by Jon Land
“I think you better come with me, miss.”
Startled, she turned and squinted up into the eyes of a short, uniformed figure wearing a gun.
“Uh-oh,” McCracken said, as through his binoculars he watched a patrol car return to the sheriff’s office.
He didn’t have to see the figure in the backseat clearly to know it was Karen Raymond. An officer waiting near the curb reached in to help her out. The driver emerged holding her field bag by its shoulder strap, letting it dangle low toward the ground.
“Trouble, Indian,” he told Johnny.
“More than you realize, Blainey.”
“What?”
Wareagle’s naked eyes were fixed on a figure that had just emerged at the head of Beaver Falls’ main street.
“Denbo,” Blaine realized, before he had even rotated his binoculars. “Son of a bitch!”
“Let her go!”
Karen swung round and saw Patrolman Wayne Denbo standing in the middle of the street, a hand poised over his noticeably empty holster. The officer who had picked her up on the outskirts of town nodded to the deputy on her other side. The deputy drew his gun and stepped down off the curb.
“I want to know what you did with the real people who live here!” Denbo demanded. “Do you hear me? I want to know where they are!”
“No!” Karen screamed when she saw the deputy’s gun coming up.
She broke free of her captor’s hold and slammed into the deputy. He reeled sideways and grabbed hold of her hair, pulling hard when she rushed him again.
Wayne Denbo had closed to within ten yards by then. Before he could draw any closer, though, one of the apparent bystanders charged in from his rear and smashed Denbo over the head with a club. Karen watched him crumple to the street.
“Get her inside,” Karen heard someone yell to the deputy who still had her by the hair.
“We’ve got to get them out of there,” McCracken said, lowering his binoculars.
“Their captors will be expecting us, Blainey.”
“Because they were advised of the possibility,” Blaine followed, something occurring to him. “Then why did they let Denbo get so far? They must have seen him coming, right?”
Wareagle understood his point at once and, looking about him, seemed to sniff the air. “We must get out of here, Blainey.”
McCracken nodded.
Before they could reach their car, a dozen armed figures appeared atop the larger hillside overlooking the small rise where the two of them were standing. Most had their hands already poised on the triggers and eyes pressed to the sights. Their spacing was good, certain to deny Johnny and Blaine victory even if they had been able to reach their guns.
“Hands in the air!” a voice shouted down, and then repeated itself, words turned into a scattered echo by the surroundings.
“Tried to arrest them,” Wayne Denbo muttered near the door to the small root cellar, his unshaven face pale and flaking. “Tried to arrest them.”
They had all been gathered here rather than taken to the three cells of the Beaver Falls jail. Karen and Denbo were already inside when Blaine and Johnny were shoved through the door. McCracken saw them briefly before their armed escorts yanked it closed again, slamming a bolt lock into place. The meager light available came only from what was able to sneak feebly through the thin cracks in the wood.
That was enough for Blaine to see Denbo curled up on the floor in a ball. A portion of his hair was matted with blood. Streaks of it were visible on his forehead.
“What happens now?” Karen Raymond asked McCracken.
“I suspect we’ll be taken elsewhere.”
“Why not just kill us?”
“Because Frye will want to be sure we haven’t involved anyone else. He knows I was asking questions in Washington. He doesn’t know of whom.”
“You still think he’s behind all this?”
“I know he is, Karen.”
“You’re forgetting that the real key is Van Dyne, and so far there’s been no hint of any connection between the Reverend and them.”
“There wouldn’t be; he would make sure of it.”
“You sound like you know him.”
“Not personally, just his type. That’s enough.”
She moved a bit closer to him in the near dark. “So all this is nothing new for you.”
“Not new, just different.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’ve met up with more than my share of madmen, but never one who thought he had God speaking to him, that he was speaking for God. All fanatics believe they’re right, but what they’re capable of, how far they’ll go, is determined by how well they can justify their actions. Not just to others, but also to themselves. Harlan Frye can justify anything. He can do anything and accept anything because he’ll honestly believe he’s doing the work of the Almighty. That strips him of fear, and a man who fears nothing is the hardest opponent of all. Makes him less likely to make the kind of mistakes that helped me take down others who came before him.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“I’d better.”
What little light they had at first vanished with the fall of night, nothing left to slither through the slight cracks in the heavy wooden door. An hour had passed since sunset when McCracken and Wareagle heard footsteps approaching outside. Karen Raymond could feel them glance at each other in the darkness, certain their positions had been strategically chosen.
Karen tensed as the door was opened. She half expected McCracken and his Indian friend to surge into motion at that instant, but they held their ground, and it wasn’t long before Karen saw why. Beyond the door, beyond the flood of light pouring into the root cellar from a number of flashlights, she distinguished shapes and some movement.
The street beyond was teeming with gunmen, each with his weapon drawn. Three of the men, carrying flashlights, approached the prisoners and beckoned the small group to accompany them back to the surface. One reached down to grasp the dazed form of Wayne Denbo. Karen noticed all three of them were unarmed and could sense Blaine McCracken’s disappointment in that fact. It seemed every move their captors made was designed defensively to keep McCracken from seizing the advantage.
Back on the street, the true scope of their predicament became obvious. The gunmen rimmed it in a wide circle, all with guns held ready at eyes or hips. Their unarmed escorts prodded the four of them into the center of the circle and cast their eyes upward to the night sky. Karen also noticed that only a select few streetlights in the center of Beaver falls, the bare minimum, had been switched on—another defensive measure on the part of their captors.
The gunmen possessed an incalculable advantage over them in all respects, yet Karen could sense their tension as clearly as her own. These men had obviously been warned what McCracken was capable of. She looked his way in the darkness and saw his face was expressionless, emotionless. The Indian’s was a virtual mirror image. They might have appeared to be nonchalant, even indifferent. But their eyes missed nothing, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. Karen knew she would have little warning when it came and made herself ready to respond with only a heartbeat’s notice.
Suddenly the night sky was split by a wash of light and sound. A helicopter surged in low over the sheltering hillside. It slowed into a hover above the center of Main Street and then began to descend deliberately toward ground level. Its rotor wash kicked dust, street debris, and paper into the air, forcing most of those present to raise their hands up to shield their faces. McCracken’s hands stayed down. Karen thought in that instant of distraction Blaine was going to move, but instead he squeezed her arm tenderly, reassuringly.
“Not yet,” he whispered.
Blaine noted the helicopter was a Chinook troop carrier, military issue repainted in civilian colors, its twin main rotors just now slowing to a complete stop. With no airfield nearby, he had been expecting the arrival of some form of chopper to spirit them off to another destination.
They couldn’t be killed until the enemy knew how far its opposition extended; who else, in other words, Blaine and/or Karen Raymond had taken into their confidence.
He and Johnny had held off making any move yet because they knew the chopper would offer their best opportunity. Once they were airborne inside it, the confined space and limited enemy numbers would work in their favor. He was certain the Indian and he would be tied down, but he was confident he could deal with that eventuality somehow.
The Chinook finally settled uneasily into the center of the street, its rotors continuing to cough debris in all directions as the blades slowed. Two gunmen moved toward the chopper and threw open its rear hold, exposing a single troop ramp. On cue, their unarmed escorts eased Blaine and Johnny forward, Karen Raymond and Wayne Denbo walking just ahead of them.
They were halfway to the Chinook, walking straight into the spill of its most powerful floodlight, when Blaine felt the man at his side go rigid and then drop. The second went down in rapid fashion and then the third, as if the street had been yanked out from under them.
McCracken hadn’t heard the gunshots and didn’t bother considering their origin; he simply took Karen down safely to the ground, as Johnny Wareagle did the same with Patrolman Wayne Denbo. For all they knew, they could just as easily be the sniper’s next targets. Suddenly, though, the remainder of the guards placed strategically in the street began to drop, felled by fire from the unseen gunman. Those left standing lunged for cover and fired wildly in all directions, hoping to at least keep their mystery enemy at bay.
“Who, Blainey?” Wareagle asked, crawling next to him.
“No clue, Indian,” McCracken returned. “But I think I’ll lend them a hand … .”
He had just slid away from Karen, ready to rise to his feet, when a grenade blast near one of the opposition’s heaviest concentrations sent him diving back to the asphalt. Two more explosions sounded in rapid succession, keeping Frye’s troops pinned down, which left Blaine and the others absurdly safe in the field of fire’s center.
“The chopper!” Blaine screamed. “Get to the chopper!”
Johnny led the way in a fast crawl toward it beneath the sporadic, random spray of bullets fired desperately their way by Frye’s gunmen. McCracken hovered over Karen and Wayne Denbo, urging them on. Wareagle had almost reached the Chinook when a pair of dark figures emerged from the narrow slot between a pair of buildings diagonally across from the chopper. The two figures ran side by side, black mirror images spinning off one another as they fired nonstop barrages at any of the enemy gunmen who dared showed themselves. Blaine noted the latest M24 sniper rifle dangling from the shoulder of one of them. Black head masks left only the darkened flesh of their faces exposed.
Johnny Wareagle led Wayne Denbo up the Chinook’s troop ramp, while McCracken did likewise for Karen Raymond. The black figures had just reached the chopper, swinging to face the ravaged battle zone. One hurled another grenade skyward while the second turned and rushed into the passenger hold with the grace of a cat.
“Go!” the other screamed. “Go!”
McCracken hurried through the rear hold into the cockpit. The pilots had been the initial targets of the snipers and lay sprawled in their seats as a result, neat holes punched in their foreheads and the glass of the windshield spiderwebbed before them. Blaine yanked their restraining safety harnesses off and pulled them from their seats. He caught a glimpse of Johnny Wareagle offering return fire from the ramp with a rifle he must have gotten from one of their rescuers. One of the figures in black entered the cockpit. The other one, sniper rifle dangling behind, moved out of Johnny’s shadow and hurried after the first. Wareagle followed last and dragged the ramp back in after him. The rear door thumped closed. The first figure to enter the cockpit opened the passenger door long enough to shove the bodies of the pilot and copilot out.
McCracken had squeezed himself into the pilot’s seat and begun to work the controls.
“Get us out of here!” screamed one of the masked figures.
CHAPTER 28
A cascade of bullets shattered the top of the windshield, and one of the black-suited figures twisted to return the fire through the still open passenger door. The other took the copilot’s seat and yanked off its head mask.
Neat hair tumbled down past her shoulders, and the figure shook it back.
It was a woman! No, a girl, who looked to be in her late teens.
“Hurry!” the other masked figure ordered, a boy’s voice.
Blaine pulled back on the throttle, working the pedals, and the Chinook fluttered into an uneasy rise. He steadied the chopper and drove it forward over Beaver Falls. Muzzle flashes from ground level continued to track it, but the fire, thankfully, was errant. Blaine felt his hand relax.
“Who the hell are you?” McCracken demanded of the strangers sharing the cockpit with him.
The second figure had just shed his head mask as well. The hair beneath it was shorter than the girl’s, but the face was virtually indistinguishable.
“You’re twins!” Blaine realized, and then he remembered. “The children of Preston Turgewell, no doubt.”
“Very good,” said the girl.
“We’re impressed,” added the boy.
“Jacob and Rachel,” Blaine recalled from Sal Belamo’s research. Johnny Wareagle and Karen Raymond stood together and peered in through the doorway leading from the hold.
“And you’re Blaine McCracken.” The boy was ogling him as a Little Leaguer would his major league idol.
“I’m equally impressed. Now tell me where the two of you fit into all this. Where does your dead father fit in?”
“He’s not dead,” said Rachel.
“He only needed to appear dead to fool them,” picked up Jacob. “It worked. For a while.”
“And just who exactly is ‘them’?”
“The Seven. When they tried to kill him after he dropped out, he let them think they were successful.”
“Wait a minute, what’s ‘the Seven’?”
The twins looked at each other.
“You know about Harlan Frye,” Rachel interjected.
“You learned of him through your discovery of the Key Society in the papers Ratansky obtained,” said Jacob.
McCracken felt his hand tighten on the joystick control. “He was going to deliver them to you!”
“To our father,” Rachel confirmed. “He planted Ratansky where he’d be able to get the list, in return for his freedom.”
Jacob was nodding. “The list included all of Frye’s most generous and powerful supporters. Eliminate them and the damage done to his plan would be catastrophic.”
“You mean kill them? All of them?”
“We had no choice.”
“What about targeting Harlan Frye himself?”
“He has become virtually unreachable,” Rachel explained. “And even if we were successful, there were others prepared to step forward and replace him.”
McCracken held the Chinook steady. “Don’t tell me, kids, the other members of the Seven …”
“The name comes from Frye’s obsession with the Book of Revelation,” Jacob explained. “The number seven appears constantly through it. The seven signs of the apocalypse, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven woes. When Frye determined that he couldn’t save civilization, he decided his destiny was to destroy it so it could be reborn.”
“And to help him in that task,” added Rachel, “he gathered six other powerful religious leaders who he thought were equally committed to changing the world.”
“But your father, for one, changed his mind, right, kid?”
Jacob nodded. “Because Frye was willing to destroy society if that’s what it took to save it.”
“But he wasn’t planning to destroy all of society, was he?” challenged Karen Raymond, speaking for the first time.
“No,” Rachel replied. “The Seven was founded to devise and follow through with a plan that would allow them to destroy c
ivilization, while at the same time saving those they judged deserving to help them establish a new order.”
“And thus the Key Society,” Blaine interjected.
“Ratansky stole the list from another member of the Seven who walked away and became a rogue, as our father had,” explained Rachel. “The list had been that former member’s insurance, keeping Frye from dispatching his soldiers to dispense with her.”
“Her?” Karen Raymond raised.
“Another?” followed McCracken immediately. “Then the Seven is now short two of its original number.”
“So far as we know.”
“They why didn’t they join forces?”
Jacob looked at Rachel. “Because the means our father chose to pursue were considerably different from those the woman opted for.”
“Meaning more violent, of course.”
Rachel’s expression tightened. “What was at stake called for it. Frye took our father into his confidence very early on, early enough for him to realize Frye had every intention of destroying the world as it is known today.”
“And, don’t tell me, Frye made your father one of the original number because of his control over the Fifth Generation.”
Jacob nodded. “They were to become the Seven’s centurions, riding herd over the weak and undeserving lot who manage to escape Frye’s wrath. Common killers, in other words.”
“The size of an army.”