by Jon Land
The imposing shape of the Rock of Gibraltar was as impressive today as it had always been. Over four hundred feet tall at its highest point, the jaggedly shaped structure formed a peninsula that jutted out into the strait that bore its name, angling for the southern tip of Spain. Still a prime tourist attraction, the rock’s limestone structure helped to account for the nearly 150 caves that had formed naturally over time. Those which had openings to the outside world would have made for perfect shelters, or storage holds, in times long past.
Or maybe not so long, as it turned out.
The group moved slowly, the fog, mist, and chill making traverse of the rock so precarious a single misstep could lead to severe accident or death.
“You’re wrong, you know,” Bajão said, turning suddenly toward Zarrin. “And I look forward to proving it when you see the barrels are still where they have been for well over a century.”
“Tell me something, Bajão. Why did your people hold onto the barrels for so long?” Zarrin couldn’t help but ask.
“Because British authorities scoured Gibraltar in search of them. We knew the Brits were up to something but never imagined it would reach the level it did. Trying to sell the barrels as common merchandise, even ordnance, would have led to our destruction, having drawn the wrath of an entire government. We’d be hunted down, jailed, or more likely executed on the spot. So we hid the barrels here, camouflaged and sealed the entrance to the cave, all the evidence of them removed from the world. We came back regularly to transfer their contents into fresh barrels, not as often once steel ones replaced the wooden variety around World War II.” Bajão seemed to spot something ahead in the sweep of Zarrin’s flashlight. “The cave’s right there, in that northern face of the rock.”
He led the way on again, while continuing to speak. “My sons have taken on the task of checking the cave once a month since they were teenagers, just as my father ceded the duty to me. The limestone in these parts did a remarkable job of preserving even the wooden barrels, except for those lost to time, the contents evaporating harmlessly I imagine.” Bajão looked toward Kosh, who’d drawn even with the group. “You’re going to get your money’s worth, Colonel.”
Kosh’s eyes strayed toward Zarrin. “I always do.”
Bajão moved his beefy hands to a rock pile and hoisted the entire connected stack aside, clearing the entrance to the cave. Kosh shoved his way past him, sweeping his flashlight about.
“Is this some kind of joke, Gypsy?”
Bajão followed the colonel’s gaze about the empty, dusty darkness within.
Zarrin remained behind them, not needing to see. “I warned you, Matias.”
Bajão’s face reddened as he twisted his gaze for his sons. “You lied to me! Lied!” He lurched forward across the rock and slapped one of his sons across the face. “How long have the barrels been missing, how long?”
“Four months,” the son answered, cowering.
“Don’t blame them, Matias,” said Zarrin, “blame Fernán Andrade.”
“Andrade?”
“He’s the only other man who knew where the barrels were hidden. He sold you out to the Americans who learned of their existence and followed their trail just as I did, likely just like you did, Colonel.”
Exhaustion mixed with disappointment on Kosh’s expression, making it look as if the air had been sucked out of his round face. “And what of us, Zarrin, you and me?”
“We can both walk away from this and live, Colonel.”
“No, we can’t.”
“Too bad,” Zarrin said, sweeping her bound hands, with fingers interlaced, sideways and up.
The blow took his hulking bodyguard on her right under the chin. Spun him around and exposed the pistol wedged into his belt. Needing their hands to negotiate the precarious climb here had precluded the men from having their weapons drawn and ready, and now that would cost them.
Zarrin stripped the pistol from the stunned man’s belt, even as Kosh’s other bodyguard was drawing his.
“Shoot her!” Kosh blared. “Kill her!”
And the second man started firing.
CHAPTER 82
Gibraltar
Zarrin leaped off the narrow path into a crevice below, bending at the knees to cushion the impact on the uneven footing. The thick mist welcomed her, engulfed her. Zarrin crouched in the moment before impact, feeling her left ankle turn when she hit a jagged patch of rock. Her right leg took most of her weight, nearly buckling, which would have spilled her off down a much deeper slope. Gun held in her clasped hands, she managed to hold her balance, wavering briefly but regaining all her footing in time to slam her shoulders against the cold face ahead of the gunshots.
They poured down in a constant rain briefly, pistol shots alternating with the din of echoing blasts from the shotguns of Bajão’s sons. The latter sprayed flecks and shards of the famed rock into Zarrin, the feeling that of being stuck with pins alternating with the harsher sting of what felt like shrapnel fragments unleashed by a blast. They no doubt expected her to fire back, but she didn’t, knowing they couldn’t see her from the ridge and not wanting to betray her own position.
“Maybe she’s dead,” Zarrin heard one of Kosh’s men say in Farsi.
“It’s not deep enough,” Kosh replied. “Go down there. Bring her back,” he followed in Spanish, addressing Bajão’s sons.
They grunted their disapproval, but their father ordered them on. And Zarrin heard the clatter of their steps circling slightly back to descend after her.
The enemy separated into two camps now, her odds changed considerably for the better. Zarrin held the pistol between her teeth and used her bound hands to claw against the rock face on the side of the crevice to climb upward. Again using the fog, the thick rolling mist washed in from the sea to collect in thick pockets across the rock. She stayed within it, following its course when it stole sight of what lay before her, knowing it collected thickest at the lowermost points. Follow it and she’d never lose track of the jutting peaks, narrow ridges, and crisscrossing paths that made up the Rock of Gibraltar.
Zarrin heard a heavy thud, followed by a gasp and the clang of metal against rock, as one of Bajão’s sons slipped and fell with his shotgun separated from him in the process. Swearing followed, the two brothers berating each other in a language she didn’t recognize.
Zarrin would save them for last.
Instinct dictated her next move, as she entered the fog and the flow, became one with the precarious, jagged sprawl of the Rock of Gibraltar the same way she melded with the music of whatever concerto she might be performing. That instinct brought her through the fog in a loop, doubling back toward the ridge leading to the cave and finding herself on an even narrower path that swept around it the long way.
Zarrin felt her heels flirting with the air as she followed that path, face and torso pressed against the rock face. The mist continued to swirl about her, its icelike coating left everywhere in its wake. This side of the peak offered no barrier to the wind lifting off the sea either. It slammed into Zarrin, seeming to blow in all directions at the same time as it whistled across the jagged rock.
She knew she was drawing close when she heard voices, the words muffled. She ended up above the cave opening, looking down on Bajão calling to his sons while Kosh and his men looked on, their backs to her. Zarrin changed the intent of her plan then and there, taking the pistol from her mouth in her bound hands and righting it downward. But she slipped on a piece of sheer rock at the last moment, first tumbled and then slid the rest of the way to the same ridge to which Bajão had brought them.
Holding fast to the pistol the whole time so, though jarred, she was still able to sight and fire on Kosh’s two men before her slide had come to a halt. They barely had time to turn, her bullets finding them in the very moment their eyes found her. She kept firing until the shots punched them backwards o
ver the side where they disappeared into the mist.
“Tell your sons to stay where they are, Bajão, or they die too.”
Too late. Bajão’s sons had already returned to the ridge along an easier slope to manage. They opened up with their shotguns, the rounds echoing in the cold night air, too far from Zarrin to manage anything but a lucky shot. She ignored the spray of dust and chipped rock and rotated her fire between them, her bullets carving a path through the mist. Both brothers went down, vanishing into the mist as well.
“Nooooooooo!” Bajão cried out, losing his footing and cracking his skull on the protruding edge of the rock as he started to go after them.
Zarrin swung back toward Kosh, the tiny man with the basketball-shaped head holding a pistol salvaged from one of his dead bodyguards in a trembling hand.
“You’ve got one shot left!” he yelled to her. “I counted!”
“One’s all I need, Colonel. Drop your gun and you get to live.”
Kosh seemed to be thinking of doing just that, then fired instead.
And missed.
Zarrin fired.
CHAPTER 83
Blountstown, Florida
McCracken and Wareagle went straight to Jeremiah’s Rule property from West Virginia. But the reverend was nowhere to be found. None of his security was about and a hand-scrawled sign duct-taped to the front door of his church read SERVICES CANCELLED.
His boxy, modular home looked painted onto the scene, surrounded by hastily installed shrubs, fruit trees, and flower gardens planted within fresh mulch that had dried to the texture of clay from lack of irrigation. From this angle, Blaine saw that the windows looked slanted, as if the land had not been properly leveled prior to the house being pieced together.
“Belgrade told me there’s something underneath it, Indian.”
“Death lives down there, Blainey,” Wareagle said stiffening. “And something else, too.”
McCracken and Wareagle broke into the house from the back, finding nothing of interest initially.
“Over here, Blainey,” Wareagle called from an area of the floor where he’d found a hatchway concealed beneath a throw carpet.
McCracken checked the hatch carefully for booby traps before lifting it open to reveal a ladder. He descended into the basement, more like a root cellar, that Belgrade’s satellite reconnaissance had turned up, following the path of illumination shone by Wareagle’s flashlight.
The stench assaulted him just a few rungs down. He passed it off initially as must, mold, and ground spoiled by the construction atop it. But the smell worsened, growing more acrid by the time he reached the bottom to sweep his own flashlight about.
The basement, which looked as if had been dug out after the house had been built, was circular and small, no more than thirty feet in diameter. The walls were formed of dark earth, the ceiling held up by hastily and unevenly placed wooden beams. He followed the stench to the far earthen wall before which what looked like a small stage had been erected.
Drawing closer, McCracken saw it was a makeshift church altar complete with a plywood cross nailed together hastily and standing crooked. The dried gray bones of a body, a corpse pulled from a violated grave, rested upon the stage-like altar, perfectly reassembled with all pieces intact. All that was missing was the flesh and blood. Its size suggested a child, ten or eleven probably, but the remains accounted for only a small measure of the stench.
Because a second set of mud-riddled bones, considerably more decayed than the first, had been placed at the foot of the plywood altar. The bones looked to have been pried haphazardly from the earth and reassembled in the same fashion as the first, only with some pieces missing in this case. Those bones, small and likely belonging to a smaller and younger child, rested on a cheap swatch of moldy carpet that reminded Blaine of the kind found in aged cars. The carpet was sodden with cool moist earth, indicating this older set of bones had been brought here very recently, almost surely within the past day.
He and Johnny must’ve just missed finding Rule on the premises before he fled.
“Indian,” he called up to Wareagle.
And that’s when he felt them coming, attacking from everywhere at once. Stench-riddled creatures raking at him with talons, jaws snapping below eyes wide with madness.
CHAPTER 84
Blountstown, Florida
Women! McCracken realized, as he fought them off. Not creatures or monsters at all. Desperate, pleading for help in barely audible rasps and cries, hands outstretched to latch onto him so he might carry them from their prison.
Half naked, reeking of their own waste, their eyes wild and terrified. He pushed them aside, realizing even in that terrible moment they must be Rule’s prisoners, held down here as further testament to his madness.
Six of them, Blaine counted, six …
The light from the flashlight alone forced one off him with filthy hands raised to shield her eyes. Blaine twisted it from her to the others, using its spill to hold the women back.
“Please,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Let me help you. I’m here to help you.”
McCracken couldn’t imagine how long they’d been down here shrouded in darkness; varying durations almost surely, all of them long enough to turn the sudden wash of illumination into a weapon for the women’s light-deprived eyes. And he caught splotchy still images in the flashlight’s reach, so horrifying that he wondered if they were tricks or illusions of his own mind.
One woman was missing a hand.
The empty eye socket of another was crusted over.
A third had dark blood oozing from her mouth. She opened it to scream and McCracken saw her tongue was gone.
He backed up toward the ladder, making sure he’d missed none in his count. An anonymous call would alert the proper authorities to the Reverend Jeremiah Rule’s personal chamber of horrors, Blaine thought as his flashlight froze on one last sight that stole a heartbeat and froze his breath.
He climbed faster than he’d ever climbed before, Wareagle helping to pull him up through the hatch and then sealing it quick.
“How bad, Blainey?”
“Worse, Indian,” McCracken said, struggling to steady his breathing, “worse than we ever imagined.”
PART FIVE:
THE TENTH CIRCLE
CHAPTER 85
Washington, DC
“I’m in the air now,” Zarrin told McCracken, speaking almost too softly to hear. “Talking to you from the lavatory.”
McCracken and Wareagle had administered basic first aid to Rule’s female prisoners prior to leaving his property. They’d suffered horribly at his hand, their wounds just one indication of his sadistic madness. Blaine and Johnny had no choice but to leave the women in the basement after bringing down water and placing the flashlights at strategic points to keep the darkness from consuming them again. They departed only after placing an anonymous call to 9-1-1 to get rescue personnel to the house.
“The Indian and I are walking across the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement place to meet up with my old friend H. J. Belgrade again,” McCracken told Zarrin.
“Another old friend of yours.”
“Only kind I’ve got. Should be able to report this whole thing is buttoned up, after we’ve spoken to him.”
“Are they going to cancel the speech?”
“That’s the hope, but short of that a full-scale roundup of the Rock Machine motorcycle gang should do the trick. Them and the Reverend Jeremiah Rule.”
“Be careful, McCracken. The man’s insane, and he’s got the White Death now.”
“Belgrade’s also arranging for a dragnet for the whole region in search of the barrels.”
“All this from a retirement home?”
“Nobody ever retires in this business. You know that.”
They approached the figure of H. J. Bel
grade feeding invisible pigeons again from his bag of bread crumbs, his eyes aimed downward, focused intently with a smile on the birds that weren’t there.
“Very convincing, H. J.,” McCracken greeted. “Almost had me fooled.”
Belgrade didn’t look up.
“It’s us,” McCracken continued.
Belgrade finally regarded them, breaking out into a wider grin. “You come to sing with me?”
“No need, Hank. There’s no one else watching.”
“It gets lonely here sometimes. No one to sing with. But now you’re here, two friends to sing with me.” His eyes met McCracken’s, nothing in them but emptiness. “Come on, let’s start.” Then, tossing more bread crumbs in rhythm with the tune, he started. “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town.”
“Hank?”
Belgrade’s gaze stayed downward, seeming to forget Blaine and Johnny were even there. “The wipers on the bus go Swish, swish, swish. Swish, swish, swish. Swish, swish, swish. The wipers on the bus go Swish, swish, swish all through the town.”
“Oh shit,” said McCracken, texting Zarrin.
She called him back from the airplane lavatory again.
“I won’t ask.”
“Don’t bother. We’re on our own.”
“How many in the opposition?”
“We’ve got to figure this motorcycle gang numbers at least a couple dozen. I’ve got Captain Seven checking their backgrounds, but I’m guessing plenty will have military experience, demolitions and explosives included. They already tried this once, Zarrin, so motivation won’t be an issue. And Rule knows everything he needs to know about the White Death.”
“Not good.”
“That was my first thought too.”
“What was your second?”
“We could use some more guns.”