Unraveling Yarns, Part 3 of 5: The Mandrake and the Yellow Father

Corbyn Farisi has just returned to Africa after training with the Office to take the fight to those terrorizing the people of Ethiopia: the fascist colonizers who call themselves the Sons of Italy and their foul leader, the Yellow Father. Farisi’s secret weapon in this final push is the mysterious and terrifying woman known to her victims as la Mandragora. The Mandrake is a specter the Italians dare only whisper of who employs the very methods she seeks to eliminate: abject terror, stomach-turning bloodshed, and calculated horror.

The five parts of Unraveled Yarns have been collected in The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, which is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

The Mandrake and the Yellow Father is a standalone short story that features characters from Operation Arm Breaker.

Content warnings: Minor swearing, death, violence, gun violence, gore, alcohol use, fascists.

WEDNESDAY MORNING, JUNE 30, 1943
EAST OF DEBARQ
AMHARA, ETHIOPIAN EMPIRE

//translated from Lingala//

Corbyn Farisi pressed himself as flat to the clifftop as he could and swept his sniper rifle's invisible beam over the sleeping camp below. Few of the Sons of Italy were awake at this hour: a lazing guard at each entrance, another wandering between the tents, too tired or drunk to properly patrol. He watched him stumble around, lit in purple only to his scope. Movement on the camp's southern perimeter draw his attention. He settled his crosshairs on a lithe woman moving like a leopard.

The Italians called her La Mandragora. Their staked ditch and timber wall did little to slow her. Their watchtowers were easily circumnavigated. Their guard was clumsy and loud and she passed within meters of him. She was a confident and relentless killer. Still, each close encounter caused Farisi's heart to seize in his chest.

She could handle them, of course. Soldier by soldier. No man had ever slowed her. It would be brutal, and ugly, but whatever she did, these Italians had earned it.

When the Italians returned to Africa for their latest attempt to conquer it, they brought their new politics with them. Mussolini had told them to take Africa by 'terror and extermination.' Where before they had wanted it for the money that could be made, this time they wanted the land itself. They thought they would be better custodians of the continent than its people. And they would wipe out those people to see it theirs.

Evaristo Accorsi was one of il Duce’s favored commanders. He went beyond what was asked of him. He was a methodical killer, and creative.

The fascists' new philosophies were based around their twisted racial science. It made their atrocities eager and justified. When they dumped mustard gas onto Ethiopian armies and cities, they rejoiced at its efficiency. The League of Nations decried it but did nothing to stop them, as its members had ignored so many other things done by white men to African people. In the end, the pesky residents of this ‘New Italy’ were dead while their resources and infrastructure survived.

Evaristo Accorsi had learned much from this war, leading his massacres. He had honed his two favored blades through practice. The first was the mustard gas. He used it in bombs, in shells, in grenades, in mines, in aerosol sprayers. He used so much of it that it stained the earth. He prayed and supplicated and thanked God and il Duce for his victories.

Religion was his second sword. He waved his cross around and his men and missionaries called him the Yellow Father. He incensed his soldiers with it, cowed his enemies, calmed his victims. He used it as a smother and as a bludgeon.

When the Italian Army had run from Ethiopia, driven out by the British, the Yellow Father had remained. His war had changed him. Horror had become a facet of his being and he could no more retreat from it than he could from Africa.

His soldiers stayed with him. They called themselves the Sons of Italy and they began their terror campaign in the British Army's wake. The places the Allies had secured and then left were soft targets to them.

The Sons came in the night, armed with heavy weapons, disdain, and entitlement. The things they did made the war pale in comparison. The survivors were few and scarred. While the bodies bled out and the fires burned, the Sons would melt away into the forests and grasslands. They fought with the fervor of men doing what they knew to be right. Where as colonizers they had committed atrocities for land and glory, as the Sons they only wanted vengeance and blood. Africa was their land, they were told, and if it was not, it would not exist at all.

The Yellow Father's sermons had coaxed the Sons into dozens of battles. They were merciless, more butchers than soldiers. They had their god at their back, that is what carried them through two years of fighting from the bush. They were vicious and dug in in their camp at the edge of the mountains, and they would be dug in somewhere else in a week's time. But la Mandragora and Fairisi had found them, and this was their last chance to end them.

If she and Farisi did not meet the Yellow Father then and there, they might never. Her time in Africa was about to be interrupted. When she returned, he might have gone back to his country. He might have taken on the facade of a priest or farmer or hero or businessman. Whatever he became, he would still be a monster.

The drunk guard stumbled a little too close to la Mandragora for Farisi's comfort. He placed his sights directly on the swaying man's chest.

“There is one coming to you,” Fasiri whispered into his radio mic. In his scope, la Mandragora froze in place. Farisi let out half a breath and put his finger on the trigger. Before he had to make that choice, the deed was done. La Mandragora's long, curved sword flashed under Farisi's ultraviolet light and the Italian fell. She wiped silvery blood on her cloak and sheathed it.

La Mandragora listened to see if the death had alerted anyone else, but the half-asleep guards in the watchtowers did not stir, and no one emerged from the nearby tents. Satisfied, she twisted around and pointed a little light upward, at Farisi. She blinked it on and off rapidly, flashing an invisible light detectable only by his scope. He decoded her message as she sent it, and replied:

“Six tents ahead. Put on your mask, Peri-peri, I do not care that it is hot.”

La Mandragora shook her head. He could almost hear her chuckling. She stalked ahead, nearly slithering. Farisi noted that she did not take her mask out of her pack. He checked his rifles. If there was trouble, he wanted to be able to act faster than her enemies.

The rifle in his hands was heavy and British. The bulky ultraviolet spotlight and scope on top was of German make, a Vampir captured during an Office raid on a Department Three armory. It had been a struggle to drag its battery to the top of this cliff, dodging wolves and geladas the entire way. He had an twenty-centimeter canister suppressor mounted on its muzzle and a full magazine of subsonic rounds loaded. From his vantage point high above, he could cover every corner of the small camp.

The rifle laid out next to him was an M1903 Springfield taken from an American ship. It was modified to launch a long lance and pull a rope behind it, in this case the Office's silk-spun, unbreakable wormline.

Confident his tools were in good order, he watched la Mandragora slink through the sleeping camp.

The central tent in the small camp was the largest. It was lit from the inside, silhouetting la Mandragora as she approached. The Yellow Father was awake.

Farisi pressed his cheek against the buttstock and exhaled slowly. He pressed his mic button.

“That is his, be careful,” he whispered.

La Mandragora stood, raised her sword high, then brought it down. The wall of the tent parted and she slipped through. Farisi could see shadows moving within. After a few seconds, the movement inside died down.

Farisi held his breath. Of course the figure that emerged was la Mandragora. He sighed in relief. She lifted the light and flashed a message to him:

'Objective complete.'

Farisi let out a short breath. He had been sent by the Office to help Ethiopian anti-terror forces eliminate the threat of the Sons of Italy. La Mandragora had done just that. They both would earn commendations from the Emperor for this, if he was allowed to know they existed.

Farisi set the thrill of hard-earned victory aside. He still had to get her out alive. She might not have had his Office evasion training, but she moved like a viper.

“The way you came in is clear,” Farisi reported. Her response was short:

'Negative.'

He surveyed her return path and did not register any obstacles.

“I see no trouble, it is time to go,” he told her.

'Negative,' she blinked back at him. He centered his sights on her and twisted the scope's focus, magnifying her. She was wearing her gas mask and had a bandolier of green canister grenades in each hand.

“Do not - !” Farisi started, but the tent behind her burst into flame. The groggy guards in the watchtower snapped awake and began shouting. Men were emerging from the tents, confused and exhausted. La Mandragora tossed the first grenades among them.

The entire camp descended into confusion. Shocked Italians clutched their necks and disappeared. Walls of yellow-green gas tumbled between the rows of tents.

As much as Farisi appreciated poetic justice, this was not the time.

“Get moving, Peri-peri,” he urged. He did not know whether she was listening at all and he had lost her in the roiling yellow.

Italians stumbled through the gas, blinded. La Mandragora materialized behind them, one after another, and laid each down in turn. Her knives were practically glowing silver under Farisi's beam.

The guard in the southern watchtower brought his machine gun to bear. Farisi whipped his crosshairs across the camp, ready to stop him from opening firing. By the time Farisi found his breath, the guard was slumped back, still, his weapon abandoned. She had known he was there, ready to fire. She had not given him the chance. Silver pooled beneath him.

“Good catch,” Farisi whispered to himself.

More and more Italians were braving the opens rows between their fumigated tents. One-in-ten had met La Mandragora by then. The others bolted for the northern gate. She let them run.

The fastest shoved the gate open and bolted. They sprinted full-bore into the neck-height barbed wire she had strung taut across their road. The slower Italians stopped in their tracks, half-blind, scared witless, and confused as to what had torn their comrades’ throats open.

La Mandragora flashed a signal to Farisi.

'Now.'

He pressed a button on his radio transceiver. The buried mines detonated around the clustered escapees. The dozen men were replaced by a rising cloud of dirt.

“Go, please,” he urged through his mic.

Just as he had been trained by the Office in guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency and given the most advanced weapons the Allies had to offer, some of the Sons had been taken under the wing of the SIM's Methodical Warfare Division. He could not even guess what weapons they would bring to bear when cornered.

When Farisi had first followed la Mandragora from their home, they had both been angry and young. Their families had been destroyed by Belgians, neither had wanted to support their Allies in war. But Emperor Selassie's charge was compelling: 'preserve our land, our people, and our legacy.' It was a cry that resonated in all who had been exploited by colonizers.

La Mandragora had not left the hunt since she had joined it. Sometimes Farisi felt like she disdained him for taking the Office's offer for training and protection, for leaving the front for those few weeks, but he had become a better leader and fighter in that time. She had become more driven in his absence, more prone to risks and brutality. Her actions were quieter, and more confident. The objectives she pursued were found quicker and attained with less struggle. She ‘did not need the tools or teachings of white men an ocean away.’ Her blade was all she needed, though she had gained an appreciation for remote-detonated land mines.

When she and Farisi had joined the Gideon Force after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, they had merely been acting and reacting in the moment. They had stayed alive by luck and by tenacity. What the Office’s training had given Farisi was the means to analyze and solve problems scientifically, with replicable results. What la Mandragora had seen as instinctual and spontaneous was just the opposite: something that could be dissected and rebuilt greater. It did not hurt that the Office had also provided them with guns, ultraviolet scopes, miniature radios, and reinforced gas masks.

Farisi scanned the small fort. If their goal was accomplished, la Mandragora could leave. Those few Italians left were wheezing lungfuls of mustard gas. She pruned them as she found them.

They let those few that could escape out of the south gate. There were no traps there, only open dry grasslands at the foot of the Simien mountains. If the adders and mambas did not take care of them in the darkness, Farisi would lead his men to round them up in the morning. Barefoot white men hacking up blood would be easy to track.

La Mandragora flashed another signal upward, a question.

“I do not see anyone else,” Farisi told her, scanning the camp back and forth through his scope. The fires leaping from tent to tent were bright as suns in his scope. He had to set the rifle down to rub his eye. He spoke as he blinked the ghost lights out of his vision. “We should leave.”

“La Mandragora!” a man shouted below, loud enough that Farisi could hear him from the cliff top. “Pensavo che ti saresti sempre nascosto da me!”

“Non mi nascondo!” she shouted back. She had learned the language of their enemy.

Farisi snatched his rifle back up but the fires were too intense: his view was utterly washed out in blinding amethyst. He struggled to unhook the massive scope.

Far below, a single gas-masked Italian stood among the burning tents. Flames walled him in on three sides, with la Mandragora facing him down from the front. Yellow gas curled around their ankles and black smoke billowed above.

A familiar sword appeared in her hand, a curved Ethiopian shotel.

“Un coltello?” the man hooted, louder even than the crackling flames. “Sai chi sono?”

La Mandragora's response was too quiet to hear, but it enraged the lone man standing before her. Farisi knew her words cut as surely as her shotel.

The Italian ripped his shirt away, revealing a lattice of steel caging his body. A diesel engine coughed to life and the strange armor began shifting and expanding on him. The bars and pistons groaned and extended into triangular, pointed stilts, raising him half-a-meter taller. The steel around his arms stretched until it was as long and sharp as spears, then pointed shovel blades snapped into place at the ends. His chest plate grew upward until there were bars protecting his face and neck.

It was some kind of trenching machine, the means by which the Sons could move their encampments so quickly. It could plow through stone, trees, and earth. If he hit her, he would prove once and for all that la Mandragora was just flesh and stories.

“Ti ucciderò, Mandragora,” he growled. “È un peccato che nessuno può più vedere.”

The man lunged at her, his contraption creaking and backfiring. Stone-sharpened shovel blades tore furrows into the packed earth where she had just stood. Her sword should have opened his throat, instead, its razor edge dragged across steel, sending sparks into his eyes. He reeled back, swinging his long arms wildly. She danced around his sprawling attacks, searching for an opening in his armor.

Farisi tried to aim again only to be blinded by his scope. He threw the rifle aside and snatched up his line launcher. If he could not hit the walking bulldozer with a bullet, he would have to try something else.

He pulled the butt stock to his shoulder, judged the distance, elevation change, and windspeed like they had taught him at Camp X, then fired.

The rifle kicked hard enough to hurt and its long spear arced across the distance, unraveling white-green wormline behind it. It collided with the armored Son and snarled in his superstructure. He swore, swatting his bladed arms at the long silken rope suddenly attached to his back. Each effort tied him tighter. Wormline was strong enough to bind ships together; hydraulic shovels would not cut it.

Farisi watched in smug satisfaction. The panicking Son was entangling himself like he had been caught by a spider. Each bit of effort expended burnt more of his fuel and took another few meters of wormline. It was almost too late before Farisi realized that his wormline was just as finite as the Son’s petrol.

The wormline went taut with a twang that reverberated off the cliff face. The line launcher snapped upward, caught between its target and the tree Farisi had anchored it to. It was a scrubby acacia, clinging to the bare rock with simple, furious determination. It would have been enough to hold him as he zip-lined down. To expect it to stand against a walking bulldozer was another story. The tree creaked as it cracked. Its roots ripped out of the dusty fissures they had clawed a life from. Farisi dove to the side as the entire thing tore free and tumbled past.

Dust blossomed, further obscuring the camp. Panic rose in Farisi. La Mandragora had fought and killed while he was in Canada, and she had fought and killed before he had known her, but still a knot tightened in his chest.

“Peri-peri,” he whispered into his microphone, “I cannot see you.”

He could still hear a diesel roar, and the clang of steel on steel, even from this distance.

“Where are you?” he tried again. She had to know that he could not cover her. His hand slipped down to the miniature radio on his belt. It was in pieces from avoiding the falling tree. La Mandragora was alone and did not know.

Farisi snatched up his Vampir-scoped rifle. Even if the flame below did not wash out its eyepiece, his tumble had cracked the delicate device. He unsheathed his bush knife and dug at the bulky thing. It gave way after a few frustrating seconds and snapped free from the rifle. Between the scope and its battery, it weighed over fifteen kilograms, and Farisi needed to move. He tossed the whole kit over the cliff. It was classified Most Secret: if he could not carry it, he could not leave it intact for someone else to find. It shattered when it hit the ground.

The way down the cliff was circuitous and dangerous. Farisi took to it like a goat, moving by feel, half-sliding and jumping from rock to rock. Each second he took was another second she was fighting fascists alone.

He reached the bottom of the shear cliff as the first rays of sunlight flared over the ridge to the east. The area around the Sons' camp was clear-cut and tamped down. Red dust rose with his bootfalls. The eastern gate hung wide open. Flames were licking the greenwood walls, leaving the wood spitting and hissing as it burned. He pulled his scarf over his nose and mouth, leveled his rifle, and entered the camp.

A few wisps of gas clung to the ground. There were dead bodies every few meters. Those tents that were not ashes were burning. Smoke choked the whole camp.

“Peri-peri!” Farisi shouted. His voice was muffled by his scarf, but he dared not remove it while the mustard tendrils swirled around his feet. The sounds of battle had ceased. He tried again: “Peri-peri!”

Farisi nearly tripped over a gas-shriveled head. It had been hacked from its body, which was nowhere to be seen. La Mandragora's blades had dulled by the end. He ducked away from a column of fire that had once been a cooking tent only to nearly step in a pile of intestines. Whoever they belonged to had tried to run, trailing them behind. He was gone, but his organs remained.

“Peri-peri?” he called.

“School Boy?” someone gasped.

Farisi spun around to find a lone figure silhouetted in flame. La Mandragora. Blood oozed from the long, curved blade in her left hand. Pieces of men covered her cloak and gas mask like stucco, men she had hacked apart by hand. Her clothes were charred, torn, and infused with chalky yellow mustard gas residue. There was a human head in her right hand, her gloved fingers locked into its open mouth and holding it upside down.

Bodies lay strewn around her. One groaned and lifted a pistol. She moved like a ghost. Her shotel rose and fell and the man collapsed, gurgling.

She climbed over a junk pile that had been the armored man. Farisi's wormline had woven itself between his joints, locking his arms and legs rigid like a dead roach. His mask was split in half where her blade had found an opening. She hopped off him and slipped between two more armored corpses.

This pair had been laying in wait, waiting to finish her off after their trench-digging friend had had his fun with her. They were reduced to scraps as well. One had been a designed to cut down trees, the other to pound the earth with pneumatic presses. A chainsaw as long as she was tall coughed and idled on the ground. Its operator's arm was still strapped to its chassis, several meters from the rest of him.

She had killed them all herself. Dozens of men, carved to tatters, dying afraid. It was a scene of horror, no different than those the dead men had made themselves. She walked among the bodies and the flames.

Farisi said nothing. There was nothing to say. He led her back to the open gate, taking slow, measured steps and never letting la Mandragora out of his sight. She paced like a leopard.

Once they were free of the camp, and its gas and flames, she spoke up:

“Is this him?”

She held the head up. It had belonged to a jowly white man with a gray mustache. He was bald, with brown spots on his gleaming scalp. Farisi ruffled through his pockets until he found a photograph. He flipped it upside-down and held it next to the head.

“Evaristo Accorsi,” he confirmed. The Yellow Father was confirmed neutralized. He let a smile cut through his stoney face. The Sons of Italy had lost their founder, their pipeline for weapons, and their inspiration. What few of them remained, those in secluded outposts, would soon wither on the vine. The militias la Mandragora and Farisi had trained would finished them off.

La Mandragora threw Accorsi's head into a bush and tossed her gas mask aside. She ripped her gore-stained cloak off her shoulders and threw her shotel so it stuck upright and wobbling in the ground. Beneath the cloak she was muscular, but small. Her clothes were green and red, cheerful and inlaid with silver thread. Beads rattled in her braids and sweat glistened on her scars. She smiled wide and whooped as she jumped into her husband's arms.

“We did it!” she shouted at the sunrise. “We killed the bastard!”

Farisi held her tight, her legs wrapped around his waist. He danced with her, not letting her feet touch the ground. Zola Majambu was smaller as herself. Farisi grinned. 'La Mandragora' was a heavy weight to bear. With that name cast off, at least for the moment, she floated like a feather.

She kissed him.

She tasted salty and spicy and smoky and warm and perfect and familiar and exciting. She pressed her forehead to his and her red braids cascaded around him. They kissed again and laughed.

He set her down and they collapsed into the dirt. He pulled her tight and she draped her hand across his stomach. He did not mind the red smear it left on his shirt. The sunrise was majestic, and he listened to the birds catch up on that night's excitement as she fell asleep to the sounds of the Sons' camp crackling and burning.

Farisi held her close and rested his cheek on her head. The things she had to do drained her. When she was able to sleep, he let her.

She would be leaving soon. She would do well in Canada if she was let them. She could be impatient sometimes, and pushy. If she thought she knew more than the person teaching her, she could be hostile. Farisi chuckled to himself. The officials were men and women of quiet disposition, confident strength, and impossible knowledge. They did not force anyone to learn and they did not brag about their experience. He hoped Zola would give them a chance. If she did not, at least Instructor Fairbairn would be there. He was known to teach patience in his own manner. Luckily, his was the only manner she would pay attention to.

But as apprehensive she was, she would be able to see their girls. The few days Corbyn had spent in Colorado getting Ayanga and Mayangi settled in with Zola’s mother had meant everything to him. He was excited that Zola would get that same experience, and the certain knowledge that their family was safe.

For him, it would only be a few weeks, but he would miss her touch, her smile, her awful jokes and heinous burps, her hatred of bullshit, her spicy soso, her little snores that she always denied. She snorted and snuggled in closer.

“I love you, Peri-peri,” he whispered to the top of her head.

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.