by Jon Land
His hands and feet had been sliced off. The blood that had dropped from the stumps had pooled in the brush and leaves, scarlet red against dark green.
Blaine and Johnny barely had time to glance at each other before the pair of Blackhawk helicopters swooped down over the river and hovered with machine guns clearly leveled at them.
“Raise your hands in the air and hold your positions!” a voice blared over a loudspeaker. “Repeat: Raise your hands in the air and stay where you are!”
McCracken found himself doing just as he was told, though his gaze was fixed on the course of the empty river. The descending Blackhawk pushed its stiff back wind into him, and he closed his eyes against the sudden onslaught of debris. He couldn’t see anything now, but there was nothing to see. Their boat was long gone by now, and the blackest part of this heart of darkness was surely on board.
Part Two
Omicron
Laurel Canyon:
Thursday, November 28, 1991; 8:00 P.M.
Chapter 10
“…PLEASE WAIT FOR the tone to speak.”
Patty Hunsecker left the same message yet again, this one perhaps a bit more harried and frantic, because she felt something was dreadfully wrong.
Of course, she had felt that way for some time now, but this was different. She found herself lingering by the upstairs study window that overlooked the front of the family’s Laurel Canyon home, seeing nothing but the dark.
Nothing.
That was what Captain Banyan of the Los Angeles Police Department had thought of the story she had brought to him, passing it off as sheer fabrication. The FBI and the Justice Department had agreed. Most recently her collected tear sheets, now a bit ragged around the edges, accompanied her to the office of her congressional representative. The man’s chief aide promised to get right back to her.
He hadn’t.
There was only one place left to turn, the place she probably should have gone to in the first place: Blaine McCracken. Why not? He owed her, didn’t he? Hadn’t he said as much in Guam eighteen months before? Maybe he had forgotten. In any case, he hadn’t returned the emergency calls she had been leaving on his private answering machine.
Call back, McCracken, goddamn you! Call me back! She looked away from the window toward the phone. It didn’t ring.
Her mind drifted to the time in her life when she had first met McCracken. She’d left Stanford after her junior year and used the trust fund left to her by her grandmother to purchase and outfit the Runaway, a research vessel crammed with scientific equipment. She was going to spend her life at sea, dedicating herself to studying the oceans and preserving their ecological balance. It was a good dream. But her parents had resisted even discussion of the issue, so she hadn’t included them in the decision. Strange people, her parents. They’d married young, and had had her barely a year later. Around the time she turned thirteen, they decided to have more children. Her first brother was born later that year, her second brother two and a half years after. The boys were not even of school age when she left the house for college; they were still strangers when she took off for the Pacific.
But now her parents were both dead, and the boys were fully in her charge. There was so much to consider, so much to do. She had inherited not only her brothers, but also her family’s great wealth.
Phillip Hunsecker had been one of the original makers of the Silicon Valley complex that later made him. His business interests were wholly diversified now and all successful. The same could be said for the others who had perished as he had. And now, at last, she had found a link between them. Tenuous, yes, perhaps even a bizarre coincidence. Nonetheless, it was there, and still, no one would listen. But Blaine McCracken would, once he called, if he called….
Patty could do nothing now but wait for that call. Standing by the window in the isolated two-and-a-half-story Laurel Canyon house, she could see the winding canyon road at the end of the driveway. Patty realized that since she’d been away the trees had grown so thick that a clear view of the street was now all but impossible. Only when an occasional stiff breeze parted them could she see the road beyond.
During one of these sharp breezes, she saw the car for the first time. Normally nobody parked on this street. They parked in driveways if they had any business being in the neighborhood at all. Her brothers were doing their homework. There were no guard dogs, no servants, just a security service that did regular drive-bys. Their car maybe? No. The security company drove metallic silver sedans with light assemblies on top. The one she had glimpsed outside was black. Patty stayed by the window waiting for the wind to part the trees. Each time it did, the black car was still there. She heard her thirteen-year-old brother, David, playing the latest from Guns and Roses; the eleven-year-old, Tyler, yelling to turn it louder so he could hear, too.
The black car was still outside. Probably nothing.
Fuck that.
If you didn’t trust your feelings, what good were they to you? A feeling had assured her there was far more to her father’s death, and now the same uneasiness in her stomach returned about the car. She’d call the police and make something up to draw them here. Maybe just call the security company direct. For what the family paid monthly, they’d better send a car around. Let their imitation cops play it for real. Patty moved to the Queen Anne desk in the library and picked up the phone.
No dial tone.
It was dead.
Enough of this shit. There was a panic button rigged into the security system, and she rushed to the keypad and hit it, ears braced for the high-pitched wailing.
Nothing.
She barely had time to consider fear, let alone feel it, when the lights died—and the big house was plunged into darkness.
“Must be the circuit breakers,” Patty’s brother said as he reached the halfway point of the circular stairway.
Patty bounded upward and stopped him there. Tyler was standing still in the dark at the top.
“Hold it,” she told David.
“Hold what?”
“It’s not the circuit breakers.”
“How do you know?”
“I do, that’s all.”
Just then Tyler screamed, and Patty raced up the rest of the stairs.
“Outside!” the boy wailed, gesturing fearfully toward the huge bay window in the front. “I saw someone moving outside!”
“Get back in your room!” Patty ordered.
“No!”
“David!” she shouted. “Take your brother and get into his room.”
The elder of her two brothers, incredibly, didn’t look scared. “Dad had a gun,” was all he said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where he kept it. Somewhere in his room. That’s where it’s gotta be.”
Patty weighed her options. The phone and alarm were useless to her. To escape on the ground would be impossible with her brothers in tow. There were two family cars parked in the garage, but the garage was detached, and it would take a dash from the house to get there. Even if they made it, they would have confined themselves to an unacceptably small space, and for what? If the parties beyond had the resources to knock out the best security system California money could buy, it was a cinch they’d like nothing better than to trap their prey in the garage.
“Want me to look?” David was asking.
“No,” Patty said. She wasn’t much good with guns anyway.
Blaine McCracken was, damn him. Why hadn’t he returned her calls? All that stuff about owing her after Guam, and this was what it came down to. He hadn’t listened; no one had listened.
As David began to protest her decision, Patty saw with horror that Tyler had edged closer to the huge glass window.
“No!”
Even as she screamed, Patty had hurled herself into motion. Two quick steps and then a lunge. She engulfed Tyler with her body and took him down just as segments of the window shattered into spiderweb patterns.
“Get down!�
� she yelled at David.
“Those were bullets!” he screeched back from the floor.
“Stay down!”
Dragging Tyler with her, she moved toward David, reaching him just as more glass popped inward with soft pffffffft sounds. The bastards outside had made it difficult for themselves by killing the lights. She continued pulling her brothers to the nearest doorway as glass continued to spray over them. At least they’ll know I’m telling the truth now, she reasoned. Banyan and the rest of them. She could see it on her gravestone now: HERE LIES PATTY. NOBODY GAVE A FUCK UNTIL SHE WAS DEAD.
But there were her brothers to think about here, as well. If she couldn’t be there for her mother or father, at least she could be here for them now.
As soon as she closed the door to her father’s upstairs study, she realized what a lousy place it was to make a stand. Feeling cornered, Patty tried to think of something, anything…
Her eyes fell on the brick chimney above the fireplace on the near wall. What she saw there determined her next series of moves.
“Dad’s gun,” she said to David.
“I can go find it.”
She grabbed his shoulder. “Can you fire it?”
“He took me to the range. Twice.”
“Find it and come back here to your brother. Anyone comes up the stairs besides me, shoot them.”
David swallowed air, “What about you?”
“They gotta get in to hurt us, pal,” she said as her eyes returned to the crossed Civil War swords hanging over the mantle. “I’m gonna be waiting when they do.”
The sword was heavier than it looked. Patty tested its tip with a finger; a tiny drop of blood proved its sharpness. Moving back into the corridor with it, she felt quite absurd. The closest she had ever come to wielding a sword had been an underwater knife, and that wasn’t very close at all. She crept down the circular stairway with her body tensed to spring, the sword gripped too tightly in her right hand.
She felt certain the house had not yet been penetrated. The outside doors showed wood veneer exteriors, but boasted a heavy steel core. The windows were triple-paned, easily penetrable by a bullet, but not at all easily by a man. There would be noise when penetration was attempted, and when she heard it, her best hope was that she and her sword would be close enough by to act.
At the foot of the stairs, she crawled toward the main entrance. Barely two minutes had passed since the gunmen had shot out the upstairs window. Time was on their side. Patty and her brothers weren’t going anywhere, and no help was in the offing. A waiting game, then.
For all of them.
She had almost reached the front door when the faint scent of cigar smoke reached her nostrils. She passed it off initially to a stale odor from her father’s most unfortunate habit. But the scent was nothing like his Havanas. Patty took a deep breath, grasped the sword in both hands, and raised it over her head. Then she leaped into the doorway of the library.
A man was sitting there in one of the burgundy leather chairs, a cigar stub smoldering in his mouth.
“There were three of them,” he said. “There aren’t anymore.”
Patty stood rigid, sword still held high. The man was wearing a black suit and his nose looked mashed.
“Name’s Sal Belamo,” the man said. “Blaine McCracken sent me.”
“You can put the sword down now,” Sal said.
“I think I’ll just keep it like this for a while.”
“You’ll end up with a pair of sore shoulders, lady.” The ashes from Belamo’s cigar stub fluttered to the hardwood floor. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to have an ashtray anywhere around? Not much holdin’ these damn Parodies together.”
“How do I know you’re not one of them?”
“I told you, lady. They’re gone, finito. I tried not to make a mess. McCracken wouldn’t’ve had to kill the fucks, but that’s why he’s McCracken.”
The sword came down a little. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Sal Belamo.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I’m good with locks.”
“And he sent you? Blaine sent you?”
“Well, not exactly. See, lady, one of your messages reached my desk, and when I couldn’t reach McCracken, I figured I’d better come out here and check up on ya. Been outside since sunset.”
Patty remembered the car parked precariously on the canyon road. At last the sword came down all the way.
“Saw the fucks lurking about just before your lights went bye-bye. Sorry ’bout your upstairs windows. Guess I don’t move as fast as I used to. I was a boxer, you know. Fought Carlos Monzon twice, and he busted my nose both times. Can’t tell shit from lilacs out of the right nostril, and the left’s not much better.”
“You came here just to guard me?”
“Your message sounded like you were pretty spooked.”
“But I was only trying to reach McCracken.”
“Yeah, well, his friends are my friends, and he doesn’t like to see his friends in trouble.”
“Which makes you his friend.”
“You ask me, everything’s relative. You get offed when I coulda done something about it and I got McCrackenballs to answer to.”
“Not a warm prospect.”
“Let me put it this way, lady: Given the choice of facing a pissed-off McCracken or climbing into a meat oven, I’d get the tenderizer ready every time.”
Chapter 11
THE BLACKHAWK HELICOPTER sped McCracken and Wareagle north out of the jungle and Brazil. They crossed the border into Venezuela and landed at a small airfield, where a twin-engine plane was waiting. This brought them to a larger military airport just south of Caracas, where they were locked in a steaming, windowless room for nearly eight hours before being escorted back to the tarmac. Resting there was an unmarked 707, which had obviously been dispatched to pick them up.
“Where we headed, soldier?” Blaine asked a lieutenant who seemed to be in charge.
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”
“Classified info, is it?”
The lieutenant shrugged. He had been supervising the eight-man team that had attached themselves to Blaine and Johnny from the time they’d been lifted out of the jungle. On the plane the soldiers kept their guns at the ready. The men were keeping their distance, too, which told Blaine they had been briefed on exactly whom they were dealing with.
He didn’t bother contemplating the details of what had brought the Blackhawks into the jungle. There could have been any number of causes, including the ravaging of the complex and the loss of contact with Ben Norseman’s team.
Blaine asked the lieutenant no further questions, and the flight passed in silence, which gave him the chance to get much-needed rest. When the beginning of the jet’s descent jolted him awake, he could see the Washington skyline ahead in the early morning light. It was Friday, according to Blaine’s watch, 6:30 A.M. It wasn’t much of a surprise that they were going to Washington. Word had obviously reached the capital that McCracken had interfered in the operations of a foreign government. A diplomatic nightmare, reparations certain to be demanded. The Brazilian authorities needed to be somehow appeased.
Through it all, when Blaine and Johnny’s eyes met the message was clear: The Wakinyan had fled the jungle ahead of them. They had somehow survived the fuel air explosive that had torn away a patch of the Amazon Basin. They had stolen Luis’s boat and escaped. Above everything else, whoever was waiting for Blaine in Washington had to be made to understand the ramifications of that. The Omicron Project had to be fully investigated. Somebody’s problem was running free now, and, if what Blaine had seen was any indication at all, the mayhem was just beginning.
The 707 came in for a landing at Dulles Airport and pulled up to the diplomatic terminal situated off by itself to the south of the main complex. Again Blaine and Johnny glanced at each other and nodded.
Blaine looked out his window and saw a black stretch limousine parked just
off the tarmac. He could see nothing through its blacked-out windows. The lieutenant came down the aisle and beckoned him to rise.
“Let’s go, Mr. McCracken.”
“I still hold my rank, soldier. It’s captain to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Blaine realized a congestion of soldiers had taken up positions enclosing Wareagle.
“He goes or neither of us does, soldier.”
“I have my orders, sir.”
“They come from that limo out there?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Wanna go out and check?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Look, son. The Indian and I have been nice to you fellas. Didn’t embarrass you all by escaping, and didn’t give you any trouble at all. Now there’s eight of you and two of us, and you got guns, sure. But either you let the Indian walk off with us, or he and I will end up walking out of here together and alone. Capisce, Lieutenant?”
The soldiers stood there like mirror images of each other, thoughts straying to the guns they would still have to raise or draw to make use of. McCracken looked at Wareagle and watched him tighten just a little.
The lieutenant relented with the slightest of smiles, his own way of saving face. “I can take the two of you as far as the limousine, Captain. From there on, you’ll have to deal with whoever’s inside.”
“For sure.”
One of the limo’s rear windows slid down as they approached.
“I should have known better than to expect a private conference,” came a woman’s voice from within.
“Maxie,” said Blaine, “what a pleasant surprise.”
“Save it, Blaine, dear, and just get in here with your Indian friend.” And then, to the soldiers, “They’re in my charge now. You’ve done well to all still be in one piece.”
Virginia Maxwell opened the door herself so Blaine and Johnny could step inside the limo. Maxwell was an elegantly dressed and coifed woman in her mid-forties, her glamour evidently better suited for a different post. Barely six years before she had taken over the directorship of the most secret of the country’s secret organizations. Several years prior to that, when the CIA had come under increasing scrutiny and the methods of the NSA under fire, a gap resulted in what the intelligence community needed to accomplish and what it could effectively get away with. The new organization created to handle the stickiest matters worked between traditional three-letter organizations in order to fill the gap. Hence its name: the Gap.
