The Tenth Circle

by Jon Land

  “Maybe not long enough.”

  Wareagle handed him the lighter from Jacob’s pouch.

  “Not much changes, does it?”

  “Let’s find out, Blainey.”

  And with that, McCracken flicked the lighter to life and touched the flame to one lace tip and then the other. The sizzling hisses started up immediately and the next moment found McCracken and Wareagle rushing through the former encampment, returning fire in token fashion as they ran, counting down the seconds the whole time.

  They caught only glimpses of the men crashing into the clearing before darting into the woods on the opposite side, hitting the ground hard at a safe distance away from what they hoped was coming. Torrents of gunfire traced over their heads at the fifteen-second mark.

  The grenades ignited a breath apart from each other at sixteen. Then the screams started, just as described in Governor John White’s journal, only much, much louder given how many more men had been trapped in the clearing when the same noxious cloud that had killed the Roanoke colonists claimed its next victims.

  The screams became rasps, then horrible gasping sounds as the gunmen heaved for air before crumpling over the makeshift graves of the original colonists, leaving an eerie quiet in the cold air rich with snowflakes now. The stench of burned gunpowder dominated the scene, drowning all other smells out, as smoke wafted over the victims, thinning to the point it all but disappeared.

  McCracken and Wareagle lurched back to their feet, both realizing they’d involuntarily held their breath until that moment. They surged into motion, toward the south, ready to confront whoever lay in wait to spring the trap. Only that part of the assault team was gone, having fled at the sound of the terrible screams that had come at the hands of exposure to the White Death. Blaine and Johnny found Jacob and Captain Seven still hidden under the makeshift cover of leaves and brush.

  McCracken jerked the boy to his feet, startling him.

  “I told you they’d work,” Jacob said proudly.

  “Finish what you were saying before, about what happened when somebody came back for the White Death.”

  Jacob jerked free of his grasp. “It wasn’t them,” the boy said, looking back toward the camp.

  “Who, then?” McCracken demanded. “And when?”

  Jacob started to back off, brushing himself off as he turned for the path. “You want the answers, you’ll have to come with me. The rest of the story is best told by somebody who was there when it happened.”

  CHAPTER 43

  West Virginia

  “You asked to see the means by which we will open the tenth circle of Hell, Reverend,” Colonel Alvin Turwell told Jeremiah Rule. “And you are about to bear witness personally.”

  The upward bank of the ground was rich with tangled roots and brush, looking untouched by human step. Around them the foliage had browned for winter but still looked somehow rustic and lush. Other than a rock face shiny with morning dew, there seemed to be nothing ahead on the mountain path that sliced through the Allegheny range of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Just a few miles away stood “the Bunker,” the once-secret government location constructed to house the country’s leaders in the event of a devastating attack on the country. The infamous Greenbrier mountain facility was open to the public for tours, a Cold War relic now a living testament to history.

  Other lesser-known bunkers had been erected amid the mountains as well, their intended use to house supplies and ordnance to make sure America maintained the capacity to both fight back against whomever had attacked the country and to rebuild. Those bunkers, too, had been emptied, abandoned, and forgotten except by someone like Turwell, who’d never lost sight of their original purpose.

  He led Rule off to the right, toward a steep rock face that extended upward like a natural obelisk. “This bunker contains the means to complete our work, Reverend. To wake this country up once and for all. The final attack.”

  “It is God’s work, Colonel,” said Rule, huffing slightly for breath from the exertion of the climb. “We are merely the instruments of His will.”

  They’d taken a private jet from Florida to the nearest private airport where a car waited, already warming, on the tarmac. And now, an hour’s drive later, Turwell felt about the sheer face for a notch, pulling downward when his fingers found it to reveal a numerical keypad. He pressed out a series of four numbers and a hidden door, less shiny than the rest of the mountain face around it, slid open.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  It was like a mammoth self-storage facility, football-field lengths separating the doors beyond which enough weapons to fight a war and defend a nation had once rested. The two men’s steps echoed off the floor tile that had remained clean and antiseptic in spite of the facility’s mothballed state.

  Turwell stopped at a set of doors halfway down, an alphabetical keypad on the wall adjacent to it this time. Again he keyed in the proper code and again a heavy door formed of solid steel slid open.

  “Behold,” he said dramatically, stepping aside so Jeremiah Rule could see beyond him. “ ‘The night is nearly over,’ ” Turwell recited from Romans, “ ‘the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.’ ”

  “Praise the Lord,” Rule said, voice cracking with excitement at the sight of what was stacked high before him for as far as his eyes could see into the darkness beyond.

  “Just four more days, Reverend, four more days before the government falls and the people of this nation wake up to a whole new world.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Roanoke Island

  Jacob’s entire family lived in a three-story tenement house. His grandfather had died in Vietnam, but his great-grandfather was still alive, still relatively spry and in possession of all his faculties at the age of somewhere between ninety-eight and a hundred and two, as Jacob put it. The old man had fought in World War II and displayed his medals proudly in his first-floor bedroom. He walked with a cane he pretended not to need, his expression perking up and growing almost whimsical when told what had befallen the group earlier in the day, especially the part about how they’d managed to survive.

  “The White Death,” he muttered between suddenly trembling lips. “At least it finally did some good.” He stopped and settled himself as best he could with a deep breath. “Call me Red Lake. The red stands for blood,” he said, focusing on Blaine and Johnny. “See, I been where you’ve been.”

  “Is it that easy to spot?” McCracken asked him.

  “Sometimes I need the voices in my head to tell me. Not today. Today my eyes told me what I needed to know. You saved my great-grandson’s life.”

  “Actually, it was closer to the other way around.”

  Now Red Lake’s gaze locked on Wareagle alone. “You hold the wisdom of many years and many battles.”

  “Different enemies,” Johnny told him, “yet always the same.”

  “The only thing that changes with evil is what it calls itself from one age to the next.”

  “Sometimes one day to the next.”

  Unlike much, if not most of Roanoke Island, the village of Wanchese was no tourist trap. It was the same fishing village it had always been, long before the Washington Baum Bridge linked the Outer Banks to the island. Wanchese occupied the southern end of Roanoke where the Algonquin Indians were probably the first to discover the bountiful supplies of shellfish there. For centuries, a huge mound of empty shells rose near a place that had won the name “Thicket Lump” as a result. Although that mound was long gone, Wanchese remained an insular fishing village populated almost exclusively by hardscrabble locals with faces turned wrinkled and leathery by the sun and hands scraped and scarred by handling fishing nets with the texture of razor wire.

  The two-lane roads that wound through Wanchese were dotted with what looked like an uneasy mix of mobile homes, farmhouses, c
ottages more resembling shacks, and newer modern homes built to take advantage of the proximity to the water. Some of the older homes had rowboats decorating the front yard or larger boats stored for the season beneath covers in the driveway. There were no chain stores, no high-end restaurants, no motels other than a single bed and breakfast. Besides the docks that dominated the town’s shoreline, the biggest sign of modernity was the Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park devoted to storing, building, or repairing boats and to processing the thousands of tons of seafood caught annually in the nearby waters. Many of Jacob’s relatives, including Red Lake, had worked there at one time or another, but the boy professed to have no interest in the business whatsoever.

  “We’d like to hear about the day the men came back for the White Death,” McCracken said to the old chief.

  “I will tell you everything I know in the hope it serves your cause,” Red Lake continued. “I only ask one favor in return: You must help Jacob.”

  “Grandpa!” the boy started to protest.

  “You notice his bruises?”

  “We did,” McCracken acknowledged. “He wouldn’t tell us where they came from.”

  “From the bar where he worked until recently. They don’t like Indians, so they fired him. I’d like him to get his job back. I’d like you to get it back for him.”

  “Our pleasure,” promised Wareagle, who filled out the entire doorway.

  Red Lake moved toward him, his cane tapping the floor in rhythm with his step. “Good. Let’s go. I haven’t been out of the house for a while. I’ll tell you the tale when we get there.”

  “Just one question, Chief,” McCracken said, as Red Lake’s cane continued tapping away. “Why bother getting the boy his job back at a place like that?”

  “So he can quit,” the old man said, winking.

  CHAPTER 45

  Roanoke Island

  “What is troubling you?” Red Lake asked McCracken while they covered the short distance from the family home to the Ebb Tide bar.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “No, that’s why I asked.”

  Wareagle smirked in the passenger seat next to McCracken, while Captain Seven rolled a joint in the back.

  “Whoever’s behind all this hurt somebody important to me,” Blaine told the old chief.

  “Somebody close?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  “Close by association.”

  “You hedge your terms,” Red Lake told him.

  Captain Seven licked the rolling paper and tightened it over the finely milled weed. “Man’s got a point, MacNuts.”

  “MacNuts?” from Red Lake.

  “Short for McCrackenballs, what people call me from time to time.”

  “How did you come by it?”

  “I was working in England when a plane got taken over by terrorists at Heathrow Airport. We, the British Special Air Service and I, wanted to stage a rescue, but bureaucracy took hold and one hundred fifty people ended up dying for no reason at all.”

  “Bet you were pissed,” said Jacob.

  “I went to Parliament Square and machine-gunned the statue of Winston Churchill there. His private parts specifically. Earned me the name McCrackenballs.”

  True to form, the Ebb Tide didn’t do much to advertise its presence, save for a simple sign carved out of what looked like driftwood, backlit by a small light array that had lost several of its bulbs. The sign flapped in the stiff breeze coming off the water, stiffer now that the sun had gone down, while snow continued to fall in a light curtain of white.

  McCracken pulled into a space directly across the street from the Ebb Tide, the vehicle silent as Johnny Wareagle stepped out into the night and beckoned Jacob to follow. The two of them walked across the street, lost to the shadows briefly before they disappeared inside.

  “Tell me about what happened in those woods all those years ago, Chief,” McCracken said to Red Lake.

  Roanoke Island, 1872

  “My tribe had clung to a small stretch of land along the same road that led to the remnants of the original fortified settlement. One morning the tribe was awoken just past dawn by a heavy rumbling. Turned out the source of that rumbling was a large British landing party rolling across the land in a convoy of wagons stocked with wooden kegs of the kind normally associated with storing spirits. My own grandfather, hardly more than a boy himself at the time, mixed easily with the sailors and American laborers who’d met the ship at the island’s docks. They were friendly to him, but proved less than willing to share the nature of their task, mostly because they weren’t aware of all the details themselves. Something about a pumping operation to pull something out of a long-dormant well with some huge machine, the disassembled parts carried by a trio of wagons nearest the front.

  “Upon reaching the former colony, those parts were assembled into what my grandfather recognized as an innovative steam engine, far advanced from the Corliss variety, the four-valve counterflow version more common for the time. This engine, a boisterous engineer explained to my grandfather, was of the compound variety. Very advanced and known for exhausting steam in successively larger cylinders to accommodate the higher volumes at reduced pressures, providing far greater efficiency with what he called ‘expansion technology.’ My grandfather only pretended to understand.”

  Captain Seven raised a lighter toward the finished joint held between his lips. But McCracken reached into the backseat and snatched it from his mouth, crushed the joint in his hand, and dumped the remains into the captain’s palm.

  “Hey!” he protested.

  “Sue me,” said Blaine.

  Through the open driver’s window, meanwhile, they all heard a muffled thud coming from inside the Ebb Tide. The falling temperatures accompanying the cold front had fogged up with the bar’s front windows with condensation, making it difficult to see anything inside, especially from across the street.

  More thuds, like heavy bumps, reached them though the open window and the three of them looked toward the frosty windows that gave up only brief glimpses of splotchy, sudden movements inside the bar. McCracken thought he heard something like glass breaking.

  “Sorry for the interruption, Chief,” he told Red Lake. “What happened next?”

  Roanoke Island, 1872

  “My grandfather watched the biggest and thickest hose he had ever seen being strung from the steam engine pump down a fresh hole dug along the sunken perimeter of the well the colony had dug to replace the one that had gone dry. It was a long process that relied on the barrels of water they’d brought with them flowing into the boiler portion of the engine and heated to produce the steam that drove the massive pistons of the pumping apparatus in a churning fashion to pull the water from under the ground.

  “The hose began to expand, the rotating action of the steam engine pumping the contents from deep within the colony’s well into the first of the barrels. The process went on through the entire day and much of the night until the well ran dry, the hundreds and hundreds of barrels filled and loaded back onto the wagons that now sagged considerably under the added weight.”

  Red Lake stopped when more motion flashed through the clouded windows, visible in variances of the light inside, accompanied by heavier thuds and additional breaking glass. The remnants of a chair crashed through one of the Ebb Tide’s frosted glass windows. Some fixtures must have broken, because the lighting suddenly took on a strobe effect, capturing shapes and shadows in splotchy, uneven motion concentrated in the same area as before.

  The loud bang of a single gunshot rang out accompanied by a flash that seemed to linger briefly like an echo. Then the frame of a writhing man followed the path of the chair out the window, taking more of the glass with him.

  “You were saying, Chief,” McCracken prodded.

  Roanoke Island, 1872

&
nbsp; “The sun had risen the following day before the process was finally complete, slowed and waylaid further by equipment breakdown in the form of seized engine parts and broken wagon wheels among others. The workers were uniformly filthy and cussing up a storm by the time it was done with the last of the barrels loaded, the big steam engine disassembled for transport north in the wagons, all the way to the Port of New York.”

  “ ‘They’ll be ready for us in port,’ ” my grandfather overheard one of the men say in a thick Cockney accent. “ ‘Extra barrels won’t make a tuppence worth of difference to a brigantine the size of the Mary Celeste.’ ”

  Movement flashed inside the Ebb Tide. Large shapes hurtling this way and that, as if launched into the air, each followed by the thwack or crash of impact with something. Suddenly, the lone entry door opened and Johnny Wareagle emerged, looking as calm and unruffled as he did when he entered. Jacob walked alongside him, staring up in dazed wonder and awe. McCracken watched for someone bursting out after them with his pistol held at the ready, but no one emerged.

  “Did you say the Mary Celeste?” he asked Red Lake.

  “I see the ship means something to you.”

  “It’s only one of the great maritime mysteries of all time. The Mary Celeste was found abandoned at sea in the Bay of Gibraltar. No trace of her captain, crew, or passengers; they were never heard from again. She was supposed to be carrying alcohol.”

  “Apparently not,” said Captain Seven, working to roll a fresh joint using the crushed refuse of the first.

  Wareagle reached the SUV and opened the door for Jacob to climb in ahead of him into the silence.

  “The boy’s been rehired,” was all he said.

  McCracken’s phone rang.

  “Hello, Hank,” he greeted Hank Folsom.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Because no one else has the number you just dialed.”

  “How soon can you get to Washington?”

  “Depends on the reason, Hank.”