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.”
“I see,” the NSA said, looking a bit stunned.
“The other thing to consider is that the Gar is one of the lesser of the Great Old Ones,” Janea said. “You don’t want to think about He Who Is Sleeping coming back. And don’t ask me for the full name. You don’t want the nightmares. But if someone has figured out how to bring back the Gar, it may mean that the great prophecies of the Old Ones returning is being fulfilled. This may only be the beginning. Or the tip of an iceberg.”
“If it’s like fifty elephants, why can’t we find it?” the NSA asked, returning to the point. “FBI on-site.”
“We had been dismissing slaughterhouses as a possible hide point,” Graham said. “Until last night, the possibility that this might be part of a group conspiracy had not been addressed. Our next step is to check out the two slaughterhouses in the area. They have not been fully evacuated, since they had stock on site that required maintenance. Given the possibility of SC threat, we were waiting for the SC combat team to recover from their mission before checking them out. It’s next on our list, sir.”
“Elimination,” the NSA said. “SC command.”
“As Janea alluded, the Gar is mentioned as being resistant to conventional weapons,” Augustus said. “However, that was in a day when ‘conventional’ referred to spears and clubs. The height of military technology was the atlatl. So it is possible that modern weapons may have effect. Then again, it’s possible that they may not. In which case…” He paused and sighed. “In that case, we had better hope that Mrs. Everette’s Christian God is willing to give sufficient aid to our case.”
“SOCOM query,” the NSA said. “Go.”
“How can conventional weapons not have effect?” the admiral commanding SOCOM asked. The former SEAL was polite in tone, but his posture showed he was having a hard time believing the subject of the conference.
“Answer…” the NSA said then paused. “SC Onsite.”
“Pass,” Janea said, looking at Barb.
“In the case of demons, conventional weapons pass through them,” Barb said. “But they can hit you as hard as a tank. I’ve got the broken ribs to show. In the case of the Children, everything we’ve hit them with has bounced unless there is godly intervention. Then they’re easy enough to kill if you do enough damage fast enough; they regenerate like nobody’s business. Simply engaging most SC entities is hard enough for the unprotected. So far, we haven’t seen the sort of mind control that major demons have, but there are plenty of indications the Gar may have that ability. And the Old Ones… Perhaps as a fundamental attribute of their otherness and perhaps as part of a sending, they induce pathological psychological conditions on the viewer. It’s pretty hard to hit something if you can’t look at it. With the Children and the Hunters we’ve found, the effect is lessened under FLIR. But we haven’t had anyone view the Gar. My guess is that the effect is going to be stronger. I’ve done some pretty horrific targets, general. This is going to be a tough mission. Even by my standards.”
“NORTHCOM input,” the NSA said.
“We need to ensure that all non-briefed persons are held as far from the threat as possible,” the general said. “Both for security reasons and due to the nature of the threat. And promulgate a finding that any possibility of encountering threat requires use of FLIR, whether day or night.”
“That’s going to degrade our day viewing,” SOCOM interjected.
“Admiral,” Barb said, trying not to sigh. “SEALs are tough and tough-minded. Which is good. But if one of your SEALs or Deltas views one of these things with their naked eyes, the best you’re going to get is a broken man. What you’re going to get most of the time is someone who spends the rest of his days in a padded room under
