by Jon Land
Labyrinth
Jon Land
For Camp Samoset
Contents
Prologue
Part One: Washington, Monday Afternoon
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two: Paris and London, Thursday Morning
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Three: Cadgwith Cove, Friday Morning
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Four: Liechtenstein and Austria, Saturday Afternoon
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Five: Schaan, Monday Morning
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Six: Florence and San Sebastian, Tuesday Afternoon
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Seven: Rome and London, Wednesday Morning
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Eight: Geneva and Austria, Thursday Morning
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part Nine: Washington and Keysar Flats, Sunday Afternoon
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part Ten: San Sebastian, Monday Morning
Chapter 35
Epilogue
A Biography of Jon Land
Acknowledgments
A Sneak Peek at Strong at the Break
Prologue
LUBECK HELD THE BINOCULARS up to his eyes. Sweat from his brow coated the glass with a thin mist, forcing him to swipe at the lenses with his sleeve. The South American sun beat down on his exposed dome. He could almost feel his flesh shriveling but paid little attention. Resting the binoculars again on the bridge of his nose, Lubeck wondered if the men near the trucks might be watching him as well.
He turned the focusing wheel and the picture sharpened. Three trucks now, one obviously having been abandoned, left behind for the sun to broil. The troops from the abandoned truck must have crowded into the others. The complement of men and weapons was just as it had been in Florencia.
The men stood with rifles slung over their shoulders, passing cigarettes and gulping water. Lubeck ran his tongue along the parched inside of his mouth, fingering his canteen. He had precious little water left, none to be wasted on a whim. Down below men in green army garb swished gallons around their mouths and spat them out near their combat boots. Lubeck’s flesh crawled.
It was a miracle he had found them. His jeep had given out some ten miles back. Walking straight across the land without rest, he had somehow managed to meet up with the convoy again. His shoes held a pair of feet blistered raw beyond pain, while the sun had stripped him of his bearings. He knew he was still in Colombia, though, probably near the southeastern tip where the country joined Peru and Brazil not far from the Putumayo River. Just what an armed convoy representing no particular country was doing there, Lubeck couldn’t figure. It made no sense, just another fragment of a story that contained only parts and no sum.
One of the men below seemed to gaze up at him. Lubeck hunched lower on his elbows, squeezing the binoculars with both his right hand and the steel pincers he had instead of a left. Amazing how well the things worked, an absolute wonder of modern science. The accident had kept him out of Nam but not out of intelligence and later the field. He became the best because people underestimated him, pitied him. His was a cripple’s lot, although he never considered himself a cripple. If anything, his substitute hand was a plus, the pincers when pressed together forming a deadly weapon always ready and waiting.
Always.
Lubeck recalled the first time he had made them work, years ago—fifteen maybe—in Brussels. He was sitting across from an Eastern Bloc agent in a bar discussing terms for a turn. The man was quick with a gun, one of the best. The conversation had not gone well. The tone and timing were off. Lubeck sensed something was wrong even before the man’s eyes froze and his hand started for his famous lightning draw. Lubeck realized he had been set up an instant before he jabbed his pincers across the table, digging into the legend’s throat before his gun had cleared its holster.
The pincers cut flesh like butter. Lubeck mastered their use, became the best at fighting in close. Guns, knives, hands—nothing rivaled his pincers. His mind had drifted back to the damn accident that had led to their insertion in the first place, when the sight of the troops squeezing back on their trucks snapped him alert again. The engines rumbled in protest, shook, then finally caught.
The trucks were on their way.
The going was slow there along a road barely wide enough to accommodate their passage. Lubeck found himself almost able to keep pace if he trotted. But he tired quickly in the wrenching heat, drained some of his water and resigned himself to just maintaining eye contact with the convoy until it reached its destination.
It had started in London with a routine security assignment that had bothered him for its very banality. When you reached Lubeck’s level, your superiors couldn’t very well pull you out of the field cold turkey. They had to ease you out, get you used to the inevitable before it happened. Retirement was nonexistent. Instead of a gold watch, you got to be station chief in some lush, tropical country with lots of rum where no one could get to you and you couldn’t get to anyone. For Lubeck, London promised to be the start of the easing process. Trouble was, he didn’t think he was ready, which meant he had something to prove.
Then the Colombian diplomat had come to him with an incredible story. Lubeck started digging, uncovered a trail filled with dead ends and detours, his only signpost being a shadowy phrase that held no substance:
Tantalus …
Lubeck would have been laughed out of the section if he called in the reserves based on what he had. So he’d followed the trail that led to South America and eighty fully equipped combat soldiers. He had picked up their movements in Bogotá and had followed them across Colombia in the jeep that had died under him hours before. Soon he would know why they had come and the pieces would fall together. He was getting close to the answer; he could feel it.
Lubeck shifted his pack from the left shoulder to the right. Thank God the radio he’d obtained at the Bogotá station was small, compact, microchip-based. He had checked in there and remained vague about his purpose. The station chief had listened intently, obliged his whim with a promise he’d be standing by, and had gone back to his rum.
Down below, the trucks shifted about uneasily on the dirt road. Its unevenness forced the drivers to slow to a crawl, and Lubeck drew up with them. He might have used the radio then had he known his position. He knew this area of the country was dotted with small, backward towns whose people were mostly farmers out of a different age. Why, then, the troops? Lubeck’s nerves were starting to get to him. He wiped his brow again but his sleeve was so thoroughly soaked the effect was negligible. The sweat stung his eyes. His steel pincers ached with phantom pain.
The trucks rolled around a corner out of sight. Up ahead, the hillside he’d been traveling on swerved in the other direction, meaning he would have to descend now and take his chances on level ground. Lubeck stepped up his pace, wanting to check the convoy’s position before he made his move. Fifty yards ahead he drew the binoculars up to his eyes, holding them with only his pincers.
The trucks had stopped. Men who must have been the leaders were conferring. A battered sign with rain-ripped letters wa
s nailed to a post on the side of the road: SAN SEBASTIAN.
The wood was rotting, the name faded, but Lubeck made it out clearly enough. A small farming town obviously. Could this be the convoy’s destination?
A jeep hurtled down the road from the town’s direction, carrying three passengers. Lubeck turned his binoculars on them. The driver was just another soldier dressed the same as the rest, but the man to his right looked to be more, though he too wore the same uniform. The man’s hair was long and neatly styled, his features dark with a pair of liquidy black eyes. The man had an air of authority about him Lubeck could feel even from four hundred yards away.
The jeep pulled to a halt near the trucks, facing them. Lubeck moved the binoculars onto its third occupant and felt his blood run cold. The man stepped out from the back of the jeep, shadowing the steps of the dark-eyed leader. He was a giant, nearly seven feet tall, and wide as well. He wore a white suit that looked totally out of place with the temperature stretching over a hundred. His eyes were narrowed into almond-shaped slits; an Oriental, obviously—the biggest Lubeck had ever seen. The giant’s hair was slicked straight back behind his ears. His flesh was rich brown; Chinese, Lubeck guessed. He wore a thin mustache across lips held in a perpetual half smile.
The dark-eyed man moved toward the troop leaders with the giant right behind. Nods were exchanged, not handshakes or salutes. Lubeck tried to focus on the dark-eyed man’s lips for reading but the distance was too great. The leaders were listening intently to him, nodding their acknowledgment. The exchange was brief. The dark-eyed man headed back to his jeep, the leaders to their trucks. The jeep’s driver swung the vehicle back around to lead the convoy forward. The trucks started on their way again.
In the back of the last one, Lubeck could see men checking the clips of their weapons. He felt the pull of fear now, and welcomed it, for it would give him the edge he needed to keep going.
The trucks had slowed to a walking pace. He descended to level ground and hung a few hundred yards behind them. He flirted with the idea of radioing the Bogotá station but dismissed the notion until he had something concrete to say.
Lubeck climbed another hillside and moved parallel with the convoy. The town of San Sebastian came into view. Dust whipped up from the poorly paved street and blasted the shuttered windows of the town’s buildings. A church steeple dominated the town’s center, and a bell could be heard chiming softly as windblown pebbles cascaded against it. Lubeck reached for his binoculars.
More military-style vehicles dotted the dusty street. Men in uniforms held their weapons tight and paraded freely, all watching the trucks entering the town’s perimeter. But where were the townspeople?
The grip of fear held Lubeck tight. Something was very wrong here all right. San Sebastian, a simple farming community … His mind kept coming back to that.
The trucks squealed to a halt. Troops piled from the back of all three, arranging themselves in groups, fanning out. The dark-eyed man was barking orders in heavy Spanish. Enough of his words traveled in the wind for Lubeck to string them into context.
“Check the houses! I want them emptied! Lofts too and outhouses! Check every room, every inch! Get to it! Get to it!”
Three quarters of the troops started off.
“Watch for stragglers!” the dark-eyed man shouted after them. He nodded to another phalanx, which moved for the church.
Lubeck let the binoculars dangle at his chest and started running, trying to better his angle. His mouth was dry and he knew all the water in Colombia could do nothing about it. He sensed now what was about to take place, but the why still eluded him.
He stopped on a hill even with the church. He was just a hundred yards from the town now. A group of soldiers was unloading large silver cans from each of the trucks and packing them onto the backs of jeeps. When ten cans had been loaded on them, the jeeps tore off, a man at the back of each working on the cans’ spouts. Lubeck swung his binoculars back around.
The church was emptying. People, virtually all clothed in tattered white rags, swept into the wide street. Soldiers poked their rifles forward, herding the people into a tight mass, keeping them still. The mass swelled. Lubeck saw young children cowering against mothers, teenage boys trying to stand brave by fathers. Older people tripped, fell, were yanked brutally up by the soldiers and tossed forward. Even from a hundred yards away, Lubeck could hear the muttered cries and pleas to God for help. Some of the people were wailing with knees pressed to the ground and hands grasping for the sky. Rifle butts quickly silenced them. Through it all, Lubeck made out one word above everything else:
¿Porqué?… Why?
Several of the other soldiers were returning now with stragglers from the surrounding houses. Perhaps they had been hiding. Perhaps they had simply been missed in the original roundup. It didn’t matter. They were tossed into the mass now and the mass absorbed them. Two hundred people, Lubeck calculated, at least a third of them children.
The soldiers poked at the mass with their rifles until it was impossible to tell one person from the next. No space to breathe, let alone move.
The dark-eyed man shouted an order.
The soldiers backed up into a semicircle and raised their automatic weapons.
The people screamed, cried, begged, tossed their hands about in desperate circles, shoving to find safety when there was no place to go.
Above the screaming, Lubeck heard the dark-eyed man’s one-word command:
“Fire!”
In the drawn-out instant that followed, Lubeck wanted to drop the binoculars from his eyes but couldn’t. The soldiers aimed their rifles straight into the mass and fired without pause. Smoke belched from the barrels, flashes swirling together into a single bolt.
Some of the soldiers changed clips.
The bullets kept coming.
The screaming curdled Lubeck’s ears. Still he couldn’t put the binoculars down.
The first wave of red and white collapsed down and in, the second atop it, clearing the bullets’ path for the next. By the end, there was no place left to fall, and punctured, bloodied bodies stood supporting each other until the wind tumbled them over into the heap.
Lubeck’s steel pincers sliced through the frame of his binoculars. He leaned over and vomited.
Lubeck gazed back down. He didn’t need his binoculars to see the blood spreading outward from underneath the pile and soaking into the dirt street. A young boy rolled off the top of the pile, into the scarlet pool.
Lubeck vomited again.
Down below, soldiers were soaking the bodies with the contents of the same steel cans that had been loaded into the back of the jeeps from the trucks. Lubeck’s mind snapped back to reality, forced out the sickening carnage he had witnessed. He grabbed his pack and was off again.
He stopped a hundred yards farther across the hillside, too close to the town for his own liking. He had to report this, but what precisely could he report? The Bogotá station could never respond in time for it to matter. Time was not the problem. His right hand was trembling and he realized his steel pincers were as well. He pulled his broken binoculars back to his eyes.
Across the town on another hillside there was a brief flash, sun meeting something metallic. Another person obviously, another witness to the massacre. Lubeck wondered who. Then he saw the jeeps with the silver cans. They were speeding over prescribed stretches of land with one man holding the cans’ spouts open, draining them of a clear liquid, which sank into the ground.
The land! Where were the damn—
“Oh, my God,” Lubeck muttered.
It couldn’t be but it was. He grabbed the radio from his pack, switched to the proper frequency, yanked up the antenna, and raised the plastic to his lips.
“Come in, Bogotá station. Come in, Bogotá station.” He fought to hold the transmitter steady. “This is Field Mouse. Do you read me, Bogotá station?”
“We read you, Field Mouse” came a male voice between splotches of static.
“But you’re broken up. Can you move closer in range?”
“Negative!” Lubeck roared half under his breath. “No time. Just listen. Are you recording this transmission?”
“Affirmative, Field Mouse. It’s standard—”
“I don’t give a fuck about standard anything. Don’t interrupt me. Just listen. I’m broadcasting from San Sebastian. The whole town’s been taken out.” Down below troops were splattering the buildings with more of the fluid from the cans, drenching the insides as well. “Everyone’s dead, massacred… .”
“Field Mouse, did you say—”
“I told you not to interrupt me! It’s on tape, goddamnit! I haven’t got time for a full report now but I think I know why this town can’t exist anymore.” Lubeck grabbed for the binoculars with his pincers and held them against his eyes as best he could. They were going to burn the whole town, he knew now, and with good reason. “As soon as I complete this transmission forward the tape stat to Washington under sterile cover. Use gamma channel. Tell them I will follow as soon as I can with all the details.”
“Acknowledged.”
Lubeck swept the area with his binoculars. Yes, it was starting to make sense now. “San Sebastian was a farming community. I’m in a position overlooking the fields now. It appears that—” Lubeck’s eyes froze. He tried to refocus the binoculars but couldn’t manage it with his pincers. “Oh, my God,” he breathed into the transmitter. “This can’t be! It can‘t be! I’m looking out at—”
Lubeck felt the presence behind him in time to duck but not in time to avoid the blow. It crunched down on his collarbone, snapping it. Lubeck howled in pain and rolled away. The transmitter flew aside.
“Field Mouse, do you read me? Field Mouse, what’s going on there?”
Lubeck looked up into the grinning face of the giant in white. Chinese for sure, he decided. Weaponless, the giant approached him making no effort to be subtle.
Lubeck struggled back to his feet, hunching to keep the pain of his shattered collarbone down. The giant was going to try to finish him with his hands. Fine.
Because Lubeck had his pincers.
