Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  Inside the crumbling chapel, McCracken had yanked the top off the sandblaster’s main tank to find it fortuitously empty. Karen Raymond rushed to join him as he wheeled the tank across the floor, with inch-and-a-half-wide rubber hoses that ran both in from the compressor and out to a nozzlelike end dragging like snakes behind it. He stopped the tank at a huge pile of sawdust, refuse from the recently constructed supportive truss that now lay in broken pieces across the floor.

  “Help me,” he ordered as he began piling the sawdust inside the tank.

  “But what, what are …” She gave up on the question and started helping him pack the sawdust in.

  Seconds later, Johnny Wareagle, his face and arms a mass of cuts and lacerations dripping blood, rushed over to McCracken. Explosions rocked the chapel on both flanks. The Skulls firing down through the windows there were hurled from their posts as glass and rubble showered inward.

  “We’re out of time, Blainey.”

  Despite Blaine and Karen’s desperately hurried work, the sandblasting tank was only three-quarters full.

  “This will have to do,” he told her, already screwing the cap tightly back into place and making sure the fittings for both hose extensions were fastened in.

  The added weight of the sawdust made the tank much harder to wheel and impossible to carry. McCracken managed to drag it toward the punctured front facade, where sunlight streamed in through the many fresh cracks and chasms. He coiled the nozzled end of the hose about himself as Johnny switched on the generator that powered the compressor. A shrill whine echoed through the stark confines of the chapel.

  Blaine reached the facade and mounted the ladder, looking up to see Sal Belamo crouching over the wounded T.J. Fields upon what remained of the scaffolding. Sal had replaced him behind the M60, offering resistance to the troops poised to attack as soon as its ammo belt was expended. Johnny held the ladder in place, and Blaine climbed it quickly with one arm held to the hose that stretched out behind him.

  He reached the top just as the M60 machine gun clicked empty, its third belt exhausted. Johnny lunged onto the scaffolding ahead of him and opened fire with another M16 he had salvaged from the platform.

  Blaine looked at the wounded T.J. Fields. “Get him down from here, Sal.”

  Belamo slammed the M60 in frustration. “Hey, if the two of you are staying—”

  “The Indian’s not staying, either. Just me. The rest of you are getting out. All of you.”

  Belamo stole a brief glance down at Karen Raymond at the bottom of the ladder. “Jesus, boss, Jesus …”

  “Get going.” Blaine saw the pair of grenades clipped to Sal’s belt. “But leave me one of those.”

  Belamo handed over one of his grenades. They traded places gingerly upon the precarious scaffolding. McCracken eased the wounded T.J. Fields onto the top rung after Sal, so Belamo could help guide him back to the floor. Johnny Wareagle snapped a fresh clip into his rifle and gazed back at McCracken.

  “They’re massing, Blainey.”

  McCracken looked at the ladder. “Your turn, Indian.” And, when Wareagle’s response was to fire another burst downward, “The others won’t be able to make it without you.”

  Wareagle waited until the M16 clicked empty again before giving in with a nod. “I’ll see you on the outside.”

  “Give me thirty seconds, Indian,” Blaine said, tightening his grasp around the neck of the hose running from the sawdust-filled tank like a fireman about to battle a blaze. “Then you’ll have the distraction you’ll need to make it out of here.”

  McCracken turned his attention back to the front and opened the nozzle.

  Major Osborne Vandal had arranged his troops in three separate phalanxes, ready to charge the Alamo chapel’s front, as well as both sides. He knew the fire emanating from within had all but ceased and could only guess as to how many in McCracken’s party remained alive. A fourth, smaller phalanx had the Alamo complex’s rear effectively enclosed, waiting for whoever had survived within the chapel to launch an escape.

  In Vandal’s mind Vietnam was being fought all over again to a dramatically different result. No wasting away in a Cong prison camp for seven years. No return home to ostracism and disgrace. This was his second chance, and he wasn’t about to squander it. He could taste the victory he’d waited twenty long years to sample.

  Vandal lifted his walkie-talkie to his mouth to give his unit commanders the go signal. Before he could speak, a shower of what looked like thick yellow dust flooded out through the broken roof of the chapel in a constant stream. It spread into a nearly unbroken blanket over the plaza knoll his men were concentrated upon, hovering virtually motionless over and around them.

  The major stopped short of giving the order to attack; his spine snapped rigid and his entire body had gone cold.

  The hose was alive, a snake in McCracken’s hand. For cover, as well as optimum angle, he held it while standing three rungs down on the ladder, the sandblaster’s nozzle aimed over the facade’s central battlement on slightly more than a forty-five-degree angle. Since the thick, humid San Antonio air hung breezeless, the resulting cloud of finely milled sawdust barely moved at all. Each layer forced the one before it farther forward, until at the point the tank was finally empty, sawdust covered the entire area of the plaza across South Alamo Road to the city’s Bureau of Tourism.

  McCracken abandoned the hose and clambered rapidly down the ladder. Halfway to the bottom, he heard the clacking of gunshots originating from where Johnny was leading the escape of Karen and the others, a number of whom were wounded and had to be dragged or carried. Besides T.J., six of the Skulls had managed to survive, but only half of those were still fit to fight. Immediately upon reaching the floor, Blaine yanked the pin from the grenade supplied by Sal Belamo and hurled it skyward through the largest chasm in the roof.

  “Seven, six, five,” he counted out loud as he sprinted toward the rear of the building, keeping his mouth open to prevent damage to his eardrums from what was coming. “Four, three, two …”

  The deafening explosion literally stole his breath as the blast ignited the blanket of sawdust hovering over the front of the Alamo chapel. The results amounted to a localized fuel-air explosive blowing downward on an unfathomable scale of pressure. Frye’s troops beneath it in the plaza were either crushed or shredded, virtually vaporized by the tremendous heat and percussion. Those at the fringes were horribly burned and mangled. Death for them, though, came as a result of the rupturing of their internal organs before the flames had a chance to catch them.

  The incredible percussion of the blast shattered every window in downtown San Antonio for a three-block radius, raining glass down in all directions. Huge shards of it floated atop the San Antonio River with the currents along Riverwalk. Yet the Grand Hyatt across the plaza, built atrium-style with no windows across its front, survived almost intact.

  The impact of the blast hurled Blaine through the air as he neared the exit in the left-side alcove. Airborne, he could feel the structure shaking around him and landed with enough control to cover his head with his hands.

  The front half of the chapel collapsed like a neatly stacked pile of blocks. It caved in on itself, leaving nothing but rubble where the shrine had been just seconds before. The long barrack, meanwhile, caught more of the brunt of the blast and left barely any rubble where it had stood, the explosion either melting the stone or pulverizing it beyond recognition.

  McCracken felt the shower of stone enclose him with painful thuds and thumps, but he clung to the hope that this part of the chapel would be spared. When the rumbling stopped, he realized he could still breathe. His jaws ached and a hollow throbbing plagued both his ears, but at least he could hear. Moving his frame shifted the weight that had piled atop him, and Blaine began to push, shove, and drive his way out. He climbed back to his feet atop a yard-high pile of rocks and rubble within the back shell of the chapel. Despite many cracks and fissures, this portion of the building had somehow rema
ined standing.

  The front two thirds of the structure, though, was gone entirely. Nothing remained of the memorial to another great battle 150 years earlier but a huge, irregular pile of beige, cream, and gray rocks. A thick dust cloud had carried over the front plaza knoll, preventing McCracken from seeing the vast carnage beyond.

  He climbed down from the pile of rubble from which he had extracted himself and limped toward the exit whose door no longer existed. Reaching it, Blaine turned back for one last rueful glance at the ruined chapel.

  “Remember the Alamo,” he heard himself say.

  EPILOGUE

  “What about Frye?” Karen Raymond asked McCracken during their flight to California from San Antonio.

  “Maybe he was killed with the others at the Alamo,” Blaine responded, aware that the tremendous force of the explosion had made it impossible to identify the remains of all the dead.

  “You don’t believe that. I know you don’t, and neither do I. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  Blaine took a long look at her. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Go after him. Stop him.”

  “We already did that, Doctor.”

  They had, indeed. In the twenty-four hours since the Alamo had fallen for the second time, albeit with dramatically different results, troops from the 7th Light Infantry Division had seized control of the Kingdom of the Seven. Although Frye and the others had drained the computers and filing cabinets of all pertinent information, enough remained to prove the Seven’s existence and identify its primary members. Beyond that, if the Reverend had survived the Alamo, none of the resources of the kingdom would be available for him to salvage in attempting to continue on the same path.

  As for the others, Tommy Lee Curtisan and Jessie Will had already turned themselves in. Louis W. Kellog had disappeared, while Arthur Burgeuron was last seen boarding a flight to South America. General Gaines, who had been party to Frye’s siege at the Alamo, had been arrested and would face a military court-martial.

  Ever since the aftermath of that blast, when McCracken was reunited with the group ushered from the chapel by Johnny Wareagle, Karen Raymond had been disturbed by his apparent disinterest in Frye’s fate. After assiduously briefing the proper authorities on everything that had transpired, he seemed to give no further thought to the Reverend’s whereabouts. And yet Blaine had insisted on accompanying Karen back to California and her sons personally.

  “If you’re not at all worried about Frye,” Karen persisted, “why did you insist on coming out here with me?”

  “Because if the Reverend is still around, I know how he’ll think, what he might do.”

  “My kids?” She shuddered.

  “Only if you were with them at the time. That’s the way men like Frye work.”

  “And you still aren’t going to go after him.”

  “If I go after him, I might as well go after the other ten thousand or so who’ve got the same mad dreams he does.”

  “Frye’s different.”

  “Not really. The contents of that test tube you sent on to the National Institute of Health are what made him different.”

  “He’ll find something else, maybe the contents of another test tube.”

  “He’ll try, Kar, they’ll all try. Each and every one of these maniacs is scary in his own right, but they only become dangerous when they latch on to something that makes their vision achievable. The distinctions are based in what they’re holding at the present time. You saw that firsthand.”

  Karen grasped his point. “And that’s where the true fear comes in.”

  “More than ever now, because technology is providing more and more means for them to latch on to and carry out their schemes. Every wondrous discovery scientists like you come up with has a dark side that can be twisted and subverted. You saw that firsthand, too.”

  “You’re blaming me for this?”

  “Of course not. Men and women like you are driven by an insatiable urge to find ways of helping a world that often seems unable to help itself. But along the way you don’t always close all the doors you open, and there are men like Frye who are waiting to use what you leave behind to their own advantage.”

  “There have always been men like Frye.”

  “But never this many doors, Karen, not even close.”

  McCracken followed T.J. Fields’s directions down the long, winding desert road to where Karen’s sons had been hidden under guard. He breathed as big a sigh of relief as she did when they arrived at the small cabin to find the armed Skull members in place and waiting.

  “I’m having more traditional protection for you set up now,” Blaine assured. “It will be in place in another twenty-four hours.”

  Karen looked at him in a way she hadn’t before. “Be nicer if you could handle it yourself.”

  “I’m not much good in the kitchen and I travel a lot.”

  “Lots of doors to cover; I know.” She started to reach for his hand, then stopped. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a single special one to come back to.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “The thing is—God, I’m screwing this up.” She took a deep breath and steeled herself. “The thing is, I’m afraid when I step out of this car, you’re going to drive out of my life. Do I have to stay in here with you with the doors locked until you promise not to?”

  Blaine smiled and grasped her hand. “Wait and see how you’re going to feel more than a day after the finish, after things have settled down. Right now we’re still too close to all we’ve just gone through, and that was quite a bit, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I don’t want to forget.” Karen squeezed his hand back tighter. “I know how I feel now and I know how I’ll feel then. I’m asking for a chance, Blaine McCracken, not a phone number.” She didn’t want to let go. “At least meet my boys. That much, please.”

  After a pause, he nodded. Karen stepped out of the car and rushed up the slight hill toward the cabin. Blaine watched the door open. Taylor and Brandon charged out of it into their mother’s arms, Taylor forgetting he was nearly twelve, and Brandon feeling ten would never end. The hug lasted forever, which wasn’t long enough. Then Karen eased them away and started to turn back to the car.

  “There’s someone I want you to—”

  She stopped. The car wasn’t there.

  Blaine McCracken was gone.

  “I couldn’t stay,” McCracken explained to Johnny Wareagle in the Maine woods a week later.

  “And that bothers you, Blainey.”

  “What bothers me is that I wanted to, and I still couldn’t.” Blaine paused. “It’s what Karen said about having something to come back to, isn’t it, Indian?”

  Wareagle nodded with his eyes and poured McCracken a second cup of his homemade tea. “If there is something to come back to, Blainey, there is also something to leave. The way we have chosen is the way of the warrior, and the way of the warrior is constant. No demarcations. No beginning, no end. Opening the door you speak of implies the acceptance of both.”

  Blaine sipped the steaming brew. “I could have at least met her kids.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t want to make leaving more difficult.”

  “Understand this, Blainey: Passing through a door does not mean having to always remain on the other side.”

  “No, Indian. I couldn’t walk in and then walk away. It’s either all the way through or not at all.”

  “Then if you pass through that door someday, it will be because the time has come. And when it does you will know it. A different way, but ultimately yours just the same.”

  McCracken frowned. “Tough to see myself changing that much.”

  “The alternative is trying to have things both ways.”

  “And we both know that’s impossible, of course.”

  Johnny shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Indian. I just think sometimes that I’m missing something.”
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br />   “You can turn away from what you do, Blainey, but not from your passion for it. Calls would come. You would answer.”

  “Like the old firehouse dog that jumps up at the sound of a bell …”

  “Quite, Blainey.”

  McCracken reached up and tugged an imaginary string. “Ding-a-ling, Indian.”

  The weeks after the fall of his kingdom stretched into months, and Harlan Frye waited for a sign of how he should proceed. It came in the middle of the night, came in the sultry warmth cheap fans in a cheap room could not ease. He woke up sweating between the sheets, bounced out of bed and fell to his knees.

  “Yes, Lord! Yes!”

  Harlan Frye cut his hair and dyed it white. He added contact lenses to change the color of his eyes and learned how to use makeup to lighten his skin to a pale, ghostlike pallor. He rented an abandoned church with some of his remaining funds; it had chairs and a pulpit, and that was all he required. The crowds started out small but grew quickly. Volunteers began coming in the afternoon to get the old church in order, patching leaks, repairing the broken chairs, so when the crowds built to standing-room level, all available space could be utilized. These volunteers evolved into Frye’s handlers and had even begun to speak of larger battles waiting to be fought.

  God had told him to go back to the beginning, to start again, to build from nothing. A new name. A new place. So he had.

  And it was happening.

  He had eternity, he had time immemorial to finish his work for the Lord. The Kingdom of the Seven was going to rise again. That inevitability fueled him, charged him. Soon, so very soon, Harlan Frye would have it all back.