Day of the Delphi

by Jon Land

  Colonel Tyson Gash checked his watch. The 911 Brigade had pulled the entire drop off in under nine minutes, an incredible three entire minutes better than their best-ever practice run. Without hesitation, following the specifications laid out en route from base, the vehicles rolled out toward their assigned grids. The remaining ground troops began their spread as well. Gash himself took command of the force that would take control of the Mall.

  He grimaced as he led his men up toward the ruined structure of the Washington Monument. Maybe they shouldn’t fix it at all when this was over. Maybe they should leave the Monument just the way it was as a memorial to the battle of Washington.

  And the troops that were about to win it.

  Traggeo continued to creep along the slippery top of the second trailer. The storm battered him relentlessly, and more than once he feared the winds would spill him to the road below or even off the mountain’s steep side. By brute strength and force of will he managed to keep his center of gravity low and find the best footholds present on the ice-encrusted trailer top.

  The most precarious move was having to leap five feet from the second trailer onto the first. After managing it effortlessly, Traggeo picked up his pace across the top of the lead trailer with new confidence. The sound of his steps was swallowed by the cushion of snow. The cab came into clear view quickly and he readied his final attack.

  Mountain Pass had taken the slippery shape of an endless S. Wareagle kept the rig’s pace steady, riding the storm as best as he could. He seemed to have formed a truce with the wind and snow, allowing him to concentrate on negotiating the multiple curves of the road. Each motion of the wheel had become an exercise in madness, as he waited to see if the tires could keep their hold.

  The remaining portions of the windshield had begun to fog up from the warm breath misting from his and Sal’s mouths. Johnny had taken to leaning forward at regular intervals to wipe the clouds away before the storm turned them into opaque shields frozen over the glass.

  He was dragging his sleeve across a remnant of the windshield when a gloved hand shattered the glass next to it and grabbed hold of his forearm. A swift yank brought his upper body through what little remained of the windshield onto the tractor’s hood.

  “Shit!” Sal Belamo bellowed, freeing his gun and starting it forward.

  “The wheel!” Johnny screamed back at Sal as the rig began to waver. “Take the wheel!”

  Johnny twisted his body to find Traggeo grinning fiercely down at him. The killer kept him pinned with his left arm while his right slashed a huge knife downward. Wareagle remembered the wound his own knife had made in that arm five days before and deflected the blow on the same spot. Traggeo howled in pain and jerked the knife upward.

  Johnny reached up and grabbed the killer by the jacket to yank him from the roof. He had begun to pull when the rig whiplashed madly across the road and slammed into the mountainside, separating the two men and catapulting both of them forward.

  Sal Belamo’s fingers had found the wheel seconds before, but he couldn’t see well enough over the big Indian’s body to enable him to regain control. As a result the only choice he had was to jerk the rig into a veer away from Mountain Pass’s edge. Without being able to work the brakes, Sal knew what was coming before he felt the tires lock up.

  The truck skidded sideways across the white blanketed road. The passenger side took the brunt of the crash, jostling Sal all around the cab. Belamo was trying to go for his gun when the truck bounced off the mountain and tipped over. The two trailers teetered briefly before dropping onto their sides, coughing up a fountain of snow. Sal tried to rise to see what had become of Johnny. But his leg was caught under the seat, his frame pinned in place and his gun rendered useless as a result.

  “Fuck!” he bellowed.

  Johnny Wareagle, meanwhile, lunged up from the snowbank he had landed in. His eyes found Traggeo struggling to his feet not far from the edge and he moved a hand to draw Duncan Farlowe’s Peacemaker from his belt. But his grasp came away empty, the pistol lost in the fall and stolen now by the storm.

  Fifteen feet away Traggeo was drawing a .45 pistol the fall had spared from inside his jacket, and Johnny threw himself forward. A tunnel seemed to open up and propel him, the gap closing quicker than should have been possible. Johnny never reached Traggeo, but he reached the pistol and kicked it out of the killer’s hand. His right wrist stung again, Traggeo managed to whip his eighteen-inch blade forward in his left.

  If Johnny had tried to follow up his kick with a second blow, the knife would have found him. But the spirits speaking through the storm had been there to lend advice, and Johnny had already backed off to draw his own knife, which was a virtual twin of Traggeo’s.

  The mad killer was grinning, teeth whiter than the storm. The snow covered both of them up to the knees and the two giants began to circle each other in equally deliberate motions. The spilled truck blocked the road forward. The toppled trailers cut off all passage to the rear. The result was a small patch of snowy ground no more than five hundred feet square to serve as their arena.

  Johnny should have known his journey here would have confronted him again with the killer he sought to cleanse the name of his people. The circle always completed itself. Following Traggeo had brought him to the Delphi. Pursuing the Delphi had brought him back to Traggeo.

  Traggeo held his knife high. His steps were crouched and wide. Wareagle kept his blade low at the midsection, his feet crisscrossing through the snow in narrow gliding motions. Measuring his chances for success, Traggeo was the first to lunge, his knife coming down on an overhead sweep.

  Johnny stepped back from the blow that was supposed to serve as distraction for Traggeo’s primary attack. He anticipated the coming kick perfectly and blocked it hard right on the knee. The mad killer groaned in pain.

  Traggeo put his injured leg down gingerly and grimaced as he backpedaled. He was having trouble putting weight on it and he angled his crouch to protect that side. Johnny knew he had the advantage now, but would have to make use of it before Traggeo fought back the pain.

  He charged in and blocked Traggeo’s defensive poke easily with his left hand and drove his knife forward with his right. Traggeo managed to shift at the last and the blade merely grazed his shoulder. He accepted the pain and rammed Johnny’s face with the back of his hand. The blow staggered Wareagle and blinded him long enough for Traggeo to launch an upward cut dead on line with his throat. Johnny was able to avoid the blow with a lurch backward that left his heels teetering on the very edge of the precipice.

  Traggeo instantly realized the precarious position Wareagle had left himself in, but he did not strike right away as most would have. Instead he angled forward deliberately, his intent being to keep Wareagle unbalanced on the edge. Unable to move backward, in response the legend would have to sidestep through the treacherous snow that could betray his footing at any moment. Traggeo could see Wareagle’s feet probing uncertainly, and he committed himself to holding off his next attack until the inevitable slip came.

  The slight buckle he detected in one of Wareagle’s knees was his signal to pounce.

  Wareagle saw Traggeo’s knife coming and twisted from its path. The edge, though, denied him the full range of motion he needed and as a result the blade dug into his right side. Traggeo tore it free and blood spattered into the white snow.

  The mad killer’s grin widened. He was going for the kill.

  Johnny spun away from the edge, a counterattack readied, and this time the knife whizzed by without a touch. Traggeo tried to pull it back, but Johnny clamped down on his wrist. His hope was that the killer would try at all costs to tear free of his hold by yanking with even more resolve backward. Johnny would need only to hang on to be drawn back to firm, secure footing once again. Instead, though, Traggeo rerouted his momentum forward. Johnny lost his grip on the mad killer’s wrist. His already dubious balance wavered and his left foot slid off the precipice.

  Sensing th
e advantage, Traggeo tried a vicious swipe across the scalp he so desperately wanted to own. The momentum of ducking beneath it stripped Wareagle’s right foot from the ledge as well, and he slipped off the mountain’s edge into the white oblivion below.

  In the end the opposition had determined Samuel Jackson Dodd’s final move for him. Watching the paratroopers spread through the capital along with their tanks and Humvees had been too much for Dodd to bear, even before the initial encounters proved devastating for his Delphi troops. Whoever these new arrivals were, they were ferocious and skilled soldiers who could scarely contain their enthusiasm at being released to their deadly task.

  The satellite pictures showed one of his tanks being killed by a TOW missile fired from a Humvee, even as the other M-1s continued to blast away successfully at prime locations in the city. It didn’t matter. All his tanks would soon encounter the fate of the first. And the largest concentrations of the remaining Delphi troops were faring no better, as the fast-moving Sheridan tanks easily homed in on them, forcing retreat after retreat.

  Strangely, this ghost team of deadly rescuers seemed to care no more for the physical state of the city than his troops did. Their Sheridans blasted holes in any building the Delphi sought to use as cover. And the fast tanks’ Shillelagh missiles were as relentless as their 110mm cannon.

  The rout, clearly, was on. The further the ghost team spread out through the city, the more this would become merely a mop-up operation for them. The Delphi troops had been too weakened and depleted by their earlier encounters with the guerrilla force led by McCracken to mount any credible resistance.

  So Dodd had no choice but to trigger the electronic satellite signal that activated the only option he had left, his last chance to secure the day of the Delphi’s anticipated results. Red digits poised over the monitor began counting down from the twenty-minute mark.

  Sam Jack Dodd watched the seconds shrink away and settled back to wait.

  The 911 Brigade had been outfitted and trained to encounter a much different enemy than the one it was facing tonight. An elaborate terrorist strike had always been the prime expectation, or even a covert enemy insurgence. In these and other scenarios, the presence of nuclear weapons was both planned for and expected. As a result, three of the 911’s Humvees were equipped with the latest nuclear-tracking devices designed to sniff out bombs wherever they were hidden within a city.

  The systems automatically triggered upon activation of the rest of the three Humvees’ communications and weapons systems. Having no reason to expect it, the driver of the lead Humvee didn’t even notice the red blip on the grid screen to the right of his console until a full minute after it had begun to blink.

  “What the fuck …”

  He tapped the screen with one finger and then two, hoping the message would change. When it didn’t, he reached for his walkie-talkie.

  “Tracker One to Rescue Leader,” he called. “Come in, Rescue Leader.”

  Over a hundred Delphi troops surged into the Air and Space Museum in pursuit of McCracken, after briefly reforming outside. Nothing was left to chance this time. Expecting McCracken to be waiting to catch the largest group possible in the spray of his weapon, they had entered in small groups through varied points. The troops proceeded to move about the first floor of the museum in a wide spread. A few might be shot, but in the process their quarry would have to give away his position. In seconds the rest would have converged upon him.

  A third of the Delphi troops climbed to the second floor in case McCracken had chosen this strategic position from which to fire upon them. But the quick and deadly firefight they had been expecting didn’t come. They were nervous and edgy as a result. They knew McCracken was in the building; they just had to find him.

  Some of the troops widened their spread to include cubicles, alcoves, rest rooms, souvenir shops, anywhere their quarry might have been hiding. A team even swept the movie theater, half expecting McCracken to burst out at them through the massive screen.

  He didn’t.

  The troops on the second floor were the first to hear the buzzing. By the time they had pinpointed the source of the noise, though, a figure whirling over them had opened fire with a belt-fed machine gun, mowing down dozens of their number and drawing an orange streak across the upper reaches of the Air and Space Museum.

  McCracken had been hiding atop an old Douglas DC-3 while the troops had fanned out through the museum. When he rose at last into the darkness, his head nearly touched the ceiling of the Air and Space. He made sure the thousand-shot belt for his SAW was weighted evenly over his left arm and then squeezed the Hoppi-copter’s control handle with the hand on that side. The single rotor on the one-man helicopter began to turn, and Blaine braced his body over to begin his attack run.

  The Pentecost Hoppi-copter was developed in 1945 with the aim of moving foot soldiers over otherwise impassable terrain. Only twenty were produced, and the military quickly gave up on the Hoppi for its cumbersome bulk and expected high maintenance. A prototype had ended up here in the Air and Space Museum, where the poster Blaine had seen minutes earlier advertised its full restoration and daily demonstrations.

  Without pausing even to check the contraption out fully, McCracken had rushed into the Vertical Flight exhibit and strapped himself in.

  The Hoppi-copter was indeed cumbersome. Basically it was nothing more than a steel cage attached to a single blade above it which boasted a fifty-two-inch spread. The relatively small engine was perched on the cage’s rear and dug into Blaine’s back after he had strapped himself in and tightened the harness. The Hoppi was bulky and poorly weighted, helping to account for its quick dismissal from service. McCracken couldn’t imagine trusting it to difficult terrain in the outdoors, but within the open confines of the Air and Space it would serve him nicely.

  The Hoppi had a single control button built into the handle grasped in Blaine’s left hand. Squeezing it regulated the speed of the rotor blade, and thus the height the Hoppi could be taken to. The way the rider angled his body, especially his legs, determined direction.

  It was as simple as any machine Blaine had ever operated and he had learned everything he needed to about it in the quick climb atop the Douglas DC-3. He left the engine on, hoping the low hum wouldn’t attract attention. Then when the enemy had worked itself into the wide spread he had been expecting, he squeezed the handle and lifted off, beginning to fire as soon as he soared over the first of the Delphi troops.

  The various exhibits of the Air and Space flew by in a darkened blur as he continued to rotate the SAW to catch all the astonished troops beneath him in its 5.56mm spray. He nearly collided with the tip of a ballistic missile and had to angle his body in sudden severe motions to avoid smashing into a model of the space shuttle and then with the prototype for NASA’s X-15 fast flier.

  He fired with virtually no pause whatsoever, not daring to give the men below time to regroup or even aim their weapons toward him. The belt slid nonstop across his left forearm, scraping his flesh through the shirt-sleeve. The SAW was light enough to handle the effort nicely, and after his early near collisions, he settled into a rhythm of using his left to control the Hoppi while his right worked the SAW.

  The remaining enemy forces were in total disarray when he drifted upward, grazing the steel supports mounted beneath the museum’s glass roof. His last attack was made in a classic dive pattern that took him beneath the second-floor balcony. The final complement of Delphi troops were rushing to flee, firing wildly in their wake. McCracken answered their fire with a burst that shattered the glass on the Independence Avenue side of the museum and spilled another dozen bodies to the floor.

  The few troops still on the second level tried for him again at that point. McCracken pulled immediately into a rise up and over them and managed to fire one last burst from the SAW when the Hoppi’s engine began to sputter from ebbing fuel. He reached the floor just before it ran out and unbuckled the harness quickly to shed the Hoppi’s weight.


  McCracken swung toward the sound of more glass shattering on the back side of the Air and Space just as the Hoppi clanged to the floor. A fresh charge of troops surged forward, dressed totally in black and armed to the teeth. McCracken lowered the SAW and smiled.

  “Hold your fire!” a familiar voice from long ago ordered and these troops that must have belonged to the 911 went rigid. “We got us a friendly.”

  Out of the glare of focused beams attached to several of the M16s stepped a barrel-chested shape chomping on an unlit cigar.

  “Nobody the fuck else but you could have done this McCrackenballs,” grinned Colonel Tyson Gash, working the cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right.

  “Looks like we finally get a chance to work together, after all, Colonel.”

  “Way I see it,” Gash said, still advancing, “’bout time the both of you decided to sign up with the 9-1-1.”

  “I figured Johnny had been to see you,” Blaine returned and let himself smile.

  “Don’t start the celebration yet, Captain,” Gash cautioned. “We still got a shit load of a problem left to contend with.”

  CHAPTER 39

  McCracken and Gash jogged at the head of the procession, skirting the clutter of bodies Blaine had left behind inside the Air and Space Museum. A Humvee was revved up and waiting directly outside the museum’s entrance on Independence Avenue.

  “We’ve got a positive fix, sir,” a soldier who had come to meet them halfway told Gash.

  “Where, son?” the colonel asked, the unlit cigar working still in his mouth now.