Day of the Delphi (22 page)

Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Day of the Delphi

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Yet something felt wrong here. Wareagle had been involved in enough rescue missions inside Vietcong prison camps to know the feeling of futility they brought with them. He knew the hopelessness, the despair of their very
settings. The feeling here was different, though equally ominous and foreboding. There was a powerful enemy at work as well. Johnny could feel that enemy in the walls, could feel it in the awful purpose this place had been constructed to fulfill.

The complex was part of something terrible. The spirits grabbed Johnny’s ear and he heeded them. He understood at once why his search for Traggeo had been so important. That was how the spirits had lured him here to take up pursuit of a far greater enemy the madman had joined up with.

Wareagle stopped in his tracks.

Traggeo was here
now
! Traggeo was
coming
!

Johnny stopped in his tracks, as if an invisible thrust had shoved up against him. His senses sharpened. Up ahead he could see light beyond the next bend in the hall.

Wareagle pulled his knife from its sheath.

The rapid series of explosions had drawn Kristen to the door of her cell, ear pressed against it to listen for more hints of whatever was going on. But the hollow sound of approaching footsteps was all that reached her. Kristen lunged backward.

The monster was coming to kill her.

She understood what David had seen. What he had known, she now knew. That information could not die with her.

A weapon! She needed a weapon!

Her eyes fell on the bed frame. Tear one of the steel support rods free, and at least she would be able to mount some sort of defense. Kristen yanked the mattress off and overturned the bed frame. It thumped hard to the floor.

The bed frame was constructed of solid wood.

Beyond, the footsteps had stopped.

Click.

Her door had been electronically unlocked. The knob began to turn.

“No!”

The word had started as a scream and ended as a rasp. The door came all the way open.

Kristen shrank back against the wall and watched the huge figure enter. Not the man monster, though. Before her stood a giant Indian whose head barely cleared the doorway when he stepped part of the way in.

Kristen was not able to tear her eyes away from the Indian’s compelling gaze.

“You have seen him,” he said without further explanation, and his eyes darted back toward the corridor. “We must leave. Hurry.”

Knowing she had no choice, Kristen stepped through the cell door and joined him in the corridor. They had started forward when a figure turned onto the hallway at its head a hundred feet down.

“That’s hi—”

Kristen’s identification of the man monster who had killed her brother was cut short when the Indian yanked her in the opposite direction. They charged toward a blanket of darkness as a staccato burst of gunfire echoed along the hall. Chasms were dug out of the walls. Some of the bullets ricocheted in metallic screeches through the air.

Kristen felt the Indian nearly carry her around the corner that led into the waiting blackness.

Traggeo had not hesitated. Even as his eyes recorded the impossible sight straight ahead of him, his aim had been fast and sure.

Johnny Wareagle!

But his ultimate nemesis, the man whose scalp he wished to claim above all others, had moved a bare instant before he had fired. The spirits who had refused to accept Traggeo as a true-blood for so long had given Wareagle all the warning he needed. But those same spirits must have delivered the legendary Indian here for a reason.

Yes!

This was Traggeo’s chance, his test. Pass it by slaying Wareagle, and he would finally be accepted by the spirits that had so long scorned him. Wareagle was everything that Traggeo wanted to be. A legend. A hero. An individual more myth than man.

Wareagle melted from the path of his first burst toward the darkness of the next hall. Traggeo charged down the corridor without halting his fire.

Click.

His clip exhausted just as Wareagle and the woman vanished around the corner. The power in this unfinished wing had yet to be turned on. Pursuing Wareagle now meant doing so in the dark, on the legendary true-blood’s terms. Traggeo stopped. The spirits were tempting him, but he wouldn’t take the bait foolishly. He knew it was Wareagle’s game now to string out as he saw fit. Traggeo also knew defeating the legend meant confronting him on his, Traggeo’s, own terms, not following Wareagle recklessly into the blackness.

He swung round and started back for the control center.

“Stay here,” Johnny ordered in the darkness after gauging that Traggeo had not elected to follow them.

Hearing the thump outside the woman’s door had led him to stop before it. The keypad had not been installed yet, but the wiring was in place. He had simply touched the proper ends together and the door had snapped electronically open.

“Where are you going?” she asked him.

“I’ll be back.”

“You’re going after him, aren’t you?”

Johnny had his killing knife poised in his hand now. He wondered whether she could somehow see it.

“I’m going with you,” the woman insisted. “He killed my brother.”

“He has killed many.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” the woman asked and Johnny felt her grab hold of his arm again.

McCracken moved slowly along the empty corridor, his mind struggling to register all that he was seeing. He had entered Sandcastle One at the point where the southern wing intersected with the eastern one. But he guessed that what his eyes recorded would have been much the same anywhere else.

Sandcastle One was a high-tech prison. There were no bars, no cells. Instead there were doors laid out along the hall in dormitory-like fashion. No more than eight feet separated one from the next, which indicated the rooms within were very small. The wall beside each door was equipped with a keypad complete with built-in microphone.

This place had been built to very precise and costly specifications. A civilized element of polish had been added that hardly fitted the class of criminal it had supposedly been constructed to house. Not drug dealers or suppliers by a long shot. The cells of the complex were awaiting a different class of inmate altogether.

Political prisoners, those who were deemed a threat to the new order about to seize the country.

The Trilateral Commission, through a subcommittee chaired by Bill Carlisle, had sought to accomplish that same goal originally through Operation Yellow Rose. Now, nearly twenty years later, militant offspring of the Trilat were on the verge of achieving it.

Blaine checked his watch. Sandcastle One’s uninhabited status explained why only a token security force was in place. But he was still hoping that clues might be found somewhere that would bring him closer to the identity of those who were behind the coming takeover.

McCracken continued on, amazed by the expanse of Sandcastle One. Based on this wing, he estimated that the complex contained upwards of 750 cells to house its prisoners. He imagined more structures like this all over the country, five others already under construction and dozens more to follow over time, if necessary, all filled to capacity.

Blaine had swung onto another corridor when the sound of automatic gunfire reached him. A long burst coming from the fourth floor. McCracken steadied his own Uzi submachine gun before him and charged that way.

“We’re getting close to where I was interrogated,” Kristen whispered to the Indian. “Somewhere on the next hallway, I think.”

Before she could finish, the Indian had thrown her behind him.

“Down!” he ordered, and she barely had time to see the man monster whirling into view before Johnny took her with him to the floor.

They crashed to the hard tile together, barely below the spray of bullets. Before she found her breath, the Indian had somehow managed to send the knife he’d been holding whistling through the air.

Fifty feet away the blade embedded in Traggeo’s forearm. His hand jerked upward. A fresh burst of bullets carved chunks from the ceiling. He wailed in agony and spun sideways, slamming into the wall against the control center keypad. In the same swift motion he tore the knife from his forearm and passed the gun over to his left hand.

Believing he had the advantage, Johnny had lunged back to his feet and charged down the corridor. But his dash hadn’t taken the swiftness of Traggeo’s response into account. He had covered barely half the distance to Traggeo before the gun angled for him again. He saw the barrel lowered in his direction in the same instant he realized he was seeing his own death.

Yet the vision of death was a false one, forestalled by a whirling figure that flashed around the corner and threw itself upon Traggeo.

Blaine had recognized the booming voice of Johnny Wareagle an instant before another burst of automatic fire sounded. Rounding the corner, he spotted Johnny first, then
hurled himself upon the equally huge and distantly familiar shape that was steadying a machine gun aimed directly at the big Indian. The gunman turned at the last and sliced backward with a bloodied arm, catching Blaine across the bridge of the nose. The blow stunned McCracken enough to keep him from using his Uzi before the huge gunman pressed two numbers on a keypad on the wall beside him.

A door marked MONITOR CONTROL slid open and Traggeo threw himself inside. A hail of gunfire from within greeted Wareagle when he lunged toward it. McCracken managed to fire a spray into the room before the door closed once more. Blaine jumped to his feet and pushed the same two buttons the huge gunman had.

Nothing happened. The door didn’t budge. Johnny Wareagle placed his palms against it, as if trying to push his way through.

“Fancy meeting you here, Indian,” Blaine said, breathing hard.

He was about to continue when a familiar staccato sound reached him. Though barely discernible through the heavy walls of Sandcastle One, enough of it found both his and Johnny’s ears for them to know its origin.

“Choppers, Indian.”

“Coming fast.”

Their eyes returned to the door marked MONITOR CONTROL at the same time.

“Nothing else we can do here,” McCracken told him.

“For now, Blainey.”

Blaine noticed the woman for the first time, her eyes glazed with shock and uncertainty.

“Looks like you sprung Sandcastle One’s only prisoner, Indian,” he said and then turned back to Kristen. “I can’t wait to hear what you were in for.”

“What brings you to White Sands, Indian?” Blaine asked Wareagle as they rushed for the main entrance on the first
floor, the woman they had freed struggling to keep their pace.

“Traggeo, Blainey.”

“Thought I recognized that guy from somewhere.”

“The hellfire.”

“Bringing us together yet again.”

“Not for long if we can’t escape.”

“Don’t worry, Indian. I’m sure Sal’s got everything under control outside.”

CHAPTER 26

“Well, look who we got here,” Sal Belamo greeted when the three of them emerged from inside Sandcastle One, his eyes on the lights of the helicopters approaching over the desert. “Join the party, big fella. No wonder I couldn’t track you down.”

He was waiting with a pair of machine guns in hand next to a Humvee he had appropriated from the underground garage that was accessible from the complex’s west side. The same garage he had watched the now-smoldering convoy emerge from.

“Looks like you boys sprung yourselves a prisoner,” Sal added, eyeing Kristen as he pulled himself up behind the wheel. “Nothin’ beats an old-fashioned jailbreak, you ask me.”

McCracken joined Belamo in the front seat. Wareagle and Kristen Kurcell took the back. The lights of the approaching choppers sliced away larger chunks of the night with each passing second.

“How many, Johnny?” Blaine asked.

“Three, Blainey. Bell Jet Rangers.”

Sal gunned the Humvee’s engine. “Have no fear, boss. These things are built for this kind of shit. We’ll be out of sight before the bastards even have a chance to look.”

Before McCracken could ask Belamo how he intended to drive without the lights that would immediately draw the choppers to them, Sal pulled a pair of appropriated night-vision goggles from inside his jacket and tightened them in place. In the next instant they were off.

Sal kept the Humvee’s initial pace slow so as to guide it more easily past the smoldering debris scattered through the yard of the jeeps and truck that were blown up earlier. The clutter near what had been the front gate was too thick to avoid, leaving Sal no choice but to drive the Humvee over it. It bucked and thumped its way forward, jostling its passengers, and ultimately squeezed nimbly by the twisted carcass of the personnel truck.

Belamo’s appraisal of the Humvee couldn’t have been more on the mark. Though squat and quirky in appearance, the chosen replacement for the trusty jeep was strong and agile and, as already demonstrated, could chew up even the most hostile terrain. Its efficiency proven in the Gulf War, it would now serve as their means of escape through White Sands. With no more debris in their path, Sal gave the Humvee a little more gas and headed off into the desert.

“Who are you?” the woman asked suddenly as the Humvee thumped over a ridge in the ground. “Who are all of you?”

“The Three Musketeers,” smirked Sal Belamo, his eyes on the rearview mirror.

“The better question, miss,” said Blaine, speaking for all of them, “is, Who are you?”

“I asked you first.”

“Sorry. Rules of common decency don’t apply here.”

Kristen shrugged. “So I’ve seen.”

“We saved your life,” McCracken reminded. “That should be worth something.”

“It’s not worth as much as finding my brother’s killers.”

“Your brother’s
what
?”

Kristen sighed. “Let me put it another way: have any of you ever heard of Miravo Air Force Base?”

“Sal?”

“Mothballed SAC. Its toilets ain’t been pissed in for a couple years now.”

“Well,” countered Kristen, “somebody there got plenty pissed
off
when my brother showed up and spoiled their surprise.”

“Surprise?” raised McCracken.

“This may take awhile. Good thing we’ve got all night.”

The story didn’t take all night to tell, even though Kristen left nothing out. She started with the tape of her brother’s phone call, contacting Paul Gathers, and then her own trip to Colorado after the FBI man disappeared. With a lump in her throat, she told them about meeting Duncan Farlowe and their brush with death in the hills outside of Miravo. The lump got bigger still when she got to the part about the discovery of her brother’s body and the condition it was found in.

“That man, that
thing
inside did it.”

“Traggeo,” Wareagle told McCracken. “Still claiming to be part of my people and turning our collective spirit sallow in the process.”

“You tracked him all the way here.”

“A lure to bring us together, Blainey, so we might pursue something much worse.”

“I’ll say,” Kristen broke in and resumed her tale with her return to Washington and visit to the Pentagon accompanied by Senator Jordan. Then she told them of going with the senator for a second visit to Miravo, which found the base to be in full working order.

“But not for SAC,” she explained. “They reequipped and reoutfitted it for the supposed dismantling of nuclear warheads, the kind used in artillery.”

“Supposed?”

Kristen swallowed hard. The lump wouldn’t give. She forced the words past it. “I’m sure my brother died because
he learned the warheads weren’t being dismantled at all. I think he saw them being flown or driven off the base.”

McCracken exchanged stares with Sal Belamo. “But when you returned to Colorado with Senator Jordan, the base was operational again. Everything status quo.”

“Of course,” Kristen acknowledged bitterly. “They had plenty of time to cover their tracks, plenty of advance warning. The senator gave it to them.”

“I thought you said that the senator—”

“I killed her on the road after we left Miravo. Not far from where they killed my brother. I had to, or she would have killed me.”

“She was one of the bad guys, then.”

“For all I know, so are you.”

“No, you know better than that.”

“Do I?”

“You’d be dead if we were,” Blaine said and looked more closely at her.

The same hopelessness that kept the tone of her voice maddeningly level did little to diminish her beauty. Even though her long wavy hair was snarled and tousled, the face captured within it remained radiant and vital. Her brown eyes refused to reflect her fear and instead confirmed her determination. Her cheeks were flushed, perhaps radiating a glow of inner strength and resolve. Blaine had pegged her as the type of person who would scrap and claw till the very end, as evidenced by what she had already managed to endure.

“Did the senator tell you anything else? Did she say anything about what she was a part of?”

“Why don’t you tell me what she was a part of? I mean, that is what brought you to, what’d you say it was called, Sandcastle One, isn’t it?”

“I was told it was a prison.”

“But I was the only prisoner.”

“Just for the time being,” Blaine said.

“Whose
prison, Mr. McCracken? I think I’ve said enough
for now. I’d like to hear from you. I think I’ve run into your kind a few times on the Hill. Out-of-work spooks the end of the Cold War left in a lurch.”

“I was left in a lurch a long time before the Cold War finished up, Kris.”

Sal Belamo took a rough spot in the desert too fast and the Humvee’s tires thudded, bouncing off the ground.

“CIA?” she raised.

“Used to be.”

“And now?”

“On my own. There’s plenty to keep me busy.”

“Like whatever brought you to the complex.”

Blaine had to crimp his neck at an odd angle to look her straight in the eye. “Someone’s after the government this time. They want to bring it down.”

“As in overthrow?”

“By all indications, yes. And there’s only a week left before they try.”

Kristen’s expression softened a little. “That’s the first time I’ve heard your voice waver.”

“Because the prospects scare me.”

“I can’t picture you being scared of anything.”

“Pictures can be deceiving. It’s what keeps me going.”

“And you’re scared now?”

“More maybe than ever before.”

“Care to tell me why?”

“Because I’m not sure I can prevent it this time.”

“This
time? There’ve been others?”

“More than I can count, all focused around power and control. Everyone has a vision, and sometimes the people with the resources to realize their vision decide that they know best what’s right for everyone else. The scary thing is that they believe in what they’re doing and that’s what makes them difficult to stop.”

“Yet you stop them.”

“I believe in what I’m doing more.”

“But this time it’s different,” Kristen Kurcell concluded.

“Plenty. And thanks to you I’m beginning to understand why.”

“Me?”

“The nuclear weapons you believe your brother witnessed being taken out of Miravo. If I’m right, they’re going to be used, and soon.”

“And just how do we find out when?”

McCracken didn’t hesitate. “We go back to Washington and find the one man who might know.”