D-Day

by Bob Mayer

  Roland glanced at Jager. “That was smart.”

  Jager shrugged. “I took the opportunity.”

  “That’s how the arm came off,” Roland said. “You weakened it, yet he acts as if he tore it off by himself.”

  Jager shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “He said you and I were comrades,” Roland said.

  “He did say that,” Jager allowed. “But you are new to me, and I am new to you.” He looked about. “You’re not the man who fell asleep after the feasting and drinking.”

  So much for wasn’t there, and then was there, but always sort of been there.

  Roland made a mental leap that would have stunned Mac and impressed Moms. It was like the painting fading out. Only those who’d been through Gates saw it. Regular people, everyone else around, couldn’t.

  “Who are you?” Roland asked, his hand tightening around the staff of the Naga.

  “Jager.”

  Several people had joined Beowulf at the entrance to the hall, the voices loud and boisterous.

  “Have you faced many monsters like Grendel?” Roland asked.

  “You said you killed monsters,” Jager said by way of not answering.

  “True. But I’ve never seen anything like that. Are we sure it’s dead? It opened those doors with one arm.”

  Jager was staring at the figures in the entrance. “It was pouring blood. It will die. The wound is too grievous to close.”

  The crowd entered, led by a man and woman, each wearing a crown, flanking Beowulf.

  “King Hrothgar,” Jager said. “And his queen. They were in here before the darkness came, and the hall was closed and the doors barred.”

  Beowulf was carrying the arm and making light of it, but the sweat on his forehead and the quiver in his arms indicated he was straining. Roland checked the download. Yep: King Hrothgar and Queen Wealhtheow.

  “Your warriors can mount the trophy, my king,” Beowulf said, finally dumping the arm in front of the dais as the royals took their seats so they could look down on everyone.

  Hrothgar signaled, and a cluster of men hurried forward to do exactly that.

  “I am sorry, my king,” Beowulf said in a loud voice, “that the rest of the body is not here. My plan was to hold his arm and strangle the beast, but I couldn’t find purchase on his neck.” Beowulf raised his own arm and showed where the fangs had slashed through flesh.

  “My maidens will bind that,” Queen Wealhtheow ordered.

  “Let us give glory to God!” Hrothgar cried out. He pointed at Beowulf. “From henceforth, he will be as a son to me.”

  “The scales of the creature were impenetrable,” Beowulf said, directed toward the king, but in a loud enough voice to be heard throughout the hall. Two maidens were ripping linen from their dresses to bind his wounds.

  “No weapon could have penetrated,” Beowulf continued. “Using my bare hands was the only way to defeat the monster.”

  Roland glanced at Jager, who just shrugged. Roland noticed a trickle of blood coming from the bottom of Jager’s tunic.

  “It was difficult,” Beowulf continued. “I had to battle the beast alone after it killed my men. And then—”

  Roland stepped out of the shadows. “This man was wounded by the beast. He requires assistance. He fought bravely. All were not killed.”

  “Not smart,” Jager said.

  A hush fell over the hall as everyone turned to see who dared interrupt the hero’s story.

  “How did you survive Grendel?” Hrothgar asked Roland.

  Feeling Beowulf’s glare directed his way, knowing that the story had to hold in order to become the epic, Roland lowered his head.

  Jager stood. “He was taking me out of harm’s way, King. By the time he could return to the battle, mighty Beowulf had already torn off the beast’s arm.”

  Hrothgar waved a hand, dismissing Roland and Jager from his attention, and turned back to Beowulf. “Continue.”

  A single maiden came over to tend Jager’s wound.

  Roland tuned out the boasting. Jager had a nasty gash along his right side.

  “It’s just a scratch,” Jager said. “There’s no need for assistance.”

  “The mark of the beast,” the maiden said, giving Jager a look which was so blatant that even Roland was astute enough to understand the intent. “It must be cleaned, or it will rot.” She jerked aside his tunic.

  Roland saw the scars and knew Jager wasn’t joking when he said he considered it just a scratch. He also cared nothing for the maiden.

  Roland sat close to Jager on the side away from the wound. He pressed the tip of his dagger against the skin over Jager’s liver and asked, “Who are you?”

  Kala Chitta Range, Pakistan, 6 June 1998 A.D.

  The chatter of helicopters shook Doc out of his killing stupor. Looking over the valley, he saw a pair of helicopters, lights flashing, flying toward a landing pad near the entrance to the Depot. Looking past those, he could see a long line of headlights entering the valley from the main road that went south into the rest of Pakistan.

  Confused, immediately wondering how they knew he’d killed the soldier, Doc realized this had nothing to do with him and everything to do with Task Force Kali being alerted and implemented for some reason. Pakistan was sending the trucks and helicopters to retrieve and deploy the warheads.

  What was causing Pakistan to retrieve and deploy its nuclear weapons was the big question. Doc wondered what the Shadow had done to push the Pakistanis to decide to initiate nuclear conflict, but remembering his childhood in India before his parents emigrated to the United States, he knew it wouldn’t have taken much.

  Once all part of British India, Pakistan had been partitioned off in 1947 to establish a Muslim state separate from India. It was one of the ideas that looked good on paper, and caused bloodshed and death in reality. A third of Indian Muslims were left in India, and violence erupted between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, resulting in anywhere from a half-million to a million deaths.

  Now, there was another death.

  Doc took one last look at the young soldier.

  Doc spun about and ran, following the directions from the download. In a hundred yards, he skidded to a halt and looked right. Without the goggles, he wouldn’t have seen it, and without the download, he’d never have known it was there: a grate set into the side of the ridgeline, camouflaged to look like part of the rock. He could feel the air blowing out of it.

  The download informed him it had taken two of those trips for this grate to be prepared just right. He reached up and pulled. Nothing. He pulled harder, and the grate separated, bolts breaking free, severed just below the heads.

  Doc didn’t stop to marvel at the fortitude of those men who’d done this, sawing slowly and silently all thru the night, stopping with just enough time before dawn to make it back to the hide site.

  He pulled a length of climbing rope out of the ruck, tied it off on the center of the grate, then tossed the other end into the darkness. He stepped up to the edge. As he looked down, the night vision goggles couldn’t penetrate the absolute darkness of however deep this ventilation shaft was.

  One hundred and eighty-two feet, the download told him. One of the men who’d sawed so patiently had dropped a small lead bob on fishing wire through the grate, unreeling it until he got slack.

  But no one had gone in.

  Doc had two hundred feet of rope. And once he went down, he knew it was doubtful he’d be able to climb back up the rope. He put one leg over the edge, then pivoted, putting the other leg into the void, sitting on the edge. He reached behind then pulled the grate up, kitty-corner. The grate was larger than the inlet, so it would hold. Unless it went exactly wrong, angled diagonally, and went straight through.

  They’d even calculated that, and the risk was acceptable.

  Nothing was impossible to the man who didn’t have to do it.

  He pulled up some slack, then snapped the rope through the carabineer attached to the har
ness and looped it correctly. He double-checked.

  Doc took a deep breath. He twisted as he shoved himself outward into the void. He had his brake hand tight to his chest. He dropped eight feet then came to an abrupt halt as the grate clanged against the opening, anchoring.

  Doc began long rappel bounds down the shaft. It occurred to him that he hadn’t done one of Eagle’s safety precautions: tied a knot at the end of the rope, so he wouldn’t rappel into free fall.

  But he had to trust the download, the lead weight, the fishing line, and damn luck.

  He kept bounding, shoving out with his legs from wall, releasing his brake hand, slowly bringing it in to hit the wall again then shove back out.

  Until, as he swung back toward the wall once more, his feet skidded on concrete, and his goggles finally came alive with a dim, green glow from behind.

  Doc unclipped and turned toward the light.

  The Time Patrol had paid a million dollars for the plans for this facility. Doc imagined some Pakistani architect was living the good life on some beach somewhere, wondering why someone wanted plans for an old facility which had been abandoned years ago.

  Doc crawled forward, the light growing stronger until he could take the goggles off.

  The shaft became a tunnel. Doc could feel the air pushing past him, indicating positive pressure maintained inside the facility. Following the information from the download, Doc began to run, making turns as indicated. He briefly wondered how the two Task Force Kali soldiers would have blindly found their way through this maze without the blueprint.

  He came to a grate through which bright light flowed, and could hear voices speaking Urdu. Doc pulled the automatic weapon off his shoulder, made sure there was a round in chamber, finally trusting all that training, and kicked the grate out.

  He jumped, landing on his feet, his knees absorbing the impact.

  Two men in white coats were walking by. They were surprised to see him, turned, and ran. Doc walked up to a glass case then used the butt of the weapon to break it. There were two levers inside, one red and one yellow. He pulled the yellow one.

  A shrill chirping noise reverberated through the tunnels of the Depot.

  The red was the alarm for a security breach.

  The yellow represented something much worse, a radiation breach from Containment.

  Doc ran deeper into the facility. He passed a few dozen scientists and workers, all scurrying to get out. They gave him puzzled and confused glances, but no one challenged him. Who was going to confront a man covered in blood with a rifle in his hand? All the security for the Depot was on the outside, to prevent someone from coming in. Once you were in—

  Also, the workers and scientists were all too concerned with getting out and away from the Containment at the center of the Depot, because they knew what the chirping alarm meant.

  Doc made the last turn into the deepest part of the facility. A man in a white coat was standing at a keyboard set into a gray wall, typing a command. A massive vault door was wide open next to him, the entrance to Containment.

  Doc shot him.

  Doc slipped inside, then typed on the corresponding keyboard on the interior. The code words flowed through his fingers (cost: $250,000) and the vault door began to rotate ponderously inward on hydraulic arms.

  “No! Wait!”

  Doc turned, leveling the weapon at the man who’d cried out. An elderly scientist, his white coat flapping about him, was limping forward, using a cane. Doc’s finger twitched, but he didn’t fire.

  The door shut with a whoosh of air and a very solid thud.

  There was the sound of thick locking pins sliding into place.

  Doc typed in the command to lock the door from the interior, with no external override possible, securing himself inside the Containment facility.

  Delphi, Greece, 6 June 478 B.C.

  Scout and Cyra walked down the slope of Mount Parnassus past the Castilian Spring. There was a cluster of people purifying themselves in the water before lining up in hope of being invited to consult with the Oracle. Scout paused, seeing about fifty supplicants, separated from the entrance to a cave by a half-dozen priestesses dressed in the same white robes that Cyra wore. They had red cloaks and garlands of flowers on their heads. They stood as still as the trees that flanked the cave, serene and calm.

  “My fellow priestesses,” Cyra said, indicating the women. “The supplicants try, even though it is well known my mother will see hardly anyone during the games.”

  “Then why was Pythagoras there?” Scout asked.

  “Exceptions are always made,” Cyra said, but there was an edge of uncertainty in her voice. She was rattled, but trying to hide it. She signaled, and two of the priestesses came to her. She ordered them to go to the cave to attend to her mother and dispose of ‘another issue.’ She also told them to speak nothing of what they saw in the cave.

  “Sounds like the mob,” Scout muttered.

  “What?” Cyra was distracted.

  “Nothing,” Scout said. “Do they have the sight also?”

  “No,” Cyra said. “It is passed in blood. I received mine from my mother, and she from her mother before her, down through the ages.”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t get mine from my mother,” Scout said. “But—”

  “What?” Cyra asked.

  “Pandora said I needed to find out who my true mother is. So, who knows?” They continued down the mountain, toward the fields where the Pythian games were opening.

  Scout was running the summary of information about the Oracle and her setup through her consciousness. The priestess chosen to be the next Oracle surrendered her name when she assumed the position, which sounded familiar to Scout, who rarely thought of the name her parents had bestowed on her. Nada had named her Scout from the very first meeting during the Fun in North Carolina, and that had been her name from then on, as far as she was concerned.

  The Oracle had been around since the 8th Century B.C., and was so renowned for her prophecies that Edith had noted she was the most powerful woman in the classical world. No war with a state outside Greece, no expedition mounted, no major political decision was made without consulting an oracle, and the Oracle at Delphi was the one. Gaining an audience was a major coup, and Scout realized her mob analogy wasn’t too far off, since it seemed those who offered the largest “tribute” seemed to get to the front of the line.

  Edith had also included various modern theories as to the source of the Oracle’s ability to prophesize: ethylene gas seeping up through the cracks in the floor of the cave; hallucinogenic hydrocarbon in the water of the Kerna Spring, upstream from the cave and reserved for the Oracle; extract from the Nerium oleander, which was poisonous, but might cause visions if imbibed in small quantities; even the possibility of snake venom (a sort of church tent revival). All were interesting, but didn’t take into account the simplest, but strangest and truest, explanation: the Oracles were descendants of the priestesses of Atlantis.

  Scout knew the history from the download, but it also gave her the future. At least, the future as it stood now. Eventually, the Christians decided the cause of the prophecies had to be demons, always a convenient explanation, and they destroyed the temple and eliminated the Oracle in 390 A.D. in the name of their religion.

  As they continued down the path, Scout saw several warriors, their shields and uniforms striking a familiar chord. “Did you go to King Leonidas’s wife and daughter after the battle?” Scout asked.

  Cyra nodded. “Yes. I spent several months with them. I fulfilled the promise you made. But I would have made the same promise to the king. He was a noble man and a great king. He saved Greece, and his name will always be remembered.”

  “‘Go tell the Spartans’,” Scout quoted, “‘stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie’.” She was surprised to feel a tear sliding down her cheek as she remembered Leonidas and his warriors.

  Cyra reached out then gently took the tear with the tip
of one finger. “You have seen too much for someone so young.”

  Scout swallowed hard. “Do you have any sense of Pandora? Her presence?”

  Cyra shook her head. “Like my mother, I felt something. I still feel it. But it’s not specific. How about your Sight? You’ve met her face-to-face. You would be closer to her than either of us.”

  They stopped near the base of the mountain. There were thousands of people scattered about the plain in front of them. Groups gathered around various events from races to musicians performing. Tents were set up, food was being cooked, and the atmosphere was in sharp contrast to the darkness in the Corycian Cave.

  Scout closed her eyes, reaching out, remembering being in Pandora’s presence at Thermopylae. She could sense the people, a sea of emotions, mostly positive, a few spots that weren’t; some red with anger, rage, even a few that were black as death, representing despair. A spectrum of humanity.

  She reached farther out over the crowd, and thus, it was a complete shock when a low voice came from behind her and Cyra. “This is where the Earth-Mother, Gaia, was supplanted,” Pandora said. “As you go around the world, it is fascinating, and disconcerting, how, in almost every culture, the worship of the Earth-Mother was twisted into a new religion or simply obliterated. In the beginning, all worshipped her. Now, such practice is hidden in the darkness, slowly dying away.”

  Scout had frozen at the touch of the tip of a blade against the base of her spine. She slowly turned her head.

  Pandora was taller than Scout, slender, dark-haired except for a single streak of white starting above one eye and through the hair to the end of the locks on the back of her shoulder. She did not have a Naga staff, like she had last time Scout had run into her. But neither did Scout, so that evened out. But she did have a dagger in each hand, one pressed against Scout’s back, the other against Cyra’s.

  “You’re both poor priestesses,” Pandora said, “letting me get this close to you. Makes me despair for the younger generation.”

  “You lied to me,” Scout said.

  “‘Lied?’” Pandora seemed amused. “About what?”