The Vengeance of the Tau, page 9
His head was gone, sliced clean off while Billy had been on the phone right here in public. There was blood everywhere. Billy could see it now, splotchy in the darkness.
My punishment, Billy realized, as he lost his breath and stepped from the car. My punishment. …
Chapter 10
THE GUARDS BEGAN SWINGING open the gate at first sight of the car heading down the dirt road late Wednesday afternoon.
“You’re late,” one said to the driver, as the car inched through the entrance.
“She’s waiting, then.”
“For hours. You’ve thrown off her routine.”
“Couldn’t be avoided. The messenger was running behind.”
The woman drove the car into the kibbutz and parked it next to the memorial to the war that had seen Israel take the Golan Heights. The memorial was an old tank, still functional and well-maintained, but covered with roses, violets, and daffodils. The planters enveloped the entire bulk of its frame. The turret alone gave away what it had once been, and the contrast was intentional. On top of this battle-scarred land, an entire people had built a beautiful nation. Israel would live with the dichotomy of beauty and force forever. The symbol of the tank was enduring.
The woman climbed out of the car and took with her a hefty stack of newspapers from all over the world: major dailies from the United States, Germany, France, and England through that very day; Austria, Switzerland, and Italy through three days before. Holding the stack in both arms, she moved in a fast walk toward a cottage isolated in the commune’s rear. The pair watching over the old woman today motioned the visitor toward the wrought-iron table where the figure in the wheelchair was seated, turned away toward the trees. She plopped the stack down atop the table and straightened it.
“I’m sorry for being late.”
The figure in the wheelchair did not turn. “Leave me.”
All too glad to do just that, the woman turned and was on her way.
This kibbutz looked much like the other self-sufficient communes that were scattered all across Israel. Large fields of crops dominated the setting. Farm animals were corralled in a number of areas. The squawk of chickens could be heard for a considerable distance. Cows looked up from their grazing to utter an occasional sound. Dogs sauntered lazily about or lay in the shade of large cedar trees and the kibbutz’s numerous buildings. Many of these were small, cottagelike structures that mostly held families. A number of larger structures were actually dormitories that housed the children. Still more buildings contained offices and classrooms for the children’s daily lessons. The largest was the cafeteria where the kibbutz members took all their meals. The synagogue could be found in the second largest.
This kibbutz would also have seemed at first glance to be like all the others in terms of the residents going about their daily chores and duties. Routine provided security, not tedium. For the residents, discipline was everything.
But a closer look revealed something odd about this kibbutz’s residents: each and every adult was female. Men were nowhere to be seen. In addition to that, this particular kibbutz enjoyed no formal registration, nothing whatsoever that provided proof of its existence. All mail was delivered to a single post office box twenty miles away to be picked up every day, or sometimes every other. To those in the government aware of the commune’s existence, it was referred to simply as “Nineteen.”
The women of Nineteen could call it home for as long as they desired. Many of the residents were war widows who came to escape the violent world that was the Israeli way of life. There was ample time to get on with their lives later. For now, their spirits needed to mend, and they stayed as long at Nineteen as necessary to see this come to pass.
It was similar for female soldiers who came to Nineteen with nerve strings frayed to the very edge. Though it had been twenty years since Israel had been attacked, and a decade since she had invaded Lebanon, limited engagements and skirmishes were a fact of life. These, too, exacted a price from those who fought in them repeatedly.
Still more of the kibbutz’s residents were widows as well, but of a different sort. Spanning the scope of ages, they had lost husband or children to terrorist attacks or the Intifada. They came to Nineteen with a rage that could be calmed but never vanquished. These would spend portions of each day on the commune’s gunnery ranges firing at black cardboard silhouettes they imagined to be the ravagers of their lives, trained by the very female soldiers who had come here to put their guns down. Contradictions at Nineteen, as in life, were everywhere. There were no easy explanations. The staccato bursts of gunfire here were no different than the clucking of chickens or laughter of children. They were accepted. Part of the routine.
And the founder of all this, of Nineteen and everything it encompassed, was the old woman who lived apart from everyone else and spent much of her days scanning newspapers from all over the world. Her cottage was the only one featuring a screened-in porch. Instead of stairs leading up to the entrance, it had a ramp for her wheelchair. A pair of neat grooves were worn into either side. The wrought-iron table had been set beneath a tree in front of the cottage, and it was here that the wheelchair rested most of the day.
“Can we get you anything?” one of the guards asked after approaching tentatively when the old woman had remained still for too long.
The old woman, half-blind in one eye, her head crowned by a cloud of silver hair, adjusted the blanket over her useless legs and spun her wheelchair so it faced the table. Her hand shakily grasped her glass of mint iced tea and drew it to her lips.
“No,” she answered, placing her other liver-spotted hand atop the pile of newspapers just brought her. “Leave me.”
The guard reslung her Galil machine gun over her shoulder and backed off. It was hers and another’s day to watch over the old woman, and this was not a task any on the kibbutz took lightly. Some knew her name, but not many. Her daily chores consisted of nothing more than going over her newspapers, in search of what, nobody knew.
The old woman set her unfinished glass of tea down and began paging through her papers in the same deliberate fashion as always, while her two guards continued their silent vigil. Had the guards been watching the old woman more closely, they would have seen her lean forward when she came upon an article on page one of the Wednesday New York Times headlined “Exiled Island Leader Javier Kelbonna Slain in Bizarre Execution.”
Her hand trembled as she rapidly turned through the front section of the paper to where the article was continued. She flipped quickly through another two newspapers before an article on the fourth page of the German daily froze her. An industrialist named Friedrich Von Tike had been found murdered last night in his office.
Bizarre circumstances again.
When she moved on to the Tuesday edition of The Times, there was no need to turn the pages at all. What she sought was right there at the top of page one: a picture of Ruben Oliveras placed just beneath the headlines on the bottom half of the page: “Reputed Drug Lord, Guards, Slain in Chicago Stronghold.”
“No,” she muttered, too softly for her guards to hear. “No! …” Louder this time, loud enough to make them turn.
The old woman brushed the entire contents of the wrought-iron table to the ground in a single swipe. Her glass of mint iced tea smashed on impact, dousing the discarded papers and making her guards go rigid.
“It can’t be,” she moaned. “They’ve come back. God help us all, they’ve come back!”
Chapter 11
“SAYIN HAZELHURST!”
Kamir’s call stirred Melissa Hazelhurst from her stuporous vigil before the video monitor.
“There is a jeep approaching, Sayin Hazelhurst!”
Melissa rose stiffly and emerged from the cover of the canopy down in the excavation. “How many men?” she called up to Kamir.
“Just a driver,” Kamir returned, hands cupped before his mouth to make sure he could be heard.
She swallowed hard. “Make sure all the men are at their posts. I’m coming up.”
Two of the men, though, had run off following the death of her father, leaving only seven in Kamir’s replacement team.
Melissa had spent much of last night and all of Wednesday perched on a stool set behind the nine-inch video monitor. The recording made by the camera in her father’s headpiece would have been considered brilliant under ordinary circumstances given the available light. But these were hardly ordinary circumstances, and Melissa found it little better than useless.
Running it over and over again. Different speeds, different filters … Always the same.
So often throughout the day she had wanted to give up and break down. Have the equipment packed up by the workers and flee this place. But she couldn’t, not yet.
Because something down there had killed her father. And Melissa could not leave, could not run, until she knew what it was. But maybe she already did.
The Dream Dragons …
They had been waiting for him down there. They had been waiting for the men who had killed Winchester, as well. Perhaps they were always waiting, left there by the true builders of what lay beneath the surface to deny entry to those who did not belong. We are, after all, trespassing on the past, Melissa recalled from another lesson of archaeology. But no one else would ever be trespassing here again, because tomorrow she was going to seal the chamber her father had uncovered. What might be the greatest find in the history of mankind would be buried once more, hidden before more damage was done.
Melissa reached the ladder and stretched before beginning her climb. Her legs were asleep from her being seated for too long. Her neck and shoulders ached with stiffness. She tried to rub the blood back into them and then began to pull herself upward.
Kamir reached down to help her over the rim, just as the jeep drew to within a hundred yards of the site. Her father had been clear about the possibility that rumors of the dig would draw hordes to it. And there was also the possibility that the jeep’s driver was connected to Winchester’s killers. Melissa looked on neither option favorably and made sure that the jeep’s driver would be able to see she had rifle in hand when he approached.
The man parked his jeep behind Kamir’s truck and stepped out with his hands in the air.
“Say, anybody know where I can find a cash machine around here?”
The long flight from Kennedy Airport to Istanbul had left McCracken little time to catch the next fifty-five-minute commuter flight to Izmir. He had landed barely an hour ago, rented the jeep, and pieced together the most direct route here possible, following the map obtained in San Francisco as best he could.
The armed woman standing before him was obviously not impressed or soothed by his sense of humor. She stood her ground silently.
“Okay, let’s try it this way,” he said to her, eyes trained on her rifle. “I’m Blaine McCracken and you’re fucking up royally.”
“Excuse me?”
“Every man and every gun you’ve got is in sight. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Never let the enemy see everything you’ve got.”
“Then you’re the enemy.”
“Lady, if I was the enemy, you and your boys here would already be waiting to become some future archaeologist’s find.”
Melissa felt uncertainty sweep through her. The man before her who called himself McCracken was tall and very broad. Even through his baggy, sweat-soaked white shirt she could see his upper body was sculpted into a muscular V exaggerated all the more by the stance of having his hands clasped over his head. He had a close-trimmed beard and a pair of dark eyes that never seemed to blink.
“If you’re a fortune hunter, you’ve come to the wrong place,” Melissa said, the words sounding incredibly lame even to her.
“You’re British.”
“Very observant.”
“Spent some time there myself. Didn’t make a lot of friends.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised. Who are you?”
“We’ve moved beyond the name stage. Excellent. The truth is, I’m not even sure I’m in the right place; at least, I wasn’t until I encountered your hospitality.”
“Where did you come from? How did you find out about this place?”
“There’s a map in my right-hand pants pocket. I’ll take it out and—”
“Stay as you are! Kamir will relieve you of this map.” She looked toward the foreman. “Kamir.”
“Yes, Sayin Hazelhurst.”
Kamir had started forward when McCracken spoke again.
“No, no, no! You don’t send an armed man to retrieve something from an unarmed man, especially when the armed man is carrying one of the best weapons in your arsenal,” Blaine said, his eyes gesturing toward Kamir’s M-16 rifle. “Quickest way to have the tables turned on you in a hurry. But you told him to do it, because he’s the only other one here who speaks English. ’Nother bad move on your part.”
“What should I do, then?”
“Have me pull the map from my pocket with two fingers and toss it away from my feet. Then send an unarmed man over to pick it up.”
“Are you that good, Mr. McCracken?”
“You don’t have to be that good, given this opposition.”
Melissa smirked. “Then let’s handle it just the way you suggested. …”
Blaine followed his own advice precisely and watched a workman who had temporarily discarded his rifle approach to retrieve the map. The workman delivered it in tentative fashion to the British woman. She unfolded it and McCracken watched her eyes bulge.
Melissa realized instantly that it was a copy of the same map her father had entrusted to Winchester, one of the seven different ones that had sent his dig teams scouring the Mideast; maps that had once belonged to the Nazis.
She stormed forward toward McCracken, thrusting the map outward, rifle slung from her shoulder and totally forgotten.
“How did you get this?” she demanded.
“You’re breaking the rules again, miss. Approaching with a loaded gun. …”
“Shut up or I’ll empty it into you! Now tell me how you got possession of this map!”
“I gather I’ve come to the right place.”
“Talk!”
“Long story. Better told in the shade over a glass of mineral water.”
Melissa backed away from him, shaking her head. “You really don’t know what this is, do you?”
Blaine gazed over her shoulder to the crater that had been dug in the ground. “I assume whatever it might be is over there, Ms. Hazelhurst.”
“Don’t call me that! Don’t call me anything! I don’t know you! I don’t want to know you!”
Again Blaine aimed his gaze over her shoulder. “What’s down there?”
“Leave! Get out of here!”
“Maybe I can help.”
“I doubt it.”
“Let me try.”
Melissa felt herself weakening, although she never could have said why. “Why should I?”
“Because it’s what I do.”
“Archaeology?”
Blaine shook his head. “Helping.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“I think you do. You’re no match for whatever it is you’re up against.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because I left a trail of bodies between the shop where I picked up this map and the Pacific Ocean, before I headed to Turkey.”
McCracken watched her stiffen.
“Judging by your reaction, Ms. Hazelhurst, I’d say that trail has extended all the way here.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” she told him.
“Won’t know that till I try.”
“You don’t understand. You could never understand.”
Blaine slid a little closer to her. “Won’t know that till you tell me.”
Melissa Hazelhurst was sitting before the tiny video screen beneath the canopy when Blaine climbed down the rope ladder into the excavation. He got his first look at the raised rectangular opening and knew that he was face-to-face with what the map obtained in Ghirardelli Square had directed him to—what Al-Akir had sought and what Billy Griggs was determined to keep from being uncovered. Back on the surface he had inspected the remains of both Winchester and Benson Hazelhurst. Hazelhurst’s corpse caught him totally off guard. He had been expecting anything, but not this.
There was barely enough left of Hazelhurst to identify him as a human being. …
What could have done this to him?
“If you’re not an archaeologist, Mr. McCracken,” Melissa said without turning from the screen as he approached, “just what is it that has brought you out here?”
“It’s a little difficult to explain.”
She swung toward him. “It seems everything about you is a little difficult to explain. Let me hazard a guess, though. The way you’re built, the way you move, you must be some sort of soldier or mercenary.”
“Was. Not anymore.”
“But I’m close. Your hands are callused and that climb down the ladder didn’t even get you red in the face.”
“I guess I’m still a soldier, just not in anyone’s army except my own. I choose my own wars or—”
“Like this one?”
“You didn’t let me finish. Or sometimes they choose me. Like this one.”
Melissa Hazelhurst looked up into the big man’s black eyes and noticed the scar running through his left eyebrow for the first time. Though she couldn’t have said why, he frightened her at the same time as she found his presence comforting.
“Let me give this to you in a nutshell, Ms. Hazelhurst—”
“Call me Melissa, please.”
“Melissa. I took the place of a certain Arab agent at a shop in San Francisco. That’s where I came into possession of the map. After fending off a rather concerted attempt to remove it from my person, I flew over here and followed it to this dig.”
“A concerted attempt … That’s what you call that trail of bodies you said you left behind?”
“Everything’s relative.”
