by Gregg Loomis
Like mixing a Borgia poison.
“I am sure I was more hindrance than help,” Maria offered, her tone unable to conceal gratitude at being released from the experience.
Forbidden to light up, Adrian was making sucking noises on the pipe. “So, tell me exactly what it is you seek, Jason. You mentioned that the poor sods on that fishing boat appeared to have traces of sulfur and various hydrocarbons, including ethylene, in their blood, and that Maria here says the mineral samples are linked to the area of the Bay of Naples.”
“I’m to find out exactly what this ‘Breath of the Earth’ business is all about, see what these extreme nuts have come up with, where they got it.”
Adrian took another sucking draw from the pipe, removed it from his mouth, and regarded the empty bowl sadly. “Damn nuisance, having to go outside to light a pipe I’ve been smoking thirty years. Things we do to please the womenfolk.”
Jason was tempted to remind his friend of his comment about demonstrating who was boss, but said, “So far, only thing I’ve learned is that this guy Eglov takes keeping a secret very seriously.”
“Bad sport, that lad.” Adrian tapped the pipe’s stem against his teeth. “You think the sailors were gassed?”
“Only way I can think of to get those chemicals into the body short of an injection.”
“And if th’ bleedin’ Ecos were that close, they bloody well didn’t need all those chemicals.”
“Exactly.”
Pipe temporarily forgotten, Adrian stared into space for a moment. “Y’ know archeology is my passion.”
Puzzled as to the connection, Jason leaned forward in his chair. “Yes, but-”
“Subscribe to the magazines, popular and some academic.” Adrian stood and went to kitchen. “Clare, where’ve you been puttin’ me archeological journals ‘n’ stuff?”
“Try lookin’ in th’ shed,” came the disembodied answer.
Adrian turned away, grumbling. “Shed, indeed! All my valuable research material in a leaky auld building…”
“If it’s leaky,” came Clare’s voice, “it’s not because I haven’t asked you a score of times to see to th’ roof!”
Adrian was still griping as he walked out of the door.
Moments later he returned with a stack of magazines.
Dumping them in front of the chair he had occupied, he sat and began to page through each. “Year or two ago, I saw an article on Greek Baia. Two or three millennia after the Bronze Age dwellings here in Sardinia, so I didn’t give much mind to it.”
“Baia?” Jason asked. “What’s Greek Baia?”
“Oldest Greek settlement in Italy.” Maria spoke for the first time. “It is in the Naples area.”
Adrian was still turning pages. “Had something to do with gases, I think.” He held up a gray-backed journal. “Ah, here it is. Written by a Professor Calligini, translated by one of your American chaps.”
“Eno Calligini, of the University of Turin?” Maria asked.
Adrian moved the magazine a little closer to his face. “Aye, a professor at Turin. Y’ know th’ man?”
Maria smiled. “Our fields, volcanology and archeology, are not unrelated, at least not here in Italy. He and I participated on a symposium on the Vesuvius eruption of a.d. 79, the one that buried Pompeii.”
The look on her face told Jason it was likely she and the professor were, or had been, more than professional colleagues. He felt a twinge of jealousy. Irrational, but nonetheless real.
Adrian glanced from Jason to Maria. “Y’ may want to read what th’ professor has to say, Jason. I recall it, he speaks of hallucination-producing vapors.”
Clare appeared in the kitchen door, holding a serving tray. “Supper’s ready. I-”
The first bar of “Scotland the Brave” chirped from Adrian’s pants pocket and he pulled out a cell phone.
“Sorry. Only have the bloody thing so th’ kids can keep in touch.” He snapped it open. “Graham here.”
His face went blank as he listened before a single, ” Grazie.”
From Clare’s expression, Jason guessed they didn’t get a lot of phone calls from their kids or anyone else.
The phone disappeared back into Adrian’s pocket. “Peppi.” He turned to Jason in explanation. “Runs the local trattoria, closest thing about to a pub. A man was asking directions here.”
Jason squinted through the windows at the collecting darkness. “Any description?”
Adrian nodded. “Big, shaved head, didn’t speak Italian like a local. Or an Italian, for that matter. Had half his face bandaged.”
“How many others?”
“Peppi didn’t see anyone else. I gather this chap is an acquaintance of yours?”
“I’d guess he’s the same one I told you about. You can bet he’s not by himself. How long would you guess it’ll take him to get here?”
Adrian gave a grim smile. “Depends on how long it takes him to figure out that Peppi’s directions are leading him astray.”
“Your friend gave him misleading directions? Why?”
Adrian shrugged. “Could be because Peppi knows we don’t have many visitors. Could be because he dinna like the cut o’ the man. Probably was a combination of the locals’ distrust o’ strangers an’ the perverse Sardinian sense o’ humor.”
“He sent the guy out to the boonies as a joke?”
Adrian nodded as he crossed the room toward Clare, taking the tray and setting it on the table. “Aye, havin’ a stranger lost in these hills would be very funny to th’ natives, particularly a stranger Peppi’d taken a dislike to.” He looked over his shoulder at Clare. “Mother, if you’d gather some bottled water from the shed, along with a few tins we can open for supper later…”
Clare left the room.
Adrian went to a low chest, removing several blankets. Underneath them was a long object wrapped in an oil-spotted cloth. Jason inhaled the familar smell of Hoppe’s gun oil. It took only a moment before Jason was looking at SAS’s favorite weapon, a Sten Mark IIS. From the silhouette, Jason noted that his friend had the model with a lengthy silencer built onto the barrel. The machine gun was clearly recognizable from the thick canvas sleeve around the rear of the silencer, the only protection a shooter had from a heated barrel. With the Sten, automatic fire was unadvisable except under the direst circumstances. Still, the British commandos had had an affection for the gun and its predecessors since before World War II, when it had been manufactured by British Small Arms along with the oil-spitting, brake-failing BSA motorcycle.
The British saw romance in ineffective machinery; hence the long life of the Jaguar automobile.
Adrian slammed one of two thirty-two shot clips into the gun. “Looks like we’re about to have company.”
Jason took the SIG Sauer from its holster in the small of his back, checked the magazine, and put it back. “I don’t know how they found us unless they went to the charter service.”
Adrian was stuffing the Sten’s extra clip into his belt.
” ‘Th’ best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a’wry.’ Or so th’ bonny bard Bobby, Burns tells us. Reason enough to keep me old weapon handy and ready.”
Jason was in no mood to discuss either alliterations or Scotland’s most beloved poet. “I doubt we have the firepower to fend them off.”
Adrian tossed one of the blankets to Maria and pulled out a Savage Model X20 nightscope, something any hunter in America could purchase at his local gun shop. “Wasn’t plannin’ on a fight, not with women around…”
“Don’t let me keep you boys from your fun,” Maria snapped.
Adrian cocked an eyebrow. “An’, as I was about to say, only th’ Sten an’ a pistol between us.”
Unspoken was the fact that, unlike in Bosnia, retreat was not an viable option.
Clare reappeared, carrying a military knapsack. “I’ve got enough water and food to last us a day or two.”
Motioning Jason and Maria to follow, Adrian headed for the
door. “We’ll not be going far, but we need to hide the car, make it look like we’re gone, perhaps off on holiday.”
“What about that?” Clare was pointing to the tray with the still-steaming haggis.
“Canna leave hot supper around, now, can we?” Adrian thought for a moment. “Much as I hate it, we’ll have to let the swine have it.”
Jason had never imagined he would be indebted to ecological terrorists.
“Ah, wait!” Adrian exclaimed. “I’ll take a wee second to turn off the ginny motor.”
“Ginny motor?” Maria asked.
“Aye, lass, the generator that provides the ‘lectricity for the house. We dinna have a local power company out here.”
The house went dark, and Adrian returned seconds later holding a flashlight. “It’s on our way we are then.”
The Volvo cranked on the first try. They drove less than a hundred yards into a deep ravine carved into the hillside that would make the automobile impossible to see unless someone knew where to look or was very lucky. From the car, Adrian led them uphill to a scattering of large stones Jason had seen earlier and dismissed as just one more of the island’s rock formations. Only when Adrian played a flashlight across the surface did Jason see a horizontal opening leading under an overhanging boulder.
“One of the early Bronze Age dwellings,” Adrian said, ducking to get into the space beneath. “Phoenicians and Romans invaded the Nuragic settlements along the coast, forced the indigenous population to retreat here into the ridges. They built homes that were difficult to find, easy to defend.”
Jason followed Adrian’s light. They stepped down into a cave-no, a room perhaps thirty by thirty. The walls still showed marks of the ancient chisels that had pried away the stone. At the back, the cool night air entered through a hole in the roof, a primitive fireplace, recognizable by smudges of soot still visible on the wall. The closer he looked, the more Jason realized the habitation was not as primitive as he had thought. The streaked wall behind the fire pit would have been heated by the flames, radiating warmth throughout the small room.
Adrian switched off his flashlight. “Make y’sel’ comfortable, but cut off the torches. Don’ wan’ th’ light givin’ us away.”
As his world went dark, Jason heard, rather than saw, Adrian stretch out on his stomach at the slit that was the cave’s entrance. He could see the outline of the Scot studying his house with the nightscope. “Dinna take ‘em long.”
Jason felt the glass pushed into his hand. At first he saw little other than the disconcerting hues of green and black produced by concentration of ambient light. As he watched, the colors assumed the recognizable shapes of the house, trees, and rocks. He saw nothing that did not belong.
“Over by the far corner of the house,” Adrian whispered.
There was a blur of monochromatic green as Jason shifted to his right. At first he observed nothing that wasn’t part of the landscape.
Then something moved, a ghostly flicker edging toward the front of the house. Then another. Jason made a minute adjustment to the scope, and several images jumped out of the background with starling clarity.
“Six of them, by my count,” he whispered to Adrian, although the distance would have prevented the intruders from hearing anything less than a shout. “The usual AK-47s. Looks like they’re deploying to cover all windows and doors. How’d they get here, anyway? I didn’t hear a car.”
“You wouldn’t. These hills can block sound sometimes, amplify it at others.”
Adrian was reaching for the return of the scope.
Jason took one last look. “One of ‘em has the right part of his face bandaged, all right. Can’t be sure, but I think he’s the one we ran into in Sicily.”
“Th’ one w’ th’ bandage, he’s the leader,” Adrian observed. “Tellin’ ‘em to search th’ house.”
It took the new arrivals only a few minutes to ascertain that no one was home.
A few minutes later, Jason caught a snatch of a voice, although he couldn’t make out the words. “What’s happening now?”
“They dinna find us in th’ house, an’ now the man with th’ bandage, he’s pointin’ in different directions, tellin’ ‘em to search for us, I’ll wager.”
From behind him, Jason heard an intake of breath, a gasp. He could not tell if it was Maria or Clare. It was more for their benefit than Adrian’s that he said, “They’ll have a tough time finding us here.”
“Aye, laddie, a tough time indeed, long’s we keep quiet and our heads down.”
“And even if they do, this is as perfect a shelter as we could want. It’ll take a high-explosive device to get to us here.”
“Don’ be too sure o’ that. A few shots through the slit here in front an’ the ricochet’d be like grenade fragments off these stone walls. Best we lie low like a fox in his den till th’ hounds have tired.”
Jason checked the luminescent face of his watch, surprised to note that only fifteen minutes had passed since they’d fled the house. He watched that fifteen stretch into twenty, then thirty. Waiting for action was one of the most difficult things in Jason’s line of work. There was nothing to do but think, and thinking frequently complicated the problem.
Jason slid his sleeve over the watch’s face and stared into darkness.
Minutes, an hour later, he heard footsteps crunching on the rocky soil outside. One, no, two men were following a course that would lead them straight to the cave.
Jason thumbed the SIG Sauer’s safety.
Adrian backed farther inside, making sure that no errant source of light gave them away by reflecting from the nightscope.
Jason felt someone beside him, Maria. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and she would not let go, her grip tense and damp. Even so, Jason took pleasure from her touch.
Looking up toward the entrance, he could see them now, or at least, he thought he could make out two sets of legs from the waist down. Two ill-defined masses of darkness against a slightly less dark night. One moved slightly, the activity quite clear against the pinpricks of stars in the dome of the ink black sky. One said something, low, guttural words Jason could not hear clearly, and the two sets of legs moved off to his left, the sounds of grinding rocks and gravel growing gradually dimmer.
A hand, not Maria’s, tugged at his sleeve.
“May as well get some sleep, laddie,” Adrian whispered into his ear. “I’d bet a month’s pay they’ll not be leavin’ us till they’re sure we’re gone. I’ll stand a three-hour watch, then wake you.”
Like any seasoned combat soldier, Jason took an opportunity to sleep whenever it presented itself. Head on his hands, he was breathing deeply in less than a minute. His sleep was light, the sort that gave rest but was not so deep he could not come instantly awake. He pretended not to be awakened when Maria lifted his head and placed it in her lap.
Chapter Twenty-five
Silanus, Sardinia
Dawn, the next day
The morning did not begin with a slow grayness. Instead, the red of a cardinal’s robe streaked the eastern sky momentarily before buttery light began to chase the night from the far ridge. In an instant of deja-vu, Jason was with Laurin, watching the sun climb to the lip of the bowl that was Aspen, Colorado. He had been so absorbed in the colors, he had forgone the ski slopes that morning for an opportunity to capture the scene on canvas.
Laurin. The places they had shared.
As always, the emptiness was filled with a sense of rage, a fury illogicaly directed at the men from whom he was hiding.
In minutes the cave would be in full daylight. Slipping out of the entrance, Jason used the last of the shadows to tend to bodily functions before returning to a refuge without comfort facilities.
Maria had much the same needs, and he met her as he entered. He pointed to the valley below that was quickly filling with daylight. “Hurry.”
She started to reply, a sharp remark, he guessed, thought better of it, and disappeared behind a nearby boul
der.
Not far below, somewhere near Adrian’s chicken coop, a rooster belatedly proclaimed what was already fact.
Carefully holding his weapon behind him rather than risk an errant reflection of the early sun, Jason stretched. Muscles, including some he had temporarily forgotten, ached from sleeping on the rocky floor. He winced as he rotated his neck in a vain hope of working out the soreness. He gave up on the stiffness going away anytime soon and he surveyed the farm below.
Two men in military fatigues were poorly concealed beside the house’s door. Two more were covering the approach up the driveway. Assuming he and Adrian had seen them all last night, that left two unaccounted for. Jason guessed they would be concealed somewhere along the turnoff from the road to the house. Or on the ridge behind the cave. Or both.
Or neither.
“No tellin’ where th’ sods might be.” Adrian had come up behind him, one military mind reading another. “Could be that we dinna know exactly how many of them there are.”
“I thought of that,” Jason said, not taking his eyes from the view in front. “Question is, how long do they plan to stay?”
Adrian shook his head. “Long as they want, I’d think, waitin’ for us to come back home. Folks ‘round here pretty much mind their own affairs rather than constantly botherin’ their neighbors. Could be a month or so ‘fore anyone comes ‘round.”
“You’ve got your cell phone, right? You could call the cops,” Jason suggested.
“Not in here. These rocks shield us from satellite contact. We might try calling the nearest carabiniere, about a hundred kilometers away, if we can get outside tonight and risk being overheard.”
Jason had a better idea. “I’d as soon not have to answer the questions they’d ask, and I’m not sure how much scrutiny my papers will take. Tell you what-if they’re still down there by dark, I have another way to handle it.”
If Adrian had doubts about that, he didn’t show them.
The rest of the morning was spent alternating watches from the cave’s mouth.
Shortly after noon, Maria observed, “They are still searching for us, looking behind every rock, checking out every building. Except one.”