Day of the Delphi

by Jon Land

  Had he heard right?

  If it wasn’t for Kristen Kurcell and Miravo Air Force Base, Duncan Farlowe never would have believed it. Farlowe figured he had a damn good notion now of what Kristen’s brother had seen that had gotten him killed. And, judging by the way their leader’s message had abruptly ended, this scout troop might well be about to share David Kurcell’s fate.

  Farlowe moved to the window and opened it to see clearly out into the storm. Much of the snow gathered on the windowsill blew into the room, and he brushed the rest away. This cabin near the grounds of an old ski resort had provided him safe refuge since Tuesday, when Grand Mesa’s municipal offices had been blown up. He figured something would be coming to chase him back to the world, but he never imagined it would be this. The irony drew a smile from him.

  The sight outside the window changed it to a frown. By now there wouldn’t be a road open from anywhere a rescue party for these Boy Scouts was likely to originate. Could even be he was the only one to have heard the message anyway. Not many folks had call to leave their shortwaves powered up these days.

  That made Farlowe the sole hope this Boy Scout troop had to survive. It took ten minutes for him to get the right clothes on and another ten for him to trudge over to the ski resort’s garage. The Sno-Cat in the front of the line of vehicles, a tank with a cab instead of a turret, would do just fine. Pack it up with as many provisions as he could salvage and off he’d go.

  “And there’s something else. We found something in the mine.”

  “My lucky day,” Duncan Farlowe mumbled to himself.

  The voice came over the chopper’s radio fifteen miles before Tom Wainwright’s Learjet reached the coordinates in central Arizona Johnny Wareagle had given him.

  “Identified aircraft, you have entered restricted airspace and are advised to turn back immediately.”

  “Tower, I have a message to deliver to your commanding officer. Request permission to land.”

  “State designation.”

  Wainwright gave the designation Johnny Wareagle had instructed him to, hoping it made more sense to whomever he was talking to than it did to him. The pause was very slight, the voice much softer when it came back on.

  “Permission granted. Come right to heading two-five-zero. We’re dead ahead.”

  Wainwright eased into his descent and passed over a thick grove of tall evergreen trees. The sight revealed a quarter mile beyond it made his eyes bulge in disbelief.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered.

  What he was looking at, descending toward, was … impossible.

  “Our commanding officer will be waiting on the tarmac,” the voice in his headset droned. “You are cleared to land.”

  CHAPTER 35

  They sat in a circle, positioned on the grass of the Mall so each had a clear view of either the Capitol or the Washington Monument. In addition to Cleese, Kristen, and McCracken there were four Midnight Riders, two men and two women.

  “Like you folks to meet my recon team,” Cleese started. “This is Luke, Sally, Freedom, and Bird Man.”

  Each of the Riders gave a brief acknowledgment as they were introduced. The bulk of the others had already begun to position themselves discreetly in small groups throughout the city, in touch with Cleese by walkie-talkie.

  “These four been with me from the beginning,” he continued. “Lord, how many nights we spent figuring ourselves on the other side of this … . Anyway, I gave each a section of the city so we can put together a notion of what we’re up against. Bird Man, why don’t you lead off.”

  Bird Man had light curly hair and a beak-shaped nose that curved downward and in, accounting for his nickname. “Lots of trucks made out to look like sanitation and DPW. Plenty of people milling about them, not doing much of anything.”

  “Dress?” Blaine raised.

  “Run-of-the-mill, everyday normal civilian. They’re trying awful hard not to be noticed. That’s why I noticed them.”

  “How many?”

  “Don’t matter, because they’re just the advance team,” interrupted Luke. He removed his wraparound sunglasses to reveal a pair of dark steely eyes and a face Blaine recognized from wanted posters picturing the members of the Black Panthers’ most radical cell. “Sort of keeping an eye on the surroundings. Larger complement figured on getting out of the sun to wait things out.”

  “Where?”

  “The Old Post Office Tower,” Luke said. “Stores are all packed, but nobody’s buying much. Restaurants are jammed, but lots of people are just lingering. Shit, I probably woulda done it this way myself.”

  “The Clock Tower,” Blaine realized.

  “Huh?” from Cleese.

  “The two tallest points in the city center are the observation deck in the Old Post Office Tower and the top of the Washington Monument. You want to take the city, you got to own those.”

  “Sniper fire?”

  “Put a squad in each and it would be like target practice.”

  “Not to mention they’d be able to pin down exactly where any resistance was coming from,” said the woman named Freedom. She had blond hair tied into braids and was busy rolling a baby stroller back and forth alongside her. “They spot us and pick us off all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Cleese looked toward McCracken. “Rockets? Take ’em out sure and fast?”

  Blaine shook his head. “You’re still thinking like a revolutionary.”

  “Long-time habit.”

  “Form a new one: start thinking like a soldier.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  “What’s important to them is also important to us. For the same reasons.”

  “Don’t get you, Mac.”

  “You will.” McCracken paused. “How good are your shooters, Arlo?”

  “Good enough. But that kind of gun wasn’t on my shopping list with Alvarez.”

  “Leave that to me. I want to hear more about these trucks.”

  Freedom leaned forward. She stopped moving the stroller briefly and the baby inside whimpered.

  “Me and Raindance took in some of the best sites Washington had to offer,” she said, working the stroller again. “Saw trucks in the area of the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, you get the idea.”

  “The Delphi’s weapons will be inside,” explained McCracken. “The men Bird Man saw posted around the trucks are guards in case anybody perceived to be a threat wanders too close. But there are plenty more in the area he didn’t see. Come show time they’ll move to the trucks and pick up their weapons.”

  “Don’t have to walk around obvious that way,” Luke picked up. “Just join the chaos and head to where their hardware is waiting.”

  “That means they left us the opportunity to cut them off from it,” the woman named Raindance concluded, her skin pale enough to make McCracken wonder if she had ever seen the sun before.

  “Don’t underestimate their security,” he cautioned. “They might have a minimum posted on the streets, but you can rest assured there’s plenty under cover in the vicinity of each of those trucks. To take them on, we’ll need some cover of our own.” He looked toward Cleese. “How’s your supply of explosives?”

  “Enough to do the job.” His face had gone almost as white as Raindance’s, but it was hardened with resolve. “And they were gonna pin this whole damn revolution on us.”

  “All the evidence would have pointed in your direction,” Blaine confirmed. “With the government fractured, Dodd probably would have taken charge of the investigation himself.”

  “’Cept if it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead now.”

  “But the trail tying you to Alvarez and the weapons that end up pulverizing Washington would have still remained very much alive. You’re just a symbol, a fabricated enemy the Delphi needs to seize their day.”

  “’Long with the nation.”

  “That’s the point.”

  Cleese nodded. “We hit ’em early and hard, we fuck up their day big time. Thing i
s, how do we do it?”

  McCracken held Kristen Kurcell’s eyes briefly before beginning his explanation. “We start with the Old Post Office Building … .”

  Frank Richter regained consciousness slowly, the world a blur before him that sharpened more slowly than the picture on a cheap television. His head throbbed and he felt something soft pressed against his skull.

  “What happened?” he asked in a raspy voice.

  Above him a boy pulled a blood-soaked jacket from his head and rebundled it in search of an unsoiled patch.

  “They put us in here,” one of the older boys said. “After they hit you.”

  “They?”

  “The men,” another chimed in. “They had guns.”

  “How many men?”

  “I think five. Yeah, five.”

  “One was really big,” added another. “And ugly.”

  Richter gazed around him in the darkness broken only by the collective spill of the boys’ flashlights. “Where are we?”

  “Another part of the mine,” from a fourth.

  Wherever they were, Richter realized it was at least a little more temperate than the front chamber of the mine had been. But it was still damn cold, and whoever their captors were, they hadn’t let the boys bring in their sleeping bags. He gazed about and saw them shivering in their thin, spring-weight jackets.

  Clearly the contents of the trucks back in the old mine’s front chamber accounted for their captivity. And the fact that there was no way their captors could let them out of the mine alive with that information was just as clear.

  Richter pulled the bloodied jacket from his head and struggled to his feet. There was no sense bothering with the front of the mine; even if the passage back was unguarded, the men would hear them coming in plenty of time to respond.

  “Has anyone checked this chamber for another way out?” he asked.

  “A couple of us did,” said one of the older boys. “We couldn’t find one.”

  “We’ve got to keep looking,” Richter told them all. “I know these mines, and I’m telling you there’s always a way out. All we have to do is find it.”

  Johnny Wareagle and Sal Belamo both knew their journey was about to come to a premature end. Grim-faced and resolute, they sat in the Jimmy’s front seat staring into the teeth of a storm that just kept biting. Johnny had taken over the wheel three miles back, and for that long he’d been able to coax the Jimmy through the mounting piles of white collecting on the road before them. Now, though, those piles had at last climbed higher than the wheel axles in enough places to turn their progress into a maddening progression of stops, starts, and skids. Both knew all progress would cease in the next few minutes. The Jimmy would simply grind to a halt, its wheels churning fruitlessly.

  “We gonna walk the rest of the way into this part of the Rockies, big fella?” Belamo asked just to break the silence in the cab.

  He turned Johnny’s way and noticed the big Indian’s eye catch something off to the right where the road gave way to a gulley. Wareagle slid the truck onto the road’s indistinguishable shoulder and brought it to a stop against a drift that came up level with the hood.

  “What gives, big fella?”

  “Look, Sal Belamo.”

  Sal followed the line of Johnny’s gaze and saw an orange sheen rising out of the vast blanket of white.

  “Looks like a—”

  Wareagle had climbed down through his open door before Sal could finish the thought. Belamo met him knee-deep in snow on the shoulder. Directly below them in the gulley lay what looked like a bulldozer without a shovel.

  “A Sno-Cat,” Wareagle said through the snow slapping at his face.

  “Declawed, you ask me.”

  The front of the Sno-Cat’s treads had been hidden completely, the rear of them covered halfway. Sal and Johnny worked their way down the fairly steep drop into the gulley toward it. Johnny reached the cab first and jerked open its door. An old, bearded man was slumped against the driver’s seat. A trail of clotted blood lined the right side of his pale face starting on his forehead.

  “He’s alive,” Wareagle reported after checking his neck for a pulse.

  “I’ll get the coffee and first-aid kit,” Belamo said and he started to claw his way back up the hill.

  The old man stirred, the chill wind seeming to revive him. He shifted slightly and Johnny noticed an old Colt Peacemaker revolver holstered at his hip. He had a tarnished silver badge pinned to the lapel of the heavy jacket that covered his thin frame. The old man’s eyes opened slowly and fixed themselves on Wareagle.

  “If I’m dead, just let me know which place I ended up.”

  “Still earth,” Johnny told him. “The toughest place of all.”

  “That’s the god’s honest truth.”

  The old man sized him up again. “Storm make you miss the turn-off for the reservation, Injun?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what exactly brings you out in a storm that’ll kill whoever it can?”

  “Finding at least one it hasn’t been able to yet.”

  “Good point.” The old man touched the swollen lump on his forehead where the trail of dried blood originated. “Guess I’m not as good at driving these babies as I used to be. Couldn’t see a damn thing. One minute the road was there and the next …”

  Wareagle’s eyes had strayed to the cramped space behind the Sno-Cat’s two-man cab. Atop a clutter of supplies lay a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  “Bunch of Boy Scouts got themselves holed up in an old silver mine fifteen miles from here up Mountain Pass,” the old man said, noting Johnny’s interest. “That stuff in the back’s to keep them going if I get there in time for it to matter.”

  “And the shotgun?”

  The old man glanced at it himself before responding. “They’re not alone.”

  “We can’t move the trucks in this,” the man standing on Traggeo’s right insisted. His name was Boggs and he too was a survivor of Salvage Company, one of four Traggeo had recruited personally.

  “We don’t have a choice,” the big man told him.

  The numbing cold had done little to ease the pain in his right forearm where Johnny Wareagle’s knife had ripped through five days before. Traggeo could block it out only until a quick motion or slight graze against the damaged flesh brought it back. Each burst of pain filled him with a vengeful yet envious hate. He had missed his chance to kill the legendary true-blood back at Sandcastle One and could only hope fate would give him another opportunity to prove himself to the spirits.

  “There was a voice on the other end of the radio,” Traggeo continued. “Someone heard the distress call. They’ll be coming.”

  “The storm will stop them, too,” said Boggs.

  “Not when there are kids to rescue. They’ll find a way up here. We’ve got to move the trucks.”

  Boggs shrank back into the cover provided beyond the entrance to the mine. The five former members of Tyson Gash’s ignoble Salvage Company had been safe and warm back in their camp set in another section of the mine when they heard the commotion. Traggeo hadn’t decided what to do until a few of the kids discovered the trucks and the lone adult began broadcasting over a shortwave radio. That had forced his hand.

  “We get the trucks out,” Boggs said, “those kids still know what was inside.”

  “Then,” Traggeo told him, “before we leave we have to make sure the rescue party gets here too late to help them.”

  They didn’t try budging the Sno-Cat until Sheriff Duncan Farlowe had completed his tale.

  “Looks like we found what we been looking for, big fella,” Sal Belamo said at the end.

  “Looking for?” questioned Farlowe before Wareagle could respond. “What the hell you boys up to? Wait a minute, this is about Kristen. You boys are here thanks to Kristen!”

  “Yes,” Johnny affirmed without going into further detail.

  “She okay? Just tell me if she’s okay.”

  “For now. Like
the rest of us.”

  Farlowe grasped his unspoken meaning. “That bad?”

  “Worse,” said Belamo.

  “We must reach that mine,” Wareagle added.

  He took the wheel when they set out, Sal Belamo seated next to him. Sheriff Duncan Farlowe had squeezed himself amidst the provisions in the cab’s back, cradling the twelve-gauge shotgun in his lap. The Sno-Cat wouldn’t budge at first, the storm’s fist holding fast. But then Johnny stopped fighting the grade and steered the ‘Cat downhill just to get started. The strategy worked. Its tank-like treads began to turn. Huge plumes of snow jetted backwards as the Sno-Cat pulled free of the drift with a jolt. Not wanting to suddenly challenge the grade, he leveled the ’Cat out before beginning a gradual climb that ended when its treads carried it over the ridge and back onto the road.

  Their sense of triumph, though, lasted only as long as it took for the road to scale sharply upward. The mountains rose up before them as shadowy giants looming through the swirling fall of white from the sky. Each yard the ’Cat managed became precious. Its churning treads fought the storm every inch of the way.

  “Is this the only route they can take out of the mine?” Johnny asked Sheriff Farlowe.

  “They ain’t goin’ anywhere till we—” Farlowe stopped himself. “You’re not talking ’bout the kids, are you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “But they matter to you; I know they do. And I know you wanna help get them safely out of this.”

  “Go on,” Johnny said.

  “You didn’t think I intended on driving right up to that mine and knocking on the front door, did you?”

  Johnny looked back at him.

  “See, the thing is, I think I can get us inside without whoever’s guarding those trucks being the wiser.”

  “It’s a rescue party,” Traggeo announced, the Sno-Cat plainly visible advancing up Mountain Pass through the storm.