Pulling out another sheet of paper, he squinted at it and said, “Not sure what this is … ten digit number with a two letter prefix. Mean anything thing to you?”
“That’s a grid coordinate,” I said glancing at it for a quick second. “The letters are the designator and the numbers are the position in the military grid reference system. A ten digit coordinate will put you right on top of whatever you’re looking for.”
Turning to Skip, I asked, “Why would you need a grid coordinate if you already had a property address? What’s this for?”
“Oh, right,” he said looking like somebody just shot his dog. “Forgot about that part …”
“Forgot about what?” Rooster said taking a few steps in his direction.
Lighting his umpteenth cigarette, Skip anxiously said, “So, these jobs … there’s one more little thing that I may have neglected to mention earlier.”
“Do tell,” Rooster said with an impatient glare.
“This is gonna sound weird, but the coordinates — they’re for, ah, burial sites.”
“Burial sites,” Rooster said skeptically while ominously tapping a finger on the hilt of his hunting knife.
“Yeah, that’s what they told me,” Skip replied looking exceptionally nervous. “Of their ancestors, ah, ancient draugr colonies and such. The burial sites are within the property limits of all the places they’re buying up. Usually out in the woods somewhere.”
“Are you telling us you’ve been traveling the country digging up dead vampires?” I said. “What the fuck, Skip?”
“No, no,” he blurted out. “It’s not like that. All I have to do is find the tree with the special mark on it. Then I wedge the coin in it. It’s, ah, supposed to be some kind of tradition or something.”
“You put a coin in a tree,” I muttered. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, I’m telling you the truth, bossman,” he said pointing at the open envelope. “Look inside. There’s probably a coin taped to the bottom. Always is.”
Grabbing the envelope from the desk, Rooster dug around inside and pulled out an ancient looking coin fastened to the bottom. Giving it a quick once over, he flipped it to me and said, “Looks Roman. Maybe first century. Check out the backside. Got a glyph on it. Similar marking as the one on the door.”
Catching the peculiar coin, I felt an immediate surge of energy pass through my hand like a jolt of electricity. It buzzed with power. Dark power. The bust of an ancient god of some sort was cast into one side. The flip side bore the image of an eagle with the mysterious glyph weaved into the backdrop.
Turning to Skip, Rooster asked, “Is the special mark on the tree the same one on the coin?”
“Yeah, some kind of draugr symbol. Supposed to mean ‘Rest in Peace’ or something like that,” he replied now profusely sweating.
As Rooster’s eye danced with rapid thought, like he was connecting a series of dots, he coldly said, “So couple things here, Skipper. You’re either the dumbest mother fucker on the face of the goddamn planet or you know a hell of lot more than you’re telling us. That’s not some draugr symbol, asshole. It’s Enochian. And you know what that means? Your colleagues are working for the Maradim.”
“What?” Skip grunted lowering his smoke. “No, no — You gotta believe me here. I didn’t know, bossman.”
Still fixing him with an intense glare, Rooster said, “When exactly are your draugr pals expecting you to complete the job in Liverpool?”
“Ah, Friday … Friday,” Skip said awkwardly lighting yet another cigarette. “I have until midnight on Friday.”
“And you have no scheduled contact with them between now and then?”
“No,” he replied between puffs. “They only want to hear from me if I run into any issues.”
With his wheels clearly turning, Rooster turned and gave me an ominous wink. With a dark smile stretching across his face, he said, “You know what, Dean? I think we’re done here. Time to let the Skipper go.” Pulling out his nepher phone, he swiped his fingers over the screen and subsequently tapped it a few times. “However, in light of recent developments, I feel it would be simply irresponsible to let him walk the streets unprotected. Once the draugrs figure out that he helped us, he’s as good as dead.”
“I could not agree more,” I said playing into whatever scheme he was cooking up. “Downright irresponsible.”
Chuckling rather smugly, Rooster put down the phone and said to Skip, “I mean, you potentially just double-crossed the Maradim. That’s some heavy duty shit. There’s nowhere on Earth you’ll be able to hide once that gets out. Now clearly, we’re not going to say anything, but you know how these things work. Word’s going to get out. Just a matter of time. You’re fucked, Skip. And I can’t have that on my conscious.”
“Hold on — We had a deal,” Skip said backing toward the door in panic. “I get you in here and you let me go. We had a deal.”
“I did say that I’d let you go,” I said matter of factly. “What I failed to clarify in the terms of our negotiation was where you’d be going, nor exactly how long you’d be there.”
In a flash of bathrobe and blubbery thighs, Skip plucked the cigarette from his mouth and broke into a full on sprint toward the door leading back to the perceived safety of his apartment. Not even stopping to say goodbye, he disappeared through the portal in a brief flash of white light and was gone.
No sooner did he break the threshold did the booming, disembodied voice of Skyphos declare, “I was able to successfully reroute the destination of the portal as you requested, Rooster. Philbert Pothier is now positively contained in Ward Nine of the Reliquary. Is there anything else I can assist you with?”
“Portal high jacking. An oldie but a goodie. Can’t beat the classics,” Rooster said smiling ear to ear. “Well done, Sweetie. One more thing. I’m sending you a picture of an old coin. Looks Roman. See if you can figure out what it is.”
“Will do. And do not refer to me as ‘Sweetie.’ It continues to upset me.”
“That was pretty slick,” I said to Rooster with a shit eating grin. “Not sure if you’re more dangerous with those pistols or that computer phone. What’s Ward Nine?”
“Ward Nine makes the depths of Hell look like summer camp,” he replied matching my grin. “Let’s just say the next time we see Skip he’ll be more than willing to tell us anything else that he may have neglected to mention.”
Tossing him the peculiar coin, I said, “So, I’m assuming you don’t believe that Skip’s simply been paying homage to dead draugrs amidst his misadventures in land acquisition, eh?”
“No. I don’t,” he replied casually snatching it from the air and stuffing in his pocket. Giving me a pensive look, he asked, “Back in the Reliquary, do you remember when Coop told us that Smitty wandered off in the woods obsessing over the fact that they were ‘missing’ something?”
“Yep,” I replied curious as to where he was going with this.
“Well, Big A asked Coop if Smitty said anything before he walked off.”
Thinking back on the conversation, I felt a light bulb go off in my head, and muttered, “Yep … He asked specifically if Smitty said anything about — a coin.” Curiously glaring at Rooster, I said, “He knew.”
“Or at least he suspected,” Rooster replied nodding his head. “Which means he probably knows what we’re dealing with. There’s clearly a link between the coins and the ability of the Maradim to open gateways. And it seems we have until midnight on Friday to figure out what it is.”
Nodding, I said, “You ever been to the salt capitol of the United States?”
“Nope. But it sounds like a good place for an ambush.”
“Roger that,” I replied holstering the otherworldly shotgun on my back. “Almost like we planned it.”
As Rooster began to collect the various documents strewn across the metal desk, I spotted the unopened, second manila envelope which was covered up by the map. Grabbing it and prying open the clasps, I pulled out a sing
le sheet of paper.
“Forgot about that one,” Rooster said looking up at me. “What’s in it?”
“It’s a list. Names and addresses,” I muttered, studying the handwritten roster crudely scratched onto the folded legal sized paper. “Looks like a hundred people or so. You think it’s a target list of some sort?”
“Dunno, maybe,” he replied preoccupied with stuffing the various documents back into the first envelope. “We’ll have Skyphos run the names through the database when we get back — figure out the correlation. We need to get out of here.”
“Roger,” I muttered tucking the sheet back into the envelope.
Accidentally dropping it on the metal floor in the process, I bent down to pick it up and happened to focus on a single name circled on the lower right hand corner of the document. As my brain processed what I was looking at, I slowly stood upright as an intangible chill raced up and down my spine. Without the ability to speak, I was slammed by wave after wave of deep rooted emotion from my mortal past.
Human emotion. Emotion long since suppressed. Buried. Forgotten — until now.
Realizing something wasn’t quite right, Rooster said, “You Ok?”
Without making eye contact, I placed the paper on the desk and pointed to the name ‘ERIN KELLY’ scribbled in block letters and circled in red ink.
No. I was not Ok. Far fucking from it.
Chapter 26
QRF Compound, Bosnia
5 July 1998 - 08:15 Hours
14 Years Earlier
“Got something to tell you, sir. And you’re not gonna like it,” grumbled First Sergeant Coates making his way into the mess tent as I sat alone at one of the several makeshift wooden tables studying our first mission brief since arriving in Bosnia three days earlier.
“You planning on making another pot of joe?” I muttered with my face buried in a stack of satellite photos. Still contemplating whether or not I had the balls to drink the first cup of Tony’s morning brew I’d been staring at for the past hour, I said, “If that’s the case — you’re right. I’m not going to like it.”
“Oh, apologies your highness,” Tony drolly replied with his signature scowl. “We’re fresh out of quadruple mocha-kateeno lattes this morning.” Nodding at the nineteen-eighties vintage industrial percolator sitting ominously in the corner, he said, “Nothing wrong with that coffee. Hell, you’ve been drinking it for ten years for Christ’s sake. Quit acting like such a woman.”
“Quadruple mocha-kateenos, eh?” I rhetorically muttered, highly impressed with his deliberate butchery of my favorite gourmet java when stateside. Putting down the stack of documents, I gave him a stoic glare, and said, “Tell me something, Big Sarge.”
“What’s that?” He replied with a shit eating grin.
“Is being that funny a full time fucking job or just something you dabble in on the side?”
“What can I say?” He replied taking a seat opposite me at the table. “It’s an unfortunate side effect of putting up with your sorry ass day in and day out.”
“Fair enough,” I said smirking. “So, you here to actually tell me something or just stopping by to give me shit?”
Taking a healthy swig from his Green Bay Packers coffee mug, he muttered, “I just got off the radio with Task Force. They’re sending in a humanitarian team. Should be here any minute. A priest and a doctor. They evidently need an escort to the northern sector.”
“Escort duty?” I grumbled with a highly pissed off glare. “What the hell do they think we are? The goddamn National Guard? Who sent the orders?”
Rising to my feet and incredibly chapped at the thought of some pencil pushing dickhead having the balls to relegate my team of elite shooters to a squad of babysitters, I barked, “Actually, never mind. I’ll call the Colonel right now and get this squared away. No frigg’n way we’re carting a couple of limp-dick civilians around the goddamn Bosnian countryside. That’s what those weekend warriors at Task Force are for. This is total bull—”
“You Captain Robinson?” A female voice boldly called out from the entrance to the tent.
Spinning around with a deep scowl to find myself completely awestruck by a striking vision of olive skin, brown eyes, and flowing chestnut hair tied into a tight ponytail I very awkwardly replied, “Ah, who are you?”
Taking a few steps toward me while forcefully extending her hand, she smugly replied with the cutest damn smirk I’d ever seen, “Doctor Limp-Dick Civilian. It’s a real pleasure to meet one of America’s finest.”
And that was how I met Erin Kelly. Or more appropriately, insulted her in our first meeting. Regardless, it took me all of about five seconds to realize that in the most unlikely of places and under the most unlikely of circumstances, I’d met the woman I fully intended to spend the rest of my life with.
Now granted, at the time I wasn’t counting on the fact that within the next six months I’d see the rest of my life run its natural course. Bit of cosmic irony there. My timing always did suck when it came to women.
“Got to be times like this when you ask yourself what the hell you were thinking,” I said meeting Doc Kelly at her Humvee and handing her a canteen as we trudged through the mud toward the command shack in a wave of staggering humid heat following an epic rain storm.
“What do you mean?” She replied taking a quick drink and handing it back to me, seemingly unfazed by the weather and subhuman living conditions.
“What do I mean?” I rhetorically asked glancing around the compound. “You traded the life of a highfalutin Boston surgeon for this.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point? For the past two months you’ve been living like a frigg’n gypsy in a war-torn circle of hell trying to help people that really don’t want your damn help. And you’re more than likely going to get yourself killed in the process if you keep it up. I mean seriously — What the hell are you doing here, Doc?”
Pulling to an abrupt halt, she said with a hard gaze, “Not that it’s any of you’re business, Captain, but maybe — maybe I’m looking for something.”
“Looking for what?” I asked noting the intensity in her voice. “Something you lost?”
“No,” she replied softly with her brown eyes burning with empathy. “Something I took. That I need to give back.”
And left me standing alone in the mud thinking there was a hell of a lot more to Erin Kelly than met the eye.
My men and I weren’t the only ones here on a mission. That much was clear.
“That’s good enough, Doc,” I muttered as the needle penetrated my skin for the umpteenth time, nearly completing the lengthy row of stitches. “You getting paid by the stitch here or what? Put an amen to it already.”
Without diverting her attention in the least from closing the sizable gash running from my right shoulder clear down the length of my arm, she frustratingly murmured, “This would go a hell of a lot faster if you’d simply — Shut your freaking mouth for two seconds and let me concentrate.”
“Anybody ever tell you that your bedside manner really sucks,” I said with a wide grin, finding it damn near impossible not to stare at her.
As the stinging-sharp pain of a deliberate needle jab made me yelp, Erin said, “Oh, my hand slipped. Sorry about that.”
“That was completely uncalled for,” I said with a stern yet playful glare.
Chuckling to herself while putting in the final stitch, and tying off the thread with a pair of tiny tweezers, she said, “All set, tough guy. Probably want to lay off the pushups for a couple days … You’re going to have one hell of a scar when this heals.”
“Chicks did scars,” I muttered admiring her handy work.
“Is that a fact?” She asked fixing me with her mesmerizing brown eyes.
“Don’t they?”
“Well, they must — if you say so,” she said quickly packing up her medical instruments.
“What about you, Doc? You dig scars?”
“No,” she replied wal
king out of the med tent with her bag in hand. “But I have been known to make exceptions.”
“Good evening, Dean,” said Father Watson as he and Doc Kelly pulled their Humvee into the compound and the final minutes of daylight faded from the remote countryside. A hard chill rolled through the air as the Bosnian autumn was quickly giving way to the renowned harsh winter. “Apologies for our unannounced arrival, however, it appears that our radio has shit the proverbial bed.”
“Shit the bed, eh? Pretty sure there’s a more priestly way to put that, Padre,” I said chuckling. “You know that you and the Doc are always welcome to a room in the Ranger Hotel. The accommodations are notably less than accommodating, and the continental breakfast consists of a stale MRE and some really shitty coffee, but the price is right. In the meantime, Luke will get your comms squared away.”
“If I wasn’t such a tired old man, I’d say something else of an unpreistly nature,” he wearily replied. “In lieu of that, I’ll simply say Thank You. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to make Task Force aware of our situation before they start wondering what the hell happened to us.” And he stumbled off in the direction of the command shack, amidst Lieutenant McCormick and his team prepping for evening patrol.
Walking to the rear of the hummer to find an equally weary Doc Kelly unloading their gear, I said, “Long day?”
“Long day,” she confirmed. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting a hot shower in this joint?”
“Define what you mean by hot.”
“That’s what I figured,” she grumbled. “How about a beer?”
“Actually, you may be in luck in that department. Willis smuggled a few cases in yesterday.” Grabbing her gear, I said, “Follow me. I’ll show you to the VIP suite. We can hit the armory on the way.”
“The armory?”
“Where else would we keep our beer stash? One could make a compelling argument that on multiple fronts, beer is more valuable than bullets out here.”
Rise of the Giants: The Guild of Deacons, Book 1 Page 27
