Operation: Mongolia

- 5 -

Banks took the lead as they headed north away from the monastery and, heeding the monks’ advice, attempted to keep where possible to rockier ground. Hynd came forward to join him, offering him a smoke.

“You really think it was a warning, Cap?” the sergeant said.

“I can’t see how it could be anything else, do you?” Banks replied. “It was a fine piece of showmanship, I’ll give them that.”

“But big electric worms? In the desert? It’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? The spice must flow and all that crap?”

Banks laughed.

“You mean like big bugs in the arctic, giant snakes in the Amazon, big fucking spiders in Syria… that kind of far-fetched?”

Hynd laughed.

“Fair point. So the water—the rain—is bringing them up to the surface?”

“Aye, at least I think that’s what they wanted to tell us. That and keep to rocky ground. Keep an eye on yon camel, will you, Sarge? It seems to ken when there’s trouble about.”

“There’s one other thing, Cap,” Hynd said. “Young Wilkins is struggling. He’ll not admit it but that bad leg is giving him gip—you can see it in his face and his limp’s getting worse.”

Banks looked across the plain to where another outcrop sat squat on the horizon.

“Two more hours, then it’ll be getting dark anyway and we’ll camp down over there for the night. Keep an eye on the lad and if it looks to be getting too bad, we’ll get him up on the camel.”

The afternoon passed uneventfully. The professor fell asleep on the camel, Wiggins kept Davies and the young doctor Reid amused with stories, some taller than others, of the squad’s previous missions. Banks kept an eye on both the camel and young private Wilkins, who was sweating profusely and now had a distinctly pronounced limp.

“I’m okay for a few more miles yet, Cap,” he said when Banks dropped back to check on him.

“Good man,” Banks replied. “But don’t overdo it and that’s a bloody order, do you hear me?”

Banks knew that the lad, like any member of the squad, was trained to suck up discomfort and work through it but this wasn’t a combat situation. If it came to it, he’d do as he said, cut the lad some slack and allow him a rest on the camel, but it looked like they were going to reach the outcrop before any such respite would be needed.

As they approached their goal, Banks saw that this latest lump of rock was just that—there was no sign of any habitation although as they got closer still, he saw there were remnants of campfires on some of the lower ledges, which he took as a good sign.

If the locals think it’s safe, it’s good enough for me.

He had Wiggins and Davies set up camp on the largest, flattest of the ledges, not bothering to look for an overhang. He’d deal with more rain if any showed up but for now the sky was completely clear, stars beginning to show as the sun went down in the golden west. The water they carried tasted flat and warm after the liquid they’d been given in the monastery, and their field rations were no match for scented rice and fresh berries but the monks hadn’t had coffee and for Banks that trumped just about everything else. As the last of the sun went out of the sky and full dark descended, the squad were sitting around a campfire with a mug each, sharing smokes.

“Prof,” Wiggins said, “you’re the man with experience in these parts. What’s with the big red worms?”

Gillings shrugged.

“I only know what you know.”

“No traveler’s stories? No local legends?”

“Apart from the two words we all heard, words I first heard from a badly frightened man, I know nothing. I’m a paleontologist, not an anthropologist.”

“So, that’s a no then?” Wiggins said, grinning. “Not even a theory?”

“Oh, I’ll idly speculate all you want, especially back home with some whisky inside me, but I saw just what we all saw. They look like big, red, overfed earthworms, with teeth. Whether they’re carnivorous or not remains to be proven but judging by the fate of the other camel, I think we have to assume that they are meat eaters.

“With regard to what they are, where they came from… Donnie and I had a closer look than you at the carvings in the top room. That frieze on the back wall showed what I presume was the worms swarming but I have no idea if that’s something that’s ever actually happened or whether it was purely allegorical.”

The younger man piped up.

“Aye, and the ones in the carvings looked more like dragons than those thick red squirmy things we saw.”

Wiggins laughed.

“Thick red squirmy things? That’s the scientific term for them, is it?”

“I don’t know how we’d go about classifying them without a closer look,” Gillings said. “They might be little more than a mouth and an arse, or they might be vertebrates, some kind of legless lizard. We’d have to get up close to one to find out for sure.”

“Aye, well good luck with that,” Wiggins replied.

The professor laughed in reply.

“It’s not something I’ve got in my immediate plans.” He turned to Banks. “How far do you think we came today?”

“Twenty-five miles at a guess. I’ll check later with the GPS. If we get an early enough start in the morning, we should manage to get to the pickup point by this time tomorrow. It’ll be a fair hike, so I suggest we all rest up as much as we can.”

He addressed the squad.

“Wilkins, you take first watch, a two-hour stint then get your head down, that’s an order. Then it’ll be Davies, Wiggins, the sarge, and then I’ll take the early shift and kick all your arses out of bed in the morning.”

For most of the first watch, they were all still awake, sitting around the fire and trying to come up with a coherent explanation for what they’d seen in the monastery.

“It was all some kind of magic trick—ABRACADABRA, look at the wee white rabbit I’ve had hidden up my jacksie—that kind of shite,” Wiggins said.

“If it was, it was the best one I’ve ever seen,” Professor Gillings replied. “I’ll agree it was certainly staged like one, a bloody good show as you said earlier, but I’m pretty sure those worms were real. Did it look like a hologram to you? And how in God’s name would a bunch of monks in a remote desert monastery get hold of hologram technology in the first place? No, I prefer to use Occam’s Razor—the simplest solution is the first one to consider and given what happened to Donnie’s camel, I’d say we have to assume it was all too real.”

The conversation went on for a while but it kept coming back to the same simple fact: everyone agreed that what they’d been shown was a warning and one that they should take seriously.

One by one, they drifted away to find a spot where they might if not sleep at least rest. By the time Davies replaced Wilkins, Banks was the last man sitting by the fire.

He dampened it down with the dregs of his coffee and flicked the butt of a last cigarette out over the ledge of the outcrop. He retrieved his sleeping bag from his kit, wandering to the south away from the others mainly to try to get out of range of the stink of the camel.

He chose a spot near the edge of the ledge with an open view along the previous day’s route and tried to pick out the monastery on the horizon but there was only darkness. The stars were obscured now by wispy fast-moving clouds that he guessed must be the last remnants of the storm. He checked the GPS to confirm what he already knew—they had a long walk ahead of them again on the morrow if they were to reach the extraction point by nightfall. He considered placing a call with the colonel but knew one wasn’t expected until they were ready for pickup and put the phone away inside his jacket before lying down on top of his sleeping back, gazing out over the desert. There was nothing to see but gray and black shifting shadows and he fell asleep to visions of squirming red, flashing blue, and golden wire all shifting and dancing behind his eyelids.

He woke some time later to the sound of raindrops pattering heavily on his clothes and came fully awake when one struck his forehead above his eyes. He checked his watch—not quite 4 a.m. so dawn was still some way off. The rain wasn’t heavy, more of a constant drip, but he noticed it had been enough to wake everyone from their sleep apart from Hynd, who was upright and standing guard at the edge of the ledge, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

“Wiggo, stoke the fire and get a brew on,” Banks said, catching the corporal in the act of lighting his own first smoke of the day. “Sarge, you’re with me. Let’s get up someplace high and scope out the day’s walk if we can.”

It didn’t take them long to scale the outcrop and stand facing north but even in that short time, the patter of raindrops had become steadier and more persistent. Banks’ heart sank at the sight as they looked out over the desert. The plain below them was dark and in shadow for the most part but although it was not yet dawn, it was plain to see that there were obstacles in their path if they wanted to head north. Huge swathes of ground had blue electric flashes running in sheets across the sands. Before yesterday, he might have imagined it to be a natural phenomenon, some product of the previous day’s storm, but having seen the writhing worms in the monastery, Banks feared that this was exactly what the monks had been warning them of.

“Bugger me, Cap,” Hynd said. “How do we make our way through that?”

Banks kept his gaze on the plain, trying to visualize a possible route.

“Bloody carefully. We stay on the rocky bits if we can,” he replied after a while. “And as Wiggo would say, we beware of the moors. We have no idea how many of the buggers there are or where they are or even whether they’re interested in us. All we can do is start walking and hope that this drizzle eases off and calms things down a tad.”