“I would suggest waiting until morning to check them out,” Barb said. “Have they been evacuated?”
“I’m not sure,” Graham admitted. “And I need some sleep, too. I’ll get somebody to run up a list overnight. Get some sleep. We’ll check it out in the morning.”
“We have work to do,” Barb said as they walked to the commo trailer.
She was tired and grouchy. Exhausted as she was when she went to bed, she had slept fitfully, her sleep constantly eroded by nightmares. There was the repetitive one, the one that she and Janea had identified as a Sending, of being held in a dark place. But she also woke up, more than once, with dreams that were memories of battling the hundreds of Hunters of the Dark. And she still suffered from nightmares of the battle against Almadu. They had eventually all rolled together.
She was starting to realize that PTSD really sucked and that she was, unfortunately, susceptible to it. Which meant she was going to have to find a PTSD therapist who either was already briefed in on Special Circumstance or who could actually be convinced she wasn’t totally crazy.
And now, instead of going and finding the Gar, they had to go to a videoconference.
“This operation has gotten huge,” Graham said. “Part of the work is coordination. You have to have it. And you two are the on-site SC experts.”
“This is usually the sort of thing that Germaine handles,” Janea said. “I can be…less than politic.”
“I already had a brief meeting setting it up with the aides of all the bosses that are going to be in the conference,” Graham said, waving to a golf cart. “I just pointed out that you ladies were the equivalent of mystical shooters and that they should expect shooter attitude.”
“I think I’m a bit more polite than that,” Barb said. “But I’ll admit I’m not at my best at the moment. Who’s going to be in the conference?”
“You don’t want to know,” Graham said, swallowing.
While the team had been in the cave, the operational tempo in the area had picked up. Goin had the look of a military post, with soldiers moving everywhere and several mobile command posts set up. Graham led them to a full-sized trailer with about a dozen antennas on top, and opened the personnel door.
The interior was lined by plasma screens, with workstations lining both sides. And it was occupied by only one technician.
“Bobby, we nearly up?”
“We’re going live in about thirty,” the technician said, waving to a set of three chairs. “Left side of the trailer and end. There’s a couple of minor players I’m having to shift to right, so if you have to look at them, you’ll have to spin around and everybody will be looking at the back of your head.” He handed Barb and Janea headsets and pointed to the chairs. “The cameras have pretty fair depth of field, but try not to move around a lot. If you’re wondering what you’re looking like, these are you,” he added, pointing to two small monitors at the work station.
Barb looked at the monitor and saw a very wan version of her normal self.
“I should have done my makeup better,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at the row of monitors and shook her head again. “I can’t see most of these.”
“Center will be NSA,” Bobby said. “Right FBI, left Homeland. Spreads out from there. You can back the chair up if you need to look far to the side. Just try to stay in front of the camera. And we’re going live in five…three…two…”
“NSA?” Janea said as the monitors went from color panels to video.
“National Security Advisor,” Barb said, waving at the middle-aged man in the center screen.
Each of the screens had a tag on it so that the unfamiliar knew who they were dealing with. There was a name, but the title was always, unfortunately, an acronym, many of which she had a hard time working out.
NSA, FBID, HS, NORTHCOM, NGB, ARNGT, and on and on.
Barb spun briefly in place to look over her shoulder, and shook her head. Augustus was on one of the rear panels with the acronym USEURSCCOM under him. He smiled and nodded with a glimmer of humor in his eye. It was the first trace of humor she’d ever seen in him, and she suddenly realized that he must have a very nasty sense of humor.
“Odin’s missing eye,” Janea whispered.
“Uh, Janea,” Graham said, wincing. “We’re live.”
“I’ll be chairing this conference,” the National Security Advisor said. “If you wish to make a comment, press the alert button and I’ll bring you in. Review of the threat. As of this morning, we have the report from the SC Onsite Team that they encountered in excess of fifty of the…‘Hunters in the Dark’ during their penetration of the Goin cave system. This is in addition to previously encountering and dispatching a…screw-ganon?”
“ Skru-gnon,” Janea said. “Child of Foulness.”
“A skru-gnon in the first insertion, and in excess of twenty Hunters and a Child in the encounter at the Boone residence,” the NSA said. “Mrs. Everette, is there any way to get any sort of feel for the actual threat numbers?”
“No, sir,” Barb said, taking a sip of coffee. “The caves are just chaotic and you run into what you run into. My best guess is that we ran into only a fraction of the total. Every time we’ve gone deeper into the caves, we’ve run into more.”
“General Cable,” he said. “Any input?”
“No, sir,” the NORTHCOM commander said. “If we could figure out how many people there were in caves, it would make Afghanistan a lot easier. Tactically, the only choice on the cave end is to send in a large number of shooters with…SC support, and comb them out. Frankly, I’d be surprised if we get them all. This may be an ongoing issue.”
“We need a better answer,” the NSA said.
Janea sighed and pressed her button.
“Ms…Grisham?”
“Please use my goddess name of Janea,” Janea said. “It’s a point of protocol, not a bitch. You would not call a Catholic nun by her given name. It’s the same with a priestess. All of the information we have is from prewritten records, oral histories passed down from when humans were hunter-gatherers. So our actual information on the Old Ones is very sketchy. But the information that we have gleaned is that, even after the war against the Old Ones had been won, there were many Children left scattered across the globe as well as more numerous Hunters. Hunters, in fact, still remain in outlying areas; SC has battled remnants within the last decade. There may not be a good answer except combing them out over the years.”
“A point to keep in mind, and I apologize for my breach of protocol,” the NSA said. “Then we come to the subject of this…Gar? Pronunciation…Janea?”
“ Gar gyi dbang phyug ma, ” Janea said. “The mother of all demons, or the mother of all foulness. Progenitor might be a more accurate term.”
“The Gar,” the NSA said. “We are now informed that it might be physically large. SC team input.”
“Again, legends,” Janea said, shrugging. “There are one hundred and fifty-seven divergent cultures that have myths of the Great Flood. What really happened? Was it the rising water from the last glacier melt? No one knows for sure. The legends of the Old Ones are the same. Most of them we get from Tibetan scrolls, which are opaque even by Tibetan standards and in many places degraded. Some were lost during the Mao years along with their information. The gar gyi dbang phyug ma is never properly described. None of them are, for some cultural reasons. We can only get descriptions from the names that are used for them. Gar gyi dbang phyug ma is her short name. Her full name translates as something like: That Which Is Fifty Elephants Covered in Cobras That Walks as a Stomach That Is the Mother of Foulness That Perverts the Mind That Walks in Dark Places That Cannot Be Harmed That Creates the Horror…It goes on. Some of the name is missing from the scroll, and I can argue all day about various translations of the words. Mother could be progenitor, stomach could be gallbladder, things like that.”