Mark Chadbourn - Jack of Ravens

‘It’s not over,’ Church responded defiantly.

‘If they have the Extinction Shears, it really is. Existence will be remade in the image of the Void for all time. No ebb and flow of hope against despair, no Blue Fire to hold back the dark. We will live in the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all worlds will be the worst imaginable.’ Tom sat on the edge of the bed, staring into the middle distance.

‘The Libertarian wasn’t planning to use them straight away. Now that the Enemy has them, they can take their time. And if the Shears are as powerful as everybody says, they can’t afford to rush into using them blindly.’

‘So what are you saying — that you’re going to parachute into Vietnam?’ If I have to.’

‘I can help.’ Gabe was at the door, his cheeks flushed.

I know how you must be feeling,’ Church began, but the likelihood is that Marcy isn’t alive.’

‘You don’t know that. You never turned away when the odds were against you. You’re not doing it now. You’ve taught me a lesson there — blame yourself. I’m not going to give up on Marcy until I know for sure she’s dead.’

‘All right. What do you suggest?’

‘I got an offer from Life magazine to do some work for them. They need photographers in the war zone. Tim Page, Errol Flynn’s son, a few others — they’re doing good work, but there aren’t enough of them. Nobody wants to risk their neck.’

‘You can get accreditation for me?’ Church said.

‘As a writer, maybe. If you’re ready to take the risk.’

‘Ten thousand Americans have already died there this year,’ Church said. ‘The chances of getting out alive aren’t good.’

Tom nodded. ‘Then it’s a suicide mission. Can I have your Frank Sinatra records?’

Vietnam, 31 January 1968

A heat haze hung so heavily over the thick jungle vegetation that Vietnam appeared to be boiling in the afternoon sun. In the sweaty, oppressive atmosphere clothes became sodden in minutes and Church’s brain thudded inside his skull with every beat of his heart.

As he looked out across the treetops from the open door of the chopper, Church accepted that while he thought he had come to understand despair on the long, weary road from the Iron Age, he hadn’t really come close. Below him, soldiers were being slaughtered, blown apart, tortured, burned alive, turned into quadriplegics. Civilians were being murdered, their livelihoods destroyed. Troops turned against their own leaders. Countrymen killed each other by the thousand. And as the sickening death toll mounted day by day, and the waves of escalating violence washed out across the region, across the world, it was clear there was no point to it at all. Vietnam was a machine fuelled by human suffering and it would go on for ever if they let it.

Church knew from the hindsight of history that it wouldn’t. Instead, the Enemy would get smart and simply shift the conflict to new venues around the globe, from Africa to the Middle East, a perpetual world tour of misery.

‘Are you ready for this?’ Gabe was checking his camera equipment in the next seat.

‘As much as I’ll ever be.’

They’d only been in Vietnam a few weeks, but already Church could see the horrors they’d witnessed etched into Gabe’s once-innocent face. His fears for Marcy had turned him into a different person. No longer the laid-back hippie with the JFK fixation, he made contacts, wheeling and dealing and bribing military men jaded by the rigours of war, doing anything he could to find leads to the Libertarian’s whereabouts.

The intelligence had been sketchy, but there had been a few references to spiders in Vietcong transmissions coming out of what had been known as the Iron Triangle, a highly dangerous area of forty square miles bordered by the Saigon River to the west and the Thi Tinh River to the east.

And so Gabe had spent several hundred dollars buying them places on a small incursion into the heart of the area: just twenty-seven soldiers and a handful of men from the 1st Engineer Battalion to investigate some of the 1,000 miles of Vietcong tunnels that crisscrossed the area.

‘The mirror’s still working?’ Gabe asked quietly.

Out of sight of the soldiers in the helicopter, Church showed Gabe the artefact he had retrieved from the Market of Wishful Spirit. A bright light glowed in the centre.

The choppers came down one by one in a clearing in a dense part of the jungle that had not been razed to the ground during Operation Cedar Falls the previous year. The troops piled out, keeping their heads low beneath the whirling blades. Church and Gabe were amongst the last on the ground.

‘Dust-off in six hours!’ the captain yelled before the helicopters took off into the haze.

The captain was college-educated and had a decent nature, but couldn’t mask his belief that he was out of his depth. Like many officers, he hadn’t had the chance to build up any experience before being thrown into the thick of combat. ‘Stay close. Don’t wander off the track,’ he said to Church and Gabe. ‘This area is rife with booby traps. We’re supposed to have cleared out the VC, but nobody believes that. There’ll probably be snipers.’ He eyed his men, the majority of whom were not yet out of their teens and as green as he was. ‘We’ve been tasked to head south. There’s been some kind of vague intel that Hanoi’s planning an offensive. That’s all crap. It’s Tet. There’s a ceasefire every year so the Vietnamese can observe their holiday.’

Church kept a poker face: he couldn’t reveal that the Tet Offensive in 1968 would be the turning point in the war. The all-out military assault by the North Vietnamese Communists finally showed the American public they weren’t winning the war and brought despair to the US homeland.

‘If they’ve been told to head south, we need to go north,’ Church said to Gabe.

‘You think the Enemy knows we’re here?’

‘I don’t think the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders cares where we are any more, but their surrogates in the military and the CIA aren’t going to let anybody get too close to their operation.’

The point man led the way into the bush and the rest of the troops fanned out behind, rifles at the ready.

‘If I get out of this alive with Marcy I’m going to ask her to marry me,’ Gabe said.

Church looked away so Gabe wouldn’t see his belief that it was a futile hope.

‘Will you be the best man?’ Gabe asked.

‘Sure.’ So his answer didn’t sound too flat, he added, ‘I’d be honoured.’

It was hard going through the thick undergrowth. The heat was merciless and the tension from constantly searching the shadowy vegetation for enemy soldiers was intense.

After a long period of silent contemplation, Gabe said, ‘I still don’t get why we’re here.’

‘Tom has a theory. The earth energy has nodes where it’s stronger — Avebury and Stonehenge in England, Krakow in Poland. The Fabulous Beasts are drawn to these sites.’

‘Why? Because they feed on the energy?’

‘They feed on it … they are it, to a degree. It’s difficult to explain. There’s a powerful tradition of dragons in the Far East, linked to the lines of force that run through the Earth. Tom thinks there might be some kind of source here — a place where the Blue Fire is created, or comes into our world, or something.’

‘So it would be more powerful, or pure, and it would attract more of those things?’

Church shrugged. ‘It’s a theory.’

After a few miles they broke for a rest. The soldiers sat around smoking and talking. Church and Gabe passed the time with the captain and a couple of engineers, the so-called ‘Tunnel Rats’. They had the worst job in Vietnam, making safe the booby-trapped, vermin-infested tunnel system of the Vietcong.