Stopping at the unmanned, wide-open main gate, it was obvious that security threats to this important training facility were on the lower end of the spectrum. He drove into the front parking lot and chose a spot next to a forest camouflaged open-back Humvee. Should the security threat level go up though, Jake noticed there were certainly enough precautionary measures to thwart an attack.
Bordering the front of the property was an eight-foot high, black steel security fence that acted as an obvious barrier to the road. Each of the thick fence posts was topped with three razor-sharp prongs to deter any climbing. It was both to decorate and to deter. He also noticed a row of concrete blocks lining the length of main building — a precaution he had seen many times in Iraq and Afghanistan against potential car bombs. Although the main two-story brick building seemed less than imposing, it was the brain trust of individuals inside that mattered the most.
Barely on time for his appointment and his stomach rumbling, Jake grabbed his gadget-filled briefcase, donned his black beret, and double-stepped it to the front doors. Glancing up at the heavily contrasted blue and orange entrance signage, he smiled when the unit’s nickname and logo caught his eye. The words Iroquois Warriors sat under the division’s logo. It displayed an orange-colored silhouette profile of an Indian head complete with five feathers in a top-knot. The feathers signified the original Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Jake nodded his approval.
Headquartered in Rochester, but having units located throughout New York, New Jersey and New England, the 3,600 Army Reserve soldiers of the 98th were traditionally tasked to train active-duty and reserve soldiers in war fighting skills and battlefield specialties. The 98th’s latest contribution was the training they gave to the Iraqi Regular Army and National Guard, thus expediting the return home of U.S. military units guarding the budding Middle Eastern democracy. It was up to Jake Tununda to capture that unit’s moment in history.
As an MHI field historian, he was not only slated to assess historical items for the institute’s collection, but he was also responsible for preserving and promoting the Army’s history — sometimes one soldier at a time. His assignment today was to orally record the unit’s after-action theatre reports as part of the institute’s Oral History Program. This material was then made available for public access in MHI’s general holdings, an invaluable national asset to educators and researchers. With holdings of 285,000 books, 1,000,000 photographs, and archival items exceeding 6.5 million, MHI was considered one of the most prestigious military educational and historical institutes in the world.
Jake kicked the morning off with three interviews of NCOs who had just rotated back home. He then moved onto the assistant division commander for support, a colonel who had served on a secret task force that hunted down and eliminated terrorist leaders in Iraq. Recording the conversation with his hand-held, voice-activated tape recorder, Jake obtained declassified insight into the operational activities of the most lethal task forces in the military.
Jake then concluded his assignment with a twenty-minute talk of his own experiences when deployed with the 10th. He had a classroom full of personnel eager to hear of his own exploits.
Finishing up his speech he used animated hand gestures and walked back and forth in front of his audience to maintain the attention on himself. He concluded with, “…And to sum things up, whatever your future contribution may be, know that we, as U.S. Army soldiers, have played a major role in American history. In a world that has never known sustainable peace, we have shaped this nation into the most advanced and safest nation on earth. From hand-to-hand combat with the American Indian—” He feigned a cough and got a chuckle. “...to modern-day conventional combined arms warfare. From revolutionary war against a monarchy, to a civil war against our brothers. To world wars, guerrilla wars, hot and cold wars, and now to the war on terrorism, we, the warriors of this nation, have confronted America’s enemies abroad so that our citizens may sleep peacefully at home. Thank you all. I appreciate your time today.”
The classroom of personnel stood up and applauded Major Tununda. Afterward, his government duties done for the day, he was treated to lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and engaged in some catch-up with several men and women he knew from previous tours of duty.
Returning back to the headquarters in the early afternoon with a full belly, Jake thought about calling Investigator Hart as he prepared to head back home to Pennsylvania. Instead, on a whim, he asked the colonel about using a vacant office to conduct some research on the Internet. His intuition told him he ought to do a little investigative inquiry into some of Thomas Boyd’s journal contents before he left. Maybe he would find something to help out Uncle Joe and Lizzie, he thought. But an image of Nero pointing the Glock at him appeared in his mind too. Maybe he would find something to get back at that asshole, despite explicit orders from his own boss not to do so.
The colonel allowed him access to an office of a captain who was out sick. He gave him a password to connect to their WIFI Internet account. Soon Jake was staring at a blank Google Search screen, but the problem was he couldn’t decide where to start digging. Boyd’s missing officer’s sword popped into his mind, or maybe he’d work on the Butler letter to Brant? Maybe the box belonged to Brant, he surmised. But that really had no relation to the White Deer Society and Atotarho’s lost crown, from what he could reason.
Instead, he decided to focus on the clues that were most relevant to stopping Nero in his tracks. The Freemason’s Cipher intrigued him the most for cracking it would reveal the directions to the Kendaia cave — Nero’s presumed goal.
In a Google Search window he typed the phrase Freemason’s Cipher and hit the search button. Thousands of hits came up. He clicked on the first link for a free encyclopedia site and started reading. He learned the Freemason’s Cipher simply substituted letters for symbols based on a grid of how the alphabet was presented. It was first used in the early 1700s for secret correspondence. A decoded example key showed the letters and how they were assigned to the grid.
There was the answer staring back at him. It was so easy, too easy. “Utterly ridiculous!” Jake said out loud. One Google Search, one hit, and at his fingertips was the answer to a 230 year-old riddle. He was thrilled but also completely disappointed at the same time. He expected more of a challenge, an investigative research, something. Hell, this was supposed to be a secret code from a secret fraternity. He should have known better, most of the Freemason’s inner workings were readily available all over the Internet — information that men once had their lives threatened over if revealed.
And then it occurred to him that if the key to Freemason’s Cipher was this easily accessible to the public then surely Nero was already one step ahead of him. With a renewed sense of urgency he opened Adobe Photoshop, the premier image manipulation software on the market, and immediately pulled up Boyd’s journal page from September 5, 1779. He scrolled down to the first torn cipher below the reference about Swetland’s Indian cave. It was time Boyd’s secret was revealed.
He used the text tool in Photoshop and started cross-referencing the cipher key against Boyd’s symbols. He keyed in each letter underneath its corresponding symbol and deciphered the message within minutes.
He excitedly read the message to himself. He then pulled up Boyd’s last journal page and scrolled down to where that page was torn off too — the second fragment. This would be the direction to the buried keg of loot.
Once decoded, he read this one out loud. “KEG LOCATION… EAST FROM KAHAGHSAW… BETWEEN TWO PARALLE… UNTIL THEY ALMOST… UNDER THREE L… PLACED EAST W… YOU WILL F…” The rest of the message was conveniently referenced by Boyd to be deposited in his most trusted Craft brother’s most trusted trade tool. What that tool was, Jake hadn’t a clue. But finding it would definitely stop Nero or anyone else from going any further. The White Deer Society’s mission would be intact and he could go on with his life.
“Most trusted Craft brother?” Jake asked hi
mself. Easy. The Craft was a short name for Freemasonry and it being a fraternity they referred to themselves as Brothers. Just as he had suspected when he told his boss Ashland, he scrolled back to Boyd’s journal and found he had clearly named his Brother in an earlier Thursday, September 2nd excerpt as being accompanied by my most trusted Sergeant Sean McTavish. And later at the end of the September 12th excerpt again mentioned ...my most trusted Craft Brother...
With a clear name of McTavish to go by, Jake entered another Google web search. “18,100 hits! Ah, shit,” he said with a sigh. “Wrong approach. Come on, think!”
Refining the search by adding the word sergeant in front of the name, as well as the year 1779, he whittled the hit meter down to 75. Now that’s more like it, he told himself.
Sorting through the top web site listings, he found a journal reference from General John Sullivan’s land surveyor who accompanied the expedition. Intrigued, Jake read on. The surveyor, Thomas Grant, narrated how on September 14th, a day after the Groveland Ambush where Boyd lost his life, that Sean McTavish had been severely reprimanded by General Sullivan for his and Boyd’s direct contradiction of the general’s explicit orders. Grant explained how Boyd was specifically told not to take more than four scouts with him, including an Oneida Indian scout, for the September 12th night reconnaissance mission of Little Beard’s Town on the Genesee River. Instead, for unknown reasons, Boyd took 26 riflemen.
He was also ordered not to make any contact with the enemy. But he failed in those orders too, ultimately leading to his detachment’s demise.
Having noticed four Indians in a deserted village the morning of the 13th, Boyd ordered McTavish to fire on them. McTavish killed one and scalped him, but the others escaped. The detachment gave chase and ran head-on into a 400-man English ambush by Butler’s Rangers and Brant’s Indians.
Putting up a gallant fight on a high knoll, the outnumbered Americans were eventually overrun, most being slaughtered at close range. McTavish and only three other survivors escaped the massacre after fighting through the enemy lines surrounding them. Boyd was wounded in the side. He and sergeant Michael Parker, along with their Oneida chief Honyost Thaosagwat, were taken prisoner. Honyost was killed instantly. Boyd and Parker were tortured to death the next day. The other survivors, besides McTavish, were listed as a famous Virginian marksman Timothy Murphy, a rifleman from New Hampshire John McDonald, and an unnamed Canadian. Thomas Grant, who had been surveying the swamp area below Conesus Lake at the time, remarked how he had helped the four survivors make it back to the main encampment to raise the general alarm.
Although a colorful battle reference, Jake still hadn’t a clue to what exactly McTavish’s most trusted trade tool was. Standing up to stretch out, he shed his dress coat and hung it over the chair back. He began his habitual pacing, his bulky arms folded across his chest, his face tense in thought. All thoughts of hooking up with the investigator for dinner were purged from his mind.
The light bulb then went on in his head.
He scolded himself, realizing a wealth of Sullivan-Clinton campaign resources were available to him right through the Military History Institute’s main computer database. He bent down and opened a new browser page linking to MHI’s web site. After logging onto an authorized staff-use-only section, he tapped into the main database. Sergeant Sean McTavish popped up immediately with two references, one in the 1779 campaign — but an exact match to Grant’s description — and the other a Daughters of the American Revolution mention of a McTavish from Upper Exeter, Pennsylvania. The DAR site opened up a short biography of McTavish, written in 1890:
Sean Michael McTavish, of Scottish descent, was from Upper Exeter on the Susquehanna River in the County of Luzerne, Pa., where at the age of 21 he enlisted in January, 1776, as a Private in Captain Stephen Bayard’s Company, transferred to Captain Matthew Smith’s Company the following November, and January 14, 1778, was made Sergeant in the First Pennsylvania Regiment. Of strong physique, courageous character almost to recklessness, he was endowed with the qualities of a fine marksman which would fit him in the scout detachment he joined under command of Lieutenant Thomas Boyd of nearby Washingtonville, and subsequently under command of Major Parr. He fought under General John Sullivan’s brigade at the Battle of Brandywine in September of 1777 where he obtained a new Ferguson style rifle from a British scout he dispatched and scalped. During the Sullivan-Clinton expedition of the summer of 1779, as payback for the Wyoming Valley Massacre the year before, he had been initiated, passed, and raised as a Master Mason under General John Sullivan’s traveling Freemason Military Lodge No. 19, thus joining the ranks of gentlemen Patriots of the Craft. McTavish proved a savage warrior during the Battle of Newtown and later up into Iroquois territory. He was known to have taken well over 20 scalps from Indians, Tories and Butler’s Rangers. He prayed every night to his most trusted trade tool, widely said to be his Ferguson rifle, as mentioned by the military Freemason brethren who later attended his burial at the Mountain View Cemetery in his hometown.
“The rifle! BINGO!” Jake laughed, his eyes glued to the biography. A grin was now pasted across his face.
After surviving the Groveland Ambush at the end of the campaign, he found the mutilated body of his close friend and commander, Lt. Thomas Boyd, the next day. Grief-stricken with mental illness and demoted in rank for not following orders, McTavish was sent back home to Upper Exeter shortly after the internment of Boyd’s body. Having no offspring and never recovering mentally from a state of severe battle distress, he died several years later at the age of 30.
“Damn,” Jake whispered, his smile wiped clean, knowing exactly the mental anguish McTavish had experienced on the battlefield.
He looked up and sighed, then deliberately switched his mind back to the trade tool riddle. Finding that one hidden reference jolted him back to exhilaration. It was a military working tool. Shaking his head, he realized he had known the answer all along but just didn’t make the connection. After all, he had even referred to the modern assault rifle as a tool of the professional warrior to his own troops in the field.
With that important clue to go on, he now had a jump-start on tracking down where McTavish’s rifle might have ended up. It would prove the most challenging part of his investigation, something he now actually looked forward to. He wasted no time.
Knowing that most Continental troops at the time brought their own weapons with them to battle and subsequently returned home with them, Jake figured that’s where he’d start searching for the McTavish rifle — his hometown. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, he started making phone inquiries.
The first call he placed was to the Luzerne County Historical Society down in Pennsylvania. He had known them to be an exceptional organization in preserving the history of the Wyoming Valley during colonial times, so he gambled that they might give him a good lead. He explained he was a history researcher with the Army looking into the McTavish Revolutionary War records. An archivist on duty said she too was familiar with the Daughters of the American Revolution reference on McTavish, but could offer no more help other than what Jake had already discovered himself. Just before hanging up though, she mentioned offhand there was a wonderful 97-year-old man named Raymond Gellers who was the Town of Exeter historian and genealogist. He was considered a local expert in matters pertaining to the Revolutionary War. But she said he was very hard to get a hold of. Jake thanked her and wrote his number down.
He immediately tried calling the man but the number rang without any response or follow-up answering service. For the next hour and a half, his attempts proved fruitless. The number just rang and rang. His other research into McTavish’s rifle also failed to provide any tangible results. The search for the rifle seemed to hit a hard end before it even got off the ground. Packing up his equipment and feeling a bit dejected, Jake headed out of the building after thanking the commander for his time. Just before starting his truck up, he figured he’d give Gellers one last chance befor
e hitting the road back home. He pulled out his phone and dialed.
“Raymond here,” said a crusty old voice on the other end of the line.
Jake sat up. “Mr. Gellers?”
“Yes.”
“This is Major R.J. Tununda with the Army Military History Institute out of Carlisle and I’m conducting some research on a Revolutionary War soldier from your hometown.”
“Lemme guess, Sean Michael McTavish, right?”
“Yes. How did—?”
“His rifle, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Can’t believe that rifle has generated so much interest lately,” said Gellers. “It sat unnoticed for years and all of a sudden, well, have you got something to write with, son?”
“Yep,” said Jake, wondering if Nero was already on the same path.
“It’s a truly amazing story,” Gellers started. “It’s a rare custom-made, rapid-fire breech loading rifle designed by a British Major named Patrick Ferguson. Came out in 1776 and was a hit with the British light infantry and marksmen because they were accurate out to 250 yards. You see the rifle could be loaded without a ramrod and then fired. It lessened the chances of blowing their cover. Four to six shots per minute was the rate.”
“Sounds like one hell of a breakthrough compared to regular muskets back then,” Jake remarked.
“Sure was. McTavish picked up the rifle at Brandywine during a skirmish.”
“I’m curious as to what became of his rifle when he came back home,” asked Jake, scribbling furiously on his notepad. “Did he bring it back with him?”
“Sure did. It remained in the McTavish family for generations as an heirloom after he died, but during the Great Depression a family member gave it to the bank for partial payment on a debt. It had been stored in a Wilkes-Barre bank vault ever since and was basically all but forgotten, that is until 1996 when the bank’s board of trustees bequeathed the rifle to our local library as one of its prized holdings.”
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