Day of the Delphi

by Jon Land

  “Lincoln Memorial, sir.”

  “Shit on a pistol.”

  “Fix on what?” Blaine wondered.

  “A nuke, Captain. We’d better get moving.”

  Ben Samuelson had begun firing wildly, desperation taking hold. Only three members of his Hostage and Rescue Team were still in position, the rest either seriously wounded or dead. The battle had claimed a number of special agents as well who had taken their places. And below, the Hoover Building itself was burning. The sprinkler system fought to contain a blaze that continued to be fed by fire from the M-1 tank that had positioned itself near FDR Memorial Drive. Each shell shook the building and sent showers of concrete into the air. The security doors and shutters had been breeched and any moment now the troops in the street below would come surging in.

  Samuelson had decided the only course left to him was to continue firing until the end. The city was falling and FBI headquarters was falling with it.

  More tank fire slammed into the building. One shell pounded the top level where he crouched, and then a second. Samuelson watched more of his people blown over, blood flowing from tears and gashes, some of the wounds destined to be mortal.

  “Goddamnit,” he moaned. “Goddamnit!”

  He popped a fresh clip into his M16, leveled it on the tank across the road, and opened fire.

  The M-1’s turret exploded in a fiery blast that shoved the tank sideways.

  Samuelson stopped firing and looked down at his M16.

  A second explosion pounded the M-1 on its opposite side and lifted the flaming tank into the air before toppling it over.

  What the he—

  A flood of black-clad troops rushed into the square and opened fire on the positions held by the Delphi, overwhelming them with sheer force as well as skill. For an instant Samuelson recalled the other group of friendlies that had perished earlier in the battle for a similar effort. But this force was different. Samuelson could see it in the confident, precisioned way they moved. Around him what had been grim stares on the faces of his remaining defenders an instant before turned to stunned disbelief and then glee. Hoots and hollers replaced the eerie clacking of gunfire as the enemy was slaughtered in a wholesale, unforgiving fashion on the street below.

  Instead of joining in the celebration, Samuelson found himself plagued by a nagging question.

  Who the hell were these guys?

  In the White House, not a single Midnight Rider had been left unscathed by the battle. Other than a few bullets left in pistols, their ammo had run out a few minutes before. Those still able to move had joined Kristen Kurcell and Arlo Cleese in the back foyer. Cleese had lit up a fresh joint and was offering it around.

  There were plenty of takers.

  The troops beyond would be rushing the White House any moment. Sitting here, nice and relaxed, maybe they’d be able to take a few more by surprise.

  Suddenly gunfire began to erupt anew outside. The Riders gazed at each other through eyes dulled by the pungent marijuana smoke, wondering if anyone was missing. Even if there had been, though, the intensity of the gunfire could never have come from a single person, or even a small group of their companions. This was something else entirely, a whole new battle picking up where theirs had left off. Not one of the Riders had the strength or resolve to even check out what was happening.

  “What the fuck?” one muttered.

  And seconds later they heard and felt the barricaded front doors blown open. Orders were shouted, precise and professional. Heavy footsteps filled the hall. One set reached the doorway leading into the back foyer at the same time the barrel of an M16 poked its way through.

  “What the hell is this?” asked a man who was dressed completely in black-out gear, from his feet to the dark stain on his face.

  “It’s a party, soldier,” Cleese said, his mind starting to clear to the reality of what must be happening. “And you’re the guest of honor.”

  Traggeo lingered near the edge for several moments after Johnny Wareagle had slipped off, peering over the mountain in search of him. When what little he could make out through the storm gave up no sign of the legend, he knew he had won. The victory felt somewhat hollow without the trophy of Wareagle’s scalp, but another trophy awaited his inspection.

  Traggeo slid along the edge of Mountain Pass to the second of the two toppled trailers to check the condition of its deadly cargo. The angle of its tumble had left it only a yard from the precipice, so he worked carefully. Using his knife he was able to jimmy the locking mechanism on the rear hatch door. The guide rails must have bent slightly when it tipped over, because progress in getting the door to slide upward came agonizingly slow. Finally Traggeo was able to force the door into the rails and open it. He peered into the trailer through the storm.

  It was empty. The green containers were gone.

  Traggeo blinked his eyes, not believing the sight. A feeling made him step away from the trailer’s rear and gaze back into the storm. He shivered.

  An apparition stood there, the ghost of Johnny Wareagle, as white as the storm itself. But this apparition held in his hand a century-old pistol that was caked with snow. His face was scraped and bloodied. The arm not holding the gun hung lower than the other. A frosty patch of red glistened on his side where Traggeo’s knife had wedged home.

  Traggeo stiffened and sneaked a hand to that same knife now sheathed on his hip, out of the ghost’s view.

  “You!”

  As Wareagle had dropped over the side he had spotted a narrow ledge ten feet down. He landed on it with both feet, slipped off, but managed to grab hold of a protruding rim with his left hand. He badly wrenched his shoulder in the process, which made first climbing upon the ledge and then back onto the road extremely difficult tasks. His plight was complicated all the more by the necessity of clinging to the rim until he was sure Traggeo was no longer peering down from above.

  Traggeo was behind the second trailer by the time Johnny retook the ground. Not wanting to risk a close-in kill, he searched hurriedly through the snow for Duncan Farlowe’s pistol and found it not far from the cab’s toppled frame. He had just gotten the Peacemaker raised when the man he had hunted stepped away from the trailer and faced him.

  Traggeo feigned a quick glance back up Mountain Pass so he could work his knife from its sheath.

  “Those Boy Scouts,” he muttered, stalling.

  “They helped me unload both trailers before I set out.”

  “Then the warheads …” The knife was in hand now, almost ready to throw.

  “Yes,” Wareagle said, completing the thought for him.

  They were still in the cave, watched over by Duncan Farlowe and the boys of Troop 116.

  “Then I will have to go back for them,” Traggeo said.

  He wheeled and threw the knife in the next instant Johnny Wareagle didn’t even move. Duncan Farlowe’s Peacemaker coughed twice from his hip, both bullets catching Traggeo square in the chest. The killer couldn’t believe his eyes. But he wasn’t gazing at his wounds. No. He was staring straight ahead, wondering how his knife had missed its target. It had been dead on line; he was sure of it. Then it was gone, almost like the storm had somehow swallowed it before it reached Wareagle.

  Traggeo started to stagger, dying eyes locked on the apparition of Wareagle.

  “Ghost,” he said and fell backward over the mountain’s edge.

  “Not yet,” Johnny told his corpse.

  The 911’s bomb disposal unit was waiting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when Colonel Tyson Gash’s Humvee pulled up, its doors already open. Gash rushed toward them, McCracken right by his side.

  “It’s here all right, sir,” reported the chief of the unit, a corporal named Revens.

  “Where?”

  “We’ve already searched the building, sir, and found nothing,” Revens continued, “which means it has to be underneath.”

  “Underneath, soldier?”

  “The catacombs,” said Blaine.

&nb
sp; Gash and the members of the 911’s bomb disposal unit, trained in all manner of explosives including nukes, turned to look at him.

  “This used to be swampland, Colonel,” Blaine explained. “Layers of tunnels and caverns had to be dug to support the memorial’s weight when it was built.”

  “Do you know how to access them, sir?” Revens asked him.

  “I will as soon as we’re inside.”

  In the command center of Mount Weather, General Cantrell had done what he would have considered laughable only hours before: he had surrendered unconditionally to the President. The facility’s regular security personnel were already in the process of disarming and detaining Cantrell’s crack troops. The President’s team of Secret Service agents had been brought to the command center where they took direct responsibility for the general.

  “I want to get back to Washington,” the President said anxiously to Charlie Byrne. “Now that this is over we’ve got plenty of—”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Angela Taft, her eyes still on the big screen. “If it’s over, what’s going on down there?”

  Before her, a full quarter of the screen was taken up by a horde of men and vehicles converging on the Lincoln Memorial.

  Samuel Jackson Dodd watched the clock tick down to the eight-minute mark and then returned his attention to his screen. The troops that had forced him to resort to this stratagem were storming inside the Lincoln Memorial. A slight tremor of fear slid through Dodd. If they knew about the catacombs, there was plenty of time for them to reach the bomb. Disarming it, though, would be something else entirely. He had left a subtle surprise to make that effort almost surely go for naught.

  The bomb would detonate at the 2:00 mark instead of at the traditional 0:00. The center of Washington would be reduced to rubble, the disappearance of the nation’s leaders even easier to account for in the process. Greenbrier and Site R remained under his control. Regaining control in Mount Weather would be accomplished in the wake of the blast.

  Once Dodd took office, of course, he would have to rebuild the capital from scratch. The challenge intrigued him. His first act as the nation’s commander in chief would leave an indelible mark on all of history, at the same time that it helped to solidify and consolidate the Delphi’s hold on power.

  Dodd resisted the temptation to announce to the surprised occupants of Mount Weather’s command center what was about to happen. It would be far more effective to surprise them and watch the shock on their faces when the explosion vaporized the center of Washington less than six minutes from now.

  He filled his viewing screen on Olympus with a single overview shot of central Washington and settled calmly back to watch.

  The Lincoln Memorial’s supporting understructure of catacombs was filled with walkways accompanied by wooden safety rails. Tours had been given of them on a regular basis until tests revealed dangerously high levels of asbestos. Since removing it was not practical, the catacombs had simply been shut down.

  McCracken had located the entrance to them on the lower floor of the Memorial. Gash’s men shot their way through a locked steel door and surged inside.

  The darkness of the catacombs was broken by a series of single bulbs strung overhead. Blaine had found the switch to activate them on the wall next to the ruined steel door. In spite of the spring warmth, the walls were icy cold to the touch. The deeper inside the troops ventured, the more in evidence were the soda straws and stalactites fashioned by the dripping and freezing water. There were puddles of water sloshing beneath their feet, and the clammy chill made Blaine wonder why they hadn’t frozen. He could see the breath misting before his face. Revens’s hand-held nuke locater was beeping now as well as flashing, and McCracken knew they were getting close.

  “It’s right up here,” Revens announced. “No, wait. Stop.”

  “Well?” Colonel Gash raised.

  “Just to the right,” Revens gestured. “In that ditch, I think.”

  Gash moved slightly ahead of them toward the ditch in question. The unlit cigar was still in his mouth.

  The nuclear warhead rested comfortably in a yard-deep depression in the ground. No effort had been made to conceal it, since a century’s camouflage already in place would have seemed to make that superfluous. A timer rigged atop the black casing was ticking down to the seven-minute mark.

  “Converted low-yield artillery shell,” Revens identified and looked back at Blaine. “One of those you told us was stolen, no doubt.”

  “Low yield or not, it’s enough to put the government out of business for a long time if it goes off,” Blaine told him.

  “It won’t be going off, sir,” Revens assured as his team went about their individual tasks in quick, coordinated motion. Tools were brought out, cases containing varying sizes of magnifying glasses and lenses unloaded. There was also a machine that was designed to the specifications of a stethoscope, only rigged to a sound board with dials and gauges. He recognized a second device as an instant X-ray machine.

  To McCracken, it all seemed too simple, too pat. For Dodd to have come this far, gone through all this, and leave no extra surprises at the end was not something he could accept. So what was it? What were they missing?

  Another bomb perhaps, a second one, to be ignored after this one had been found?

  No. The portable locater would have picked up two blips if that were the case.

  “I know this baby well,” Revens continued. He was crouching in the ditch now, eyeing the shell confidently. “Won’t even have to use all this stuff to shut her down.”

  Revens turned the waist-high warhead on its side and affixed a pair of suction cups to the locking mechanism on its underside. The suction cups were connected to an elaborate sensor mechanism that looked like a laptop computer but was actually a master unlocking system allocated to battalion field commanders so they could manually deactivate their warheads in any eventuality. The final fail-safe procedure in the loop.

  As Blaine watched, numbers began flying across the device’s small screen. Four locked home and began flashing.

  “Halfway there,” Revens said to McCracken and Colonel Gash.

  The clock, facing upward with the warhead tipped onto its side, ticked to 3:59.

  A fifth number joined the others on the screen and began flashing. The next two followed at intervals of fifteen seconds. When the machine correctly identified the eighth and final one the screen emptied except for the eight numbers. Revens hit the keyboard’s execute key.

  The clock had reached 3:20.

  The two men on either side of Revens brought the instant X-ray machine, along with what looked like an electronic stethoscope.

  “Now we check for booby traps before I remove the lock.”

  “No!” Blaine said, dropping down into the ditch. “This warhead would have an internal clock, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then why bother with one we can see?” He looked back at Gash. “It’s here to fool us. It might read two minutes and forty-five seconds, but we don’t have that much time left.”

  “What do you suggest, Captain?” Gash asked him.

  Blaine swung toward Revens. “Remove the lock now.”

  “Sir, if I do that and it’s booby-trapped …”

  “They wouldn’t bother with a booby trap. They would have figured the clock was enough.”

  Revens looked at Gash. The colonel nodded.

  The clock read 2:30.

  Reluctantly, Revens cupped the sophisticated housing that fastened the lock required for detonation into the warhead. With the proper unlocking code entered, he turned it to the right. It clicked into place at the 2:19 mark and he started to twist it back to the left.

  Click.

  2:13 …

  Revens moved his left hand up to join his right and used both to grasp the locking mechanism’s ridged edges. If the warhead was booby-trapped, they’d all know soon enough.

  2:08 …

  Revens held his breat
h and started to slide the locking mechanism toward him. He had it in hand and cradled like a baby as the countdown clock facing the ceiling ticked to the two-minute mark.

  EPILOGUE

  “This country owes you a lot, Blaine,” the President said yet again, “one hell of a lot.”

  Three days had passed since the battle of Washington had ended, and this was the first time in that period that McCracken had met with the President alone. The commander-in-chief had insisted on returning to the White House after spending only a single night at Camp David. Tyson Gash’s 911 Brigade had left the task of mopping up the city to the 82nd Airborne, who arrived just over four hours after the battle of Washington had begun. Had the 911 stayed long enough for the media to descend once Prometheus was deactivated, they would have been hailed as heroes. Gash would have been able to name his terms for return to the service that had spurned him. Instead, just before dawn the men of the 911 were trucked to Andrews Air Force Base, where their transport planes were waiting to ferry all troops and equipment back to their Arizona base. The only ones not making the trip were the few casualties, and their hospital stays promised to be as quiet as they were short.

  The 82nd served as backup for Delta Force in the retaking of Greenbrier and Site R as well. None of the temporary inhabitants of either locale fully understood what had happened. There were numerous rumors, but hard facts were difficult to come by and the truth remained elusive. Only the President, Charlie Byrne, Angela Taft, and Ben Samuelson knew the whole story, and they had no intention of sharing it.

  By Monday, incredibly, the government was up and running again. Since very little damage had been done to the Capitol’s interior, Congress held a virtually normal session even as construction crews began the massive repair job outside. The nation’s representatives attacked their roles with renewed vigor and pride. In that sense the very basis for the day of the Delphi had been proven wrong. The government emerged from the crisis stronger than ever.