The Bone Hunters (2 page)

Sean remembered that to arm Japanese grenades they had to be hit against a hard surface. He fired at the soldier as he prepared to hurl the grenade. The explosion dropped him and two others. One kept coming.

“Banzai . . . Banzai,” he yelled.

He was the tallest Japanese Sean had ever seen, over six feet, and was waving a sword as he closed to within five feet of the truck. When Sean fired a longer burst, he stayed suspended for a few moments, dancing grotesquely as the bullets tore into his chest before he fell away.

Sean could now hear the BARs firing from the direction of the roadway behind the convoy. The Japanese were obviously trying to encircle them, attacking from both directions along the road.

He heard a loud moan from inside the cab of the truck. It had to be J.D. As Sean dove through the open passenger door, he felt a sharp stab of pain in his right
arm. Glancing at the sleeve, he saw that a bullet had passed through the fleshy part of his shoulder.

J.D. was still sitting upright in the driver's seat behind the shattered windshield. A shot from the Nambu machine gun had torn away his right eye. He was barely conscious and blood was puddling on the seat around him from another wound in his side. Sean dragged him out of the line of fire and laid him on the floor of the passenger-side. J.D.'s good eye briefly regained its focus.

“I'll be back,” said Sean.

He dropped through the open passenger door and found a new firing position in the shallow drainage ditch that ran along the edge of the roadway. The wound in his arm was starting to throb as he reloaded another magazine.

The staff car was now on fire and the blaze from its gas tank illuminated the roadway ahead of the convoy. Dead Japanese lay all the way back to the darkened buildings. There were no more attackers, at least for the moment.

The firing was constant at the other end of the convoy. Out of the corner of his eye, Sean saw someone crawling toward him from that direction along the ditch. It was Captain Allen. There was a tourniquet around his thigh, and blood was flowing from a wound above his scalp.

“They've got us surrounded,” he said through clenched teeth.

A Japanese soldier who had been lying beyond the staff car suddenly got to his feet and began charging toward them. His head was lowered to the ground as if he didn't want to know what was waiting for him. Sean cut him down with a single burst.

“Can you drive this truck?” said Captain Allen.

“Yessir,” said Sean.

“Get the red crate to the port at Chinwangtao,” he said. “The
President Harrison
.”

“Yessir,” said Sean.

Captain Allen took the Thompson from him and aimed it toward the nearest buildings.

“Go,” he said.

Bullets from the Nambu machine gun thudded into the dirt in front of him as Sean rose from the ditch. A moment later, he was through the open passenger door and behind the wheel as Captain Allen returned suppressing fire at the machine gun position on the roof.

Ramming the gearshift into first, Sean engaged the clutch and the truck lurched forward. As it gained speed, machine gun bullets raked its side and the engine compartment. The truck kept going.

They had gone several miles when Sean slowed down and stopped again. They were in open country. He gently lifted J.D. back onto the seat and examined his wounds. The right eye was gone, but the bullet had only creased his skull. Sean placed a gauze bandage around the empty cavity. The bleeding from his chest wound had slowed to a trickle. Sean removed an ampoule of morphine from the truck's medical kit as J.D. grimaced at him through the pain.

“Don't want it,” he said.

“I need to get you to a corpsman,” said Sean.

J.D.'s left eye squeezed shut.

“Get to the port,” he said. “We can't be more than a couple hours away.”

If the road ahead is clear of Japs,
thought Sean. He
picked up the half-full bottle of Haig & Haig and tipped it toward J.D.'s mouth. The sergeant took several deep swallows before Sean poured another inch onto his wound.

“Let's go,” J.D. growled.

Sean drove through the night repeating the same silent prayer.
Save him, Lord. Save him, Lord.
Save him, Lord
. J.D.'s breathing got increasingly ragged. Each time they hit a mud-clogged rut in the roadway, the cab would shudder violently and J.D.'s hand would tighten convulsively on Sean's wounded right arm.

It was after three in the morning when Sean saw the lights of Chinwangtao in the distance. The always bustling city was nearly empty. As they drove through the streets, the quiet was unearthly. Sean didn't stop until they reached the piers where the big oceangoing ships had to dock.

When he was heading across the concrete jetty that led to the outlying piers, J.D. regained consciousness. Sean pointed out to him a small detachment of Chinese soldiers hauling bales of cotton toward the walls of two large warehouses.

“They're setting fire to the port,” said J.D. “The Japs must be close.”

Sean drove down the length of the last pier. All the ship's berths were empty until he reached the end of the wharf. A darkened ship slowly materialized out of the gloom. Sean could see Chinese coolies rolling oil drums up the gangway to the forward deck. Far above them on the bridge, an officer was yelling down to the men on the dock and waving his arms in a circular motion.

“They're pulling out,” said J.D. “I can't see the name of the ship.”

Sean got out of the truck and ran to the edge of the gangway.

“Is this the
President Harrison
?” he yelled up to the officer on the bridge.

The man looked down at him and laughed.

“I hear she vas sunk by de Japs,” he said in a thick European accent. “This the
Prins Willem
.”

The
Prins Willem
was obviously an old coast runner. It stank of leaking fuel, and reddish stains streaked the once-white paint on the superstructure. The hull plates were covered with huge patches of rust. Sean didn't know much about ships, but this one didn't look as if it could make it out of the harbor.

“Ve leaf now . . . Jap here anytime,” the officer called out.

His crewmen began hauling in the mooring lines.

“There is something real important in that truck,” yelled Sean as the ship slowly began to edge away from the pier. “Can you take us with you?”

“Vat is it?” demanded the officer.

“I don't know, but they don't want the Japs to get it,” he called out.

The officer stared at him for several seconds. Then he waved to the half dozen coolies who were still standing on the dock. When he called out something in Chinese, they ran to the truck, dropped the rear gate, and swarmed aboard.

Sean watched as the red crate was hauled across the dock to the gangway and then up to the deck of the ship.
He could see it was punctured with bullet holes and he wondered if what was inside had been destroyed.

“Are you coming?” asked the officer.

Sean ran back to the cab of the truck and opened the passenger door. J.D. was sitting there in the same upright position. For a moment Sean wondered if he was still alive.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of gunfire from farther down the pier. In the garish light from the burning warehouses, a Japanese motorized detachment was heading swiftly across the concrete jetty. He watched it turn onto the pier and accelerate toward them. Behind him, he heard the lines being cast off. The gangway was still attached to the pier as the ship began to pull away from the dock.

“We have to go, J.D.,” he said, reaching to move him out of the seat. “The Japs are here.”

“I ain't goin',” said J.D.

Sean looked down and saw the pile of fragmentation grenades sitting on his lap. J.D. had removed them all from the canvas sack. Sean glanced back toward the departing ship. Its metal gangway was trailing along behind it, the end still barely attached to the dock.

“Go,” yelled J.D.

Sean ran toward the gangway, which was already separated by two feet of black water. He leaped for it and managed to land on the bottom rung. As he began climbing toward the deck, he looked back to see the first Japanese armored car in the motorized detachment pull to a stop next to J.D.'s truck.

Behind it came a light tank. Blocked by the truck, the tank's gun turret swung smoothly toward the retreating
cargo ship and opened fire. The first round from its 37 mm gun slammed into the stern of the
Prins Willem
, opening a four-foot jagged hole in the hull plates.

His fingers working in their familiar rhythm, J.D. Bradshaw began pulling the pins from the grenades on his lap. As he finished the task, the passenger door swung open and a squat Japanese officer with gold teeth pointed a pistol at him.

“Welcome to hell,” said Bradshaw before the massive detonation erased the end of the pier.

5 May

Bellamy Annex

The Long Wharf

Boston, Massachusetts

It had turned out all right after all, thought Dr. Barnaby Finchem.

Astrud was originally from Norway, but after coming to Boston as a doctoral exchange student, she had become a devoted citizen of the Red Sox nation. One of her cherished fantasies was to sit in the first row of seats next to the Pesky Pole in right field. Barnaby had acquired tickets from a Harvard colleague who owed him his tenure.

Barnaby had then endured four innings of the actual game, his six-and-a-half-foot and three-hundred-pound slab crammed into a plastic seat designed for Tom Thumb. Their seats faced the Green Monster across the outfield, and the only way Barnaby could see the batter's
box was to lean forward over the railing and crane his neck around the person one seat closer to home plate.

Of course, everyone near the Pesky Pole was leaning forward and craning their necks as well. In the second inning an inebriated fan in the row behind him started harassing him over his free-flowing mane of snow-white hair.

“Hey, Medusa, you're blockin' the whole goddamn outfield,” the fan called out, generating laughter from the morons around him. Barnaby turned around. The man was as bald as a cue ball.

“Jealousy is no excuse for stupidity,” he retorted.

From there the man's comments had become increasingly obscene.

It had all mercifully ended when the Red Sox pitcher gave up a fly ball that sailed wide toward the Pesky Pole and straight toward Barnaby. An obese woman in the seat behind him rammed him forward over the railing in her zeal to catch the ball. After a stern warning about lifetime banishment from Red Sox security, he and Astrud were escorted to the nearest exit gate. Thankfully, she hadn't blamed him for the fiasco.

In the cab going back to Cambridge, she had become increasingly solicitous, at first stroking his sore knee before her supple fingers slowly moved up his thigh. When they hit a traffic logjam near the Longfellow Bridge, Barnaby decided on the spur of the moment to bring her to his secret lair on the Long Wharf, which was only a few blocks away.

Now, as he was approaching seventy, Barnaby's past two heart attacks had forced him to severely curb his libido. He now took pride in a strict regimen of never
attempting to seduce one of his doctoral students. Only if one of them seduced him, and she was unbearably desirable, would he allow his defenses to be breached.

Astrud met the standard.

He had met her at an academic competition for Norse scholars organized by one of his colleagues in the archaeology department. Barnaby now taught only one course, the Origins of Civilization lecture series, and it was harder to get into his course than the seats by the Pesky Pole.

Nine doctoral candidates were in the academic competition. As the star of the archaeology faculty, Barnaby had been chosen to chair the jury. His life achievements were legend.

After achieving first-class honors at Cambridge, the expatriate Englishman had spent forty years becoming the foremost expert on Norse culture and language in the world. There had been other candidates for that honor, but they were now dead, including a man he was forced to kill a year earlier.

Each student in the academic competition had been charged with the task of creating an original depiction of ancient Norse life. Three of them were triumphs of vision and inspiration, magnificently rendered, deeply felt, and intuitively recreated, projects that resonated within Barnaby's own carefully nurtured imagination. Five of the remaining projects were less than brilliant. And then there was Astrud's.

In her primitive oil painting, she had imagined a fifth-century Norse funeral scene in which a young woman lay in a wooden bier, her white-clad body covered with wildflowers. Historically, he knew it had absolutely no connection to Norse life, but the face was indelibly lovely
surrounded by its helmet of blond hair. Looking at it, he realized it was a self-portrait of the doctoral student standing beside him, the artist herself.

“How did you research the context for this funeral scene?” he found himself asking her. “We have no evidence of how a Norse funeral was conducted in the fifth century.”

“I imagined it, Dr. Finchem,” she said, gazing up at him with those exquisite blue eyes.

By all that was holy, he knew he could not vote for her project, but when the competition was over, she expressed no disappointment at all when she came up to him at the reception.

“Just meeting you, Dr. Finchem, has been the greatest thrill of my life,” she said.

He felt his resistance melting away.

Twenty minutes after leaving the Red Sox game, he was unlocking the great steel door that led into his lair on the Long Wharf. He turned on the overhead lights in the single massive chamber.

About fifty feet by fifty feet, it had twenty-foot-high ceilings and rough-hewn oak beams that braced the whole expanse. The windows overlooking the harbor were clad with iron shutters.

The first section of the chamber included a fully equipped laboratory with all the assets necessary for both an archaeologist and a pathologist, including a computer lab, printers, cameras, recorders, and flat-screen television monitors.

Astrud was nearly overcome with emotion in the second area of the chamber. It was Barnaby's Norse library, with documents, diaries, old vellum manuscripts and rune
tablets going back twelve centuries. On the wall she saw a hint of his vast collection of Viking swords, tools, shields, and knives.

The final section was his living area, which included an expansive kitchen. Copper pots and pans hung from an iron rack above commercial appliances and granite countertops.

“I like to cook,” he said.

Her eyes wandered away from the kitchen to the nearby elevated sleeping loft, which was constructed from raw timbers and covered with animal pelts and sheepskin rugs.

“A tenth-century Viking sleeping pallet,” said Astrud observantly. “I've always wondered if they would have been comfortable while sleeping in the nude. . . . How would you research that, Dr. Finchem?”

They came together on the pallet. Barnaby no longer cared whether his students bedded him for his brains, his fame, his marking pen, or his ability to further their career. At sixty-nine, he still loved the feel and touch of a beautiful woman without having to pay her alimony. He had been down that road more than once.

The only impediment to his anticipated pleasure was buried inside his upper chest. It was an implanted cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD, which he had been assured by his doctors would correct most life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias after the last heart attack.

The ICD had never met Astrud.

When they had finished, he turned wearily onto his back and stretched out his six-and-a-half-foot frame. It had been good, very good. He was falling into a deep
sleep when the cell phone he had left on the kitchen counter began to ring.

It was a new phone, and he had set the ring tone to the cries of a flock of seagulls, the least obnoxious tone on the list. He had not bothered to set a ring limit before it went to an answering message, and the cawing went on and on. After two minutes of the shrieking cries, the gulls sounded as if they were coming to eat him alive.

No one except Astrud knew the new number, and she was lying insensate next to him in the Viking pallet. But what if she had shared it with someone else? That was the likeliest possibility. What had seemed like such a good decision in the cab was probably going to be a grave mistake, he decided. If she was that indiscreet, he needed to gently but firmly disengage.

When the gulls finally stopped, he realized he was desperately hungry. He had avoided the “Green Monster dog” in the concession stand at the baseball park, and the lovemaking had added to his appetite. In his mind's eye, he contemplated the array of superb meals he had prepared and were now frozen in the big Viking refrigerator.

One of them was a classic Norse wine stew, savory chunks of venison and imported wild boar slow-cooked in a tureen of Swedish truffles, carrots, and onions. He had found the recipe in a rune parchment from the eleventh century. Heading down to the kitchen, he brought it out to defrost.

When the delicious aroma began to permeate the living area, Astrud descended from the pallet wearing one of his Abercrombie & Fitch flaming red flannel shirts. It ended becomingly at her thighs and set off her naturally
flaxen hair. He decided to hold off confronting her about giving out his cell phone number.

After pouring her a glass of Castello Banfi's 2010 Centine, he removed a loaf of shard bread from the oven and they sat down to enjoy the feast. They were finishing the second bottle of wine when Barnaby broached the noble idea that it might be a good decision for her to find a worthy man no older than her father. A moment later she was clinging to him again like a limpet mine, her sweet mouth on his.

After another session on the sleeping pallet, he knew how a sled dog felt approaching the finish line at the Iditarod. He was finally falling asleep again when the carnivorous seagulls began to shriek again.

“Aren't you going to answer it?” she asked with that remaining echo of her native Norwegian accent.

“No one aside from you has the number, Astrud,” he said in a less than fatherly baritone.

“I haven't given it to another soul,” she said, her eyes going liquid.

The ringing stopped again and he waited in the silence for it to resume. Instead, someone began knocking on the steel entrance door. The pounding echoed through the chamber.

“For the love of Thor,” Barnaby growled.

Planning to verbally lash whoever it was standing in the hallway, he climbed off the sleeping pallet and stalked naked to the door. Putting his nose against the glass peephole, he looked out into the shadowy passageway and frowned.