Reign of Evil

CHAPTER 45

Walker slid into a ditch along with YaYa and Hoover. He breathed heavily through his mouth, trying his best to ignore the cold, wet mud. YaYa held the dog down as they all peered over the edge. At street level, they could see the sticks strewn across the road that were once the Tuatha. The cargo truck had hit it going fifty at least, exploding it into tinder.

But what of the Tuatha? Did the impact of a truck carrying a heavy cargo on a long flatbed kill it? Or even injure it?

Walker had his answer right away.

The driver climbed out of the cab and walked to the front of his truck. He was tall and broad shouldered with a gut that told of a lifetime of off-duty beers and taking up space in pubs from here to London. He held a hand on his head as he stared at the sticks, then looked at the front of his truck. From Walker’s vantage it didn’t seem to have done any damage. But he doubted the trucker cared. At this point, he probably thought he had been seeing things, such as a human-shaped stick man running across the road.

What the man couldn’t see was what was happening beneath the truck—a single stick began to drag itself into the brush on the other side of the road.

Hoover saw it and began to growl, but YaYa hushed him. But the man had heard. He turned to the sound, but the SEALs ducked as low beneath the lip of the ditch as they could.

They heard the man begin to walk in their direction, the heels of his boots clomping on the pavement. Walker reached toward the 9mm pistol under his left arm, wondering what he was going to do once the man saw them. It wasn’t like they were chartered to kill random civilians, nor did he want to.

Holmes spoke over the MBITR. “Walker, what’s your status?”

He didn’t dare speak. The man was almost upon them.

Then a horn honked. Then another. It looked like the local Bratton townsfolk didn’t appreciate a truck stopping in the middle of the road.

The footsteps stopped as the honking increased.

“All right, all right,” he hollered. Then in a softer voice he added, “Bloody eyes are seeing things.”

The restless locals stopped honking. His footsteps receded, then were stopped by the sound of the truck door closing. Soon the truck had pulled away, followed by the seven cars that had stacked up behind it.

Holmes’s voice was filled with stress. “Walker, report!”

“Think it’s on the move again. Stand by.”

YaYa pointed and Hoover took off across the road. The SEALs waited for a car to pass, then followed. Soon they were running across a field. Hoover was sprinting straight for a stick figure. It looked different from the other. Probably because of the shape of the sticks and wood that was available. But Walker had no doubt that it was the same creature.

“Got it. Heading west northwest.”

YaYa pulled ahead as Walker slowed, his legs becoming leaden. Gone were his stress fractures that had plagued him in BUD/S, but the sprinting was tiring him out. But not YaYa, who was an ultramarathoner. He could run for days.

Holmes spoke. “We think it’s heading toward Ian.”

“That far?” Walker figured it would take them hours to run that far. Correction. It would take YaYa hours. It would take Walker days.

“Break off and meet us in Westbury.”

“Dressed like this?”

“Make it happen.”

Walker slowed to a walk. YaYa did as well and called Hoover through his own MBITR connection. The dog slowed but kept going. YaYa called in a stern voice and the dog stopped. She turned and loped back with a disappointed look on her face. Not that she was disappointed she couldn’t keep going, but that her human team members were so damn slow. If the dog could shake her head in exasperation she would have.

YaYa found a minivan parked on the side of the road in front of a nineteenth-century stone house. He checked the driver’s side door. It was unlocked. Although it would have been nice if the keys had been inside, they weren’t that lucky. But it was an older model and it wasn’t long before he’d hot-wired the ignition and they were backtracking to where the others waited with the witch in a copse. It was the farthest they had dared go. After those trees were open fields with homes and travel trailers. None of them thought that they’d go unnoticed.

The three other SEALs got in after the witch was loaded into the back.

Walker wondered if Holmes had spoken to Ian on his private command channel. “Any word from Section 9?”

“Not a one.”

“We going there?”

“Only place to go.” Holmes glanced at Laws. “He thinks that’s where it’s heading.”

Laws shrugged slightly. “Only reasonable place to go.”

Preeti called and Holmes automatically put it on the squad frequency. The first thing she said was, “The Tuatha. Don’t trust it.”

“Too late,” Holmes said. “Tell us what you know.”

“The Tuatha wasn’t just any faerie. It was perhaps the most powerful of them all.”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

Preeti began to recount her research, but Holmes soon cut her off. “Get to the point, Preeti.”

“I think the Tuatha that the Bohemian Grove had taken and used is none other than Merlyn the Magician.”

“Seriously?”

“Absolutely. Let me explain. In the body of English literature Merlyn appears more than six hundred times spanning fifteen hundred years.”

Yank interrupted, “But it’s fiction.”

“Very true. But there’s a tradition in England, as there is in most countries, to use folklore as the basis for literature. The continued incarnations of this historical figure set a pattern.”

“Couldn’t they all be referencing the original source?” Walker asked.

“They could, but that wouldn’t explain some of the divergence. Especially his disappearance from English literature and his appearance in German literature in the early 1800s.”

Laws shook his head. “Wasn’t he just the creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, though? Merlyn is and has always been a literary figure.”

“Nope. Geoffrey just associated him with Uther Pendragon and gave him credit for moving the stones that make up Stonehenge. And it was Sir Thomas Malory who first paired Merlyn with King Arthur. What I’m talking about is a series of Middle Welsh poems which were later retold in the Black Book of Carmarthen and which refer to Merlyn and his relationship with Arthur centuries before Malory or Geoffrey.

“His original name was Myrddin and first came to light while he was living in Caer-fyrddin, or Carmarthen, which stakes its claim as the oldest established town in Wales. Caer means ‘Fort’ and fryddin is believed to be a version of ‘Myrddin,’ meaning ‘Fort of Merlyn.’ Modern scholars agree that the name is eponymous to the town—that the town derived its name from ‘Myrddin’—but doubt that Myrddin existed prior to the town, despite what medieval scholarly texts assert the same.”

“So modern scholars doubt what scholars closer to the era believed?” Laws asked.

“Exactly. These same modern scholars associate Myrddin with Lailoken, who was a sixth-century prophetic wild man mystic.”

“But you disagree.”

“There are Roman texts identifying Myrddin as a guide in the area circa AD 27.”

Walker could tell by his expression that Holmes was getting impatient. “And this is significant how?”

“Camarthen wasn’t founded until it became a defensive fortress in AD 75. Forty-eight years later.”

Holmes’s eyes lit up. “Now you have my attention.”

“The rest is supposition, with me asking myself how a being could exist over the span of at least two thousand years. And that was as—”

“A Tuatha Dé Dannan jumping from host to host,” Holmes finished.

“But let me tell you the best part.”

“Go ahead.”

“Section 9 has a record from 1909 of killing a man known as Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual, who was a Spanish pianist and composer working and living in London. He was identified as being part of a plot to kill Edward the Seventh, son of Queen Victoria. He’d created an opera during which assassins associated with the Golden Dawn were going to kill the King by flooding his private box with acid vapors.”

“The Golden Dawn are of German origin,” Laws interjected. “They’re organizationally descended from Rosicrucians.”

“Isn’t the Bohemian Lodge tied to the Golden Dawn?” YaYa asked.

Holmes waved them silent. “I don’t get it.”

“The opera to be performed that night was called Merlyn.”

The inside of the van was silent for a few moments. “You have a lot more, don’t you?” Holmes asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“So tell me again why we need to know this.”

“It’s simple. If Merlyn, or Myrddin, is a Tuatha, and he had a close relationship with King Arthur in the past, where do you think he’d most like to be?”

“By Arthur’s side, especially if there’s to be the dawn of an Arthurian hegemony.”

Laws snapped his fingers. “And we helped him get here. My guess is that the Golden Dawn sold, traded, or gave the Tuatha to the Bohemian Grove, probably shortly after their failed attempt on the King’s life. The people of the Bohemian Grove have been protecting their investment with golems since then, knowing how valuable the Tuatha’s life force is. Even if the Tuatha had wanted to return to its home, it couldn’t have, not with the protective measures in place, such as the tattoos and magic.”

Walker nodded. “Then came SEAL Team 666. Do you think it was that well planned? Was Jen invited to Stonehenge on the Winter Solstice to set this chain of events in motion?”

Yank whispered, “Feels like Mexico City all over again.”

Laws put a hand on Walker’s shoulder. “We’ll never know, Walker. I doubt their information is that good, but we can’t rule it out. Remember, our information and existence is special-access code word.”

Sassy Moore moaned as she sat up. “So what you’re saying is that we’re all a bunch of chumps? And look at me. When the Red Grove couldn’t get him from us, the Tuatha killed its host so I’d be forced to take it inside me, in order for me to personally escort it to the mound.” She closed her eyes and held her head. “I felt the surge of power when it touched the mound. Like a charging system. It went from weak to full charge in a second. I didn’t stand a chance.”

Preeti interrupted, “I heard what she said. Listen, there’s one last thing. Cadbury Castle was the home of King Arthur and is largely believed to be Camelot. If King Arthur is going to rule England, then—”

“It’s going to be from Camelot.” Holmes glanced at the others inside the van. “Any news on Ian?”

“We’re monitoring reports of gunfire and explosions in the area. Locals are calling the police, but their calls are going ignored.”

“Are they just not answering?” Walker asked.

“Yep. Ringing off the hook.”

Laws turned thoughtful. “So the calls could have been hijacked, the police might not be in their office, or they might be intentionally not answering.”

“Could be any one of those. We have no way of knowing.”

“The roadblocks have also been removed,” Preeti added.

“Maybe that means they needed the men to fight against Ian and his Marines.” Holmes chewed on his lip for a moment. “Keep monitoring local traffic referencing Glastonbury Tor and surrounds.” Holmes paused, then added, “You might want to send a warning through Ian’s contacts with MI5 and the Home Office. If this thing gets out of hand, the Queen might need to be evacuated.”

Silence hugged the line for a few moments. “It’s come to that?”

“Yeah,” Holmes said. “I’m afraid so.”

“Okay. Roger. And, boys?”

They all answered, “Yes?”

“Be careful, please.”

No one said a word. They didn’t have to. Preeti’s voice warmed them. Not only was it hers, but it was also that of their mothers, dead or alive, their wives and lovers, dead or alive, and every other woman who’d ever showed concern for them.

Be careful, please.