Age of Voodoo Read online

“Enough,” Buckler barked. “Fun time’s over, people. From here on in we are icicles. Installation entrance lies three hundred metres inland. Penetrator, Jersey Shore, you’re on point. Whisper, you’re our tail-end Charlie. Chatter to a minimum. Let’s roll, crew.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  AN AVATAR OF DEATH

  IT WAS A low cinderblock structure, not much larger than a double-wide trailer home, situated smack dab in the middle of the island. It had a single tiny window on each side—lookout apertures—and a broad, sturdy door made of galvanised steel. The palm trees encircling it cast a rippling, dappled shade. A balmy, pleasant spot, it seemed. Nothing to be afraid of here. No reason to be on edge.

  Except that the door hung ajar and askew. The lock bore a starburst pattern of scorch marks.

  “Signs of forced entry,” Tartaglione said. He and Sampson were closest to the building.

  “That’d be the Marines,” said Buckler. “They knocked, no one answered, they busted a hole. Jersey Shore, you and Penetrator move in. Be careful.”

  At the doorway Sampson went down on one knee, carbine to his shoulder. He nosed the barrel between door and jamb and used it to widen the gap gently. Tartaglione slipped through. Sampson covered his teammate as he checked out every corner of the building’s interior.

  “Empty, Big Chief Dirty,” Tartaglione said. “But there’s something you ought to see.”

  Buckler padded across the strip of open ground between the trees and the building and disappeared inside. Moments later, his voice came over the comms: “White Feather? Bring Guardian Angel over. We need to consult her on this.”

  Lex ushered Albertine to the building. Inside, the air was oppressively thick and smelled of sea damp and machine oil. As Lex’s eyes adapted to the gloom, he made out a caged-off section containing a heavy-duty diesel-powered generator, a hulking great device that surely dated back to the installation’s original construction. Judging by the amount of dust and corrosion on it, it hadn’t been operational in decades. Opposite lay the entrance to a freight elevator. The sliding doors were stuck part-way open, revealing a profound, impenetrable blackness beyond.

  Beside the doors was a symbol. It had been finger-daubed on the wall in some kind of dark sticky substance, and it took the shape of a crude headstone—a cross perched on a pedestal, with diamond patterns adorning its upright and arms. On one side of the headstone the artist had added a miniature coffin and an uncapped bottle, on the other a skull-and-crossbones and a shovel.

  “A vévé,” said Albertine, her voice hushed and containing the faintest of tremors.

  “Yeah, thought as much,” said Buckler. “And I’ve sniffed up close and it’s painted in blood, just like it looks. The question is: which loa’s vévé is it?”

  “His. The Baron’s.”

  “Had a bad feeling you might say that.”

  “This is Baron Samedi’s realm,” Albertine said. “It has been claimed in his name.”

  “‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’”

  “That and more. You might expect to find a vévé like this marking the gatepost of a graveyard. This one is telling us that if we go any further, we’re as good as corpses.”

  There was a moment’s silence while that sank in.

  “Ho-kaaay,” said Tartaglione. “So who’s for calling it a day and heading back home?”

  The quip didn’t raise so much as a chuckle.

  “Anything we can do to fix it?” Buckler asked Albertine.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, could we just rub the vévé out? Would that maybe erase its influence?”

  “We’ve seen it now. Rubbing it out won’t rub out our memories of it. We’re already intimidated by it, as we have every right to be. And whoever put the vévé there used blood—and most likely not chicken or goat blood either.”

  “Human blood?” said Sampson, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

  Albertine nodded. “Maybe their own, maybe someone else’s. There’s only one reason a vodouisant would do such a thing, and that’s to demonstrate unswerving loyalty to the loa of death. Down below us there’s a bokor who has given himself entirely over to the Baron. He has become an agent of death, an avatar of death. He has no fear of the Baron and therefore no fear of the consequences of any of his actions. That suggests he is a very dangerous man, and probably quite mad.”

  “No shit,” said Tartaglione.

  “That accepted, is it safe to just go past it and carry on?” said Buckler.

  “It would be prudent to adopt some form of protection first,” said Albertine. “A garde. If only to bolster our mental defences. The vévé has spooked us, and fear increases one’s susceptibility to magical attack. A garde can reverse its malign influence, but I should warn you that it won’t be pleasant. You can’t ward off a blood vévé the way you can most ordinary wanga spells, with prayers and song and a dash of eucalyptus oil.”

  “You saw us putting on an ointment of angelica root and caraway just now. A Wiccan I know brewed it up for us and incanted a charm over it. Won’t that be enough to do the trick?”

  “Only vodou can resist vodou. Bring the other two in—Morgenstern and Pearce. And I’ll need to borrow your knife...”

  THE SEVEN OF them stood in a circle, their sleeves rolled up, left arms bared. Albertine had prepared a concoction in a small china bowl—a grey-brown paste made of rum, garlic powder, flakes of dried cinchona bark, ground-up mandrake root, and a pinch of dust from the floor.

  “Brick dust is preferable,” she said, “but concrete dust will do.”

  Using Buckler’s KA-BAR knife she made a small incision in her skin, just below the shoulder. She rubbed some of the paste into the wound, at the same time invoking the aid of the garde loa, the minor spirits whose role it was to watch over souls in peril.

  “I bind you into me,” she said, tying a scrap of fabric round her arm. “I seal you inside where you will be able to look out for me.”

  She went round the circle repeating the ritual for each of the Thirteeners, wiping the knife blade on a rum-soaked rag in between to sterilise it. The SEALs bore the discomfort of the cut with varying degrees of stoicism. Only Tartaglione made any noise, a comic “Ouch.” Buckler scowled at him.

  Lex, last in line, grimaced as the knife was drawn across his arm but nothing more. Pain was in the mind. Pain was only ever in the mind.

  And—it was very peculiar—the instant Albertine finished binding the wound, he felt a huge, overwhelming sense of relief. He looked at the vévé on the wall and he saw only a crude, scrawled picture. Not a forbidding emblem of doom but merely a design, something almost abstract, like a graffiti tag. Meaningless to the objective viewer. Even the nature of the substance used to draw it no longer bothered him.

  The expressions on Team Thirteen’s faces matched what he was feeling. Where they had been tense before, now they were nonchalant. Where there had been concern, now there was indifference.

  Tartaglione went up to the vévé and gave it the finger. “Superstitious fucking bullshit.” Then he crossed himself and spat on the floor.

  Buckler tried pressing the call button next to the elevator. Nothing happened.

  “Electricity’s out?” Lex suggested.

  “Shouldn’t be,” Buckler replied. “When the installation was recommissioned, they sank a geothermal vent. There’s a binary cycle power plant feeding this place a constant five kilowatt-hours of free energy per day. Chances are the elevator’s been purposely put out of action.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably to keep people like us out.” Buckler shone a conventional flashlight down the shaft. “I can see the roof of the elevator car. It’s about thirty feet down. There’s a pile of what looks like rappelling gear there. And...” He directed the flashlight beam upwards. “Yep. Rope was secured at the top of the shaft. And cut by someone. Take a gander.”

  Lex leaned in and peered up. There was an iron joist a few inches below the ceiling of the shaft. From i
t a short piece of rope dangled, the loose end neatly severed.

  “Adds weight to the ‘intruders not welcome’ theory,” he said. “No cables or hoist mechanism, so I presume the elevator’s hydraulic.”

  “You presume correctly,” said Buckler. “Keeps the profile of this building low. Also, better from a security standpoint. Makes the elevator easier to disable from downstairs, not so easy to sabotage from up here.”

  “No chance of getting it going from up here, either. Is there any other way in? An external air vent of some kind?”

  “None you can fit a body through.”

  “No backdoor emergency exit?”

  “Nothing. This elevator’s it, sole point of access and egress. So we’ve no alternative but to rappel, like the Marines did.”

  Pearce tossed a rope over the joist and hitched it tight. He tested the knot with a tug, then let the remaining length drop to the elevator car roof. He wound the rope around one thigh and swung out into the shaft.

  “Careful now, Whisper,” said Buckler.

  Pearce just gave his CO a look and dropped out of sight.

  Moments later, he supplied a sitrep. “Peachy.”

  Tartaglione descended next, followed by Buckler, then Sampson.

  “Your turn,” Morganstern said to Albertine. “Ever done anything like this before?”

  Albertine shook her head.

  “Then don’t copy those guys, sliding down like that. That’s just showing off. Loop the slack once around your waist, like so, then walk yourself down backwards, feet against the side, paying out the rope as you go. Don’t worry about falling. You won’t, and even if you do, it’s not far and someone’s bound to catch you. Are you listening, team?”

  “Roger that,” said Buckler. “I’ll be keeping the rope steady at this end, Guardian Angel. You can do this. Walk in the park.”

  Albertine eased herself down the elevator shaft, heeding Morgenstern’s advice to the letter. It was slow and painstaking, and Lex was on tenterhooks throughout, until he heard confirmation from Buckler that she’d made it safe and sound to the bottom.

  He indicated to Morgenstern that she should go next. “Lady SEALs first.”

  “Honorary SEAL,” she corrected. “It’s still the only branch of the US Armed Services that doesn’t accept women. I used to be in the Navy’s Hospital Corps, a medic, but I’ve been with Thirteen long enough that the others hardly remember that any more. They treat me like just another shooter, just one of the guys.”

  “Bet there’s an interesting story attached to how you came to join.”

  “You bet right. There is for all of us. But we don’t have time for that right now.”

  “Not even the abridged version?”

  “Okay then. The Cliffs Notes guide to Team Thirteen. For one reason or another, we’ve all got a reputation for bad luck. You know how it is with people in the military. Things go south for you on a few missions in a row, rightly or wrongly you get singled out, earn a rep as a Jonah, and it sticks.”

  “So they bundle you all together in the same unit...”

  “Figuring, ‘What the hell, least they can do is screw things up for each other and not for the rest of us.’”

  “Nice.”

  “Isn’t it just?”

  With that, Morgenstern leapt into the shaft and slithered down.

  Lex took a last look around the cinderblock building. The raw masonry of the walls, the defunct museum-piece generator with its bulky dials and gauges, the bars of dusty sunshine slanting in through the windows. He had a hunch he wasn’t going to be above ground again for a good long while. He savoured this final glimpse of daylight, this final breath of fresh air.

  “White Feather, something keeping you?” Buckler demanded over the comms.

  “Coming.”

  Lex grabbed the rope and scissored his legs around it like a firefighter descending a pole. He began to lower himself hand over hand. Simply sliding would have shredded his palms to pieces. He didn’t have gloves on like the Thirteeners did.

  Above him he heard a faint but distinct creak. The rope gave a sudden sharp lurch. He froze. There was a pattering sound, granules of something crumbling and falling.

  “Hey. What was that?” Buckler said. “What’s going on up there?”

  A flashlight beam probed upwards. Lex shut his eyes as it passed over his face, and opened them again as it continued above his head.

  He heard a second creak, this one louder, and in the beam of light he saw the joist shift downwards a fraction. The rope lurched again.

  “It’s coming loose,” he said. “It’s going to—”

  And it did.

  And so did Lex.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  COLONEL GONZALEZ

  PLUNGING THROUGH BLACKNESS.

  He didn’t have far to drop. Ten, maybe twelve feet.

  But he had no means of gauging exactly where the elevator car roof lay. He let himself go limp, but the impact, when it came, was still a bludgeoning, painful shock.

  The joist was plummeting after him. He rolled blindly out of its path, and it pounded, end first, into the elevator car. A tremendous, thunderous clang. The car shuddered. Someone screamed.

  Lex had felt the joist whistle past his foot, missing by millimetres.

  There was a second clang, duller than the first, as the joist keeled over, fetching up at an angle, its upper end coming to rest against the side of the shaft.

  Dust and debris rained down in its wake. People choked and spluttered.

  Buckler: “Are we all okay? Who’s hurt? Anybody hurt?”

  His flashlight swept a hazy glow over everyone’s faces. He got nods, grim grins. Lex’s shouted warning had at least given Team Thirteen and Albertine time to leap to the edges of the elevator car, so that neither he nor the joist crash-landed on any of them.

  The flashlight beam finally found Lex, crouched in a corner.

  “What the hell did you just do?” Buckler demanded.

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking.” Lex picked himself up, dusted himself off. His back and shoulders ached. “No bones broken. Haven’t got a bloody great piece of iron sticking out of me.”

  “You pulled half the building down on top of us.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. The joist must have been loosened from its setting, what with the weight of all of you hanging off it one after another. I was the final straw. That or...” He snatched the flashlight from Buckler and trained it upwards. “Those look like chisel marks to anyone?” Two rectangular slots could be made out where the ends of the joist had been lodged. The concrete around each bore signs of having been chipped away at, especially underneath. “Booby-trapped. Rigged to give way if anybody tried to do what we did. They knew a second team might be coming in after the Marines. They were prepared for us.”

  “How do we know it’s not just natural erosion?” said Buckler. “That hunk of metal’s been stuck up there for decades. Sea air eats concrete and cement for breakfast, and maintenance and upkeep hasn’t been a high priority around here.”

  “Scared to admit you might have screwed up? Face facts, great and mighty Lieutenant Buckler. You should have inspected the joist more carefully before Pearce attached the rope.”

  “This isn’t on me.”

  “Well, who else is it on?” Lex said hotly. “Definitely not me, Yet you instantly tried to blame me for it. You’ve been ragging on me from the start. According to you I can’t do anything right. I’m just a millstone to the whole mission, a stupid Limey blundering around getting in everyone’s way.”

  “Hey, if the shoe fits...”

  “You smug git. I could have been crippled just now, or worse. Any one of us could. All you had to do was be a little less gung-ho, a little more cautious. And afterwards your first reaction was to find a scapegoat to deflect the guilt onto. Call yourself a leader? A leader leads, he doesn’t pass the buck.”

  “That’s enough, now.”

  “Is it? Is it, Buckler?”

&
nbsp; “Get out of my face, Dove.”

  Lex did the opposite, thrusting himself up closer to the SEAL commander. “Make me.”

  “You’re pissed, I get it,” Buckler said. “Near-death experience, yadda yadda. But if you do not back the fuck down on the count of three, this is going to get ugly.”

  “Ugly?” Lex retorted. “You’ve never seen ugly.”

  “Please. Both of you.” Albertine interposed herself between them, one hand on Lex’s chest, the other on Buckler’s. “For one thing, indoor voices. Shouting at each other isn’t doing anything except possibly giving away the fact that we’re here. Keep it down. And for another thing, while I’m sure all this posturing is good for your egos, it’s not helping. An accident happened. We’re alive, we’re unhurt. Let’s just be grateful for that and move on.”

  The flashlight, shining up from below between the two men, lent their features a wild, hectic air. They glared at each other, sweaty, dusty, nostrils flared. It could easily have degenerated into a brawl. Lex was conscious of his responsibility to the mission, his duty of care to Albertine. At the same time, the urge—the need—to plant a punch in Buckler’s face was almost too great to overcome. There was only so much crap a man could put up with, only so much provocation he could take.

  Lex was, however, above all else a professional. He reined in his temper. Bit back down the anger and the injured pride.

  “This isn’t over,” he said. “But it can wait.”

  “Too right it isn’t over,” Buckler replied. “I’m watching you.” He forked an index and middle finger at his own eyes, then at Lex. “Like a goddamn hawk. Try anything dumb, put my or my shooters’ lives at risk again, and I will come down on you so hard you’ll think Armageddon itself has arrived.”

  He pushed himself away from the shaft wall, shoulder-butting Lex aside.

  “We can still get back up using ropes if we have to,” he said briskly. “Someone’ll have to climb, but with all those cross braces and guide rails lining the shaft, it’s doable. What would be better is if we can get the elevator restarted, which we should be able to do once we’re in the installation. There’s an access hatch in the top of this thing. Marines must have used it, and that’s our way down too.”