Life as a New Hire Ch. 34

Flaviu flexed his governmental muscle once more, allowing us to highjack a few county vehicles. That joy lasted about fifteen minutes. Flaviu had gotten a call; Virginia relayed the news that it sounded like someone was putting his feet to the fire. They were in a separate van. Unfortunately, she didn't know Romanian.

Even less pleasing was the answer to that dilemma as Tiger Lily stopped us in the white pebble driveway to the Professor Loma's manor house. Either Eastern Europe had a different pay scale for academics, or this guy came from money. Charlotte was out the passenger side door first while Pamela opened the van door.

"Did anyone think to call ahead to say we were stopping by?" I tossed out there. No one responded, which implied we'd dropped the ball.

"The local university said he wasn't coming in today," Riki said, then her phone rang. She put a little thing on it that screamed 'super-spy stuff'.

That was good news. Pamela went exploring. Charlotte backed me up, accepting that her armed and armored self might not project the positive first impression we would need. The Romanian SIE agent came sprinting my way before I dropped the door knocker.

[Romanian] "Mr. Nyilas! Mr. Nyilas!" he yelled. Nice. Now the people inside knew my name.

[Romanian] "Yes?" I regarded him politely. Riki wasn't coming out of the van.

[Romanian] "The Russians want to talk with you," he seemed excited.

[Romanian] "That's nice. Tell them I'm busy. When I wrap up this business, I'll give them a call." What else was I supposed to say?

[Romanian] "No, they are sending someone to see you," he clarified.

[Romanian] "Fine, when will they get here?" I huffed.

[Romanian] "About an hour. Helicopters of the 903rd and 904th Helicopter Squadrons are bringing her here," he exulted.

"Her?" followed by "Ouch!" when Delilah smacked me in the back with Riki's laptop case.

"Stay on task, Dummy," Delilah teased me. "You are like a dog seeing a squirrel."

"If you are calling him a dog," Odette sang out, "you've got it half right."

[Romanian] "The Russian Foreign Minister asked my Foreign Minister to fly their military attaché to meet with you," he kept going. "What is this about?"

[Romanian] "They are banking-rolling my rise to power, Mr. Molnar. I'm reviving the Kingdom of the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen," I winked - he blinked. "Honestly sir, I haven't a clue why the Russians want to chat with me. I'm sure she'll let me know." He didn't like my non-answer. I rapped the door knocker.

The door opened up and there stood a cute...honestly, I had work to do, damn it!

[Romanian] "Hello, I'm Cáel Nyilas," I presented my Irish ID. It looked the most impressive.

"I'm Dijana Loma and it's okay, I speak English," she dazzled me with her 'you look sexy' smile.

"Listening at the door long?" I teased her. She sashayed her hips. I was in trouble.

Why was I in trouble? Freaky Dragon Lady was standing behind the girl looking at me rather impatiently.

"Yes," she snickered. "Since your three vans pulled up in the driveway. Plus, today's been pretty boring so far."

"So, how is high school treating you," I prayed for her to be underage.

"I'm a freshman in college," she wiggled her hips once more.

"Of course you are," I shook my head. "Can I see your dad?"

"He's boring - I'm not," she grinned.

"I'm a very disreputable character," I cautioned her. "I'm hated by women on three continents. You shouldn't trust me."

"I don't," this precocious imp kept playing with me. I fell to my knees.

"Please, have mercy. I'm so lonely for female companionship right now, but I have work to do that involves your father," I begged.

Dijana looked past me to the various women waiting to come in.

"What are all those?" she pointed with her chin.

"They are all 'No-Fun Smurfs'," I warned her.

"Oh, that's why you want to shoot him," Vincent addressed to Delilah.

"I don't want to shoot him," Delilah corrected her American ally. "I want to wrap him up in duct tape and keep him in a closet until Christmas. Totally different thing."

"They don't seem to like you very much," Dijana noted as I stood up.

"No Miss, we all love him and we'd love him even more if he'd get back on task," Chaz stated, totally deadpan.

"Thanks Chaz, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," I looked over my shoulder. "I take back what I said earlier. I would feel comfortable in a communal shower with you."

"Shut the fuck up, Carl," Chaz replied laconically. "Work? Remember?"

"I thought your name was Cáel," my latest temptation inquired.

"It is," I shrugged. "I find it best to not correct Chaz though. He's a professional."

"A professional what?" Dijana kept at it.

"He's in landscape design," I beamed. "The kind that normally involves airstrikes, artillery and copious amounts of man-portable kinetic energy."

"You could have just said he was a soldier," she snorted.

"No...no, he can't," Charlotte muttered.

"I'm a colorful manipulator of the spoken word," I sighed. "Can I see your dad, please?"

"Okay," she smiled, turned tightly, ass slightly thrust back at me, and off she went.

I made my progress through the house nice and slow, and not only to scope out her pre-twenty tight butt. I was also letting Charlotte and Chaz, who were right behind me, scope out the environment as we moved. A young man and woman were halfway down the stairs when they spotted us.

[Romanian] "Sis?" the male asked.

[Romanian] "They're some people here to see Da," she replied.

[Romanian] "I'm Cáel Nyilas," I gave a mock-salute. "I'm interested in dead people."

[Romanian] "I'm Vasilije and this is my girlfriend, Hajnalka," he made the introductions. The freaky she-thing was indicating that I should look at the guy. He was important. I didn't know why.

Dijana led me back to her father's spacious study, curtailing my conversation with his son and his son's romantic interest.

"Da, you have some visitors," Dijana announced to her father. "This is Cáel Nyilas. He's an Irish diplomat and he has interest in your work."

You would expect that several armed people walking around your domicile would elicit some sort of concerned response. Not this guy. He looked up, gave a gentle smile, stood and shook my hand.

"Welcome to my home," he said in heavily-accented English. "What can I do for you?"

"Professor Loma, I'm interested the 'Rising Sun' symbol from this region of Romania that you've referenced in your published works," I said.

"Oh...where do you want me to start," he sat back down.

"Let's start at the beginning and assume I know nothing of this area's history," I said, leaning against his desk.

"It all began when this cave was discovered in the Harghita Mountains by hikers in 1953," the Professor began. "Initially, the investigating officials decided it was a mass grave where the advancing Soviets had killed Hungarian partisans in 1944." That was a politic way of saying the advancing Russians murdered captured Hungarian and Székely soldiers - the latter were probably native to the region.

"Worried about regional tensions, Bucharest (Romania's capital) decided to rebury the dead with a few bones going to the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj. In 1968, a visiting professor from Krakow came across the bones there and was curious about the damage they'd sustained. With some effort, he and the staff did some radio-carbon dating...and they discovered that one fibula came from the 2nd century CE while the second bone, a femur, was from five hundred years earlier - mid-4th century BCE.

After some effort, a joint Romanian-Yugoslavian-French archeological team explored both the cave and the reburial site in 1971. They found there were well over two thousand dead - all men in their middle years dating from the late 7th century BCE to the mid-2nd century CE. It was amazing ... all the men were beaten to death.

The only religious iconography we could find was a cave drawing in an elevated nook. It is a series of pictographs," he finished with a grin. "That's what drew me here in 2009." Then he showed me the first picture. It was a very crude figure of a man with his arms upraised. His left hand had a clear circle around it. The right arm had a dark circle with a larger, white 'X' through it.

"What were the other pictures like?" I inquired. He showed me a larger picture that scrolled over the entire length of the primitive mural. The rightmost figure was larger than the rest...he had a long-handled axe in his right hand and a bow in the left, both upraised. Then came three more figures, linked hand-in-hand.

The middle of the three had a circle around his head. The one on the right had his hand upraised, yet empty. The one on the left held a bow upraised. The first figure I'd seen anchored the left end of the line. Over each figure was a series of scratchings. You would have to know what you were looking for, to understand those chicken-scratches. It was Old Kingdom Hittite.

Beyond the first man I'd seen was a half-risen/fallen Sun...then I made out the triangle on the left while the center and right of the horizon was flat. Beyond the Sun were three taller figures. Two were clearly women while the third was a serpent. The first woman was drawn in red, the second was in yellow and the serpent was white.

"It is that figure that fascinates me," the Professor indicated with renewed excitement.

"What about it?" I murmured.

"I've seen it repeatedly throughout the Balkans; everywhere but here - in Transylvania. In this one cave is the only symbol like that in the entire region. And it makes no sense, because it is also the oldest depiction of that figure that has ever been found."

"Which means?" I was curious. I knew I was missing something crucial.

"I'm not sure. It is an archeological void. It is here, perhaps the cave was in use until the fall of the Dacian Kingdom to Emperor Trajan in 106 CE," he educated me. "Then it appears again in the late 7th century in Thrace," seeing my confusion, "Bulgaria."

"It remains in a few villages in the region until the 9th century, when it starts cropping up in various Slavic lands from northern Thessalonica to Croatia by the 11th century. In 1054 the symbol is associated with two name - здухаћ and ветровњак depending on which Orthodox Church records you read. In the West, they are called zduhać and vetrovnjak."

Coolness. I was waiting for the punch-line, if there was one. This guy was obviously used to talking to things that couldn't talk back and couldn't flee.

"Convergent with this mythology was another peasant belief and in 1813, near ... well anyway, those mythologies finally came together - Dragon men," he beamed joy.

"Men who are half-dragons?" I reposed. I had another idea where this was going.

"No - no," he shook his head. "Men who mate with Dragons to forestall their wrath - exhibited by storms and other weather related calamities."

"On the cave wall," I nodded. "The white 'X' on the shield is actually crossed lightning bolts and the 'S' is a dragon."

The man's mouth popped open in surprise.

"You see it too," his head bobbed happily.

"Yeah. It gets better," I sighed. "Is there a high cliff near that cave those bones were found in?"

He had to think about it before he accessed one of books.

One picture, not of the site, but close by, showed that there were indeed, high cliffs about.

"Those mean weren't beaten to death," I enlightened him. "They committed ritual suicide in a process called 'taking yourself to the cliffs'."

"How do you know that?" He was clearly intrigued by the idea, as it helped put some strange pieces together.

"I know of a society that does that today," I answered. "Usually, when they feel age is overcoming them, they say good-bye to their families and meet their end on their terms." My long-ago ancestors had seen themselves as Amazons and kept to their traditions, up to and including their method of death.

"Do you have any proof of that?" he worried.

"Which explanation makes more sense?" I postulated. "That a cult murdered people in rural Transylvania for eight hundred years and no one suspected, or that an insular society, practicing their own religious practices, lived here ... and their end of life traditions included a fatal leap to meet their demise."

"I concur, and it makes the nature of all the bludgeoning wounds make more sense. I can certainly have some members of the County Hospital take a look at some of the remains to see if they will support this hypothesis," the doctor was missing the obvious - like how I knew.

"I'm glad we are making some progress," I grinned. "So how many of these markers are there and are any names attached to them?"

"Oh!" he piped up. "That's the other fascinating part of story. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the families with that particular grave iconography started dying out."

"That's unfortunate," I remarked. My job was getting easier.

"It gets even more interesting," he continued, implying that my job might not be getting easier.

"You see, the males of those lines have been dying under mysterious, even nefarious, circumstances," he was almost giddy...sort of like the teenage-me with the latest Victoria Secret's catalog. "They've been expiring like that for the past two hundred years. There are almost none left. In fact, my children and I may the only surviving ones among people born under that sign."

"Cáel, is there a conspiracy to wipe out this man's bloodline?" Chaz inquired politely.

"Hold on," I gave Chaz pause. "You said that only the men have been getting offed?"

"Yes...what do you mean by conspiracy? Who kills random people for 200 years?" he was again clearly ignoring the obvious - like all the armed people in his house.

Dot Ishara pretty much assured me I was the last Isharan, until my baby-making exploits. Of the Arinniti sons, there was no sign. Why was someone offing the males of House Illuyankamunus, unless that blood line was like mine - carried through the Y-chromosome? But, we had a House Illuyankamunus, although there were only eight of them.

"Chaz, yes, I think his life and the life of his two sons are in danger," I addressed the Brit. "I think his daughter may be a peripheral target as well."

"What makes you think our lives are in danger?" the Professor was gripped with disbelief. He was a solid academic and a firm believer in the Rule of Law and that European society had matured beyond the need to use force to solve its problems.

I was thinking in expanding circles of coincidence and logic. The Dacia Draco - the totem of the Dacian Kingdom, the tool of terror those people used against all their enemies. In that pre-Roman kingdom...what if the male Amazons had taken a role, serving as elite warriors for those Thracian kings?

The Dragon hadn't been a random pagan symbol, it had been a tribute to their Dragon Goddess - the only Goddess who had not abandoned them. The Romans must have slaughtered most of those Amazon sons and daughters. The most significant faction had left the homeland and continued their religious observances elsewhere.

I supposed they did it so that the Arinniti and Isharans could go into hiding while they continued to practice their dragon-rites. Two hundred years ago, someone had figured out what was going on and killed...the males. Yet, Illuyankamunus was interested in the Lovasz sisters. While I'd been having my chat with the Professor, more people had come into the room.

Rachel directed her team to go over the terrain around the spacious house. She'd left Chaz, Selena and Vincent with me. Virginia, Odette and Delilah had gone to the kitchen with the Loma children (they'd sprouted a younger brother). The Lovasz sisters were with me, as was Flaviu. Pamela was wherever she was.

"Cáel," Riki rushed into the study, "we have a problem." That meant either I had a problem, or the United States had a problem with me. One look into her eyes told me this wasn't something that could go away quickly.

"Alkonyka, could you stick with the professor and find out if any more of you are hanging around," I requested then..."Oh God, Alkonyka, your Dad was murdered."

"What?" she and her sister looked my way.

"It fits with the Professor's discovers," I suggested. "I'll be back ASAP." I followed Riki out of the room and half way down the hallway to the kitchen. Flaviu stayed close, too. "What's up?" I inquired.

"We have received intelligence that the Russians are looking for some sort of military agreement with the Khanate and you are supposed to finalize the deal," Riki studied me. "What are they talking about?" she added.

I didn't go 'umm', 'ah' and prevaricate. "How did the Russians know how to find me?" I asked.

"We told them - the taskforce - at the insistence of Ms. Love," she replied. She was on edge and I couldn't blame her.

"Then let's re-examine those maps your people sent," I stated. "There has to be something there I've missed." I was back in the Havenstone 'intuit your task' mindset. Chaz stuck with us. A few quick, worried looks by the kids left Riki, Chaz, Delilah, Flaviu and me alone in the kitchen. I went back to examining all the data I'd been given.

Delilah began giving me the picture of the aerial struggle going on. In that portion of the globe, the Khanate held the advantage with the Russian Air Forces a close second and the PLAAF behind them. The Chinese still had comparable numbers, but their remaining quality was very inferior to the other two players.

Between the Khanate and Russians, the quality was close to the same, but the Khanate had the greater numbers and now, the actual combat experience. "If the PLAAF (People's Liberation Army Air Force) and the Russian aviation team up, the Khanate's offensive will falter," Delilah finished up her analysis.

Boom! Everyone wasn't looking at it the right way. They saw too few Khanate forces and I was wagering that they were focusing on the illusion of that weakness, not its strength. The Khanate needed to concentrate its forces and that meant they were feinting. It was the whispered voice of Alal coming into play.

I perceived Temujin's intentions through the lense of a Master of War. The Khanate offensive against Heilongjiang province was one colossal dual-deception. He was deceiving both the PLA and the Russians into thinking he was going to ravage the region. No one believed he could seize it, but he didn't have to.

He could wreck the country pretty effectively by maintaining air superiority (which he had established) and the use of mobile forces outside the urban areas. The problem was that it was resource intensive for the struggling Khanate and eventually futile. He couldn't effectively besiege the cities nor stop the Chinese from supplying them.

Eventually the PLA would become strong enough to drive him out. Losses for no gain. Unless, he could deny the People's Republic of China Heilongjiang without invading. Enter the Russians. If he could convince the Chinese he could take the province, they wouldn't put up too much of a fuss when the Russians intervened.

The Russians could intervene because the Khanate had smashed the major PLA forces facing the Russian Army. The problem Temujin was facing now was how to guarantee the Russians did cross over the Chinese frontier. Numbers...well, they were sitting right there in the Russian city of Chita. Chaz told me the proper terminology was 'Force Projection'.

Numbers alone didn't matter. It was the numbers you could bring to the battlefield that were critical. One Russian Army, the 5th, was placed defensively, warding the primary Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. It could enter Northeastern China, but the terrain was hellish. Another army, the 35th, was where it needed to be - opposite the main avenue to invade the Heilongjiang heartland.