Day of the Delphi

by Jon Land

  “We’ve confirmed it was indeed McCracken who managed to get the bomb off that American Airlines Airbus en route to Miami on Saturday night.”

  “Planted by our enemies to get rid of him, of course.”

  “They’re his enemies also, sir. But he left no trail for us to follow once he reached Miami. We’ve left messages at all his drop points and tried unsuccessfully to contact a former intelligence operative who often fronts for him. We even sent a team into the Maine woods to search for an Indian he served with in Vietnam and apparently has continued to work with, also without any results.”

  “He’s getting close to them,” the President proclaimed, an edge of hope sliding into his voice.

  “We can’t be sure of that.”

  “I’m sure. And anyone who’s read as much about McCracken as I have in the past few days would be just as sure. We find him and we find what we need to save this nation from Dodd and company.”

  Charlie Byrne shifted uneasily. “Unless they find him first, Mr. President.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Thanks for letting me tag along, boss.”

  “Got a feeling I’m gonna need you on this one, Sal.”

  McCracken had barely beaten Sal Belamo to Albuquerque Airport Monday afternoon. He had stopped once to buy a change of clothes to replace the ones lifted from the farmer’s clothesline back in Oklahoma. Belamo wore a crinkled linen suit over a plaid shirt. The supplies he had brought with him for both of them would already be making their way to the baggage carousel.

  Belamo wasn’t much more than five-and-a-half feet tall and had carried more flab than muscle ever since Carlos Monzon ended his career in their second fight. The contrast with McCracken’s V-shaped, muscle-laden frame and Johnny Wareagle’s massive bulk belied the fact that Belamo was as good as either of them in a pinch, albeit in his own style.

  “You ready to tell me what’s goin’ on here, boss, I’m ready to listen.”

  McCracken explained it all as best as he could on their drive south on Route 25 toward the White Sands desert and Sandcastle One. It wasn’t Arlo Cleese and the Midnight Riders at all who were out to topple the government. That was only what the country was going to be led to believe by the true perpetrators, who formed the remnants of Bill Carlisle’s shadowy Trilateral Commission subcommittee.

  Belamo accepted the tale with a combination of shrugs and nods. By the time Blaine reached the end, though, his face was twisted into a frown of taut displeasure and disgust.

  “Then these detention centers—”

  “Are good places to stash those who don’t agree with their plans,” McCracken completed.

  “Gonna be lots who fit that bill, boss. It’s a big country.”

  Kristen’s cell was small and windowless, a single recessed ceiling light all that stood between her and total darkness. She lay atop a stiff cot set directly opposite the solid door. With her watch gone, she found that distinctions between night and day had become blurred. Her mind wandered. She tried to hold it steady, to reconstruct what had happened in the fuzzy period since her capture.

  Her last clear stretch of memory was of being dragged by the man monster who was wearing her brother’s hair from the car where Samantha Jordan lay dead. She was still screaming when another man jabbed a needle into her arm.

  Then darkness.

  Consciousness returned intermittently after what might have been an hour or a day. She recalled being jostled in the binds of a safety harness. Her ears were aching. A grinding, whirling noise filled them.

  A helicopter! She was being taken somewhere on a helicopter!

  “She’s come around,” a voice said.

  Then darkness descended once more.

  Kristen’s next clear memory was awakening inside a tiny room to the monotone voice of a man asking questions.

  “Had you spoken to your brother immediately prior to the night he left the message?”

  “No.”

  Why was she answering? Her questioner’s round, flabby face loomed above her, caught in the light from the small room’s single bulb. The slightest movement he made took his face from the bulb and allowed only slight flickers to dance across it. As her vision cleared, Kristen realized there was a second figure in the room, back by the door, shrouded in darkness.

  “Did he at any time tell you what he had uncovered in Colorado?”

  “No.” She couldn’t help answering.

  “Did he tell you what he saw at Miravo Air Force Base?”

  “No.”

  “Did you even know he was in Colorado?”

  “Not until I found out that was where the phone call had come from.”

  “Through the FBI agent. Paul Gathers.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you share the information with anyone else prior to coming to Colorado yourself?”

  “No.”

  “And once you reached Colorado?”

  “Farlowe. The sheriff of Grand Mesa.”

  “You told him everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “To your knowledge, did he share the information with anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Who did you share the information with after your return to Washington?”

  “Senator Jordan.”

  “No one else?”

  “Colonel Haynes at the Pentagon.”

  “Other than Colonel Haynes.”

  “No. No one else. Only the senator.”

  When Kristen said that, a picture of Samantha Jordan’s dead eyes staring at her in the car flashed through her mind. She shuddered.

  “She can’t take much more.” Her inquisitor had turned round to face the shape hidden in darkness by the door.

  “She’ll take as much as we need her to. I have my orders.”

  And then the inquisitor’s flabby face turned back Kristen’s way. “Did you speak to anyone after coming to Colorado with the senator?”

  “No.”

  Kristen felt herself nodding off, unable to concentrate.

  “The situation is contained,” she heard her inquisitor report to the shape by the door in apparent conclusion. “I’ll order a light sedative to be administered. That’s all she’ll need. She’ll be taken to one of the cell blocks to await the next session.”

  “Fine. Let’s go.”

  The door to the small room opened. Light from the corridor flooded in, catching the man previously lost in the darkness.

  A big man, huge. Towering in the doorway, he seemed to fill out its width. He stepped out ahead of her inquisitor and the light caught his face, his hair.

  Oh my God …

  Kristen knew the face, recognized it from back on the road when they had taken her prisoner. It was square and angular, flat as the rock-face side of a mountain, framed still by her brother’s hair.

  Kristen wanted to scream.

  The door closed. Something rattled. Footsteps echoed.

  Kristen willed her eyes to stay open, willed herself to stay alert, aware. But her lids were dead weights and closed over her eyes despite all her resolve.

  Since then Kristen had come awake sporadically, each reentry into consciousness lasting longer and leaving her more in command of her senses. She’d been able to avoid closing her eyes for what felt like an hour now, fighting to keep her mind active.

  Put it together! Reason it out!

  Kristen vividly recalled the imposing sight of the green storage containers, each with a nuclear warhead inside, lined up in the reconstructed hangar at Miravo Air Force Base. Hundreds had undoubtedly come before them and hundreds more would undoubtedly follow.

  A fresh chill seized Kristen. Colonel Riddick had been all too happy to display the contents of that hangar. But she had seen no evidence on the base to suggest they were actually being dismantled. Anyone in possession of such an arsenal would become party to incredible power. What if David had witnessed some of those containers being spirited off the base by truck or plane? His death would have been judged
necessary to protect the terrible secret he had become privy to.

  Could it be that nuclear arms were being pilfered and sold to whomever could meet the asking price? The fuses and unlocking codes needed to activate the warhead could conceivably be provided by Colonel Riddick. She knew Riddick was lying about the base’s status on the Saturday she and Duncan Farlowe had nearly lost their lives in the hills beyond it. And that meant he could be lying about everything else.

  But there was far more involved here than simply a black-market operation Riddick was part of, something even bleaker than the terrifying thought of brokered nuclear arms. Samantha Jordan’s participation proved that.

  “Give me a chance to explain. I can still bring you on board. I can convince them to let me.”

  The words were among the last the senator had spoken. Explain what? Convince whom? Whatever Jordan was a part of must have intended to make use of the stolen warheads themselves for a purpose other than profit. The balance sheet being kept here was not about dollars. It was about power.

  Kristen wrapped her arms tighter about herself and pushed her body up so that she was half sitting, her back pressed against the concrete wall. Her mind remained sluggish and she had to hold fast to her thoughts before they slipped away.

  A conspiracy was going on that stretched to the highest corridors of power, extending even into the FBI. Paul Gathers must have made the connection between Grand Mesa and Miravo Air Force Base. When he began to make inquiries, he was silenced. Then she and Duncan Farlowe—

  Duncan Farlowe! She had implicated him in all this during the course of her interrogation. That meant the old sheriff was in grave danger. Not being able to warn Farlowe, being responsible for what was about to befall him, made Kristen feel even more helpless.

  She let her thoughts veer away and focused on what she knew. She was a prisoner in some sort of ultra-modern high-security prison. She had been kept alive strictly to learn what she had discovered and who else she might have been in contact with. Once her story was confirmed and perhaps another interrogation conducted, her usefulness would be exhausted.

  And the man wearing her brother’s hair would kill her.

  Johnny Wareagle sat in front of the steaming coffee that turned his insides sour on its way down. He never drank coffee, drank nothing like it other than the teas he concocted and bagged himself. But he wanted to seem as normal as possible to those inside Carrizozo, New Mexico’s lone diner. He wanted the waitress to accept him so the questioning process would go smoothly.

  “I get you anything else, honey?” she asked, holding a fresh pot of the black acid in hand.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Man your size really should eat more. How ’bout it? Bacon and eggs? Maybe a side of flapjacks? Come on, I’ll even go back and make them myself.”

  “Sorry, no.”

  The diner and Carrizozo were located at the virtual beginning of White Sands, the rolling endless expanse of land in plain view outside any window. He’d come here straight from Tyson Gash and the 911 in the hope that someone inside would know what in White Sands had led to Traggeo being brought to the area. Johnny wasn’t getting his hopes up.

  “You heading to the reservation?” The waitress appeared eager to talk.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We got lots of ’em couple hundred miles west of here. Lots like you, Indians I mean, stop here on their way.” She chuckled. “Guess they don’t have much of a choice. This is the last stop there is.”

  . “Who else stops here?”

  “You mean regularly?”

  “If there is anyone.”

  “Not many ’sides tourists and the usual truckers hauling loads to and from Mexico. Used to be better. Not too long ago, either. We actually went back to operating twenty-four hours a day when the construction teams were around.” “Construction teams,” Johnny repeated, a sensation like static pricking at his skin.

  “Sure. Must have been hundred-man crews, and near as I could tell they were running shifts ’round the clock.”

  “Building what?”

  The waitress leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper, the coffeepot a memory in her hand. “I heard it said it was a new army base, but the real truth is that the government needed another place to put all the space aliens that they been collecting for decades.”

  “Have you ever seen this base?”

  She shook her head. “Never seen it myself and never met anyone who has, ’sides the workers. I’m never going to, either, since they never got it finished. Ran out of money or something, or the aliens died most likely.”

  “I know these parts,” Johnny lied, “and I’ve never noticed such a place.”

  “That’s the point,” the waitress scoffed at him. “Don’t you get it? A place the government plans to stash aliens they don’t exactly want to advertise. They built it on the way to Alamogordo, of all places, on roads unmarked and hidden. They built it so even if you happened to get yourself lost and pass by, you might not even notice on account of it’s the same color as the sand. I heard it said it damn near disappears at night.”

  “Can you show me where it is?” Johnny asked her.

  “You got a map?”

  McCracken and Sal Belamo first saw the headlights coming toward them fifteen miles down a lonely road deep in the heart of White Sands. Belamo’s directions for Sandcastle One had them heading south on Route 54 out of Carrizozo and then west into White Sands at Tularosa.

  White Sands was not a desert per se, nor was it even a wasteland. Instead flora bloomed near breathtaking rock formations. The land sloped, curved, and climbed, rebutting the common belief that White Sands was no more than a barren plain. Sagebrush and tumbleweed shifted about, hitching a ride with the wind.

  “Company,” Sal told Blaine as the headlights gleamed their way.

  McCracken slowed their car to a halt after spotting a jeep turned sideways across the narrow road. In typical guard-style procedure, one of its occupants approached in the spill of a blinding floodlight while the other hung back by the vehicle. Both were dressed in army uniforms.

  “Just two,” Belamo confirmed, a .44 magnum that looked as big as one of his stubby arms eased into his lap.

  McCracken had the SIG-Sauer Belamo had replaced for him in hand as well. The approaching soldier reached his open window and Blaine gave him the best innocent look he could manage.

  “We’re lost,” he said.

  The soldier held his M16 forward but not leveled. “You have entered a restricted government compound. I’m going to have to ask you to—”

  “Just tell me how to get back on Route 70,” Blaine said, stretching his unfolded map toward the window, virtually filling it.

  “—vacate the area immediately upon penalty of seizure and arrest.”

  To punctuate his order, the soldier poked the barrel of his M16 against the map. The paper collapsed as Blaine grabbed the barrel and yanked the soldier forward. Before the man could respond, Blaine’s SIG split one of the map’s folds and jammed into his ribs.

  “Take your finger off the trigger.”

  The soldier hesitated, even though his barrel had been tilted harmlessly toward the backseat. He stole a quick glance at his partner back at the jeep, thought about firing a burst to warn him.

  “Do it and both of you die,” McCracken cautioned.

  His eyes gestured sideways to make sure the soldier noticed Sal Belamo steadying his .44 magnum against the dashboard in line with the soldier standing back at the jeep.

  “Do what I tell you,” Blaine continued, “and you both live.”

  The soldier pulled his hand from the trigger.

  “Now tell your friend to come over here. Tell him to hurry.”

  The waitress in the Carrizozo diner had told Wareagle that the complex in the desert seemed to disappear at night. Accordingly, Johnny had waited until after dark to make his approach, following the directions she had provided through White Sands. He was proceeding on the ass
umption that Traggeo was part of some outlaw plot whose leaders were taking great pains to keep undetected, a plot the killer had tried to enlist the man called Badger from Tyson Gash’s 911 Brigade in as well. Security precautions, then, were certain to be in place around the installation falsely thought to have been abandoned prior to completion.

  Well after dusk Johnny had left his rented truck on the side of the road three miles from the spot on his map the waitress had marked for him in White Sands. He left the hood up and tied a white handkerchief to the radio antenna to indicate a simple breakdown to any patrol. He also made sure to leave a clear trail moving in a direction opposite from his true destination, so a patrol would have no reason to believe he was heading for the complex.

  This done, he doubled back off the road and headed deeper into White Sands. With the darkness and the sagebrush acting together as a veil, Johnny almost missed the complex altogether. Only the high steel fence surrounding it finally alerted him. Gazing through it from less than four hundred yards away, Wareagle could barely make out the shape of the huge building housed within.

  Not only was the complex painted the exact color of the surrounding desert, but its exterior seemed to have the same rough texture as the sand. An unfinished grainy quality ensured that both the light and the darkness would strike the building the same way they struck the land surrounding it.

  It looked, well, like a massive sandcastle chiseled out of the desert plain itself.

  From this angle, all Johnny could see was a four-story structure that stretched nearly two hundred yards from east to west, built pyramid-style with each level protruding out from the one above it. What little the night gave up indicated that comparable wings extended south from either end. That meant the complex was either U-shaped or a square, a courtyard enclosed by its walls. Without binoculars, Johnny could tell little else for sure. And yet the way the whole compound was laid out made him question whether this was the training center he had expected at all.