft, which was all kept in a special handwritten journal. The Majestic Black Book. The governors of M3 kept that book well protected, and a lot of the hard science was recorded only in it. They didn’t trust the security of computers, even those that weren’t attached to landlines or Wi-Fi.
E.T. and his buddies bullied us into recovering the Black Book. We did, and the original was turned over. I wasn’t there for that part of the job. I’d taken some gunshot wounds during the big, messy finale. By the time I got out of the hospital the Majestic Black Book case was over. Since then none of us have heard a peep from anyone who doesn’t have “Earth” as point of origin on his passport.
Now… there was this crazy stuff in Antarctica.
Church sighed. “It’s a troubling matter.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you could say that. And you weren’t attacked by a mutant penguin. Have you seen Bunny’s face?”
“I have.”
“Speaking of Bunny… where is he? Where’s Top? Where’s everybody?”
“Most of our teams are out on assignment. You can talk over the specifics with Harcourt later. As for First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit, they are on light duty. I have them out collecting evidence from the offices of the scientists who were killed down at Gateway.”
“They okay?”
Church made one of his rare jokes. “Shaken, not stirred.”
I laughed louder than the joke deserved. Ghost woke up again, looked around, saw there was nothing to eat or bite, farted very loudly, and went back to sleep. Church, without comment, went and opened a window. The sea air was nice. Bastion jumped off his chair, climbed up to the windowsill, and sat there watching the pelicans.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The blast picked Bunny and Top up like the hand of a fiery giant and slammed them into the opposite wall. The force hit the man in the dark suit, too, but he was already falling, struck at the same instant by bullets fired from both DMS agents’ guns. Everyone went down. The gunman toppled backward through the doorway, but Top and Bunny slammed into the wall and then crashed to the floor.
It was all very fast, very noisy, and very painful.
Top coughed and tried to blink his eyes free. His gun was gone and he began frantically slapping the floor to find it. Found it under a piece of burning wallpaper, swatted the flames away, grabbed the gun, fumbled it back into his hands. All in a wild moment while his brain tried to process what was happening. The hall was filled with choking dust and burning rubble. The heat was immense and Top shimmied away from the flames that were spreading across the far wall.
A shape rose in the gloom. Massive and hunched, and it took Top’s dazed brain a second to realize that it was Bunny, staggering to his feet, his gun clutched in his fist, blood streaming down his face from between ruptured stitches.