The Western Lands (27 page)

"Even if that means . . . ?"

"The code word is POP."

"The casualties could run into the millions."

"The billions, Peter. The billions." The Chief spread his hands and smiled. "Outsiders. None of our people will be touched. Operation Bunker."

"How long?"

"Long enough for things to cool off. Then we emerge like the Phoenix, without, of course, the inconvenience of being incinerated like the peasantry."

Peter squirmed
deliriously
.
This was
true
greatness. You can't fake the real thing.

"You
are
a cold-hearted bastard!" he ejaculated.

"Just drop a few hints . . . room in the Bunker for the right kind of Jews. You know what I mean . . .
white
Jews. None of 
that Galician trash. Now they tell me Portuguese Jews is the best kind, like Portuguese oysters."

He's coming around, Chief. Out of a clear blue sky he says, 'It's the kikes in our race that give us a bad name.' "

"Tomorrow is always white and blue," the Chief said enigmatically. "Any trouble with the cracker boy?"

"Not a peep. Gave him the old white schmaltz right down the old line: 'What are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes and the yids? Why don't you come over here where you belong and act like a white man?' "

"And how is our darky shaping up?"

" 'Always a place in the Bunker for the right kind of darky.'"

"Swallowed that, did he? Believes in the American Dream like all niggers ... well, as one menstruating cunt said to another ... 'I guess it's in the rag.' "

The Chief smiled slow and dirty.

P
eople without any long-range commitments. They can be bought by anyone, but they have no honor in being bought. To hire such operatives as protection is to be precariously and temporarily protected from your protectors . . . the old protection racket.

"If you're smart you will protect yourself from
me.
At a price." Blackmail, and the price keeps escalating.

So other agencies protect you from the Thuggee-protectors, and so on. Hitler created the SS to protect himself from the SA, and to eliminate the SA. Had he lived long enough, he would have needed protectors from the SS, and protectors from those protectors ... where does it end? Perhaps with only one protector, who is, of course, your deadliest enemy.

I saw a picture of a balloon suddenly and unexpectedly soaring and some people still holding onto the ropes connected to the balloon were suddenly jerked into the air and most of them didn't have the survival IQ to
let go in time.
Seconds later they are sixty, a hundred feet off the ground. Those who didn't let go fell off at five hundred or a thousand feet. A basic survival lesson is:
Learn to let go.

Put it another way: Never hang on when your Guardian tells you to let go.

Right Now.

Suppose you were holding one of those ropes? Would you have let go in time, which is, of course, at the first upward yank? I'll tell you something interesting. You would have a much better chance to let go in time now that you have read this paragraph than if you hadn't read it. Writing, if it is anything, is a word of warning . . .

Let Go!

A word about conditions in the Land of the Dead: quarters are precarious and difficult to find one's way back to, and privacy is fleeting. Doors are flimsy, often absent, leaving your quarters open to corridors, passageways, streets, and there are always other means of access, so one is subject to find anybody or anything in one's digs, if one is lucky enough to have digs. Bathroom facilities are filthy and inadequate. One shaves in a toilet with a shard of broken mirror.

As usual I am looking for a place to have breakfast, always difficult. This time it's a cafeteria common room. Mikey Port-man, deceased, falls in beside me in the line. He is broke as usual ... be my guest. It's close to eleven. Last serving. Cold, watery Spanish omelette slopped onto a dirty plate with soggy toast and cold coffee. Why do we need to eat, being dead? I guess we are eating the concept of food.

This time our quarters are in a basement area, concrete corridors and wooden partitions with wire mesh doors. My lodgings are on a ledge fifteen feet above the concrete floor, reached by a shaky iron ladder. The ledge is six feet wide and slants downward, so that I am in continual danger of falling off the ledge. Fatima the Arab girl is waiting to come in and clean up.

Often the quarters look like hotels, with elevators that take one to the wrong floor or stick between floors. Door dogs importune one in the corridors, and some people make pets of them. The same difficulty to find a place, to eat breakfast—at one place the waiter told me the restaurant was not distinguished enough—and the same danger to one's continued tenancy.

The White Hunters offer essential protection against the extremely dangerous animals, reptiles and amphibians found in the Duad and in the pestilent lowlands, sloughs and swamps that surround it. They take a lot of killing before they know they are dead. Unlike the Thuggee Guards, the White Hunters have a code of honor. They are bound to protect the life of a client, even a client that they despise, at the risk of their own.

We break through heavy underbrush to a meadow leading down to the river. The farther bank is hidden in mist.

"Well, let's go."

The White Hunter stops his client.

"You wouldn't get five feet. Look . . ."

He tosses a rock out into the meadow. The rock breaks through a thin crust of mud, steam jets up through the hole and the grass around the rock hole writhes and twists like a Van Gogh and suddenly a steaming claw emerges.

"It's not just the mud, which is sticky as hot rubber—you can't walk in it, you can't swim. There are predators that live in the hot mud—blind, naturally, but just break the mud crust and they converge, great bloody worms with a disk-shaped mouth like a rotating saw, and crabs and snakes with incurving needle teeth. Better try the jungle approach."

We turn aside, skirting the deadly meadow with its glistening green grass. Giant trees overhead. Our path darkens. A huge centipede crawls up out of a hot sulphur spring that gushes from a limestone cleft. Wilson gives it a double-barrel shot charge that guts it from head to ass. The stinking, eviscerated body squirms around, shooting jets of poison from its fangs, the liquid dissolving the limestone.

Consider this scenario: HIS and Neph make the pilgrimage and reach the Western Lands. The knowledge they bring back could destroy the existing order founded by the Venusian Controllers, which manifests itself through all authoritarian governments and organization: the Church, the Communist Party, in fact
all
governments currently operating. It's a tight monopoly on Power.

So try seizing power in some small country and setting up a distant system,
separate
from the other systems. And that is exactly what HIS did at Alamout. For starters, no victimless crimes on the books. Someone wants to take drugs, it's his own business. Right away you have the KGB, the CIA and every other agency with orders to terminate,
stat.

So HIS and Neph flee Egypt with every contract in the known world on their ass. Finally they reach Alamout. And HIS held it for thirty years. He did not, as some say, fail. He wasn't attempting old-style territorial politics. Alamout was never intended to be permanent. It was intended to gain time to train a few operatives for the future struggle, which is right here, right now, in front of all of you. The lines are being drawn.

"God's word says that the Occult is the enemy."

Some reborn son of a bitch is listening to his Master's Voice like a good human dog.

"Magic is the enemy. Creation is the enemy."

ALAMOUT

Sometimes it can be done in minutes. Other cases take years. Sometimes it doesn't happen. This is sad, but there is always useful work. When it does happen, they both know. You can't fake it. Neither HIS nor the initiate could fake it. Take a pure desert boy, no defensive impactions, and there is immediate access to the Ka. The Secret Name can be written, and the assassin dispatched on his mission.

He passes through a soft gate in a gush of molten gold into the Master's Garden, and he knows the Old Man will be with him and show him when and where and how to strike.

His legs take him to a lodging house. The landlord is middle-aged, rather sad-looking. They exchange hand signals. The landlord's name is Temsemani. He brings out a map of the city and shows him where the Sultan's litter will pass during the festival.

For three days Ali frequents the area, fitting into the venerable role of the mischievous street boy, yelled at and chased by shopkeepers.

Sixty years ago the Sultan had undertaken an expedition against the nomads of the western desert—a joke expedition, since the nomads retreat ahead of his forces.

On the expedition: the Sultan, with his concubines and courtiers, is established in luxurious tents. He is a foppish, strikingly handsome youth with cold features, like chiseled marble. Scouts have found a pool of tar, liquefied and bubbling from underground heat. The Sultan gives the order to collect barrels of the tar. It is useful to pour on besieging forces.

A number of young desert boys have attached themselves to the expedition, doing menial work in return for scraps of food. The Sultan's eyes fasten on a boy and narrow with greedy anticipation. He beckons. The boy rushes up with a dazzling smile.

"Can you run?"

The boy nods eagerly, expecting a messenger job that will mean food from both sender and receiver. At an order from the Sultan, a scout pours a bucket of melted tar over the boy and applies a torch. Screaming in agony, the boy runs fifty yards and falls against a sand dune.

The Sultan strolls over, drawing the smell of roasted flesh and pungent oil deep into his lungs. The boy is lying face down, moving spasmodically. The Sultan rolls him over with a contemptuous boot. For a split second the boy glares at him, spitting hate from blackened eyes.

The music starts in the early morning. The Sultan will come by in an hour. Already the bearded Syrian guards line the streets, their staves held horizontally in both hands to keep back the crowds. Ali slips along the edge of the crowd. A great cheer goes up, and he feels a shiver run up his back to the neck and out his eyes in a flash and the Old Man is there in a mantle of light.

The Sultan is now a thin old man with a white beard, carefully trimmed. He should be magnificent, but he isn't. He looks mean and petty and ill-natured. He never looks straight in front of him, but always a little above and to the left. Whatever he is seeing there, he doesn't like it.

The Sultan has ruled long, and his kingdom has prospered. He holds audiences where any man may plead his grievances. Word of his mercy and wisdom have spread through the land. His aqueducts and grain storage bring freedom from hunger. To those without land or implements, he distributes bread and soup. His armies protect the frontiers, bringing freedom from fear.

Ali moves through the cheering crowd: just a street boy. Watch your purse. The Sultan's face is a mask of old ivory carved in lineaments of noble serenity, annulled by eyes as dead as pools of tar.

Now!
Ali feels it up the back of his neck and out his eyes in a blaze of silver light. The street shifts under his feet, tilting him under the staves. He streaks toward the Sultan's litter like a shooting star.

With an incredulous wrench, the Sultan swivels his eyes to focus on the youth, four feet in front of him, and the bottom falls out of his eyes, leaving a hideous mask of crab terror. The Sultan's mask shatters in a scream of abject recognition:

"You!"

Ali's dagger catches him under the chin and protrudes from the top of his head. A witness said that as the dagger struck, the Sultan's eyes caught fire and burned like pitch.

The eunuch Vizier scrambles awkwardly from his litter, screaming, "Take him alive!" But the Hittite guards have already shattered Ali's skull with their staves.

"I said—"

"We did not hear,
master."
The guard gives him an evil grin.

"I'll have you—"

"Will you,
master?"

"Well . . . be careful . . . and remember that I give the orders."

"We will remember,
master.
"

Looking at the grinning, bearded faces, the Vizier feels the clutch of cold fear.

W
ish they were all that easy. All I had to do was slip into the
hand,
like putting on a glove. It can be a tricky business, guiding a boy like that. Sometimes they freeze the controls, and there is always the problem of enemy interception. You can run into a dead blackout of enemy occupation. Usually there's a chink, a long chance, but a dead blackout always indicates the whole operation is blown. They've gotten to your agent and turned him all the way. Time to pull out fast.

The Sultan could not have lived long in any case, with the inevitable ambitious General, treacherous Vizier and two sullen sons. The Old Man knows what will happen. The Vizier will speedily poison the sons, keep the General occupied with foreign conquests and set up a moderate regime. He is a cowardly, corrupt, indolent man, but very astute. While the former Sultan was extremely rigorous in persecuting dissident sects, and made deadly enemies in consequence, the new regime will be lenient, making it easy for the Old Man to place his agents.