by Jon Land
CHAPTER 29
Sunnyside Yard, Queens, New York
“Don’t piss me off, MacNuts, or I may turn you in for the reward money,” Captain Seven said, his voice turned raspy by the heavy dose of smoke he’d just sucked into his lungs.
“There’s a reward?”
“Figure of speech,” the captain winked, inhaling another long drag off the marijuana blunt rolled into a cigar wrapper that smelled of cinnamon and grape as it burned.
His gray hair dangled well past his shoulders, hanging in tangles and ringlets left to the whims of nature, as if he used the rain as a washbasin. The captain wore a Grateful Dead tie-dyed T-shirt under an old leather vest that was fraying at the edges and missing all three of its buttons. So faded that the sun made it look gray in some patches and white in others. His eyes, a bit sleepy and almost drunken, had a playful glint about them. And when he uncrossed his arms with the still-smoking marijuana blunt in hand, McCracken noticed his T-shirt featured a peace sign with MAKE LOVE above it and NOT WAR below.
“You said it was important, MacNuts,” said Captain Seven. “You didn’t say it was this important.”
“I don’t remember saying anything.”
“Eyes are the window to the soul, man, window to the soul. And yours look about as pained as I’ve seen anyone not bright enough to improve their mood with some high-end hydro.”
“There’s not a drug in the world that can manage that right now, Captain.”
McCracken had no idea what the captain’s real name was, only that he had gotten this one thanks to behavior, eccentricities, and intelligence that had led one military commander to call the eccentric tech whiz a visitor from the seventh planet from a distant galaxy. Captain, accordingly, wasn’t a real military rank. Even though he’d never spent a day in boot camp or wearing a uniform, his efforts along with his scientific knowledge and creativity had saved countless lives. Captain Seven had been one of those on the forefront of using technology as a prime weapon against opponents of all levels, starting in Vietnam where he’d been assigned to further the efforts of McCracken and others in Operation Phoenix.
To reach the captain’s “home,” McCracken had made his way through the tight cluster of train cars packed into Amtrak’s Sunnyside Yard that ran along the lower length of Queens. Constructed in 1910, it had once been the largest locomotive storage yard in the world, occupying almost two hundred acres at one point. Today, it featured an amalgamation of mothballed engines and passenger cars overgrown with weeds sprouting from beneath their track beds and still-active train cars awaiting use when overflow or repairs demanded. Many, if not most, of the cars stored there might never leave the yard again, including two interconnected rusted-out relics located just short of an overpass and perched against a heavy steel fence, beyond which stood a ten-story self-storage facility.
Blaine had found the captain not in those cars in which he lived, but in an area of Sunnyside Yard hidden behind both a curve and an assortment of rusted steel corpses of train cars stacked off the tracks. The area looked utterly innocuous, perfect staging ground for the many experiments Captain Seven continued to carry out either on his or the military’s behalf.
Today, those experiments seem to involve what McCracken had first thought was a swarm of bees, but now realized was something else entirely.
“Mini-drones,” the captain said, flailing at the air briefly before snatching one for Blaine to see. “That’s what I call them.”
“Surveillance?” McCracken asked, holding the light, bee-like device up for closer inspection.
“Not quite. Allow me to demonstrate.” With that, Captain Seven hit a single button on a small remote, pointing the device toward a clothesline assemblage layered over the worst-dressed scarecrow ever. “Time to let my bug-thing go.”
“ ‘Bug-thing’?”
“Haven’t come up with a fancier name yet.”
McCracken opened his fingers and the marble-sized bug-thing took off like a jet, straight for Captain Seven’s horribly attired scarecrow. Impact came with a blast powerful enough for McCracken to feel the aftershock ripple from even forty feet away. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the scarecrow except for a few stray patches of an old denim jacket.
“Vintage Levi’s, MacNuts,” the captain proclaimed, approaching to better view the effects of the blast. “Always like to see my old shit go to a worthwhile end.”
“Miniature flying bombs,” McCracken said, shaking his head in amazement.
“I like that. Think I’ll call them ‘bug bombs’ instead. They key on temperature so I made sure to heat up the scarecrow to a comfortable 98.6.”
“Why didn’t the bug bomb just zero on me?”
“Ah, you noticed!”
“I’m still standing here, aren’t I?”
“Proximity,” the captain explained. “My bug bombs don’t arm until they’re twenty feet from whoever’s wielding them, the controller. So as long as you don’t move much and the target, or targets, are a reasonable difference away, just cover your ears.”
“Targets plural?”
“Artificial intelligence, MacNuts. My bug bombs automatically veer to the next available target when they read another on a course identical to theirs. Pretty simple shit, actually.”
“For you anyway.”
Captain Seven gave him a longer look. “And what about for you?”
“You remember my kind-of-son Matthew?”
“I remember he’s got a son of his own now,” the captain said, as if seeing something in Blaine’s eyes.
“Hopefully,” Blaine said, leaving it there.
“What brings you here again?” the captain managed and took another hit from his blunt.
“The word Croatoan mean anything to you?”
“Holy shit,” Captain Seven said, coughing the smoke out.
CHAPTER 30
Sunnyside Yard, Queens, New York
“Welcome to my humble abode, MacNuts,” Captain Seven said, arm extended to beckon McCracken to enter the train car that served as his home.
He lived among the yard’s relics. His heat and power came courtesy of underground propane tanks, the track on which his cars were perched taken off-line years before when he took up residence with the full acquiescence of the government in exchange for his work in the field of unique weapons development.
They slithered through a narrow break between a pair of engines parked nose to nose to reach the two passenger cars that formed the captain’s home, shielded by a minefield of strung-together passenger cars, some of which looked as if they dated back to the time of the yard’s opening.
“I’m sorry about the kid,” he said once they were inside, sucking in a deep hit off his tightly wrapped cigar blunt and exhaling a fresh cloud of smoke.
“Am I crazy for believing he might still be alive?”
“You’re crazy for still doing the shit you do, but not for that. Strange, inexplicable stuff happens every day; I’m living proof of that.”
“You mean like miracles?”
“I can only name about a thousand. Look around you.”
They’d entered the trailing car that contained the captain’s workshop. A collection of machines and half-completed experiments resting amid stacks of beakers, burners, chips, and diodes, and objects salvaged from here or there waiting to be tested or employed in one jerry-rigged weapon or another.
“Good thing you played to my soft side,” the captain said, “ ’cause otherwise I’d still be retired.”
“Since when?”
“Since I got your call. My mind was so messed up after our last adventure, I had to give up drugs a while, and I do not intend to go through that hell again.”
“You’re serious,” McCracken realized.
“As a heart attack—something else I narrowly avoided thanks to you.”
“I’m sure you have plans.”
“Thinking about starting up an old-age home for new-age folks like me. You know, where the elderly get to choose which cannabis to smoke, instead of fighting for the shuffleboard court. Rogue agents need not apply.”
“But since I played to your soft side …”
“I am definitely intrigued, MacNuts.” Captain Seven took another deep drag off his blunt and let it out slowly.
His wild hair, twisted into ringlets, shifted from side to side as he shook his head. “Croatoan … Only one of the greatest remaining unsolved mysteries known to man. How almost one hundred twenty settlers on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast simply vanished from the face of the earth. Except they didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Disappear. In fact, they never even left the fortress encampment where the colony was built.”
McCracken took a step closer to him. “You been reading a different history book than me on the subject?”
“Funny you should ask,” Captain Seven said and lifted an old, worn leather journal from a stack on his shelf. He eased it from inside the kind of perma-seal bag favored by archaeologists, flashing the front cover long enough for McCracken to see THE JOURNAL OF GOVERNOR JOHN WHITE scrawled in faded gold print upon the tattered leather. “Because something killed those colonists, MacNuts. Something really, really, really deadly. Call it an original version of a weapon of mass destruction, maybe the first one in existence, unless you count the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.”
“And you think whoever’s behind what I’m facing this time figured out what it was?”
“Nope, worse—I’m worried that they found it.”
CHAPTER 31
Roanoke Island: 1590
I make these entries from my cabin on board Captain Glanville’s ship in full knowledge they may serve as my epitaph should this journal ever be found at all.
I fear it will not. I fear my return to the site of the island colony once in my charge will see my death, as it saw the deaths of so many I was responsible for, including my own dear granddaughter. So perhaps I do this for Virginia, whose life was snuffed out much too young. Perhaps I do it because I cannot let her death go unanswered and unpunished.
Captain Glanville has resisted my overtures, my insistence about returning to the camp. He says we must pull up anchor and be gone from this cursed place as soon as the fog and the storm clear. He does not understand we cannot leave this unfinished, especially if my greatest fears turn out to be true. For if we dare flee as frightened, cowering men, we risk sentencing others to the same fate.
But I have kept the truth of my suspicions from the good captain. He is a simple man who knows war and must know his enemy at the sharp end of his blade. I will let him believe Indians were responsible for the fate of the colonists. I will let him believe we return as a war party to seek them out, that there will be a large bounty waiting for the savages’ skins when we return home. I cannot share the complete truth with Glanville because I am not aware of it myself. I only know with dread certainty, first, that the colonists are all dead and, second, that the Natives had nothing to do with it. There was no evidence of an attack because there was no attack; indeed, the signal for such in the form of a Maltese cross was nowhere to be found where it otherwise would have been near CROATOAN as carved into a still-standing post.
But no colonist carved it; I see that in the clarity that distance brings, the same clarity that tells me I must return once the storm passes. I suppose the word could be easily passed off as something geographical or some indication from the local tribe of Natives. But the word Croatoan, I have learned, has another meaning, one of dire impact and portent that makes the placement of the word not an announcement at all.
But a warning.
Of what exactly I do not know; at least, am not totally sure. What I do know is whatever befell the colonists, including my own family, struck them all at once, in a mere instant. It struck them down as they stood or slept, with a malevolence never seen before. I remain a God-fearing man, but in recent years have not seen fit to make time for religion or church. My duty became so all-consuming that it swallowed my faith and bastardized my beliefs. Perhaps, if things had been different, I would have a better understanding of the nature of the evil that struck the colony I now must return to confront and destroy as best I can.
That evil had lain dormant for years, for centuries, waiting for our coming to serve up victims to its ultimate contentment. And then it still lay in wait for the proper time when the colony was least prepared. I commissioned the building of the fort myself, personally supervised the crafting of its walls and fortifications to be able to repel any attack, even if it came from a vastly superior force. So, too, the plans I left in place assured sufficient stores of food and water to withstand a long siege. I sailed from the colony lo those three years ago secure in the notion my people were safe from any attack from the outside.
I never considered the need to protect them from an attack from within.
So tomorrow I return to the colony, my colony, with Captain Glanville and those of his men who know what it is to see death and dispense it themselves. But I fear even their trained and practiced eyes are ill prepared for what we will find. And I fear, too, their weapons will be useless against the enemy that resides there.
Glanville wants revenge for the two men he lost to the evil; perhaps he wasn’t as hard to convince as he let on, making me dangle bounty before him as an added incentive. But such bounty is worthless to any man dead before he can claim it. And if we are not careful, that will be the fate that awaits us all.
So take these words, if you are reading them, as warning to make sure no one ever sails the waters with Roanoke Island as their destination. Strike it from the maps of shipping lanes, nautical charts, and the knowledge of this New World that bears with it dangers and the grim reality that we never should have ventured here.
CHAPTER 32
Sunnyside Yard, Queens, New York
“Are we finished now?” Captain Seven asked, after McCracken was done reading.
“You sure this is authentic?”
“I matched the writing against White’s signature on a number of requisition orders that survived the era. Door’s over there. You can let yourself out.”
“Only White survived and returned to England, didn’t he?”
“Spent the rest of his life at odds with Sir Walter Raleigh, doing everything he could to steer future expeditions away from the New World. Lots of people thought he’d lost his mind. Maybe that’s why I relate to him so well, MacNuts,” the captain said, taking a glass-blown bong from a nearby shelf and packing it with the contents of a Ziploc bag. “Invented it myself,” he explained. “Noncombustible. No match or lighter required. Simple oxygen supplies the required spark. Cleanest high you’ll ever experience.”
“Not for me, Captain.”
“Come on, make believe you’re back in the ’Nam world.”
“Didn’t smoke there either.”
“No? And me thinking you hung out with that big Indian on account of him being a whiz with homegrown. You know, Indians were the original weed farmers. Shit, why do you think the pilgrims had such a good time that first Thanksgiving? Hint: it wasn’t the turkey.”
“Since White survived, why are there no more entries in his journal?”
“Must’ve had so much to say he started a new one. Makes sense, considering there aren’t a lot of pages left in this volume. It was discovered a few months back among the possessions of a collector, the only White journal found there or anywhere else for that matter.”
“So whatever I’m looking for …”
“Only one place I can think of to find it.”
“Think I’ll head down to North Carolina to check out a certain island.”
The captain bounced up out of hi
s seat. “Sounds good to me.”
“I thought you were retired.”
“Nope, just thinking about it. Who else is gonna hold your hand, lest you end up unleashing a shit storm on the world.”
“How’s that exactly?”
Captain Seven grabbed a small tote bag and began stuffing in all manner of bowls and bongs, along with three Ziploc bags of pot. “Because whatever killed the colonists might still be there.”
CHAPTER 33
Steubenville, Ohio
Zarrin moved purposefully about the law-enforcement personnel inside the cordoned-off crime scene where a bomb had laid waste to a church four days ago. Her ID badge dangled from her neck, identifying her as an agent for one of the various investigative agencies on the scene—so many that it was easy to fit in and hide in utterly plain sight. She had many such IDs for intelligence and investigative services all over the world, an invaluable resource when it came to the kind of close access to the scene her detailed planning required.
She spotted a group of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents conferring off to the side, two of them showcasing objects in their hands sheathed in plastic evidence-gathering gloves. Zarrin approached and stopped just short of them, making sure they could see her badge.
“Is that the trigger?” she asked a female agent holding a small twisted and charred metal object.
The woman checked her dangling ID, clearly impressed as she nodded. “You know your shit, don’t you?”
“I’ve been around a bombing site or two,” Zarrin told her.
The call she’d gotten at Heathrow was from Colonel Kosh.
“You should have told me,” he accused. “Now you have placed my mission at risk.”
“Colonel?”
“You think I wouldn’t have realized? That church bombing in Ohio has your trademark all over it. How could you not tell me of your involvement?”