“Okay.” Sarah stopped and looked at him with her eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, just who packed my stuff?”
Jack winked and led her out of the room.
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
As Niles and Ryan sat in the green sedan on their ride back to the surface, the young lieutenant could see the director was deep in thought. The camouflaged dirt floor above them parted to allow the massive lift to complete its journey to the surface, where they were met by a lance corporal. He waved and then disappeared into a small maintenance cubicle that doubled as the security office. Ryan started the car as the large double doors parted and bright afternoon sunshine once again filled the interior. He backed the car out and onto the gravel drive at the back of the mansion. With a last wave at the marine guard, he put the car into drive and headed toward the front of the grounds. As he passed two men in light Windbreakers, Ryan had the queer feeling they were being watched. He lifted his hand and adjusted the rearview mirror in time to see the two men turn and raise their own hands, only theirs weren’t full of car mirror. Ryan immediately saw the submachine guns. He pushed Director Compton down hard to the left by grabbing his suit coat, and leaned down across him. Just as they both hit the seat, bullets smashed through the rear window and into the interior of the vehicle. Ryan felt flying glass as he blindly slammed his foot down on the accelerator and shot off the road into the cemetery proper. Niles had the good sense to keep down.
“How many?” he asked without attempting to rise.
“Three,” Ryan said loudly over the noise of more rounds striking the metal skin of the car. As he lifted his head to see where to steer toward, he saw a dark green Dodge pickup truck with two men in the front and one standing in the back. It slid sideways in an attempt to head them off. Ryan threw the wheel to the left and turned the car around, narrowly avoiding a large tree. He tried to head back the way they had come. He was starting to wonder where the Parks Service men were when he saw one of them sprawled on the grass not ten feet from his spinning front wheels. “Five!” he called, correcting his earlier statement to Niles.
More bullets pinged and thumped into the moving car, and the passenger-side window blew inward as a larger calibered weapon opened up from the back of the pursuing truck.
“Goddammit, this ain’t going to last long if we don’t get some help!” Ryan shouted as he slid down again in his seat. As he did so, he crushed the accelerator down to the floor, again narrowly missing some of the outer white crosses that marked the resting place of fallen soldiers and statesmen. Reaching under the seat, he brought up the only weapon they had, an old Colt .45 he had brought along simply because Jack’s regulation was that no security man left on a field assignment unarmed. So he chose a weapon he had first qualified with in the navy, the venerable Colt.
“Hang on, sir!” he cried as he swung the car into a complete 180-degree turn. He used his right hand to steer and with the left he pointed the .45 automatic out of the window and started pulling the trigger as fast as he could at the oncoming truck. Several of the large rounds hit the truck’s windshield and one or two found their mark, striking the man standing in the pickup’s bed. The bullets struck their attacker so hard he went flying out of the back; Ryan was amazed to see him bouncing like a rubber ball until his body struck one of the white crosses and came to an abrupt stop with blood misting the air around the memorial, staining the white marker crimson.
“Hah! Got one,” Ryan cheered in momentary triumph.
Niles sat up to see. “Look out!” he shouted as he saw the first two men. They were both standing in the road, shocked that the car was speeding right for them once again.
Ryan pulled the wheel to the right just in time as the two men again opened fire. Several bullets hit the windshield and spider-webbed the safety glass. One of the bullets grazed by his head, only inches from his skull.
Niles reached out and pulled the gun out of Ryan’s hand, swinging the weapon out of his broken passenger window. He was cursing up a storm, already angered by the futility of his computer search and, on top of that, at the indignity of being shot at in this hallowed place.
“Son of a bitch!” he screamed as he fired off the last four rounds in the Colt’s clip.
Ryan quickly glanced out the side window and was amazed to see one man grab his face and careen into the other, sending his fire off target. Then an amazing thing happened. Ryan didn’t see the tree and they slammed into it. It was a rear-right-side quarter-panel graze, but enough to stop the car. At the same time, the dark green pickup truck found the road and came screeching toward them. Ryan figured in a split second that was it, as he turned the ignition and there was nothing but the clicking of the solenoid. The car was as dead as they soon would be. As he thought this, the truck suddenly swerved, as loud popping noises sounded from a distance away. The truck’s front window blew inward. The man in the passenger seat grabbed his chest just as his face disintegrated in a hail of large-calibered bullets. The driver of the truck slammed on his brakes and turned the big vehicle around, stopping only to retrieve the one man who was standing and carrying his partner. The driver waited only long enough for the man to throw his buddy into the back and climb in, and then sped away toward the front gate.
Ryan closed his eyes as the silence grew around him. He heard the ticking of the cooling engine and the heavy breathing of Niles, but that was all. He looked around and took stock of the damage. He shook the director until Niles looked at him with a blank stare.
“You okay, sir?” Ryan asked, himself a bowl of jelly.
“How does Jack do it? I mean, that’s the first time I have ever been shot at,” Niles said as he slowly laid the gun on the glass-covered seat.
“I’m sure he hates it as much as us, sir.”
As they watched, several Arlington guards and the Group’s undercover marines made their way to the car. Ryan opened the car door; it creaked loudly and fell to the grass. In the next second, the black hand of the lance corporal who had moments earlier seen them off was helping him out of the car, and then the director.
“Ballsy bastards, weren’t they?” he said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “They must have wanted us stopped from leaving here pretty bad.”
The lance corporal checked Niles for injuries. “A few more minutes, you might have taken up permanent residence here.”
Niles remained blank faced. How in the hell could someone send a team into a covert site, and how in the hell did they know he was there?
“We’ve got to get back, Corporal. Get us some transport, please,” Niles ordered, “before the Parks Service starts asking questions about us.”
“Yes, sir,” the corporal said as he sprinted off back toward the maintenance shed.
“Mr. Ryan, someone knows what’s up here in Washington.”
“Yeah, and I would sure like to know who it is. I could have that F-16 trainer armed with no trouble …”
“I admire your sentiments, but we have to get back to the Group, ASAP!”
Three hours later, Ryan and Niles were in the F-16 somewhere over Nebraska when they received a scrambled transmission from the Group’s information center. The director was surprised to hear Jack’s voice on the other end of the call.
“Major, I thought you were heading out to Montana.”
“Copy that, Doctor. We delayed in the hope of tracking down the identity of the man Lieutenant Ryan shot in Arlington.”
“And?” Niles asked from twenty-eight thousand feet.
“Niles, the body was gone by the time our security arrived up top. Someone beat us to it.”
“Who in the hell are we butting heads with? Major, we’ll talk again when we arrive; hang tight until I arrive, then we’ll figure out how to proceed.”
“Roger. By the way, Mr. Ryan tells me you may have saved both of you with some good shooting.”
“I was scared to death!” Niles said quietly into the face mask.
“All battles
are fought by scared men who would much rather be somewhere else, Mr. Director. And pass along to Ryan, well done.”
Ryan smiled under his mask. Praise from Caesar.
EVENT GROUP COMPLEX NELLIS AFB, NEVADA FOUR HOURS LATER
Niles had showered and was sitting in the conference room with Alice, Jack, Pete Golding, and Virginia Pollock; Lieutenant Commander Everett was on the speakerphone from New Orleans. The director filled them in on the details of his trip and the murderous attempt on his life in the cemetery. After they were all updated, there was a knock on the door. An army signals officer entered and gave Niles a sheet of paper. Niles read it and then reached for the remote. He punched a button and a ten-by-six-foot liquid crystal screen slid down from the ceiling at the head of the conference table. He then pushed another button and the numbers 5156 appeared on the screen. Then suddenly a face appeared, blurred and then refocused and stabilized. A woman smiled into the camera and she stepped aside and allowed an elderly man to step into view.
“Director Compton?” the man asked. “I can’t see you; we have all of our monitors in use at this time. There is quite a bit of excitement going on here at the moment,” the gray-haired man said as he turned and hushed everyone behind him.
“I can hear and see you, Nathan,” Niles assured the excited professor as he looked around the table and spoke in hushed tones to the others. “Dr. Allan Nathan, expert on American history, has combined his department with Anthropological Studies to see what can be found out about the Little Bighorn archaeological projects.”
“Good, good. We have just received the pictures from the National Parks Service on items they recovered on their most recent dig.” Nathan disappeared from the screen for a moment, but his voice could still be heard. “I am forwarding the pictures to you now.”
As they watched, over 150 small images of items filled the entire liquid crystal screen. Some were easily recognizable, such as arrowheads, a rusted navy Colt pistol with the wooden handgrips missing, a boot that had deteriorated to the point that it had no leather upper any longer. Buttons with “U.S.” embossed on them, belt buckles with the same, and, most disturbing of all, bones. Finger bones, a pelvic bone, and what was easily recognized as a large femur.
The room was quiet as they looked at the images.
“The Parks Service had a real good dig this time out, as heavy rains removed even more topsoil than the fires had a few years back. Now what’s so exciting here, Mr. Director, is the fact that for the first time they concentrated heavily on area 2139.” As the professor spoke, the images of the artifacts disappeared from the screen and a Parks Service rendering of the battlefield took their place. On the illustrator, at a spot just north of Last Stand Hill, where Custer and his companies had met their grisly fate, was a yellow circle. Inside the circle was a legend with the letters C, I, and L. “This is where Captain Myles Keogh made his stand with the remnants of the three troops, or companies. We have found quite a few artifacts besides the brass and copper shell casings, which indicated, by the way, that the three companies had put up one hell of a defense; the Parks Service discovered thirty-seven military-issued and nonmilitary items in this group that they believed had been carried to the Little Bighorn by Seventh Cavalry troopers.”
Niles stood and walked closer to the screen. Jack Collins remained seated, and was writing down the details of what the history department was saying. He had never studied the battle in 1876 the way he should have, only tactically at West Point, never thinking of, or trying to imagine, what it must have been like to have fought and died there.
“According to eyewitnesses, mainly a few Northern Cheyenne and Sioux, Keogh and his men fought bravely, with the captain standing firmly in the center of his dismounted troopers. Some say the image of him like that was the mistaken reason why Custer has always been depicted that way, but the Native Americans swear it was Keogh and not Yellow Hair that was directing the hardest fight.”
“Professor, please, we can go over the Seventh’s exploits at a more convenient time,” Niles said impatiently.
“Yes, of course, I was just trying to set the stage somewhat for you.” Now the photos of the total recovered artifacts replaced the map of the battlefield. “These items were recovered inside the areas defended by Keogh’s three companies.” As he said this, the computer images began to drop away, until only thirty-seven artifacts remained. “We have several items here that could have possibly contained the map: two army-issue saddlebags, ten leather pouches, most for tobacco storage, and three bottles. We do have several Christian crosses, but the most interesting item is this box here.”
A yellow circle centered itself on a metal box that appeared rusted shut and heavily dented. As they watched, the item rotated 160 degrees to show the back, below the old hinges. In the center they could barely make out three letters. The first letter was totally wiped out due to rust, so all they could clearly see was “W.K.”
Nathan continued. “So the initials were a blank, then W and K. Do you see what I mean? This may be the best lead we have, as it just might have belonged to either Myles Walter Keogh or a sergeant by the name of John William Killkernan, a sergeant attached to L Company. The odds are fifty-fifty.”
“Have you contacted the Parks Service and asked if the metal box contains anything?” Niles asked, trying to hold down his excitement.
“That’s the bad news, I’m afraid. They say they haven’t examined the items as of yet, beyond the initial cleaning and photo stage. They are currently displayed at the battlefield as is, before any forensic work is performed. We requested access but it was denied by the University of Montana, as it was their dig, and the Parks Service gave us lip service about shared responsibility.”
“Thank you, Professor Nathan. Pass along to your people that you may have saved our butts on this one, and continue your research. I’ll get someone out there. Can you spare someone to accompany?” Niles asked.
There was silence at the other end of the speaker. Then Nathan came back on. “Yes, I can spare me. My team has their chores to do and I’m only in the way.”
“Good, I’ll set you up with security and another volunteer that knows something about the Little Bighorn. Again, thanks, Professor. Be ready to leave within the hour.”
Niles walked a little more briskly back to his chair than when he had left it. He took a deep breath and looked at Jack.
“Major, I think it’s time you get to Montana.”
“I’ll take Mendenhall and Jason Ryan along so I don’t have to talk too much to Professor Nathan.”
“Take Mendenhall, but I would appreciate it if you leave Mr. Ryan here. I need him to do something and I need you to plan it before you leave here.”
“Okay. Alice, you said you had a candidate that knows something of the Little Big Horn?”
“Yes, Director, a certain Second Lieutenant McIntire,” Alice said, looking at Jack.
“Good, gather your things and alert Mendenhall and the lieutenant. You’ll have transport in thirty minutes at the base. And take care of Nathan, will you, because he’s not really a field man.”
Jack nodded and started for the door.
“Jack?” Niles said as he hesitated with the phone halfway to his ear.
“Yes?”
“You and Ryan come right back after you’ve alerted McIntire and Mendenhall as to your travel plans. Mr. Ryan will also be traveling, but a little farther south. And while you’re at the battlefield, be careful, we don’t know who else is after the map. If Farbeaux is in it, things could turn ugly real quick, and we don’t need to lose more soldiers at the Little Big Horn.”
“You have something for Ryan I need to know about?” Jack asked.
“I want him to liaise with a rescue element in Panama. I don’t know how yet, but we need something in place down there.”
“Good idea. We have to come up with a way to feed them real-time intel on what’s happening, if we can get down there.”
“Jack?” Carl had sai
d nothing until this very moment, on speakerphone from New Orleans.
“Yeah?”
“Watch your ass, buddy. There are bad guys out there looking to stop you hard. The way they went after Niles and Ryan says they mean business.”
“I’ll do just that, and you and Ms. Serrate stay put and watch yourselves; they may be onto you, as well. Did you start getting the equipment we’ve started sending out from our stores?”
“Yes, sir, the master chief is like a hog in mud; he’s working now with our techs, getting the first of our gifts installed.”
“Very good, Commander Everett, see you as soon as we get back from Montana.”
Jack winked at Alice and left the conference room, feeling pretty sure that the Little Bighorn could not claim any more U.S. soldiers.
Ten minutes later, Niles had fully explained to Jack his and the president’s plan for Jason Ryan. Jack had concurred and he left quickly, going into Signals to request the equipment needed for Niles’s South American safety valve, leaving Ryan standing in front of the director’s desk. The plan was contingent upon Ryan and his team’s meeting up with an experimental platform that might or might not be used. It was all they had, and using it would be a long shot, but Niles still wanted something, anything, set up in case Jack and his team ran into trouble down there.
“I have a job for you, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve seen your training record. Jack’s been running you ragged, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir, he’s a real hard—”
“I see you’re up-to-date on your jump training, is that accurate?”
Ryan looked at Niles and became a tad off balance. He had indeed finished his jump training, but had quickly found out, after his ejection over the Pacific last year in a naval mishap, that he hadn’t taken to parachutes all that much.
“Accurate …I…uh, yes sir, the record is accurate.”
Legend: An Event Group Thriller Page 19
