Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “Over there!” she heard a voice cry out, followed by the blare of static over a walkie-talkie.

  Katie took off, immediately conscious of footsteps pounding in her wake. Quick glimpses to the sides revealed harbor police converging on her from seemingly all angles until she darted into the labyrinthine array of pallets and storage containers packed with coffee and waiting for transport. She dipped one way, then the other, the police concentrated behind her when she spotted the open cargo hold of an eighteen-wheeler, packed with just-delivered bags of freshly harvested coffee beans. The truck was likely bound for New Orleans’s Dupuy Storage and Forwarding, home to one of the country’s largest bulk-processing operations.

  Katie didn’t hesitate, launching herself into a mad dash that ended with a leap into the eighteen-wheeler’s hold. She stumbled upon landing, turning her ankle but still managing to squeeze herself between a pair of pallets packed to the brim with khaki-colored canvas bags of whole beans. The aroma was richer and stronger than any Starbucks brew she’d ever drunk. Stronger still once the hold door was yanked downward and sealed, plunging Katie into darkness.

  She felt the rumble of the engine starting and a jolt as the truck pulled out of the loading line, heading toward the access road. Katie longed for a cell phone, a computer, anything she could use to contact Todd Lipton in Greenland.

  Because if Ocean Bore had found her, it could well be they’d found WorldSafe’s base as well.

  Katie needed to report what she knew to him, some secret mission the Deepwater Venture had been on in search of something other than oil.

  But what?

  CHAPTER 12

  New Orleans

  Johnny Wareagle was waiting at a table well past the bar inside K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen on Chartres Street in the French Quarter when McCracken entered. Wareagle rose when he saw him approaching, his knees banging the underside of the table and nearly upending it. He looked distinctly uncomfortable so far from his wooded retreat in Maine, or more recent temporary home in South Dakota, but forced a smile nonetheless.

  “Little late for Mardi Gras, aren’t you, Indian?” McCracken greeted, unable to disguise how happy he was to see the man he’d known for forty-plus years now. Their friendship dated back to serving in the same Special Forces unit in Vietnam, a covert-ops team specializing in behind-enemy-lines infiltration missions as part of Operation Phoenix. Phoenix had been the CIA and army’s dedicated attempt to lift the failing war from the ashes and, from an operational standpoint, it succeeded, though too late to have a measurable effect on the eventual outcome.

  The thing that was an endless source of great pride to men like McCracken and Wareagle, though, was how much the current special-operations community owed to the lessons learned from their work in Operation Phoenix. Vietnam was justly credited with creating the entire concept of Special Forces “A” teams, small groups of professional specialist soldiers who were as attuned to training a local resistance or guerrilla force as they were mixing it up themselves. McCracken and Wareagle were hardly alone among other Vietnam-era SF veterans in marveling at the efforts of their descendants in equally hellish places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, like then, most of their work, with the exception of the celebrated SEAL Team 6, went unknown and unnoticed. Covert ops were called that for a reason, after all, and McCracken knew the operators of today willingly shunned the spotlight just as much as he and Wareagle had.

  And still did, for that matter.

  “But right on time to help celebrate your birthday, Blainey.”

  McCracken laid the soft case containing the restored samurai sword down across an empty chair. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “You come to K-Paul’s every year on your birthday,” Wareagle said, grateful to sit back down so the stares of the crowded restaurant’s occupants were no longer drawn to his seven-foot frame.

  “Yet you never felt the urge to help me celebrate before.”

  “This is a special year.”

  “That because I’m turning sixty or since we lost a hostage last week?”

  “We’ve lost hostages before, Blainey.”

  McCracken clenched his fists and tapped his knuckles together. “Not with me on the verge of such a momentous occasion we haven’t. Not after two years of being away from the game.” He picked up his chair to move it farther under the table, then just set it back down again.

  “Just what I thought,” Wareagle said, nodding.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re still blaming yourself, still failing to consider the three hostages we saved and the fact that all four would’ve died if we hadn’t intervened.”

  McCracken crossed his arms and gazed across the table at Wareagle who was struggling to find comfort in a chair that wasn’t built to accommodate his vast size. “So where’s my present?”

  “Coming.”

  “Dancing girl?”

  “Better.”

  “What?”

  “The third of us left from the original group.” Wareagle hesitated for effect. “Paul Basmajian.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Crazy Horse, South Dakota: One month earlier

  Immediately after his initial meeting with Hank Folsom about the hostage college students, McCracken made the trek to Crazy Horse, South Dakota, where Johnny Wareagle had been holed up for months on his latest mission. Not reconnaissance, rescue, or extraction, but the completion of a monument to the greatest Sioux warrior of all time, Chief Crazy Horse.

  Once completed it would be the largest sculpture in the world: a granite portrait of the famed warrior on horseback carved, blown, and whittled out of the imposing Black Hills. In scale as well as complexity, the final product would dwarf even the collection of presidential profiles on nearby Mount Rushmore, the portrait’s nose alone stretching to twenty-seven feet. Construction had actually started way back in 1948, subjected over the years to endless financial and political setbacks before suffering further stagnation in recent years despite eighty-five full-time staff members dedicated to its construction.

  Wareagle’s involvement originated in the lack of an accurate rendering of what Crazy Horse actually looked like. Descended from a long line of Sioux warriors, Johnny had been the beneficiary of old drawings picturing subjects from his own warrior lineage standing with the legend himself: his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather if memory served McCracken correctly. These were deemed the most accurate of any Crazy Horse portraits, with the added benefit of picturing him as both an old and young man, though he looked remarkably similar in both. But the level of Wareagle’s contribution changed as soon as he visited the site and proclaimed he could not, would not leave until he saw the portrait out of granite completed.

  McCracken had found Wareagle hard at work with hammer and chisel in hand amid the harsh winds and biting temperatures of late winter in South Dakota. He worked without a safety harness or belay on a narrow ledge barely wide enough to accommodate his feet, making McCracken feel almost guilty for hammering a restraining bolt into the face alongside his oldest friend and tying himself down.

  “Nice work, Indian.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Blainey.”

  McCracken felt the cold breeze blow some of Wareagle’s etchings into his face. “This your version of retirement?”

  “Anything but,” Wareagle said, barely looking up from his labor. “Honoring the greatest Sioux of all time reminds me of a legacy I can never totally live up to.” He met McCracken’s gaze and held it this time. “Crazy Horse was a warrior until his very last day on Earth and I will be too.”

  “That’s good, because we’ve got a job.”

  Wareagle glanced at him, but only briefly. “As I figured.”

  “’Cause why else would I be here.”

  “It was only a matter of time, Blainey, but this job will still have to wait until I’m finished.”

  McCracken looked up and around to regard their place amid the massive carving. “I don
’t think the college students held hostage by a drug cartel in Mexico can wait that long.”

  Wareagle tensed visibly, then did his best to reposition the chisel before lowering it to face McCracken again. “So you came here to rescue me first.”

  “An assault rifle or an MK-2 knife would look a lot better in your hand than a hammer.”

  “Different weapons, different tasks.”

  “Statues don’t bleed, Indian, and granite is plenty harder than flesh and bone.”

  “You know why I came here?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “To find out if I could stay, to find out how long I could live without that part of me birthed by the Hellfire.”

  “End result?”

  “I knew you’d be coming and in my mind’s eye did not welcome your presence. I saw myself turning you away, refusing a return to the world we have so long known.”

  McCracken shifted on the thin ledge slightly to better face Wareagle. “So here I am.”

  “And when I got your message, the vision from my mind’s eye proved wrong. I felt something stir in the pit of my stomach, a familiar feeling I could not ignore or deny, confronting my true nature.”

  McCracken again regarded the product of Johnny’s labor. “As a warrior instead of an artist, you mean.”

  “Like the tale of the scorpion and the frog.”

  “I figured I owed you, Indian.”

  “Blainey?”

  “How many times have you lifted me from a funk with words I didn’t fully understand but somehow made things feel right? How many times have you made sense of what we were facing, put it in perspective? So that’s what I’m doing, returning the favor.”

  “Because you feel I’ve strayed from the path.”

  “Not in so many words, but that’s the general idea. You and I were bred for one thing, Indian—wet work, not art work. Here you are turning the legend of your people into the face of a memorial when the real memorial is how many lives we’ve saved over the years.”

  Wareagle smiled thinly. “How many lives this time, Blainey?”

  “Four.”

  “And how many captors?”

  “A hundred, maybe more.”

  And then, undramatically, Wareagle returned the hammer and chisel to his work belt. “The Hellfire all over again.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”

  CHAPTER 14

  New Orleans

  “Baz?” McCracken asked now. “Is he still working the Gulf? I thought he retired.”

  “Twice,” Johnny Wareagle told him. “But he can’t manage the task any more than we can.”

  “Except he’s got the good sense to stay away from guns, drug dealers, hostage rescues, rocket-propelled grenades, Hellfire missiles—should I go on?”

  Wareagle seemed unmoved. “It’s worked for us for forty years, Blainey.”

  “Minus the last two.” McCracken shook his head. “Why the hell are we still alive? I mean, we’ve both known soldiers, operatives, operators—whatever you want to call them—who didn’t make it through their first field op. We’ve survived what feels like a thousand of them.”

  Wareagle settled back in his chair at the K-Paul’s table, suddenly pensive. “There is a legend among my people called the Rabbit and the Elk. The rabbit lived with his old grandmother, who needed a new dress. ‘I will go out and trap a deer or an elk for you,’ he said. ‘Then you shall have a new dress.’ When he went out hunting, he laid down his bow in the path while he looked at his snares. An elk coming by saw the bow. ‘I will play a joke on the rabbit,’ said the elk to himself. ‘I will make him think I have been caught in his bow string.’ He then put one foot on the string and lay down as if dead. By and by the rabbit returned. When he saw the elk, he was filled with joy and ran home crying: ‘Grandmother, I have trapped a fine elk. You shall have a new dress from his skin. Throw the old one in the fire!’ This the old grandmother did. But when he returned to the snare, the elk sprang to his feet laughing. ‘Ho, friend rabbit,’ he called, ‘You thought to trap me; now I have mocked you.’ And he ran away into the thicket. The rabbit who had come back to skin the elk now ran home again. ‘Grandmother, don’t throw your dress in the fire,’ he cried. But it was too late. The old dress was burned.”

  “Okay,” McCracken said, after Wareagle had finished, “I’m waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “The point.”

  “Among young Sioux, the point of the legend has always been the folly of assumption, of fooling oneself into believing something is what it isn’t. We—you, me, Bas—have never suffered from that. We live today because we see the world for what it is and accept our place in it.”

  McCracken looked at Wareagle across the table, grinning. “Good. Because I was having trouble picturing you in a dress.”

  Wareagle looked down at the hand that had just set the water glass down on the table. “You’re not wearing your ring, Blainey.”

  “Neither are you.”

  “The difference being I never do.”

  “Maybe I don’t feel especially worthy of it right now.”

  Wareagle turned his gaze toward the soft case lying across the extra chair. “How old is the sword?”

  “Five hundred years, give or take a decade.”

  “How old was it yesterday?”

  “About the same.”

  Wareagle leaned back just enough to make his chair creak. “My point exactly.”

  “What about last week? Believe I was considerably younger before Juárez.”

  “Why us after so long, Blainey?”

  “Suit who came calling said he came to us because we were the only ones who could get it done.”

  “But you don’t believe him.”

  “I think he came to us because no one else would take the job. Suicide mission.”

  “Anything but, as it turned out.”

  “I don’t know what’s worse, Indian. The feeling we were done or the feeling maybe we should be.”

  Wareagle leaned forward, so fluidly that his chair didn’t make a sound this time. “There’s another story my people tell of a Sioux warrior who once defended his tribe single-handedly against a Cherokee raiding party. It was winter and the Cherokees were foraging for food when they came upon the village. But in snow and cold, the Sioux warrior struck them all down. The legend says he covered himself in ice and snow so the Cherokee looked past him into the air. And when it was over, instead of celebrating, he wept. Not out of guilt or remorse, but because there was no one left to kill.”

  “Did he live to fight another day?”

  “The legend doesn’t say, Blainey.”

  “Neither does ours.”

  CHAPTER 15

  New Orleans

  Katie DeMarco moved quickly down the sidewalk, cell phone glued to her ear, willing the connection to come through. She knew they’d found her again; spotting jacket-clad men on this blistering hot New Orleans day baking the asphalt beneath a sun-drenched sky was a dead giveaway there, even before she glimpsed them talking into their wrist-mounted microphones when she passed by.

  She’d ridden the eighteen-wheeler all the way to the Dupuy Storage and Forwarding facility, climbing down once the cargo door was raised open to the shocked stares of the workers. Katie paid them no heed, just hurried off before they could gather their thoughts.

  “Hey! . . . Hey!”

  She never acknowledged the calls shouted her way, walking until she found a bus stop and climbed onto a bus bound for the nearby downtown district. She stank of coffee, the pungent aroma so imbedded in her nostrils that she couldn’t shake it.

  Upon reaching the French Quarter, Katie had purchased a throwaway cell phone in a drugstore, stepping outside to find more jacketed figures seemingly talking into their hands directly across the street from her. There was no choice now; she had to risk making the call while she still had the chance, convinced those at the other end were in at least as much danger as she.

>   Katie dialed Todd Lipton’s satellite number, her pace kicked up to a fast walk just short of a jog. She heard a click, followed by a harsh buzzing sound that indicated his phone was ringing in Greenland.

  “Hello,” Lipton answered finally, through the static bursts clogging the line.

  “Todd, it’s me.”

  “Is that you—”

  “Don’t use my name. It’s not safe. None of us are safe.”

  “You’re breaking up. I can hardly hear you. Could you say that again?”

  Katie DeMarco moved the phone closer to her mouth, continuing to weave through pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk. “I said you’re not safe. I think Ocean Bore is on to us.”

  “I heard ‘on to us.’ Did you say on to us?”

  “Yes, Todd. You need to take—”

  “I can’t hear you . . .”

  “—precautions.”

  “Precautions? What precautions?”

  “I stepped in a load of shit here in the Gulf. I don’t know what Ocean Bore is after, but it’s big and it’s not oil. Repeat, not oil.”

  “What about oil?”

  “Did you hear what I just said? Can you hear me now?”

  No response amid the static.

  Katie swallowed hard, as she composed her next words. “Listen to me, Todd. They’re after me. They know I was on board the Venture.” Katie waited for him to respond. “Todd, are you there? Can you hear me?”

  Silence followed, interminable and empty, that left Katie’s mind racing.

  “Todd?” she posed, hoping he was still there, the connection intact.

  “I heard you say they were after you,” his voice returned finally.

  “I’ve got to move. Don’t try calling me. I’ll call you again as soon as I’m safe.”

  “Did you say safe? Are you in danger? What’s going on?”

  “Todd, please, there’s no time. Just listen!”

  “You need to contact Twist,” he said instead.