by Jon Land
“Hey, these morning talk shows and afternoon soaps beat the fuck-all out of real life. You ask me, guys like you and me could learn something from this shit.”
Sal Belamo had saved McCracken’s life the first time they had met eight years before, and they’d been working together off and on ever since. Until recently Belamo, a pug-nosed ex-boxer whose greatest claim to fame was losing twice to Carlos Monzon, was Blaine’s prime contact inside the intelligence community. But helping McCracken destroy the Tau had earned him an indefinite suspension and permanent ostracism. Belamo still had plenty of friends on the inside, though, and he was always there to help.
“Need a favor, Sal.”
“Name it. Just give me time to turn off yesterday’s episode of ‘The Young and the Fuckless’ on the VCR … . Okay. Gaw ’head.”
“I’m gonna fax you six sets of fingerprints that the locals here in Miami couldn’t get anywhere with.”
“Soakin’ up some sun, MacBalls?”
“Never even saw it shine, Sal. See what you can find out.”
“Hey, you need backup, I’m here. ‘The Bold and the Bosom’ can wait.”
“Not yet, Sal, but stay close.”
“By the phone, boss.”
And now, ten hours later, McCracken found himself hanging back amidst the trees waiting for Tom Daniels to appear. Several occasions in the past had brought them together, none of them pleasant. A number had culminated in Daniels petitioning Company directors for Blaine’s “removal,” the bureaucrat ultimately being rebuffed in each instance, which only added to his hostility. As a result, Blaine had no reason to really trust Daniels, but he had recognized the fear in Daniels’s voice that morning and later again when the meeting was set up. Fear was something that transcended hostility, made allies out of even deadly adversaries.
Blaine unzipped his jacket to more easily reach the SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter pistol holstered inside it. He held his ground, nervous. Daniels was the kind of man who was nothing if not punctual.
The bushes ruffled behind him. McCracken swung, pistol drawn.
Nothing.
“Daniels,” he called softly. “Daniels.”
He turned one way, then the other. His back against a thick nest of shoulder-high shrubbery, Blaine regretted not taking Sal Belamo up on his offer to serve as backup.
What might have been footsteps or just a trick of the wind sounded from somewhere in the distance. McCracken’s shoulders bent the bushes inward now, waiting.
A rustling noise and a low moan came from behind the shrubs he was nestled against. McCracken spun away, gun leading.
“Help … me.” And Tom Daniels fell against him with what remained of his life spilling out on the ground.
“Jesus,” Daniels moaned, collapsing forward.
Blaine let him down easy and crouched to join him. Daniels’s midsection had been shredded. In-close work, a knife probably. His eyes burned with pain. Blood was already sliding out his mouth.
“Left me for dead,” Daniels managed.
McCracken kept his SIG palmed, eyes searching.
“Who did this to you, Daniels?”
Daniels’s fading stare tried to find McCracken’s. “You’ve got to stop them. They’re close … .” He took a muffled, gurgling breath. “It’s theirs.”
“What’s theirs?”
“The country … They’re … taking over.”
“How, Daniels? Who?”
“Indications, signals,” Daniels said, his mind drifting. “Needed you to flush them out. That was the plan.”
“Flush them out with what?”
“Operation Yellow Rose,” Daniels wheezed. “That’s where it began. Everything comes back to it.”
“Comes back to what?”
With death very near, Daniels’s pain receded slightly. He began to shiver.
“They’re writing the future.” His eyes faded again. His mouth dripped blood. “Not here. Never here … . Prometheus! They can’t do it without Prometheus!”
“What’s Prometheus?”
“Ten days! You’ve only got ten days!”
McCracken grasped Daniels more tightly and lifted him from the ground. “Talk to me, Daniels! Talk to me!”
The blood was bubbling in a pool from Daniels’s mouth now. His eyes had locked open. Blaine eased him back to the grass.
The hackles on his neck rose. The sound of fresh footsteps gliding across the park’s grass had reached him. Daniels’s killers were approaching from different angles. He couldn’t be sure how many. But it was enough.
And he was trapped.
The gunmen entered the clearing in unison from five different vantage points. Three wielded Ingram submachine guns and two held M16s, scopes that would have helped them lock in on whomever Daniels had come to meet still attached. Except for Daniels’s body lying facedown, the clearing was deserted.
“Shit,” the leader muttered.
He approached the still, bloodied form alert for movement, but focusing as well on the surrounding bushes and trees. The Telefunken long-range listening probe now dangling from his neck had not only allowed him to find Daniels but had also filled his ears with another voice that could only be that of the man Daniels had come here to meet. Where was he now? The leader reached Daniels, wary eyes still casting about him. He started to kneel down.
A gun snapped up and exploded in front of his eyes.
McCracken had donned Daniels’s blood-soaked suit jacket after dragging the dead man into the bushes. He barely had time to throw himself back onto the grass before the hit team stepped into the clearing.
The killers had responded just as he had expected. Blaine had kept his eyes facing the ground until the approach of the leader halted and the air shifted to indicate he had knelt down. Then McCracken sprang, pistol firing.
The first three had gone easily, the element of surprise too much for them to overcome. The fourth managed to find his trigger before Blaine shot him in the face, and the fifth actually fired a wild burst before a pair of the SIG’s bullets hammered into his chest.
McCracken lunged back to his feet and sprinted toward the nearest exit, not knowing whether more killers lurked in the park, perhaps attracted by the gunshots. The full moon could give him away to a professional as easily as daylight.
Once outside, he walked for a few blocks to make sure he wasn’t being followed before hot-wiring an inconspicuous car parked along the side of the road. His immediate goal was simply to flee the area. Beyond that, though, a plot that Daniels had died for uncovering had been dumped in his lap.
“They’re taking over.”
Operation Yellow Rose …
Prometheus …
Places to start.
“Ten days! You’ve only got ten days!”
McCracken gunned the stolen car’s engine and drove off.
Clifton Jardine, director of the CIA, replaced the phone on its cradle and massaged his eyelids. The news that Tom Daniels’s body had been found in Rock Creek Park had shaken him badly, because the murder seemed to confirm Daniels’s incredible conclusions. But the plot he had uncovered could still be stopped if the right people could be convinced of its existence.
The phone on the desk of his downstairs study rang and he fumbled the receiver to his ear.
“Yes? … No, I don’t want you to wake the President. I just want to see him first thing in the morning, before breakfast, if possible … . Yes, I know how late it is … . Yes, I know his schedule is set. It’s imperative that he change it … . That’s right, just him and me … . No, I can’t tell you … . I can’t tell you that, either … . Right. I’ll be there.”
Jardine hung up the phone and heard the soft click of the French doors leading into the house from the patio being opened. He swung round in his leather chair to be greeted by a burst of cool spring air.
“Oh, it’s you. It’s about time.”
The doors clicked closed. The breeze retreated behind them. The man who had entered came f
orward.
Jardine gestured at the phone. “That was the White House duty officer. Tomorrow morning, seven o’clock, God help us all. I didn’t believe him, you know. Right up until—”
The man had stopped. Jardine saw the gun in his hand.
“Jesus God …”
The man gave him time to say no more. Two soft spits spilled Clifton Jardine to the floor.
The French doors opened once again and the man disappeared into the night.
PART TWO
OPERATION YELLOW ROSE
THE MAINE WOODS:
SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1994; 7:00 A.M.
CHAPTER 6
“He has killed again. That is why I had to come to you, Wanblee-Isnala.”
Chief Silver Cloud raised the cup of tea to his lips in a trembling hand. Across from him, in the cabin he had fashioned with his own hands and tools, Johnny Wareagle sat listening and watching intently.
“The spirits showed me the killing in a dream,” the chief continued, his voice cracking.
The trip to Maine from the Oklahoma reservation where he presided as elder had obviously taken its toll. Silver Cloud was approaching eighty now, and to Wareagle finally looked his age. His leathery skin was sagging, its bronze tone faded to a dull olive. His eyes seemed old for the first time.
“You must stop Traggeo, Wanblee-Isnala. You must hunt him down before he can do further damage to our people. He is not one of us, and yet each killing brings more shame upon our people.”
Wareagle slid one of his huge hands forward and helped Chief Silver Cloud ease the heavy mug back to the table between them. The mug was homemade too, and as with everything Johnny fashioned, it had been made with his seven-foot, 275-pound proportions in mind. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, its coal black shade marred by an occasional strand of gray. His massive chest was covered by a leather vest he had sewn himself. He leaned his hands on his knees and his shoulders stretched to a girth that made even the old chief’s eyes widen.
“You know him from before, do you not, Wanblee-Isnala?”
“Only as one knows another stranger in the Hellfire.”
“Where it started,” the chief recalled.
Traggeo was a hulking monster of a man who arrived in Vietnam calling himself half Indian even though neither of his parents boasted a direct bloodline. He went on patrol with braided black hair and war paint smeared over his cheeks. He was thrown into a stockade after killing and scalping three Vietnamese villagers suspected of being Cong collaborators. But the war did not end for him there, thanks to a Special Operations colonel named Tyson Gash.
Gash was a renegade himself, his methods and manners unacceptable even to the accountless lot who ran the only part of the war America actually won. He ended up leaving Special Ops to form his own splinter group for missions even Johnny and Blaine McCracken’s Phoenix Project group couldn’t handle. Gash pulled men like Traggeo from military stockades and piles of Section Eight discharges. He selected them from a rogues’ gallery of the most immoral, brutal, and ruthless. He convinced the hierarchy who approved the scheme that he could control them, that their expendable nature made them perfect for missions deemed unsurvivable.
And to some extent he was right. Gash’s “Salvage Company,” as it became known, did prove quite effective on several occasions. The problem was it got started too close to the war’s end. By the time it was fully up and running, the cease-fire agreement was signed and Nixon was claiming peace with honor. The members of Salvage Company, though, knew little about peace and even less about honor. The ones who survived encounters in Laos and Cambodia were given amnesty and let loose back in the real world.
Traggeo was one of them. The war paint and braids became his trademark. The tale that a great Indian warrior had been reborn within his soul left the war with him, even though he lacked any true Indian heritage. After Vietnam he had bounced around several mercenary groups before returning to the States. Five years ago he had beaten four men to death in a fight and had scalped them all, then escaped from jail before his trial. There’d been a number of other killings over the years, all with the same pattern.
Three nurses on a single night in Chicago.
An entire family in Idaho.
Two unfortunate off-duty policemen outside of Los Angeles.
The list went on. All the victims had been scalped. And each time that trademark act linked Traggeo to a killing, his fabricated Indian heritage came back to haunt the people he claimed to be a part of. It had become a question of honor for the Sioux tribe Chief Silver Cloud presided over. Traggeo had to be found, had to be stopped. But just over a year before, the old man explained, he had disappeared.
“Another of our tribe thought he had finally located him. Will Shortfeather.” Chief Silver Cloud produced a dog-eared color snapshot of a tall man with stringy, straw-colored hair that neatly rimmed his scalp. “He disappeared. We never heard from him again. That was two weeks ago.”
Wareagle nodded. “And this other killing?”
“The night before last. I came out here by bus on the morning after the dream came. I knew it had started again. But worse now. Somehow worse.”
Silver Cloud’s eyes pleaded with Johnny, and Wareagle felt a pang of affection for the man who had been one of his spirit guides. The thought of this old warrior spending more than twenty-four hours on a bus ride east to ask for his help was humbling. And if Johnny refused his overtures, Silver Cloud would be on the next bus without question or rebuke, thinking no less of him.
But Johnny wasn’t going to say no. And neither was he going to let the old man return west on anything but an airplane.
“Will you help us, Wanblee-Isnala?”
Wareagle held the picture of the Indian with the straw-colored hair at arm’s distance. “Where was Shortfeather when you heard from him last?”
The lines on Silver Cloud’s ancient face seemed to ease. His shoulders straightened from their slump as if a great weight had been lifted from them.
“Gainesville,” he replied. “Gainseville, Texas.”
CHAPTER 7
The President swam his laps in the White House pool while his chief aide, Charlie Byrne, walked back and forth alongside.
“I don’t want to talk about the polls, Charlie. The polls give me gas.”
“You can take a pill for gas, Mr. President.” Even though they’d been friends since high school, Byrne insisted on addressing him formally at all times. “There’s no pill I know of that can take care of our problem in the polls.”
The President switched to the breast stroke. “The good news is I’ve still got two and a half years to set things right.”
Byrne continued to walk along the pool’s rim. “And the bad news is it’s taken only one and a half for things to get this bad.”
The President dunked his head and came back up, squinting the chlorine from his eyes and starting toward the ladder. “Is there anything you would have done different, Charlie? I mean if we had everything to do all over again from scratch, what would you change?” When Byrne made no effort to reply, the President continued, “It’s not me, it’s not us. It’s the damn system. We’ve been penalized for trying to effect real change, for facing up to problems that have been ignored for so long that no one wants to look at them anymore. Maybe we’d have been better off doing nothing.”
“Or moving slower.”
The President started to pull himself slowly up the ladder. “We couldn’t afford to move slower.”
“Your approval ratings—”
“Is that what this is about? Is that what everything comes down to?” The President reached the rim and stood there, dripping. “Make no move unless it gives us a positive read? Attain popularity with rhetoric? More of the politics of nothingness.”
“Sir—”
“Or maybe we need a war. Bomb Iran or North Korea unless they surrender their nuclear capability. Do wonders for my approval ratings, wouldn’t it? At the very least it might make people forget
about Half-term Harry for awhile. Hell, they might even start calling this place the White House again.”
“That’s not what I was suggesting.”
“But there’s really no other direction to move in. Eighteen months and I’m already a lame duck. And you know the worst thing, Charlie? I’m not sure I care. Maybe I’ll just spend the next two and a half years shoving the truth down this country’s throat and then pack my bags willingly.”
Arms wrapped around himself, the President stepped away from the pool and accepted a towel from Charlie Byrne. The few laps he’d managed to swim had fatigued instead of refreshed him, and he sank into a chair by the wall to dry himself. He held the towel over his face for a time, as if hoping that when he pulled it away his features would be as they were when he assumed office. He considered himself robust then, in excellent health. Now it sometimes took his breath away just to climb the stairs. His hair had thinned and whitened. The lines already on his face had deepened into crevices, with fresh cracks spreading out from them. The muscle he had worked so hard at keeping had turned to flab. The office was to blame or, more accurately, the frustrations of it. The terrible plight he had inherited had left him with a set of expectations that were impossible to meet. When things got worse instead of better, coupled with a succession of broken campaign promises, the country turned on him in a heartbeat. The people had become like drowning swimmers, willing to accept a lifeline from anyone who tossed it their way.
“I believe you were talking about the polls, Charlie.”
“You’ve got company in them this morning, sir.”
“Sam Dodd again?”
“You’re down fifty-five percent to seventeen to him with twenty percent undecided and none of the other party’s likely candidates beating the margin for error.”
“Well, at least I’m still in second place,” the President said, trying to sound jovial. He tightened the towel around his shoulders. “Think I’ll stay there?”
“Dodd’s no Ross Perot. He won’t self-destruct, and as an independent he won’t be subjected to normal scrutiny either. Besides, he’s already opened his closet to reveal his skeletons and nobody cares. The man can afford to make sense. People like him. Jesus, I like him.”
