King wondered if he hadn’t made a grave mistake in dragging his old friend along on this outing. “George, right now I know as much as you do. Yeah, it could be Ridley. Or it could be something completely unrelated. That coin is our only clue, and that’s why I immediately thought of you. But if you have even a hint of a bad feeling about this, we’ll call the game.”
“I may not be in your league,” Pierce said, trying to sound confident, “but I know how to duck and cover when the bullets start flying. If this turns out to be a chance to take down some still functioning project of Ridley’s, then I definitely want in. And if not…well, then the explanation for that coin’s presence in the Americas might rewrite the history books. Just one thing, though.”
“Name it.”
Pierce grinned. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you call me ‘pawn.’”
10.
East of Phoenix, Arizona — 0520 UTC (10:20 pm Local)
Nina Raglan stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned environment of the Toyota Land Cruiser and embraced the warm desert night. The temperature was still in the high eighties, but cooling as the rocky soil radiated its stored energy away into the cloudless sky. A life-long resident of the southwest, she thought of this as comfortable weather; in just a few short weeks, the daily low temperature would be closer to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the highs would regularly exceed one-hundred and ten.
She was parked at the Campaign Trailhead, in the northeast part of the Superstition Wilderness. The Land Cruiser had nimbly negotiated the eight-mile long stretch of unimproved Forest Service roads connecting to state route 88, but from here, she would have to proceed on foot to reach her goal.
She circled the parked SUV and opened the rear hatch to reveal her gear, all carefully laid out in the storage area. She shrugged into her 1.6-liter CamelBak hydration pack, taking a perfunctory sip of tepid water from the bite valve—a water supply was the single most important factor in surviving a night in the desert, even in mild conditions. She then picked up the handheld video-camera, clicking it on to verify that the batteries were fully charged. She switched it to low-light infrared mode, and the dark display screen came alive, revealing the darkened landscape in an eerie green glow. Satisfied, she turned the device off and stuffed it in one of the large pockets of her lightweight windbreaker. She performed a similar function test on the Garman GPS device, noting her location on the backlit liquid crystal display, and the distance to the waypoint she had earlier entered into the device: just over six miles in a straight line, though it was unlikely the terrain would let her travel the shortest possible route. To get where she wanted, she would have to follow a series of trails weaving along the flanks of the Pinal Mountains.
Nina had only one more piece of equipment to add, something she hoped she would never have to use. She glanced nervously at the other two four-wheel drive vehicles parked at the turnaround; their owners were nowhere to be seen and presumably already in a camp somewhere down one of the trails. Confident that she was alone, she picked up the Glock 27 9-millimeter pistol, inserted a fifteen-round magazine with a grip extender, and then actioned the slide to chamber a round. The pistol went into the nylon holster, already threaded onto her belt, partially concealed underneath the windbreaker.
She didn’t much care for guns or their potential to destroy life, but it was patently foolish to hike in the desert without a gun. That was a lesson her father had taught her very early in life, one of many, and she held his wisdom in high esteem. He was the reason she was what she was.
And what she was, at least in a professional sense, was one of the foremost scholarly researchers of everything covered by the vaguely defined term ‘paranormal phenomena.’ There were a lot of people involved in paranormal research, owing in no small part to the proliferation of reality-television programming that featured enthusiasts armed with cameras, audio recording devices and sundry other equipment, hunting for ghosts, monsters, aliens and pretty much anything that seemingly defied rational explanation and titillated the imagination. It was the “scholarly” part that Nina felt set her apart from the crowd. To be sure, many of the professional celebrity-caliber researchers—she did not think of them as colleagues—gave the appearance of applying the scientific method to their investigations, but just enough to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Most of their “findings” were a hodge-podge of mutually contradictory bits of errant data, pieced together into a mosaic that hinted at still greater wonders to be revealed and kept the ratings up.
Nina had been labeled a skeptic by her detractors, and to the extent that any scientist worth her salt tries to put aside preconceptions and think objectively, she was. Her mind was open to all the possibilities, but she had thus far seen no compelling evidence to make her a believer. Like her father before her, she earned her living writing the facts about so-called paranormal phenomena, free of sensational speculation, often exposing frauds and charlatans in the process. It wasn’t exactly lucrative; people didn’t like having their illusions exposed. But her books sold marginally well, and because she was—as one producer had told her—telegenic, she was often invited to appear on cable television programs, ostensibly as a skeptical foil to the raving pseudoscientists. Tall and slender, with long black hair and a face that seemed to have taken the best of both her father’s Irish and her mother’s Native American genetic traits, she was, as too many of her fan letters often pointed out, an exotic beauty. If not for her intractable refusal to play to the crowd, she probably could have had her own show, but her integrity to scientific principles was non-negotiable.
Deep down however, she wanted nothing more than to discover that there really was more in heaven and earth than science had thus far revealed.
Nina didn’t expect to make such a discovery tonight.
She closed the door on the Toyota, extinguishing the only source of artificial light, and she was plunged into the near total darkness of the desert night. After a few moments however, her eyes adjusted and she saw a wondrous landscape, painted in the faint silver of starlight. The craggy peaks of the Superstition Mountains stood in stark relief against the velvety night sky. There was a tiny LED squeeze light on her key-chain, and a much larger MagLite under the seat of the Land Cruiser, but she resisted the impulse to light her way by such means. She was, after all, trying to sneak into an area that had been designated by the authorities as an exclusion zone.
In the last twenty-four hours, the nationwide paranormal community had been set on fire by the strange reports coming out of Arizona. After filtering through the paranoid tangents and discarding probably erroneous exaggerations, Nina had been able to piece together the facts—if they could be called facts—that had triggered the current conflagration.
According to the most reliable sources, an unknown bipedal creature had caused the multi-vehicle accident that had temporarily shut down a section of Highway 60. On the national scene, it was being called ‘Bigfoot’ or ‘sasquatch,’ a term derived from the Salish word for ‘wild man,’ which originally had applied only to the legendary ape-like creature that roamed the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Stories of a similar creature were to be found in almost every part of the world, from the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas, to the Skunk Ape of the Florida Everglades, and Arizona was no exception. According to locals, at least the few of them attuned to the chatter, the accident had been caused by the Mogollon Monster.
Nina had followed the Internet discussion forum threads back to the earliest posts, which contained links to a video that had evidently been removed. Later threads angrily decried the removal as censorship, but several of them focused on what had been on the video: a fierce hominid, or possibly a primate, attacking a young woman in a car, immediately following the highway accident.
Nina had grown up with stories of the Mogollon Monster. It was reputed to be a hominid, ranging from six to eight feet in height, covered almost entirely in long dark hair. Some people who claimed to have encountered it re
ported a strong smell, similar to the odor of a skunk, and said that the generally shy creature produced whistling and shrieking noises. The only remotely violent behavior associated with the creature was a tendency to throw rocks at campers from a distance. The idea that such a reportedly peaceful creature would attack a car seemed as unlikely as…well, as unlikely as its existence in the first place.
Cryptozoology had always represented a troubling sub-class of paranormal research for Nina. It was ostensibly nothing more than a search for new animal species, and as such, firmly rooted in the principles of science. Cryptozoology didn’t require you to weigh in on heavy philosophical subjects about what happened after death, or whether the possible existence of extraterrestrials was at odds with religious beliefs. There were even a few examples of cryptids—mostly animals thought to be long extinct—that had been verified.
But science cut both ways. For an animal species to avoid extinction, it had to play a functional role in its ecosystem—it had to eat to survive, and that kind of biological impact produced tell-tale evidence. Even more importantly, animal species required a minimum population size to avoid the negative effects of inbreeding. The existence of the ubiquitous lake monster, for example, seemed very unlikely because for the species to remain extant, there would have to be, at a minimum, a dozen or more breeding pairs at any given time. Decades of searching had not revealed a shred of evidence to verify the existence of a single monster swimming in the depths of Loch Ness, much less the remains of the thousands that must have lived and died over the course of several millennia. Such details however rarely seemed to bother the true believers.
Nina didn’t think the Mogollon Monster was responsible for the events that had closed Highway 60, and she wasn’t hiking across the Superstition Wilderness to find proof of the creature’s existence. She expected to find only a very rational, banal explanation for the accident and the subsequent enforcement of the exclusion zone, and when she returned with proof, she would write about it. If she learned something else, something unexpected, she would write about that with the same objectivity. That was what she did.
Though barely discernible in the darkness, Nina had little trouble keeping to the trail, which followed a creek bed along the western slope of Pinto Peak. The course of both the creek and the trail—which according to the guidebooks, had been in use since prehistoric times, and in the not so distant past, had been used by the Apaches and by US Army soldiers hunting them—had been determined by nature; like the water that periodically flowed down Campaign Creek, the trail followed the path of least resistance, through the narrow divide between the craggy mountains.
Nina had lapsed into a natural rhythm, her legs no longer complaining about the constant climb. After about two hours, she crested the high point on the trail, still well below the level of the surrounding peaks, and began the somewhat trickier task of descending the other side in the darkness.
As she started down the path, she checked her GPS. She was more than halfway to her objective, and soon would turn east along Cuff Button Trail. If she kept this pace, she would be in position to observe activity in the exclusion zone well before dawn.
Her sense of satisfaction was short lived. As soon as she put the Garman back in her pocket, she realized that the few moments spent staring at the screen of the device had deprived her of her night vision. Even as she cursed her stupidity, an unseen loose rock shifted beneath her foot. She went down on her backside, sliding unceremoniously about ten feet down the trail. The coarse terrain scraped her legs through the rip-stop fabric of her pants, which nonetheless protected her from serious damage. The same could not be said for her bare hands; she had instinctively flung her arms out for balance, taking the impact of the fall on the heels of her hands, which were then nearly shredded by the short slide down the rocky trail.
She cursed her bad luck, instinctively cradling her scraped and bleeding palms. But even as the echoes of her oath and the sounds of tumbling rocks jarred loose by her fall were swallowed up by the night, she heard another noise that turned her blood to ice.
It was one of those sounds that everyone recognized instantly, even if their only experience with it was from movies and nature documentaries—a rapid clicking sound, almost like a party noise-maker.
It was the unmistakable buzz of a rattlesnake, and it was close. Despite her familiarity with the desert and its many diverse and potentially deadly denizens, Nina did what most people do when surprised by a venomous snake: she screamed.
11.
King and Pierce were only about a quarter of a mile away when a shrill scream broke the otherworldly quiet. The two men exchanged a brief glance and then, as if motivated by a single mind, turned and headed back up the trail at an urgent but prudent jog.
Faced with essentially the same problem—how to approach the exclusion zone surreptitiously to conduct a covert investigation—King and Pierce had arrived at the same solution as Nina Raglan. Using the highway was a non-starter; that route would be subject to the heaviest surveillance. But the maze of trails running across the Superstition Wilderness was not as likely to be watched, particularly at night. That, at least, was what King was counting on.
He had done extensive map reconnaissance during the flight, scanning overhead satellite imagery of the area, researching other environmental factors that might have significantly altered the conditions on the ground. He had also done a little shopping.
Their first stop after picking up the rental car at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, was at a large sporting goods store in Tempe, where his purchases were waiting to be picked up. Equipped with the very best survival gear, and perhaps most importantly, two sets of ATN Viper night vision monoculars, King drove their rented SUV east, away from the setting sun, along state route 88 and the Campaign Trailhead, little suspecting that very soon they would have company on the trail.
King’s night vision device soon revealed an attractive woman, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, staring fearfully at her surroundings. Her eyes, which glowed like green coals in the Viper’s display, were darting back and forth, and he realized that she was straining to see in the darkness. Her head snapped up at the sound of their approaching footsteps.
“Who’s there? Don’t come in any closer. I’m practically sitting on a rattler, and he’s pissed off.”
King froze in place and immediately began scanning the area around the woman for some sign of the snake that was menacing her. Most of the ground on the hillside was bare, but there was a jumble of large rock flakes a few feet below where she sat, and a few yards away up the hillside, there was a waist high sagebrush, either of which might have concealed a lurking rattlesnake.
“Hold still,” King said, unnecessarily. “My name’s… Call me King. I’m going to approach very slowly and see if we can’t shoo Mr. Slithery away with a minimum of drama.”
King could see her searching the darkness to locate him and found it a little disconcerting. He was standing right in front of her and could see her plain as day, but from her perspective, he was a disembodied voice.
He cautiously extended the tip of his lightweight aluminum trekking pole—another of the purchases he’d made from the sporting goods store—and tapped the rock pile near her feet. There was a blur of motion as something darted from beneath the rocks and bumped the pole.
“There you are,” King murmured. The snake, probably a diamondback rattler, was incredibly fast, and as the woman had so eloquently put it, very pissed off. It was a wonder that she hadn’t been bitten. He continued probing the creature’s hiding place, hoping that it would do what most wild animals did when confronted with a threat that could not be overcome with their natural defenses, and move away. The snake struck again, closing its mouth around the tip of the pole and this time, it refused to let go.
King carefully pulled the relentless animal away from the rocks and away from its original intended victim. “Okay, ma’am, I want you to move very slowly to your right.”<
br />
He could see the naked apprehension on her face, but she nodded and did exactly as he had instructed, shifting sideways at an almost glacial pace, without making a noise louder than a whisper. When she was about three feet away from where she had been, King gave the pole a shake and the snake let go, squirming once more into its hidey-hole.
“Ok, ma’am. You’re safe now. You can get up.”
“Nina.”
“Right.” King grinned. In the military, everyone except enlisted personnel in uniform was either a “sir” or “ma’am,” until you were told otherwise. It was a habit that sometimes persisted, even though he was now in the super-secret, autonomous Chess Team, where military traditions did not apply.
“Uh, Jack?” Pierce said, from just behind him. “We have a problem.”
King turned and found his old friend staring back down the trail. He also saw the ‘problem’ of which Pierce had spoken. Two figures, wearing digital pattern camouflage, from the tops of their desert boots to the cloth covers on their Kevlar tactical helmets, stood a few yards away. Another similarly dressed figure was covering them from about a hundred yards up on the hillside. Each weapon was equipped with a PAC-4 infrared laser targeting emitter. The laser beams were invisible to the naked eye but bright as day in the ocular of a night vision device like the Viper or the much more advance PVS-7s that each of the newcomers wore. The lasers reached out from the carbines to show where the bullets would eventually go: right into King’s and Pierce’s hearts.
Soldiers. They’d been caught by an army patrol.
One of the pair from below took a step forward and gestured with his carbine. “Face down. Hands where I can see them.”
“What’s going on?” Nina asked, unable to make out anything more than silhouettes.
“Shut up,” snarled the soldier. “You’re all in a shitload of trouble. Do as I say, or you leave here in a body bag.”
Callsign: King - Book 2 - Underworld (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella) Page 5
