REPORT: Operation LUDLOW, Part One: Getting caught up.

 

26MAY2003

It's been a while. 

What's there to catch up on?

After Chile, everybody hoofed it back to the states. Jihadi Joe got everyone excited. First we invaded Afghanistan, then two months ago we stormed into Iraq to take boot to Saddam's ass. "Mission Accomplished" was announced a few weeks ago. None of those nukes have turned up yet. Funnily enough. Oh well. 

The "Global War on Terror" has given us enough to worry about. Most us have been so busy in task force briefings and putting in overtime on the weekends, we barely realized how long it'd been since A-Cell called to say hello. But we got called out for two in the last two years.

There was an old case I-Cell worked, the first one IRENA ever did with us, IMOGEN's first as a fully "read-in" agent. Some asshole going around Alabama and Tennessee annihilating families, writing shit on the walls. That kind fellow's name was Bobby-Ray Tulk, a product of Exalted Circle's efforts to raise those "hybrids" in secret. Tulk was a sorcerer who could make those fathers kill their whole family before turning the gun on themselves. They were his old chums from when he was a kid. Hybrids, like him. They caught him at a swampy little shotgun shack way out in the sticks. Watched him twist Agent IVAN in half with a flick of his wrist before they ventilated him and burned his corpse. 

Someone was doing that to families again near the Savannah River. I-Cell peeled out that way and eventually caught up with the culprit. A great big six-foot fuck off Air Force superfreak named Nick Pask. A brief run-in with NRO DELTA's fixer-in-chief, Lepus, clued them in that Pask was the result of a Majestic-12 Biotechnology program. "RECOIL" was the codename. Pask said he heard a voice that guided him to do the murders. They let our cousins in the Air Force deal with their little mutant while they mucked it out to where he was bivouac'd along the river and blew up the statue of "Tulu" he was leaving offerings at. Something came out of the water and scared them off after. IVY needed reconstructive surgery on her hand after that encounter. That was in March of last year.

Then in June of last year, they went on another. IRENA, ISAAC, and the new girl, IVY, could make it. Some surveyors went missing on Owlshead Mountain near Townshend, Vermont, an area that Delta Green's been to more times that the liquor store. Whatever went on there, none have been particularly chatty about it. Whatever it was in those hills broke both of ISAAC's legs, they had to put titanium rods in them. I think he's back on his feet now, though his legs ache anytime the weather changes, he says. It was around the time they were wrapping that opera up when I came by to tell everyone the bad news. Batter down the hatches. 

The word was that the secure email was no longer to be accessed without his say-so. No contacting anyone outside the cell without his foreknowledge or A-Cell's expressed consent. No dead-drops. No check-ins. Nothing. Numerous cells across the conspiracy had stopped picking up. If what IRENA said in her report is true, it looks like Majestic's brainwashers managed to get their hands on some of us and flip them. For a while, I think most of us were worried that a Southerner with a grin full of gold teeth was gonna turn up and tell us to get in the van. Maybe they'd skip the formality and just send a wetworks team down the chimney with MP5s for the whole family. Ho-ho-ho. No such visit. Yet. 

Now, after all this time. A-Cell calls me up on the phone. Gives me a code phrase and I drive to the Irish Bar and knock on the backdoor after its closed and ALPHONSE lets me in. Haven't had a pint with the old man since we drank to I-Cell spanking the Skoptsi once for the final time. He gives me the script for the opera. It's fresh. We don't even have the full story, just leads. He wants us to go out and gather information, help him figure out exactlty what in fresh hell is even going on. The story so far is this: After a blackout, a home in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, explodes and burns to the ground. What has ALPHONSE's attention is that the home belonged to Dr. Ephrim Jassim, the father of one Halimah Jassim. I wondered how long it'd be until I heard that poor girl's name again. 

Halimah Jassim was an archaeology student - or was it history? - at the University of Chicago. She got tangled up with this guy invovled in the antiques trade, Thomas Drennon. Drennon's an occultist, gets it from his dad, an Army Major that turned a lot of money helping the Iraqi mob smuggle antiques and art out of Saddamist Iraq after the first Gulf War. Long story short. He finds out an item he's interested in is in the hands of some kindly russians, who offer a trade in exchange for an oddity his dad picked up years ago, some old Russian icons. They made the deal. The Skoptsi got some of their Black Icons, and Drennon got the thing that would kill him less than 24 hours later. The bowl, the "Demon Bowl" as Dr. Wu would call it, brought something to earth that took over Halimah's body. She incinerated Drennon and went on a rampage across the prairies that I-Cell just barely managed to keep the lid on. Then MAJESTIC got involved. 

They handed her off to O-Cell, O-Cell handed her off to some friendlies who'd take care of her. We were moving so quick we barely had time to cover up our tracks. MAJESTIC caught the scent early and caught up with Halimah not long after. We didn't even know until Lepus let it slip to I-Cell, trying to goad them into a confrontation at Club Apocalypse. 

They came to me then. Told me what he'd said. Halimah was in their "care" now. It made me skin craw, and I could tell they thought of me just that littlest bit less when I told them we weren't going to do anything. Lepus was trying to bait them, trying to trick them into going out searching for her and walking into a trap. That, or he was being truthful, in which case, we were never going to find out where they were keeping her. Even if we did, there'd be no way of getting her out. 

That's what I told myself. For four years, I've been telling myself that. 

Now that hen is coming home to roost. 

God have mercy on us all.

-I