Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  Campbell wasn’t going to argue with her. “Again, ma’am, I hope you’re right. We’ll have to see where the evidence takes us.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Arne Wingard stuck his head in. “Doctor Wyrick? Doctor Haskins? We’re ready to sink our first trench down to Level One. Sorry, Colonel, are you through in here?”

  “Yes, I just wanted some technical information,” said Campbell. “What do you mean sink a trench down to Level One, Doctor Wingard?”

  “In view of what’s going on, I think it’s a good idea to see if we can hurry up and get to the good stuff, so to speak, as soon as we decently can,” replied Wingard. “If there is any good stuff to be found, which I’m convinced there will be. Allura and I and several diggers are going to take the six center grid squares in the longhouse area down about another four feet to Level One, the earth strata we estimate at between ten and twelve thousand years old. Paleolithic, although we’ll have to confirm the age of the strata by carbon-dating from soil samples, of course, which will contain animal and vegetable residue of various kinds. Orthodoxy tells us there shouldn’t be anything down there except Indian bones and stone hand tools, not even any Clovis or Folsom points that far back. If there’s anything else, we’ve hit pay dirt.”

  “Let’s hope you can date it accurately,” said Campbell with a significant look at the others.

  “Sure we can. Why not?” asked Wingard. He looked at them. “Anyway, each grid block is a meter square, so we’ll have a kind of trench, and then we start working from the center outward towards all four walls, so we in essence lower the floor of the longhouse in sections, and sift through every grain of dirt. We think there must have been centuries at least of constant habitation here, on and off, as the site was occupied at different periods, but we don’t know when that earliest period of habitation was. What say let’s go find out?”

  “Certainly, Doctor Wingard,” said Haskins. They left the Shack and Wingard looked at them. “Any developments?” he asked.

  “Not really, but it’s early days yet,” said Campbell.

  “Look, I know you gentlemen don’t have crystal balls, but are any of my people in danger here on this site? Is the site itself in danger?”

  “There’s a chance, yes,” Campbell told him bluntly. “Somebody doesn’t like what you’re doing here and they’re willing to go to any length to stop it, as we saw last night. This person or persons may be trying to frighten you into suspending the dig. You gonna get twitchy on us?”

  “Not on your nelly!” said Wingard immediately. “I just wondered if I was being paranoid wearing this.” He opened his khaki work jacket and displayed an automatic in a shoulder holster.

  “Just because you’re paranoid, that don’t mean they ain’t out to get you,” Campbell told him.

  “Paranoids have enemies too, you know,” added Tom.

  * * *

  Bob knew full well that in MacPherson and Botha he had perfectly competent subordinates who were capable of handling a homicide investigation, and who would resent the Chief of Ds leaning over their shoulder and back-seat driving while they worked. He also understood that, although he was being exquisitely polite about it, the fact was that this was a Bureau of State Security operation and Tom was in charge of it despite his lower rank. Therefore Campbell forced himself to do both the politic and the practical thing; he left Lost Creek and the investigation into Bella Sutcliffe’s murder in Tom’s hands, went back to the Fairmont Lodge, returned from there to Missoula with the helicopter, and then went home for a late lunch. That afternoon he went back to his own office and dealt with other matters, sternly resisting the urge to phone Tom or DS MacPherson for an update. He knew they would call him when they had something or needed something from him.

  Tom finally called about six that evening, just as Bob was leaving for the day. “First thing, we need to use full scramble. It’s possible our guy may have his own interception technology, or else he’s got American satellite access. We need to try to avoid any eavesdropping.”

  Robert clicked a couple of buttons on his desk phone to activate the NAR’s latest top-security audio ambiguation program. “Let’s hope our techies are still one jump ahead of theirs,” he said.

  “Knock wood. Okay, there’s news,” Horakova told him. “Some good, some bad, some weird.”

  “Start with the bad news first,” said Bob.

  “The bad news is that we have not turned up hide nor hair of a viable suspect,” said Horakova. “Not so much as a whisper of a clue. As far as Mac and Botha can tell, everybody at the Fairmont checks out. Your lads and a few of mine have discreetly turned that hotel upside down. Nobody has anything in their possession they shouldn’t have, or anything that might be used as a garrote, although that could well be hidden someplace in a tool shed or a store room looking like an innocuous piece of rope or string. The man would have to be a gibbering idiot to keep it on him. Since a gun wasn’t used, we’ve no reason to demand any of the guests give us their personal weapons for ballistics analysis, and the foreigners don’t have any anyway. Other than that, everybody’s clean as a whistle. No more strange home-made death rays or time machines. I had one of our tech teams flown down from Spokane. They brought along a few items we don’t have in our BOSS lab here, and a special medical examiner as well.”

  “I’ll bet Eddie Cantone was tickled pink,” said Campbell.

  “Actually, he was okay with it,” said Horakova. “He said that way if anything was wrong with the post-mortem, his own rump was covered.”

  “Nobody in the regular cops likes security cases,” Campbell dryly. “You trenchcoats make us nervous. License to kill and all. No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Tom. “We’re supposed to make people nervous. Anyway, now for the weird part. Our forensic egghead brought with him some kind of super-duper micro-spectroscopic analysis machine and a laptop full of hotshot software that WPB stole off various American and European computers, and we were able to find a few traces of foreign DNA on Bella Sutcliffe’s remains despite the dunking in chlorinated water.”

  “Under her fingernails?” asked Bob. “So she fought back? Good for her!”

  “Nope,” said Tom. “Saliva. The strangulation forced her tongue through her teeth and effectively sealed her mouth shut, keeping the pool water out.”

  “I don’t follow,” said Campbell.

  “The bastard seems to have given her the kiss of death, literally. Slipped her some tongue before he slipped her the noose.”

  “What a prince!” snorted Bob in disgust. “But you say you were able to get readable DNA?”

  “Yes,” Horakova told him. “If you were worried, Arne Wingard’s off the hook, and so is Speidel. We got their DNA maps from the Health Service in Missoula and up in Coeur d’Alene, where Speidel lives.”

  “It must be nice not to have to worry about warrants in your service,” commented Campbell.

  “It is. No match on any of the Eminent Persons, either, unless the ONR or one of the other foreign agencies got clever and tampered with their ringer’s on-file DNA records before our Circus hackers could steal them, which I suppose is possible if you’re really into Byzantine conspiracy theory.”

  “And this is the weird part, how?” asked Bob.

  “Our killer, or at least our kisser, whom I think we can assume are one and the same, is seventy per cent Khazar Type C, which is usually Lithuanian or other Baltic Jew; fourteen percent Khazar D, which is Polish or Galician Jewish, and ten percent Caucasian as in from the Caucasus Mountains area, so this one’s great-grandmother probably was raped by Cossacks, or at least she partied hearty with them. The remaining six per cent is bits and pieces of Eastern Europe and a touch of something they think might be Lapp.”

  Campbell sat there in stunned silence for a moment. “You’re telling me we’ve not only got a spy and a killer running around my patch here in Montana, but a goddamned Jew as well?” he demanded.

  “That’s what it looks like,
yes,” said Tom quietly. “What can I tell you, Bob? These people are the greatest masters of deception in human history. It’s what they do. Did we really think they would never deceive us again just because we won a revolution and then a war? They don’t stop, you know. They’ll never stop until we kill them all.”

  “Anything else?” asked Campbell heavily. “You said there was good news?”

  “Yes, the good news is that white people were here in North America first,” said Tom.

  “They found something on the site?” queried Bob.

  “Roughly twelve thousand years ago, whoever built the first longhouse at Lost Creek apparently raised it around a grave or a tomb,” Tom told him. “Very primitive, just a narrow hole filled with stones and vegetation of some sort, possibly wildflowers, in which was laid the body of a young man of about twenty.”

  “Some kind of human sacrifice like those European bog burials?” asked Campbell. “I saw a TV program on them once.”

  “They’re not sure, but it looks more like a normal burial of a respected person” said Horakova. “They’re still slowly exposing the remains as we speak, and they’re setting up floodlights down there to keep on working through the night. I have to admit watching them unearth that grave is sending chills up my spine. You don’t often get to witness history being made.”

  Georgia’s face flashed through Bob’s mind as it still did every few days, despite the years that had gone by. “It’s overrated, sometimes,” he replied.

  “Well, the skull is definitely modern Caucasian, not Cro-Magnon, damned sure not Indian, and they found some flint spear points and a knife blade that might have been grave goods, stuff for the departed to take with him to the afterlife, so forth and so on,” Tom continued. “The blades are of the classic Solutrean shape. The Martineaus have confirmed this. They’re in a state of shock. All the EPs are. This is as if we’d found Kennewick Man fully intact where he fell, and this time there are no lefty-libs or Indians or any damnable United States of America to tell us we can’t learn all about him. If this find holds up under their scrutiny, and the carbon-dating confirms the age, then this is it, Bob. Game, set, and match. We were here first.”

  “When Scorpius hears that, he’s going to go berserk,” said Campbell grimly. “You’ve got full security on the site?”

  “Four of my men, plus I made sure Bobby and all the allegedly off-duty Guards who are helping out are strapped,” confirmed Horakova.

  “I think we need to ramp it up,” said Campbell. “Let me send you some uniforms for visibility.”

  “All right, thanks,” said Tom. “The way I see it, Scorpius wants to mess up of all these archaeological finds in order to discredit the site, or simply make any kind of analysis impossible. That would seem to be his line of thinking, based on that X-ray bomb, assuming he really did intend to use it and the whole thing isn’t some sort of bizarre diversion. The murder looks spur-of-the-moment to me.”

  “So why did he kill her?” wondered Campbell. “There are three classic motives for homicide, the Three P’s they call ’em in detective school: passion, profit, and protection. This must be a protection killing. He had to shut Bella Sutcliffe up, or get her out of the way.”

  “Either she was his accomplice and she got out of line somehow, or else she found out something about him that made her a danger to him,” speculated Tom.

  “Or he’s worried we’re getting close and he wanted to throw sand in our faces,” Campbell reminded him.

  “But we’re not getting close,” complained Horakova. “We still haven’t got a clue, except we now know he’s a hebe.”

  “Which almost certainly means he is in deep disguise and was inserted deliberately by ONR or maybe CSIS, probably some time ago,” said Campbell. “Let’s see if we can start working up a profile of someone close to the Lost Creek site itself or maybe just to the university who might fit. The main thing is to try and figure out where he will strike next.”

  “I’d rather not,” said Horakova. “Too risky. He’s already killed once. Is there any way we could draw him out? Bait him with some nice juicy artifacts or something of the kind, and set a trap for him?”

  “Let me think about that,” mused Campbell. “Let’s look at this from his point of view. By killing Bella Sutcliffe, he’s blown his cover, at least to the extent that now everybody knows something’s going on, and he knows we’re looking for him. If he didn’t already know.”

  “I’m sure ONR found some way of notifying him through whatever communication channel they’re using that he was compromised when our guy hacked their database and discovered his existence,” said Horakova.

  “True. One way or the other, he knows we’re on his trail and we’ll be all over the whole Lost Creek project like white on rice. He has to move fast now. He has to do something that will completely ruin the whole dig.”

  “Another X-ray bomb?” guessed Horakova. “And where would he have planted that thing, anyway, to irradiate the maximum number of Lost Creek artifacts? It would have to be in the Shack on site, which is where they are taken before they’re shipped out to the lab at UM, or in the lab itself. That’s all I can figure, but he wouldn’t be able to get them all at once, and he would have had to find some way to activate the Röntgen tubes when he wasn’t around, unless he’s suicidal. Plus, in both locations it would be pretty hard to conceal the thing without somebody noticing it; people are in and out of both places all the time. So how did that devilish machine end up in the Fairmont Lodge? Who brought the damned thing into the hotel, and why?”

  Campbell stared at the wall in front of him, tapping a pencil on his desk, thinking hard. “It wouldn’t be the lab,” he said after a bit. “There’s no point in damaging a few artifacts when they can always excavate more. He has to do something to screw up that entire archaeological site, make it useless to scholars and its secrets unobtainable. He has to take out the dig itself. How would you go about that, Tom?”

  “Hmmm. Interesting point. You couldn’t flood the place, since Lost Creek itself is only a trickling stream. Some kind of really massive explosion that would bury all twelve acres or so of the extended site? Probably not within his capability if he’s operating alone. Be a hell of a big truck bomb. Maybe we should ask Jason for an expert opinion,” Tom added with a chuckle.

  “Not a bomb,” said Campbell, his blood suddenly freezing in his veins. “A missile. Maybe a Predator Five mounting a tactical nuke or a CL-20 warhead. Something that would reduce the whole site to nothing but a gigantic crater.”

  “Could it get by our air defense grid?” asked Horakova. “All those goop guns and static curtains, not to mention good old-fashioned Bluelights?”

  “There hasn’t been a serious war scare ever since the Seven Weeks ended, Tom,” said Campbell. “One thing about being a nation of soldiers with a two-for-two track record against Big A itself is that nobody else has been stupid enough to try us on. No one is expecting an attack, not by one single fast missile fired without warning from a mobile launcher hidden on the back of a truck or inside a railroad freight car as near to the border as they can get it, which is what I imagine Scorpius has lined up. Two or three minutes in the air to reach Anaconda. Yeah, it might get through. And they’re desperate enough to try it. You have no idea how a proven and accepted Lost Creek will morally destroy what is left of world liberalism, once it becomes an accepted historical fact that white men were here first and we seem to have a lot longer pedigree on earth than any other race.”

  “So when do we think this might happen?” asked Tom.

  Campbell took a deep breath. “If it was me, I’d say tonight,” he said. “Scorpius doesn’t know whether he slipped up and left a clue behind that will nail him for the Sutcliffe murder. For all he knows, we might be closing in on him right now. He has to move fast, break contact with the scene, and then try to escape back across the McCurtain, or possibly submerge deep back under cover here in the Republic. If you’re digging up a twelve-thousand-year-
old Caucasian corpse in North America, from Scorpius’s viewpoint that has to be stopped now. I’ll call up Jason’s old boss, General Drones. He knows me, professionally and socially through Jason and his old NVA crowd, and I’ll explain the whole thing to him so he can get air defense on the alert. They’ll listen to him a lot quicker than me, and it will be faster than my trying to go through the NDF chain of command on the ground here. Tom, you need to evacuate Lost Creek. If nothing happens you can just blame it on me, say I’m coming down with Alzheimers and I had a panic attack or something, but this is the only way I can think of Scorpius can permanently remove that archaeological site as a threat to his ideology.”

  “Mmm… if you’re right, that will also tip him off,” said Tom. “He might get spooked and disappear.”

  “Tom, Ally and Bobby are out there tonight!” Campbell snapped at him.

  “I know they are, sir. But I want to try something. Let me get back to you.” Horakova hung up.

  Campbell cursed the younger man, and then realized he didn’t have time for recriminations. He dialed the personal number of the old NVA man A.J. Drones, now retired but still a voice that could cut through red tape. He was right about Drones still having major juice. Half an hour after Campbell got him on the phone, the entire northeastern and southeastern border area’s air defense command went on full alert. Then Campbell sat back in his chair and waited for Horakova to call back, fighting the urge to lose his cool and his dignity and call first. Again he had to remind himself that this was a State Security case and, lifelong friends though they were, Tom was under no obligation to even so much as give him the time of day. The hours crept by and the phone was silent. In the Guard station outside his office door he could hear the noise of the night shift coming on. The one time the phone rang it was Millie wanting to know if he was coming home soon. “I need to stay here for a while, Mil,” he told her.