Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  “Procedure be damned,” Marmara said, a bit of unease creeping into his voice. “We were late leaving Ankara because of the storm and must make time. Please divert. We are under no danger. Repeat, no danger.” The captain only wished he could have explained the protected nature of his cargo, rendering his the safest ship currently at sea, from pirates and anyone else. “Please acknowledge.”

  “Negative, Lucretia Maru. Please stop engines and prepare for boarding.”

  “Affirmative, Coast Command.”

  * * *

  Captain Marmara watched the six Coast Command personnel, including a female crewmember, climb the boarding ladder from the deck of their patrol boat. He recognized it as one of the older, hundred-and-fifty ton models of German origin that were nearing obsolescence twenty years earlier, but somehow still remained in service.

  It left him shaking his head.

  As a law-enforcing armed unit of the military, Turkish Coast Command was responsible to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in terms of assigned duties and operations along the Turkish coastline. Formed in 1982 as the maritime wing of the gendarmerie, the Coast Command enjoyed a personnel strength of about eleven hundred and over sixty boats and ships, one of which was now going to put the Lucretia Maru even more behind schedule.

  Marmara watched as his crewmembers helped the Coast Command personnel over the rail. He exchanged a salute with Lieutenant Commander Soptir, not bothering to hide his displeasure.

  “This was wholly unnecessary, Commander. You must be new at your job.”

  “How’s that, Captain?”

  Marmara couldn’t help but smirk. “Some things are better left unsaid.”

  Then he spotted the female crewmember sliding up from his right. “Yes, Captain Marmara,” she said, “they are.”

  And that’s when he felt the pistol pressed into his ribs.

  * * *

  Rifles unshouldered with the Lucretia Maru now stalled at sea, the five other fake Coast Command personnel rounded up the remainder of the crew, who now sat with arms draped behind their heads on the foredeck. The operation had been carried out with military swiftness and proficiency, not a single shot fired and the ship’s crew knowing better than to resist.

  “I believe we’re ready for our tour,” the woman told Captain Marmara, her face still draped in the shadows cast by her oversize cap.

  Stray strands of black hair protruded from the bun contained beneath it. And yet that and the dark blue uniform could not contain her steely sultriness. Her green eyes were empty and ageless, her skin flawless save for a dimple-size scar on her forehead and a larger depression of one that ran diagonally across her right cheek. To the captain of the Lucretia Maru, it looked like residue from a knife wound.

  One of her men jerked Marmara to his feet. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” the captain sneered.

  “I’m robbing your ship, Captain,” she told him, “of the copper piping you’re carrying in your holds.”

  Marmara’s sneer became a smirk. “That’s what you think?”

  “Why don’t you show me?”

  “As you wish,” the captain said.

  * * *

  Just the woman and one of her men accompanied Marmara three levels down to the cargo holds. Believing he could overpower both, he made a fitful launch for a fire ax hanging from a hull perch only to feel himself twisted around in blinding fashion and slammed against the bulkhead. He felt certain it must’ve been the man who’d overpowered him, but turning he saw it was the woman squeezing his breath off with one hand while the other pressed the pistol against his forehead.

  “Don’t test me again, Captain.”

  “You’ve already failed, pirate,” he managed, as they resumed their descent. “Miserably. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Down on the freighter’s cargo level, Marmara stopped just short of a bulkhead door. “Last chance, pirate. Once I open this door, there’s no going back.”

  The woman flashed the pistol again. “Do I need to count to three for you?”

  He smirked again. “Suit yourself.”

  And with that Marmara keyed in the proper code, twisting the hatch wheel when the pad’s light glowed green. “Like I said, there’s no going back now.…”

  He jerked the door open, allowing the dull light of the grated steel passageway to sift through, illuminating the hold’s contents.

  Not copper piping at all, Raven Khan realized immediately, feeling her chest tighten as the stench assaulted her. She took a few steps inside, the horrible sounds every bit a match for the smell, even before her eyes adjusted enough to the darkness to see what lay before her. She focused on one section in particular, blinking to make sure the sight, in all its ugliness, was real.

  Raven doubled over, feeling suddenly sick and sure she was going to vomit until she composed herself with several deep breaths and stood back up. The floor seemed to wobble beneath her, but she clung to her balance and stiffened her spine.

  “You see what I mean?” the captain continued. “Run now, pirate, and you just may live another week. You picked the absolute worst ship on the sea to hijack.”

  Raven jammed him up against the wall, pistol pressed against his forehead. “I’m going to kill you.”

  Emotionless, Marmara glanced up at the barrel. “That would change nothing. You think I have a choice? I don’t do what they say, they kill my family.”

  “What who says?”

  “I answer that, my family dies, too. So, pirate, make my day and pull the trigger.”

  THIRTEEN

  CARSON CITY, NEVADA

  “And do you consider staging exhibition fights against mixed martial arts champions proper behavior for a Las Vegas casino owner?” Kern resumed, after clearing his throat.

  “Durado Segura took exception to being asked to turn his title into what he perceived to be a joke. It was supposed to be a simple event carried out for charity, but Mr. Segura overreacted. Perhaps you should ask the two women trapped in the cage whether my intervention was warranted or not. And, if you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Chairman, what does such a thing have to do with my gaming license in the state of Nevada?”

  Kern leaned forward, as if provided with the opening he’d been waiting for. “Everything, Mr. Tiranno, it has everything to do with that, since it indicates you’re no stranger to violence, does it not, sir?”

  CALTAGIRONE, SICILY 1975

  Riding atop his tractor, Attilio, more grandfather to Michael than farmhand, was still smiling when his face exploded, the old man’s teeth vanishing in a burst of gore from his ruptured skull. The tractor continued forward on its own, the hands of its faceless driver still clinging to the wheel.

  pffffft … pffffft … pffffft …

  From where Michael was standing in the barn, the clacking sounded like sodden firecrackers, the bullets that spawned them taking the farm-hands Ercole and Stefano down in their tracks in the middle of the grazing field. The sight of them falling drew his father’s attention. Michael saw Vito Nunziato lurch up from the table set upon the house’s screen porch and lunge for the lupara shotgun he had propped up in the corner where screen and wall met.

  pffffft … pffffft … pffffft …

  The bullets ripped through the screen, spun his father around before he could reach the shotgun, and slammed him backward against the wall. Michael’s mother reappeared in the doorway in that moment, dropping to the porch’s plank floor the pair of plates she was carrying. Michael thought she may have screamed, but the sound of the plates shattering drowned everything else out.

  * * *

  “I suppose I’m not,” Michael said finally. “Everybody knows my casino was one of those struck in the terrorist attack on Las Vegas a few years ago. But that’s not why I’m here today, is it?”

  “No, Mr. Tiranno, it’s not. That attack is not the subject of today’s hearing. Since you brought up the past, though, did you enter into a partnership agreement with a man named Max Price upon coming to Las
Vegas?”

  “Briefly.”

  “What happened?”

  “He bought out my interests.”

  “You mean, forced you to sell.”

  Michael managed a smile. “If you consider making a five million dollar profit on a five hundred thousand dollar investment to imply force, then, yes, Mr. Price forced me to sell.”

  “He built the Maximus Casino on land you had secured, and then that casino exploded.”

  “I believe imploded is the proper term. You can find all the details in the FBI’s report exonerating me from any culpability. The same report blamed a gas leak.”

  “Then it’s a good thing this board is not bound by that conclusion. You were investigated, were you not?”

  “No,” Naomi corrected before Michael had a chance to. “Mr. Tiranno was only questioned. He was never considered a suspect. I believe other casino owners were questioned as well. None of them were considered suspects either.”

  “But no other casino owner purchased Price’s company for pennies on the dollar after shorting his stock, and then built the Seven Sins on the refuse of the Maximus.”

  “And, five years ago, no other casino owner saved the city of Las Vegas from destruction at the hands of terrorists.”

  “Some of the facts surrounding that incident remain a mystery and a matter of dispute,” Kern noted tersely.

  “But not the fact that a new road in Las Vegas has been named after my client to recognize his heroism and contribution to the city,” Naomi reminded. “This commission’s proclivity to continually ignore that fact doesn’t change its reality. And it’s not too much of a stretch to say, Mr. Kern, that without my client’s intervention, the aftermath of the attack would’ve provided a much different economic landscape in the city of Las Vegas and the State of Nevada as a whole, both of which you purport to be guardians for. With all due respect, sir, you should be thanking my client instead of badgering him.”

  Kern leaned forward over the raised bench, addressing his remarks directly at Michael. “Thank you, Mr. Tiranno. And, by the same token, most men would have run last night. Most men would never have picked a fight with a mixed martial arts champion. But you’re not most men, are you, Mr. Tiranno?”

  CALTAGIRONE, SICILY, 1975

  Michael saw his mother jerked backward by the spray of bullets as his father, dragging blood across the old paint, threw himself futilely sideways to shield her.

  The guns blared again, shredding the screen, pocking even the mended spots with fresh holes. Vito Nunziato disappeared in the torrent of fire. Michael heard high-pitched screams, as the three men swarmed toward the house, leveled rifles silenced but smoking.

  pffffft … pffffft … pff—

  Out in the barn Michael covered his ears, reached the haystack and started to grab for the pitchfork. He wanted to save his family, rush to their rescue. But he got only as far as the door before his fingers slid off the wooden handle as quickly as they’d found it, and he burrowed himself into the hay pile instead.

  * * *

  “I guess I’m not like most men, Mr. Kern,” Michael conceded. “Most men never would’ve built a resort with the scope and grandeur of the Seven Sins, would they?”

  “Precisely what this committee is charged with determining. And toward that end, we will reconvene one week from now.”

  Kern rapped his gavel down on the table and took his leave instantly without answering any questions shouted at him by the press. For his part, Michael rose and checked his cell phone again to see if he’d missed any more text messages. Looking up from the blank screen, he met the gaze of an innocuous-looking man in the rearmost row of the chamber with a bad comb-over and a cheap suit, twirling a Mont Blanc pen about in his hand.

  “Michael?” Naomi prodded.

  “Sorry,” he said, turning toward her. “What were you saying?”

  “That we need to get all financial records in order by next week’s hearing.”

  “Sure, of course,” Michael told her, gazing again toward the back row.

  But the man in the cheap suit who was twirling a Mont Blanc pen was gone.

  FOURTEEN

  RETEZAT MOUNTAINS, TRANSYLVANIA

  Professor Henri Bernard emerged from the underground chamber unearthed the day before.

  “You look as disappointed as I feel,” Scarlett said to him.

  He looked at her, not bothering to hide his suspicion. “Strange that someone in ancient times would go through so much trouble to hide something that isn’t there.”

  “Unless another team uncovered and removed it ahead of us,” Scarlett said, offering a hand to help him off the ladder.

  Bernard refused to take it. “There’s no mention of that in any of the records I examined.”

  “You mean the ones that can be accessed, Henri. There are plenty of expeditions known to have explored this area not prone to leaving notes. The Nazis, for example.”

  “Nazis, Scarlett? Really?”

  “It’s the truth,” she said, shrugging. “What can I say?”

  “Maybe you can explain how some of the stone shavings I found on the chamber floor had hardened into clumps.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The effect of exposure to moist air,” Bernard told her, brushing the dust and gravel from his pants. “But the effect takes hours to become this pronounced, not minutes.”

  “Maybe the air’s moister than you think, Henri.”

  He shook his head, clearly not convinced.

  * * *

  Unable to restrain her curiosity any longer, late that night Scarlett sneaked into the command tent where all the field equipment was located. An impressive array common to all high-end archaeological dig sites, this one included.

  She took a stool at the high table containing the various tools and equipment, and laid the pouch down before her. Then she gingerly unfastened the straw ties binding it closed and peeled back the top edge, humbled by the fact she was the first person to do so in two thousand years.

  Next came the most painstaking and crucial part. Scarlett opened the top of a clear plastic rectangular box that once sealed would mechanically flush out all air to prevent the ancient contents from being ravaged by the elements. Precious little exposure time was all it took to contaminate writings this ancient, turning them to dust sometimes right before the watcher’s eyes.

  Scarlett eased the matted contents of the pouch out slowly, again wearing plastic gloves to protect them from the oils of her skin. The pages that emerged were folded over into a book style, formed of parchment as opposed to papyrus. But something else claimed her eye: the worn, otherwise blank cover page was marked by a seal formed of red wax she recognized immediately as the royal seal of Julius Caesar himself. A complete version of the decayed seal she’d spotted upon the pouch itself.

  Enough to set her heart fluttering.

  Wasting no time at all, Scarlett placed the pages within the clear plastic, resealed the top, and touched a button. She heard a mechanical whir followed by a dull whooshing sound and adjusted the cool light and magnifying glass to inspect the now protected contents by using easily manipulated tools, built into the protective shell with the controls on the outside, to turn and examine the pages.

  As civilization turned from BC to AD, parchment emerged as a more practical alternative to papyrus, making the written word far more accessible to the general public and far longer-lasting given parchment’s ability to better withstand the elements. The animal skins were soaked in lime and scraped, stretched, and dried, rubbed smooth with pumice, and cut into sheets then sewn together. Eventually, the Romans also substituted parchment for the wooden leaves of the tabula to form a kind of notebook, like the one revealed now, that became the prototype of the modern book. Parchment was folded in half, stitched together and then finished in a cover to protect the accounts, notes, drafts, or letters contained inside.

  But the contents of these parchment pages were none of those. The layout of the cursive text made
it look more like a journal, a recounting of something in the ancient Latin dialect favored by the most noted scribes of the time. Scarlett had become expert with Latin linguistics from the time of the ancient Romans, but was still under no illusions she’d be able to translate the entire contents of the journal in a single night. That would take days, weeks, or months, even for the most adept in the field given that no writings this aged would be totally intact, requiring sophisticated extrapolation to fill in the gaps. But what looked to be the journal’s title, printed boldly on the top of page one, was something else again. And Scarlett positioned both the cool light and the magnifying glass over the clear plastic protecting it for closer inspection.

  She felt her heart skip a beat, holding her breath as she checked the titled words, the name of the author beneath them lost to the ages, again to make sure she’d read them right.

  * * *

  The figure laid low on a ridge of the Retezat Mountains that overlooked the archaeological dig site. He held the Brunton Eterna ELO Highpower binoculars to his eyes, marveling at how they provided a sharp view over such a long distance, enhanced further by night-vision capabilities. At just thirty-two ounces they delivered a crisp, clear image thanks to a bright fifty-one-millimeter objective and BaK-4 prism glass with fully multicoated lenses. Right now those lenses could make out nothing of the woman who’d sneaked into the tent toting a leather bag around her shoulder. But he kept them pressed against his eyes anyway, waiting for her to reemerge.

  * * *

  The first inside page indicated that the journal contained the results of an expedition indeed ordered by Julius Caesar himself. From what she could glean from the dates provided, the expedition had begun during the height of Caesar’s power, undertaken by a loyalist order handpicked for the task, an expedition of an unprecedented elaborate nature for the time.

  She couldn’t stop now. It was a tedious process. Translating the ancient Latin text but hearing the words as English in her mind, even imagining she could hear the unnamed author’s voice, the cadence and rhythm of the words familiar to her as if she’d somehow encountered this particular scribe’s writings before. The process went much better than expected, despite the fact that many of the letters had faded over the thousands of years since they’d been scrawled. Scarlett found herself unable to lift her eyes from the fragile parchment pages, falling into a rhythm that saw her make far more progress through the early sections than she’d ever imagined.