UNSEEN FORCES: SKY WILDER (BOOK ONE)

by Ed Kovacs

  “You’re right, I’m sorry to say. It certainly wasn’t my original plan. We’ll be taken into custody, perhaps for as long as a week, before massive payoffs reach the right people. There is not one shred of evidence linking us to the attack on the First Lady. Everyone saw a deranged Secret Service agent do the deed. The poor man, acting alone, killed himself, didn’t he? The official police report will determine Doctor Fakhry’s wound had been self-inflicted, a remorseful act related to his involvement in the heroin trade. What crime have I committed here? Facts will emerge that I’m simply the victim of your obsession, and after your display at the gala tonight, who would dispute that?”

  “Let the liquid of Ra entereth into thee as into the divine members of Osiris,” spoke Rene as she held her wrist out to show Forte the time, while still keeping the gun trained on Sky.

  “Yes dear, almost ready.”

  As Forte stirred in a final ingredient, Sky glanced at Diana and caught her eye for a millisecond. They had to act now, and she got the message.

  Wilder took a step forward, “You know, maybe I’ll take you up on that drink. It’s almost closing time, the lights will be going out.” He caught Diana’s eye again as he said his last line about the lights going out, then he threw himself forward toward the base of the altar.

  Her angle of fire obstructed by the stone altar in front of her, Rene squeezed off two rounds at him, and to her credit, did not miss a word of the invocation. One round tore through the shoulder padding of the tux jacket and grazed his shoulder blade.

  Forte ducked immediately when he saw Sky lunge, so Diana’s head shot mangled his crown but didn’t find flesh and bone. On the run, Diana’s second shot took out one of the lanterns, then she and Rene exchanged fire, Rene’s rounds shattering the alabaster water jug.

  Diana took cover behind the sarcophagus, and seeing Sky exposed at the base of the solid stone altar, she turned and shot out the second and last lantern, plunging the room into black.

  Rene shouted the invocation as she fired more rounds, the crimson muzzle flashes like maniacal demon strobes in the hellish atramentous gloom. Diana fired back, sighting on the exploding gases leaving Rene’s gun barrel and on freakish glimpses of her shrewish face under a golden sun disk.

  Impacting bullets splintered stone chips from the walls and altar and sarcophagus, spraying razor-sharp flechettes of rock; Diana’s left cheek and eye were riddled with what felt like a hundred hot needles. Then there was only the sound of Rene’s incantation and of two empty pistols being dry-fired. They were both out of ammo and neither had reloads.

  Wilder curled up crippled with an anxiety attack, flashes of a life distant and yet real as his breath. He saw himself dying: terrified, parched, gasping for the last breath of thin stale air. And he heard himself asking for forgiveness and a chance to make amends for the travesties he had committed on the sacred tombs of his ancestors. He let go. He died. His body did, anyway. And what a feeling of release it was. He was free. He allowed himself to dwell in that weightless bliss for only a moment, as his breath slowed, and for the first time in this life as Sky Wilder, his fear of darkness and being closed in, completely dissolved. The panic, the anxiety departed.

  Unfortunately he had no time to marvel at this rebirth. He felt his way blind, climbing onto the platform and circling around the side of the altar toward Rene’s chanting.

  Emboldened, Forte stood and reached to open the small athanor door, casting a faint glow of light into the room from burning embers. Rene moved next to him as he quickly poured the elixir into two stone cups dating to antiquity.

  Then the muffled sound of an explosion shook the earth, quickly followed by a concussion from above. The ground rumbled and rocked, dust from the millennia rose instantly and filled the magical chamber, as statues tumbled.

  Wilder lost his balance and fell as the stone stairway began to collapse and boulders shot in from the incline like out-of-control, overgrown bowling balls, smashing the precious furniture, the walls and anything in their way.

  In the last faint glow of the athanor, just before a boulder smashed it to ruin and returned the room to darkness, Wilder stumbled through the dust cloud toward Diana.

  She still had use of her right eye and saw the aged bow and arrow a few feet from her reach. The string had disintegrated, but the wood might hold. With a determination bordering on fanaticism, in the whirl of collapse and confusion, she used her teeth to rip a narrow strip from the hem of her gown, an improvised goong hyun, and in the utter onyx blackness attached it to the still pliant wood. She found an arrow and nocked it as she stood.

  “Hwal bae oom ni da, I am learning the bow,” she whispered as an entreaty, and released the missive of death with her exhale. She knew the unmistakable sound of a target being struck in inky nothingness; it thwacked as Sky lit his torch lighter that he’d forgotten about.

  The hazy, ghoulish tableau flickered unforgettable: Simon Forte drank the elixir from the cup at his lips; Rene held her full chalice, a 3200-year-old Egyptian arrow piercing her heart.

  As she collapsed, Forte dropped his empty cup and screamed.

  CHAPTER 30

  Daniel Pratt should have planted the Semtex plastic explosive in Hui’s secret chamber, but the room gave him the creeps. He refused to spend one more second in there than he absolutely had to. Pratt had calculated that the force of the blast would accomplish the desired result if he placed it under a stone table in the phony chamber.

  Indeed, the concussion blew a wave of dust and small rock particles up the stairs into Dr. Fakhry’s office and knocked Michelle Stark to the floor. The windows blew out and the power died. The roar of the building ripping apart as it started to fall into the rapidly forming sinkhole reminded her of when she worked in Los Angeles and an earthquake had caused her refrigerator to belly flop from the kitchen into the living room.

  Stark knew enough to get out of the building, pronto. Somehow she scrambled through the falling debris with only a few nasty gashes, but there was zero doubt in her mind that no trace of Sky Wilder or Diana Hunt would ever be found.

  ###

  Wilder reached Hunt just as a menacing creaking and the deep straining of hoary unseen mechanisms signaled an imminent solution to the question of whether the Book of Spells should ever see the light of day.

  “The stairway collapsed and we’ve got about sixty seconds of flame here. I don’t want to have a second lifetime where I die sealed in a tomb.” He saw the patina of blood and stone flecks on her face. “You’re hurt.”

  “I’m okay. So how do we get out?”

  “There should be a second secret entrance.”

  “Where?”

  “Something about the eyes of the sun. That’s the only clue I know.”

  “I didn’t see a depiction of the sun in here, and I can’t see much of anything right now.”

  “But there’s a sun disk, painted on the wall over there, with hands reaching out or something,” he said. “I didn’t get a good look at it.”

  Another massive groan shook the room as they stumbled to the wall. Chunks of stone began falling from above, and part of the wall near the main entranceway fell in a heap.

  “Doctor Wilder! Don’t you want to test your theory?! Don’t you want to see if I’m an Immortal?!” Simon stood over Rene’s body clasping his gold pen which sprang out its icepick-like point. A newfound madness raged in his eyes.

  Sky rubbed his hand along the face of the wall. His index and middle fingers found the eye sockets of the enigmatic Sphinx, painted in the center of the disk, and pressed in hard. Two small stone plugs recessed.

  A section of wall strained to swivel open, a dark passageway hiding behind it, but the room shuddered on the verge of disintegration. The antediluvian escape mechanism unable to open the stone portal any further.

  As Forte took a step toward them, a rock slab dropped down and glanced off his shoulder knocking him to the platform next to Rene. Another, much larger slab dropped onto his legs,
crushing them from the knees down, as the altar broke in half and crumpled. Forte screamed the hellish howl of a tortured soul doomed to an eternity of suffering.

  Wilder and Hunt looked to their nemesis and his entrapment, but only for a moment, for Sky needed to wedge the door open, and fast. He grabbed a wooden yoke, jammed one end into the opening and pushed... but the old wood snapped against the weight of the door. It snowed rock in the chamber now, they only had seconds left.

  “Push!”

  They slammed their weight into the door edge, straining, and it gave an inch. Time for one more try. Sky rubbed his gold pendant and said a silent prayer to God and Hathor.

  “Help me!” screamed Forte, squirming to get free. “I have the elixir right here. I have endless wealth. I’ll give you anything!”

  “Then give me back Lou Burdette’s life! And Ping’s!” shot back Sky. He turned to Diana. “Again!”

  They slammed the door as the room seemed to come apart. The door shifted... the opening a tight eight inches, but big enough. He helped Diana through, then stole a quick glance back to Forte. Had he become physically immortal? Sky hoped so, for Simon Forte lay hopelessly pinned by the timeless rock of Giza next to the corpse of his dead lover Rene Bailey, with the Book of Spells just out of his grasp.

  Sky squeezed through the entry, the torch lighter barely flickering, as the secret chamber of Hui sealed the fate of Simon Forte.

  The stairway was more stable than the room had been, but not by much. They quickly climbed for what seemed like forever, until a stone hatch cut off their escape. The lighter barely burned and gave scant illumination.

  “We’ve got to find the hatch lever! We don’t have much light left!”

  They frantically searched for an opening device, more by feel than by sight.

  “Are we at the surface?”

  “A few thousand years ago I would have said yes. But now, there may be thirty feet of sand on top of this hatch. There’s a chance that, if we can open it, we’ll be buried alive in sand.”

  “What’s this?” Diana said as the light flickered out.

  Sky reached over. “Feels like a simple wooden lever.”

  Diana held him lightly. “Are you always this much trouble?”

  “I’m a high-maintenance boyfriend.”

  “Oh really? Are we going steady?”

  “Seems like it. Listen, I wanted to say that if this doesn’t work, I—”

  “Ssshh. Don’t tell me now. Tell me as we’re floating in a houseboat on Lake Powell, lost in each other’s arms. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now open the damn door and get us out of here.”

  He covered their heads with his tuxedo jacket, then engaged the lever. As the stone hatch opened inward, an aeon of sand dumped into the stairway. Sky held fast to the lever for a handhold as the desert floor avalanched past them, spilling into the vertical shaft. Like an hourglass filling to signal that time had run out, hundreds of cubic yards of plunging sand displaced the emptiness of the stairwell until it lapped at their feet, then their knees. And then... silence.

  As the dust settled, moonbeams of the blue moon in Scorpio blessed the lovers with a kiss.

  “Pinch me and tell me this isn’t a dream,” she said, peeking out from his tuxedo jacket.

  “Come on, we’ve got to get to the road and hitch a ride before someone finds us.” They pulled their legs free, then crawled up the sandy slope to the surface. Lying low, they watched vehicles arrive at the ruins of Fakhry’s office, where all attention was focused. “Good, there’s Michelle, she’s okay.”

  “I don’t get it. Forte’s dead, why do we have to run?” asked Diana.

  “Because he didn’t set that explosion that almost killed us, did he? But I think I know who did.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The Sven Carlsson sailed north between Shetland and the southwestern Norwegian coast on a crisp, cloudless night. Most of the crew slept soundly after a hard day filling the holds with sand eel. The ship’s true capabilities had to stay masked by the cover of a working trawler, but Captain Jaeger looked forward to scaling back the time he spent at sea chasing fish, and increasing the land-based oversight of his growing fleet based out of Vagur.

  Five healthy shots of aquavit ensured the deep sleep Jaeger currently enjoyed in his cluttered quarters. He snored loudly as he always did after drinking, and since he drank every night, his rip-saw-like snoring was a given, sometimes roaring loudly enough to wake him from slumber. But what woke him tonight was the sharp steel edge of a tanto knife pressing in against his throat.

  “Hvem er du?!” he gasped as he jerked awake, then quickly froze at the sight of three men in black fatigues, black balaklavas covering their faces. Two of them had chopped M-4 carbines aimed at his face.

  The operator with the knife, a WOR cell member based in Scotland, leaned in closer and spoke with a thick Scottish accent. “Cap'n Jaeger, I’ve a message for ya. Helpin’ shoot down jets full a innocent people tisn’t an honorable occupation, sir. You’re bein’ retired.” The operator thrust the knife into the captain’s throat, severing the jugular vein and slicing into the esophagus and spinal column.

  The captain tried to shout, but could only gurgle bubbles of blood.

  The entire crew of the Sven Carlsson was executed, sealed individually into heavily weighted, perforated, fifty-five gallon drums and thrown overboard into 20,000 feet of water. The ship turned south at full speed as members of the fifteen-man insertion team painted the new name, Bella Madre, on the stern. In several days they would reach the out-of-the-way port of Paramaribo, Suriname, where the next chapter in the vessel’s life would be written.

  ###

  True to form, it had taken Hassan only a few hours to provide Sky and Diana the perfect getaway craft, a 1982 twin-engine Cessna T303 Crusader that could do 190 knots at 10,000 feet. The cockpit featured gray leather seats with burgundy trim, and light gray ultra suede headliner and burgundy carpet. The takeoff went smoothly and Sky enjoyed piloting the plush ride, equipped with state-of-the-art avionics on the inside, yet low-ley enough on the outside to attract little attention.

  Thanks to the autopilot, they took turns taking short naps. As they neared Crete, the inky blue-black horizon lightened to muddy gray and dawn finally broke pink-orange over the sea.

  “I could go for some French toast right about now,” Wilder said, rubbing his eyes.

  “English muffin with strawberry jam for me.”A guaze bandage covered one eye, but she gazed into the sunrise, then, “I refuse to believe the General tried to kill us. It’s not what I’m getting, not what I’m sensing.”

  “You don’t think he’s capable of it?”

  “Capable, yes. That doesn’t make him guilty.”

  He nodded. “I’ve spent my life trying to answer hard-to-answer questions. Archeologists are all amateur detectives. We deal with the forensics of history, sticking our noses into the mysteries of life that often date to antiquity. Some mysteries are very mundane: how did the women of a village cook the grain they ground with their grinding stones? What did they do with their refuse? Sometimes the unsolved issues are mind-boggling: why did the Maya abandon their large cities? What happened to the Anasazi? One of the ways we postulate answers is to sift through garbage, very often literally.”

  “Dumpster diving through history.”

  “Something like that,” he smiled. “Clues are funny things. They can easily be overlooked, maybe for centuries, because they seem insignificant or they’re not fully understood. Clues are footprints from the past. So I’m thinking there are some answers waiting, something I missed, at the SW secret library in Italy.”

  “Sounds like a shot in the dark.”

  “Not really. Just before our tango on the dance floor I spoke to Tasnee. Her contacts in Thai intelligence said General Klaymen had just arrived in Florence.”

  “Don’t tell me. He’s staying at Forte’s pensione.”

  Sky nodded, then the pair fell
silent. They spent the day hop-scotching along the Mediterranean until finally making a three-point landing on the 1688 meter-long Macadam paved runway at Aeroporto Amerigo Vespucci, only 2.7 nautical miles NNW of Firenze, or Florence, Italy, luckily beating fast-approaching thunderstorms that blackened the horizon with a warning of death.

  ###

  The Piazza della Signoria bustled on the wet spring evening like an updated Renaissance painting, teeming with grace, refinement and the suggestion of a power that once was. The piazza, dominated by the fortress-like Palazzo Vechio, sat a few blocks north of the Arno River near Michelangelo’s old neighborhood.

  “This was the site of the famous ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in fourteen ninety-seven,” said General Klaymen. “Savonarola, an extremist monk, convinced his followers to torch their possessions. A year later he found himself hung and burned on the same spot.”

  “One has to acknowledge the Italians for their passion,” said his lover, as she squeezed his hand.

  General Klaymen and Nina Sprague sat under a cafe umbrella, impervious to the drizzle, as they sipped hot chocolate at Rivoire, on the west end of the piazza. Nina leaned in toward him for warmth.

  “I’m always impressed by how well-dressed the Italians are, compared to Americans,” he noted.

  “But unlike in Savonarola’s time, I doubt that any of these Italians would be willing to incinerate so much as one Versace shoe string,” she joked. Nina, a European WOR member, had certainly been correct in tipping off Wilder to the secret library kept by Simon Forte in Florence. How she could guess that he would somehow crack the code, was, well... mystical. A tarot reader, she had told Klaymen it was “in the cards,” and left it at that.

  They watched as Daniel Pratt approached with three bodyguards, one of whom held an umbrella over Pratt’s head. He carried an antique black leather doctor’s medical bag, and looked significantly better groomed and dressed than he’d ever looked in his thirty-one years of life. He sat across from Klaymen like he’d been wearing $8000 suits since day-care, and set the black bag on the empty chair between them.