Red Mist

By Jules Smith and Larry B. Lambert

Legends endure for a reason. Sometimes they survive to impel our cultural hubris. Occasionally they endure because they instil a sense of focus on what was and perhaps a vision of what will be. They are always a reminder. When they come back to haunt us, things start to get interesting.

 

A couple in Iceland, very much in love, visit a historic site and suddenly he throws himself into a volcano, burning to a crisp in front of her eyes, and thereafter, it is always raining.

 

The dwindling North Sea Oil supply is suddenly rejuvenated with a new discovery, a huge oil field of light, sweet, crude worth billions. Exploration, drilling and pumping begin to breathe life into a faltering industry and just as things seem to be going well, the oil is polluted with radioactive thorium.

 

US Army Special Forces operators in Iceland on an exercise are drawn into a crisis and as NASA withdraws, they boldly face the challenge. All but one are rendered insane and the memory of Red Mist turns into a quest for answers – that the CIA already has.

 

In Texas, a political fixer is called on to deal with a situation and finds himself completely out of his depth.

In England, a psychologist's life is turned upside down as a skald makes a disturbing prophecy.

In China, aggressive experiments into neutrino research create a completely unforeseen disaster and portend a global cataclysm of Biblical proportions.

 

Just when you're sure that you have all the answers and are confident that the science is settled, it isn't.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head Of The Fable
• Release date: Aug 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201250393

Book preview

Prologue

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange 

roof, thinking of home. – William Faulkner

---

In a spartan room with bare bunk beds, Alan Frazier, 28, brown crew cut, blue eyes, cut muscles, sits on a lower bunk, shirtless. Rain pounds on a window that looks out into a stormy sky over the godforsaken ruins of what must have been a very nice town. He can’t recall how he got where he is or precisely who he is. A worn OD green duffle bag rests on the deck, next to his bare feet. There is a name, FRAZIER, A; SSG; XXX-45-5277; ODA5116; US Army, and it is hand stencilled, maybe by using a template and a sharpie. He knows what ODA5116 means. He understands that it means that he’s assigned to the First Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, based at Fort Campbell Kentucky.

When in town, at Fort Campbell, he lives off-base in a small, poorly furnished bungalow and has a mongrel dog named Rex that his buddy’s girlfriend is taking care of while he is deployed.

Looking away from the rain on the window that has hypnotized him, a mirror hangs from a wall and he stares at an unshaved man that he doesn’t recognize while suspecting that he’s looking at himself. Scars and bruises of varying ages crisscross his torso. Fresh, unstitched cuts stretch from his hairline down to the bottom of his ear. They are not deep, but they bled a lot and are still weeping, dripping down onto his shoulders and chest. There is another cut, lower on his face, crudely stitched. He recalls taking a few tucks at it with a surgical needle and thread from his aid kit. It distorts his lip slightly. Other wounds form an inkless tattoo carved crudely onto the flesh of his upper chest, ‘de oppresso liber’. It could use stitches too. He knows what it means. While probing his memory, he realizes that he does not speak Latin. He suspects that he may have carved it into his own chest. He looks down at the knife resting in a puddle of blood on the mattress next to him. Yeah. He turns in the mirror to see an ink tattoo on his shoulder. Crossed arrows. He knows what that represents as well. The details of who, how, where and when he was inked, remain fuzzy.

You can’t survive certain experiences. But sometimes despite the odds, you do and afterwards, you don’t fully exist, precisely because you failed to die. The failure gives him a pang of guilt.

Death brings with it a sense of authenticity that Alan Frazier does not feel. He is disturbed because in a strange way he is inauthentic. That lack of sense of self embraces him coldly.

He’s not the only man in the room. There are others, wearing t-shirts, BDU’s, and there are bullet-proof plate carriers spread here and there. Some of the trauma plates have been hit more than once. They are in a state of disrepair. Their firearms are on the bunks, very close at hand. Many have green tape here or there on them to perform some personalized function.

A man sits on a bunk across from Frazier and methodically field strips his rifle. He then reassembles the component parts, oiling, wiping off oil, stripping oil, swabbing the bore. A small mountain of cleaning rags surrounds him and he smells of solvent and oil.

Patrick, knock that shit off. Patrick ignores him and begins to tear down his rifle for the eighth or twentieth time. Frazier doesn’t know how many times.

He realizes that he knows that the man’s name is Patrick.

The rain plays in sheets across the glass of the only window in the room that serves as a temporary barracks. The others either stare into space or watch the rain beating on the windowpane. Patrick is the exception and it has become unclear to Alan whether he is a robot or SFC Patrick O’Donnell, 18B, Special Forces Weapons Sergeant. Doc Coulter, MSG Malcolm Douglas Coulter Jr., 18D, Special Forces Medical Sergeant should help if it’s a human problem, not a robotic issue, but he is watching the rain on the goddamned window along with everyone else. Coulter is not completely motionless. He’s dragging a plastic safety razor over his bald scalp – again. That inattention to Patrick O, further underscores his concern that Patrick is a robot and not an authentic human being. If he was human, he’d be loading those empty magazines instead of stripping and reassembling his M-4.

What were the magazines emptied into? And if it was a firefight, who picked them up and brought them here after they were so thoroughly – emptied. Such are his thoughts.

He hears thunder in the distance and flashes of light play across the window. Frazier, Alan R., can’t tell for sure whether it is artillery or thunder, but as he resolves what he just heard against his memory, it is definitely thunder and lightning. It lacks the high order crack of military explosives or demolitions such as C-4. The flash of lightning is different too with its flickering intensity.

Nobody flinches when a door opens and sunlight streams in. Her shadow precedes Olga, a woman of thirty-five who is attractive, but not in a glamorous way. Hers is a natural beauty, worn with intelligence and dignity.

Blank eyes turn toward her.

We need you all to gear up and go back into the cauldron.

He recalls the events, painfully. Rain slashes Alan’s face as he runs, his eyes staring vacantly ahead as his legs pump evenly, his feet chopping through mud, jumping over rocks, solid footing despite the landscape. His uniform looks as though he climbed through razor wire. His armor has taken hits and we can see through the camouflage fabric into the ballistic plate below. He carries his rifle with a practiced ease and slides one magazine out, replacing it by rote. He runs toward the threat without fear or rancor, slinging the rifle, sliding a hand grenade out of its pouch. He straightens out the pin and then pulls it as he runs, allows the spoon to release, counts one-two, throws and drops. BANG!

None of the men move except for SFC Patrick O’Donnell, who stands and looks for more cleaning rags, ignoring Olga completely. Doc Coulter has moved his razor from his scalp to his cleanly shaved face.

Olga now faces WO2 Jason Miles, skin black as anthracite, the old man of the outfit at age thirty-five, 180A, Assistant Detachment Commander. Something in Frazier’s memory triggers. Captain Carlos Sanchez, 18A, Operational Detachment Commander, had his head blown from his shoulders. Frazier’s brain recorded the event from behind Carlos. There was a loud pop and the captain’s head burst like a balloon. It happened on the run-up to the caldera, that Olga is calling the cauldron. That means that Jason is now the boss.

But Jason’s attention turned from Olga back to the rain on the window.

Warrant Officer Miles, I’m addressing you directly. Your men need to gear up and recon that target site again. We need to know what’s going on and you are the only ones who can do it. Olga isn’t in Jason Miles’ chain of command. She’s a spook, CIA case officer. Even if she was the Army Chief of Staff, it wouldn’t have had much impact on Jason.

The warrant officer’s hand moved from his knee to his mouth and he began gnawing on the end of his index finger, chewing through the flesh, down to the bone, shredding it, blood spurting — watching the rain.

Pat O’Donnell has found more cleaning rags and he’s back on his bottom bunk hard at work.

Staff Sergeant Frazier, Alan R., has returned his gaze to the window and the rhythmic sheeting rain.

Olga has left the building, and walked out to her white Land Rover with USA diplomatic license plates and Icelandic national license plates, parked out front. She takes a satellite phone from a bag on the front seat and speaks into it.

---

They say that it’s raining, Mr. Lawson. Olga Shearer tells the man in charge as he steps out of the haze gray OV-22 Osprey with no markings, that had just landed vertically, and very loudly. They’re combat ineffective. They won’t re-engage. She’s now walking with him.

They don’t need to re-engage. It wouldn’t do any good.

Lawson folds the briefing papers that Olga cabled to him earlier in the day. He puts them in his pocket and looks up at the clear, blue sky through dark aviator sunglasses, absently running his fingers through his thinning white hair. Raining?

That’s what they say.

All of ’em?

Olga shrugged a ‘yes’. Bryce Lawson has been around The Company for a long, long time. Rumors abounded that it was Lawson himself who’d deflowered the Virgin Mary. Others suggested that he’d held the cloaks of the Romans while they pounded the nails into Jesus-on-the-cross. Some said that he pounded the nails himself giving the Roman executioners tips while doing so. A lot of people fear Bryce Lawson but Olga doesn’t know anyone who understands him beyond the legend that grew up around him. He looks so normal, just a guy — but still possibly the same guy who gave advice to Eve in the Garden.

Olga has never met him before and the man she walks next to doesn’t impress her with any of those allegedly well-deserved reputations, but there is something about him that she can’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it is confidence? In a world of uncertain people, Lawson’s presence screams certainty. Breathes confidence. And while surrounded with insanity, radiates quiet competence.

He knows what’s going on and he may have a plan. He must have a plan. It’s an article of faith that may or may not be accurate, but she grabbed a hold of the concept.

Olga worked with his ex-wife, also a Virginia Farm Girl, when she was state-side assigned to Global Targets Division. Sylvia Lawson, the ex, never said a single word about him. Not even when she was drunk on grappa and raving. Olga asked whether or not Sylvia’s refusal to comment was due to fear. Sylvia, a Rhodes Scholar and former Miss Florida said, no, it’s respect. Now he was married to the deputy director of a different alphabet agency, and they were a solid DC power couple, with kids no less.

Olga follows in Lawson’s wake as he speaks to a few of the Agency’s contractors, who also disembarked from the Osprey and who now provide security. The egg heads who created the pig-fuck by sending in the Army, departed as soon as Olga arrived, hours before and hadn’t surfaced anywhere. She fervently hopes that she will not be held accountable for a bad NASA decision.

There is the natural worry that Lawson will simply make a phone call and have her relieved short of the tour and sent back to headquarters, where there would be a desk and the trite, meaningless tasks as a cog in the great machine. That’s how it happens when things go horribly wrong. Thank God the press hasn’t caught wind of this. There would be the inevitable whispers and gossip within the bureaucracy, but her career would be finished. Lawson has the power to do that to her with nothing more than a grunt and a sideways glance. Her recourse, given the nature of what happened, consists of resignation, suicide or both. She’s seen that end in others and it holds no appeal for her.

It has been one of those incredibly strange things and Olga doesn’t know quite how the sequence of events had landed her there. She reasons that the Iceland government called NASA, and the NASA people who showed up were mostly ex-Air Force. One of their people encountered ‘something’ in the steaming, burning caldera and they panicked, grabbing the Special Forces A-Team who was training on the other side of the nation-island. It had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with the Agency. Just the sort of bad luck that ruins careers.

And as with so many things, which had to happen in the course of screw-ups, it defaults to the Central Intelligence Agency to try and determine what-in-the-heck was going on. As the ‘nation’s first line of defense’, it had that role, even in Iceland if the Icelanders, and Denmark, had handed it off to the US to deal with. The director sent his favorite fireman, the ancient of days, Bryce Lawson.

Olga reasons that Lawson checked his options, maybe called his ex-wife and picked her over the other two options at the tiny CIA presence at the well-worn US Embassy at Reykjavik.

He demands a run-down on what the NASA people told her before they fled.

He takes off his sun glasses and looks at Olga, Ms. Shearer, shall we go in? Bryce Lawson tries to be polite. She trails Lawson as he saunters slowly into the NASA Containerized Housing Unit (CHU) and looked at what remained of ODA5116. Frazier. Staff Sergeant Frazier.

Frazier turns his gaze from the window to Lawson. Lawson turns to Olga. He’s the one who carried the decapitated captain out? Fireman’s carry? Olga nods. That’s why he’s drenched in blood? Olga nods again. Lawson lifted Frazier’s arm almost tenderly. Frazier stood. He led the soldier to the shower, reached in and cranked the water hot. Walk him into the shower, then get in there with him. He needs a woman’s touch.

Olga’s eyes bug out and she wants to say something, but she doesn’t. She does precisely what Lawson asked because he is Bryce -Lawson, and his will is too great for her to resist. That and he speaks with such great compassion that she wants to do what he directed her to do.

The shower was meant for one person. The scalding water cascades over them in the shower and Alan Frazer senses that he is being held. The fog lifts ever so slowly as she gently scrubs his hair and massages his scalp with one hand while holding him close with the other. More hot water, more soap and he opens his eyes as she lead him from the shower and hands him a towel.

Seeing Olga as if for the first time, toweling off next to him, Alan asks, Where am I?

Here, sergeant, let me put some bandages on your face. Olga sits him down on a wooden bench, shuffles through a large first aid kit, finds what she’s looking for, and tenderly dresses his wounds.

Half an hour later, Alan Frazier, wearing a clean, dry, uniform, presents himself to Lawson, who sits on a wooden crate just outside of the cargo bay of an OV-22 Osprey, dressed in a rumpled striped shirt and dark trousers. He’s eating a tuna sandwich on pumpernickel and drinking from a dark amber bottle. He motions for Frazier to sit with a hand that he uses almost like a flipper.

He feels very different from the way he had before. His memory of the stupor he’s been in has now faded to the point where he wasn’t altogether sure that he’d been in a stupor at all. Who are you and where’s the bus that hit me—–sir? He looks back over the rocky scenery and asks, isn’t there a destroyed village out there? There’s nothing as far as the horizon except the command trailer with the NASA logo on it."

Are you hungry?

Oh, Yes, Olga said had that the man’s name is Bryce Lawson and that he wants to speak to him. Nothing more.

Lawson points to a blue and white plastic flip top cooler lashed down to a palate with other equipment stacked just outside of the Osprey’s cargo bay. Crack it open. There’s a bowl of tuna, green onion and pickles, light mayo, a bit heavy on the mustard and pepper. Throw that between a couple of slices of bread, grab a beer and some chips. He points to one of the canvas sling chairs set up next to him, in front of the aircraft’s bulkhead. Then sit and we can talk. You’re feeling weak, aren’t you?

Frazier nods and smiles weakly. Then he assembles a sandwich, sits on the cooler instead of the sling chair and takes a bite. It’s good. The beer, Nøgne Ø Imperial Stout, is a brand he has never seen before. He samples it and says, That’s good too.

I made the tuna this morning, though I must confess, when I did, I never thought that I’d end up here today. The beer is Norwegian. I was there — in Norway, this morning, with a plan to fly all the way up to Svanvik. Norway is beautiful in the late spring. Iceland is different. Plans change. He shrugs.

Frazier takes another bite, chugs half of the bottle. Then he takes another bite, tears open the bag of potato chips and eats a few of those. The bag says that they’re crisps—British. Alan finishes the beer and feels ready to talk.

It’s Loki’s fire. Lawson points off in the distance to the plume of smoke. The Norse attributed what you experienced to the god, Loki, the trickster and lord of fire. Fire can warm you, save you, cook your food, comfort you and burn you to death in your house with all of your children around you, screaming. All from the same pile of sticks burning in front of you. When it happened in antiquity, they attributed it to Loki and his unpredictability.

You believe that, Mr. Lawson?

Of course. They did think that it was Loki.

Are you pulling my chain?

Certainly. Have another beer and toss me one while you’re at it.

Alan Frazier digs through the crushed ice in the chest and retrieves two bottles. He tosses one to Lawson and opens the other.

We are aware of other times that this situation that you found yourself in has happened. The Chinese or the Russians may have had encounters like yours but they buried it just the way that we did, so there’s no knowing there. The first that we have a solid record of involved an encounter with the Delaware State Police in 1928, who responded to a phenomenon at the seashore. They killed themselves afterwards and the only accounts we have are all contemporaneous to the event but I’m convinced that they faced the same thing that you did. There was another situation in Alaska with an oil drilling crew. Only one of them survived. A young man who’d just returned from combat in Vietnam with the Marine Corps up on the DMZ. He’d been wounded near Phu Bai and when he left the Corps, he gravitated to roughnecking. After the encounter, he found other work. And then there is you, here in Iceland.

We’re in Iceland? No shit?

I shit you not.

And the woman who, uh, showered with me?

Olga. She resurrected you, yes, she works for the same alphabet agency that I work for. She is very good at what she does, but she doesn’t know why she is. Don’t worry about that. She did her job.

It was raining. Frazier looked up at the brilliantly clear sky.

You think so? Go back into that NASA container and the men in there, your friends, will claim that it still is.

Captain Sanchez?

Dead. Same with sergeants Broadmoor and Kelly. If you walked into that CHU, you’d swear that Sergeant Terrell is there sitting on a bunk, looking at the rain, but he’s not. He’s dead too, laid out in a body bag in the shade between Sanchez and Kelly.

Were we attacked?

Absolutely.

By whom?

You mean, ‘by what?’ Now that is the question, isn’t it? Do you remember the encounter?

No. I don’t recall much. The last thing that I clearly remember, we were in Kentucky — Fort Campbell, and there was a training evolution we had geared up for. The details are — I don’t remember much of even that. What will happen to the rest of them, my friends?

They’re insane now. I expect that they will remain like that. Maybe in the psych ward at Walter Reid, eating pudding, looking at the rain on the windows. You are different because you picked up your captain and carried him out. They panicked and ran.

How do you know that they panicked and I didn’t?

You’re here talking to me and they are still in there. Lawson shifted subjects, Iceland has a bureau that deals with volcanoes because they have a lot of them and they study them. They’re very good at what they do, so when they saw that caldera forming, Lawson pointed to the plume of smoke, they sent a team, but it wasn’t like any volcano that they’d ever seen. They thought that it might have been a meteor strike, so they called NASA. NASA thought that it didn’t look right. They were correct.

Lawson takes a deep breath, finishes his sandwich and then finishes his second beer. NASA came, screwed around with it, panicked, called your team which happened to be handy on your NATO exercise, and when things went to pot with you all, they split. Somebody who knew somebody called me, and here we are.

And who exactly are you, Frazier asks? You’re here, with these guys who hover around you – I mean, who are you besides being able to blend up a good tuna salad?

It really doesn’t matter who I am. What does matter is that you’re going back up there to that liquid magma and this time I’m going with you. He turns to Olga. Shearer!

Olga Shearer emerges from the aircraft and hands Staff Sergeant Alan Frazier a thin sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard that requires his signature. As he begins examining the small print, Bryce Lawson says, "Sign on the tabs and lets get this show on the road. You’re separating from the US Army under honorable circumstances, you will receive