Pandora's Box: Book 3 of the Crystal Raven Series

Catching a flight in Africa was surprisingly easier than in Europe these days. The African Brotherhood had a plane available, a surplus military cargo plane of Vietnam vintage, and were happy to lend it and its crew to him. Its crew, fresh in from Turkey and feeling lucky to escape alive, were glad to fly in the opposite direction. It was a mess over there, and their type of craft would be useless for funnelling troops and munitions to the front lines, especially now that the vampyres had access to modern anti-aircraft batteries. With that kind of firepower, their engines did not need to kick out the heat of a jet engine – they were too damn slow to outrun anything made after the nineteen-eighties.

Gabriel settled back into one of the hard seats and closed his eyes. He had hardly slept since leaving Turkey, and now that he was back on his way to Nam, his memories would not let him rest. In all his years of service to the Brotherhood, he had avoided visiting this particular academy. And after he had graduated and moved back home, where his field of operations was on the opposite side of the globe, it had been easy. And now that was all coming to an end. He was returning to where his adventure with the Church and its Brotherhood had begun.

He had bad memories of Vietnam, and not all of them had to do with the war. Decades of war and strife were bound to attract demons and their ilk. That kind of hatred and death weakened the boundaries between the two worlds, the evil of those fighting leeching into the psyche of the land. So many varieties of demons fed on fear and hatred and death and misery. Any war of ideology, whether religious or political, and especially a civil war, created an ideal feeding ground. Nobody hated more or deeper than brothers. Compared to what he had learned in those jungles, did the politics mean anything? Whether communism or democracy, both their ideals became corrupt over time, both leading to inequities and human suffering. Was any of it worth a single soul?

Gabriel was well into his second tour when his squad ran into its first demon. A tank was anchoring either flank of their line as their unit moved onto a Viet Cong position. At this point, in the initial minutes of the battle, they were only exchanging sniper fire, the two forces yet to fully engage. The screams started behind the enemy lines. Trees flew into the sky, and for one brief moment, Gabriel and his companions thought their air force had made a bombing run. But there was not supposed to be any air cover available for this mission – only artillery. Too much cloud cover, too many enemy anti-aircraft batteries for the flyboys’ liking.

The screams kept coming. Screams but no explosion, no balls of napalm fire ripping through the jungle. Confused, they watched as the first Viet Cong raced from the jungle, turning to fire at something back in the thick undergrowth. His own troops opened fire, and he called for a ceasefire. If another squad had caught the Viet Cong from behind, the last thing he wanted was for the two forces to cut each other down in a crossfire. When the bullets flew thick and wild friendly fire was sometimes more dangerous than that of the enemy. He had already lost his wingman to a friendly fire incident, a stray artillery shell that had dropped in on them as they followed a trail down to a river. The hell if he was going to lose anymore.

And then a giant hand reached out and plucked up one of the Viet Cong soldiers. Scaled and clawed, all Gabriel could think of was that the Pentagon had drafted Godzilla. Hey, anything was possible in this crazy shit. His lieutenant called the two tanks to move in on it. Those Shermans packed enough punch to take down any creature crawling through these jungles, even one unknown to modern science. The smoke from the first shell had barely cleared when a foot slammed into the lead tank. A second hand pulled the turret from the vehicle.

Gabriel could still hear his lieutenant’s panicked call for artillery even after all these years….

One of the crew brought him back a cup of coffee heavily laced with whiskey. At this altitude, it was cool in the cargo bay, and the warm drink was appreciated. They were still out over the ocean and were not expected to make landfall for another hour. Gabriel thought it was a good a time as any to break out the sandwich he had brought with him. God alone knew when the next time he would find a moment to sit and have a meal, and he needed to keep up his strength.

He must have fallen asleep shortly after he ate. Gabriel started awake as the plane shuddered through a field of turbulence. Righting himself as the door to the cockpit opened, he caught a glimpse of the crew struggling over the controls. That doesn’t look good, he thought.

It came out of the clouds as they crossed the border into Vietnam. Only those roiling banks of grey and black were not clouds. Great blankets of bats darkened the skies with their wings. They filled the sky from one horizon to another – a living storm cloud the likes of which no-one on board the plane had ever seen. Led by a mountain of flesh, claws and teeth, they descended on the plane. Its twin-prop engines could not make headway against the blizzard of tiny kamikazes. It was a lame-duck limping away when the massive claws sank into the metal of its wings. Already overburdened, the wing gave way to metal fatigue and snapped a foot from the body of the plane, causing the craft to veer dangerously away.

Gabriel was thrown across the plane as it pitched to the left. The demon followed, sinking its claws into the body of the stricken craft. It shook it angrily back and forth, knocking its occupants wildly about until the overstressed metal of the second wing tore away. Toppling from its grip in an uncontrollable spiral, the plane dropped like a lead weight. Pilot and co-pilot fought the spin all the way down, but the cabin was already tearing itself apart long before the fuselage hit the ground.

The Grand Master could not say at what point he had fallen out of the shattered plane, but it couldn’t have been too high up. When he woke up at the top of a tree, one or two of his bones were not broken. The climb out of the tree – or should he describe it as a fall – took care of those. Rolling to his feet, his back and left side screamed in pain. Not the way he remembered his jump school instructors teaching him to exit a plane, but any jump you could crawl away from had to be a good one, he figured. Now if he could only figure out how to walk. And maybe somewhere to crawl towards, like a Howard Johnsons with room service and a masseuse, even a house doctor and a nurse who didn’t mind… Well, that could wait for another wish list.

Wreckage from the plane was scattered across several miles of jungle. He spent the first hour wandering around looking for other survivors when he came across a large section of the fuselage. There were no other bodies anywhere nearby, but the crew had all been in the cockpit at the time of the attack. Inside, Gabriel found his pack and other gear still tied up in the green cargo netting. He wondered, briefly, what would have happened if he had been strapped in here? Probably would not have survived in as good of shape as his pack, but then again, he might have had a softer landing than the tree had offered him.

Following the trail of wreckage, his crossbow held at ready, he eventually found the remains of the cockpit but still no bodies. It looked like the top had been ripped off with a can opener. If anyone had been alive when that had happened, they were now in the belly of that flying reptile. And judging by the amount of crushed foliage in the immediate area, it had probably followed its lunch all the way down to the ground. He wondered briefly if it were still hungry, and whether it would now consider him well tenderized after his recent fall. With no further urging, Gabriel made himself scarce.

Two miles from the crash site, he paused on the crest of a hill, staying well under cover. With his compass and GPS unit, he spread out a map and set about working out his location. The crash put him closer to his destination than landing at the airport would have, although he would have much rather preferred a nice comfortable ride in a jeep to humping a pack through the jungle. If his memory still served him, this part of Vietnam was nothing but hills and dense tangles of vegetation that took weeks, if not months, to hack a path through. If he was lucky, he would be there by Christmas, 2028 - New Years at the latest.

Ten miles as the crow flies, twice that distance humping his way through this rough country. The way he felt now, he ought to be up to the hike by next Tuesday. Well, old man, he thought to himself, sitting here isn’t getting you any closer. Frankly, he didn’t want to be in the jungle after dark but doubted he could make it any sooner, even without the sore hip and twisted ankle. It was going to be one of those long, harrowing nights he hoped he would live to regret. Not that he needed any more regrets, it was just he so much preferred them to a bloody, gruesome death. But then, whatever floats your boat, as they say.

The jungle was everything he remembered – hot, sweaty, itchy and wet. Shortly after noon, it began to rain, a steady deluge that added pounds to his clothes and pack. If it wasn’t rock, it was slippery, and wet rock wasn’t much better. At least the rain cut overhead visibility down to almost nothing. He no longer worried so much, even crossing open ground – at least about the bats and their large brother. If that thing was still out there, it would be having trouble staying airborne, and bats were too smart to get caught out in this shit. Still, there were things in the jungle that were equally as deadly, some as small as a spider or a snake, others as large as a tiger or other cat.

The last few miles became easier as he began to move into more settled land. He found a dirt lane bordered on either side by rice paddies, the patches of jungle fewer and far between. The open ground still did not worry him in the heavy downpour, but he still kept to the tree cover whenever possible. If nothing else, it kept him slightly on the dry side of sopping wet.

By sunset, with only a mile still to go, he was wearing a hat he had woven out of banana leaves. It kept the rain out of his eyes, although visibility continued to be less than five feet. Perhaps that explained why he had not seen any signs of habitation – people or animals – since he had reached this country. What was the population these days? It had to be in the millions, and even in this hill country, he seemed to recall several fair-sized towns and villages. Surely, even in the rain, someone would be out fishing or working the rice paddies? What was a little rain to people who grew up in monsoon country? Demons and bat plagues were another matter altogether.

On the crest of a hill, he paused to study the blurry lights on the far side of the valley. The Academy of Sardar Pagoda was located in a Buddhist monastery so ancient the jungle now covered most of its walls with a tangle of vines. It was said that only those who were meant to could find it, but Gabriel did not know how much of that was Oriental mysticism and how much the truth? He had never had any trouble finding his way here with his map and compass, even when he was still with the US marines.

They were waiting for him when he reached the gates. That was not mysticism, merely the product of alert sentries and one long rope bridge that provided the only access to the monastery. Okay, so there were three blind instructors here who could kick his ass and had a disconcerting habit of answering your questions before you asked them. That had to have a logical explanation – like logic, or age, or the habit of people to ask the same questions whenever they came here. Believing in demons and vampyres was enough of a stretch for the Grand Master of an order dedicated to combating these same creatures. Anything else was mere mumbo jumbo.

“We feared for your safety when the dragon attacked your plane,” Pham, the eldest Buddhist monk said in greeting.

“I suppose you could have seen the attack from one of your towers,” Gabriel grunted, playing the Doubting Thomas to his believer.

“I assure you it has been raining here for more than a week,” the Buddhist replied calmly, a hint of amusement in his voice.

“I wonder why whoever carried word here did not check for survivors,” Gabriel complained. “They had to have driven to beat me here, and I would have appreciated the ride.”

“I assure you, you are our first visitor in over a month,” and the other monks laughed.

Always it was the same between these two.

“Come,” Pham offered. “We have tea on. We will discuss the mobilization of my people.”

Gabriel hesitated.

“Come,” he turned back to the Westerner, “my people will be ready to leave in the morning. Getting you on your way might be more problematic.”

“Ain’t it always,” the Texan complained.