The Emerald Scepter

by Paul Kemprecos

  Hawkins checked his altimeter and compass. “We’re at ten thousand feet,” he said. “The point should be about a hundred feet in that direction.”

  Calvin swept his flashlight at the soupy mists.

  “What if it isn’t?”

  “Simple. We fall off the mountain.”

  “Good thing I know when you’re joking.” Pause. “You are joking?”

  “Sure, Cal. I’m joking.”

  They lugged the first bag fifty feet or so, set it down and went back for the other. Abby dropped light sticks to create a path through the fog. After a couple of trips back and forth the gear was stacked and ready to go.

  A silvery glow came to the mists as the new sun reflected off thousands of droplets of moisture. They moved through the pre-dawn gloom like ghosts. As the fog thinned, the mountain top materialized and they could see that they were near the edge of the domed summit.

  Hawkins and Calvin walked onto a ledge, which stuck out like a huge diving platform. The vertical wall of gray rock under the ledge dropped a few hundred feet to where the mountain flared out at a forty-five degree angle.

  Valley fog was pooling in a wooly layer of dark gray clouds that obscured the base of the mountain. Hawkins extended his hand and felt the air current rising up the sheer face.

  “Good air flow. Should give us a nice ridge lift.”

  Abby’s plan to jump off the top of the mountain and fly down to the Kurtz camp on hang-gliders had seemed crazy when she proposed it. But it seemed slightly less insane after she showed off a 3-D image she had created on her IPad with a GPS link to Google Earth. Abby pointed to the ledge.

  “Here’s your diving board. Mountain elevation is around two thousand feet. Follow the flight line I’ve charted to this clearing near the camp, and with the sun behind you, you should make it to the ground without being seen.”

  “Not bad. What about extraction?” Calvin said.

  “I’m still working that out.”

  After Hawkins studied the maps and photos he said, “I’ve done enough hang-gliding to be comfortable with the flight. What about you, Cal?”

  “I’ve tried it a few times. Can’t be any worse than fast-roping from a chopper onto the deck of a ship. Let’s do it.”

  The answer didn’t surprise Hawkins. Calvin would jump into a volcano if Hawkins asked him to, and he’d do the same for his friend.

  Returning to their stockpile, they unpacked the bags and assembled the gliders. The cargo box yielded camouflage one-piece jumpsuits, helmets with built-in radios that could be operated with a finger switch, and protective goggles. In addition to their weapons and ammunition, they each had a wristwatch that contained an altimeter and compass, and a helmet-mounted variometer that would track the climb and descent rate and warn the pilot with a beeping sound if the glider was in danger of stalling. Hawkins had a wrist GPS as well.

  “Time, gentlemen,” Abby said with a glance at her watch.

  “Ready?” Hawkins asked Calvin.

  “Ready.”

  Hawkins strapped himself into the harness, grabbed the sides of the control bar, and lifted the sixty-five pound glider over his head.

  Calvin hoisted his glider, teetering as he tried to balance the assembly.

  “Looking good, Cal,” Hawk lied.

  “Let’s see if I got this right, Hawk. Push the bar down to go fast, pull it to slow down. Shift my weight to make a turn.”

  “You’ve got it. The launch is easy. Just run down the slope, jump off, and when you feel surge from the wind in the sail, drop your hands from the sides of the bar down to the horizontal bar.”

  “Like this?”

  Calvin trotted down the ledge, keeping the wing level, and jumped off into space. The glider dipped, as the force of gravity pulled it down and forward, but the wing caught the air being deflected up the face of the mountain, and rose higher, delicately balancing on an updraft.

  Calvin soared away from the mountain and over the fog-shrouded valley in a straight line. He tucked his legs into the cocoon-like bag that extended from the harness, straightened his body, rolled the wing to one side and then the other, and straightened out into a dive to gain speed, climbing in an aerobatic loop that had him flying upside down, then back again.

  He lowered his left wingtip, a maneuver that brought him into a rolling turn back toward the ledge. Calvin’s voice crackled over Hawkins’ earphones.

  “What’s wrong, hawk man? Forgotten how to fly?”

  Hawkins pressed the radio switch. “You said you had only flown couple of times.”

  “That’s right, man. Liked it so much I bought my own glider.”

  “I didn’t know bald eagles grew so big,” Hawkins said, referring to his friend’s shaved scalp.

  “Best you can do man? Flap your wings instead of your mouth and get up here in the sky with the big birds.”

  Abby’s voice cut into their conversation.

  “It’s getting light. If you two eagles don’t get to the ground in a couple of minutes you’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “Lady’s got a point,” Calvin said.

  “So she does.”

  Hawk started off at a brisk walk that accelerated into a run. He leapt off the ledge and felt the surge as the sail caught the wind, arresting his downward motion. The glider lifted him higher and he headed out in a straight line, keeping his wing more or less level. It had been a while since the last time he had flown in a hang glider, and he reminded himself that his moves had to be gentle.

  Within moments, he was soaring over the valley, kept aloft by the wave of air upwelling from the ground far below. Calvin had come around and was pacing him on the right side. Hawkins glanced at his wrist GPS, shifted his body weight to adjust his course, and as he neared the target, pulled back on the bar. The front of the wing tipped down, and he began to gain speed. Several times he got going too fast, or had to correct for current variability, so that the descent was more like that of a falling leaf than a bird.

  Near the top of the cloud layer he looked as his altimeter. The ceiling was low, which would keep them invisible until the last few moments of flight, but the ground would come up fast.

  He jerked his thumb downward, and Calvin gave him the OK sign.

  Abby watched Hawkins’ torturous descent from the top of the mountain. She was wondering if she’d been overconfident in coming up with this crazy plan and breathed a sigh of relief as the pair of large birds slipped out of sight in the gray clouds. She lowered the binoculars and looked around at the shreds of fog that lingered on the bleak, rocky summit.

  And all at once, she felt very much alone.

  She took a last glance into the chasm, muttered a quick prayer to the gods that look over mortals who have more courage than good sense, and hurried back to the Jeep.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Marzak watched Cait get into her Honda and he started the engine of his rental car. He was parked across the street from her Alexandria apartment. His Washington Redskins baseball hat was pulled down low over his platinum hair and aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes.

  He pulled out behind Cait, keeping back a couple of car-lengths. He followed her out to the Beltway, then toward Washington, expecting her to head for Georgetown, but she bypassed the city, and drove over the Bay Bridge, then south on the eastern shore of Maryland.

  The change in expectations heightened his hunting instincts, especially as the countryside grew more rural and houses farther apart. She pulled over a couple of times, once into a gas station where she talked to someone in the office, then kept going.

  He would pounce as soon as he sensed that the moment was right.

  When Cait turned off the country road onto a narrow blacktop road that led into the woods, he knew that moment would come very soon.

  Cait’s deci
sion had been impulsive.

  She had every intention of driving into Georgetown to begin her research, but she changed her mind at the last second. She had been thinking about the treasure, and its long voyage from Afghanistan and across the ocean, when she remembered the fate of the Kurtz yacht.

  The boat had ended up as a restaurant on the Eastern Shore of Maryland according to Sutherland’s Prester John file. Cait thought the rediscovery of the yacht and its connection to the treasure would be another whole chapter in her book, and she felt herself irresistibly pulled to visit it.

  She wandered the back roads, and was about to give up her search when the gas station attendant told her the restaurant had closed years before, but the boat was still there on the shore. She could hardly contain her excitement when she saw the faded old sign on the leaning post.

  The Yachtsman Seafood Restaurant.

  She ignored a No Trespassing sign and turned onto the road. Trees and bushes whipped both sides of her car and the wheels bumped over broken blacktop that looked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  The rank smell of the bay became stronger as she drove deeper into the woods. She traveled another quarter mile, rounded a curve and saw the old yacht Kurtz had named after his dead wife. Barely visible on the stern were the words: Sweet Priscilla. Cait stared at the yacht, trying to reconcile the rotting old derelict in front of her with the sleek ocean-going vessel she had seen in the old photographs.

  She got out of the car and walked toward the vessel, which had been drawn up onto land. She could see the sparkle of bay water beyond the marsh that bordered the shore. She walked past another restaurant sign, this one hanging by a single nail, and stopped at the bottom of a wooden ramp leading onto the deck. She tested the ramp with her foot to make sure it wouldn’t break under her weight, and walked up it.

  Cait stopped in front of a gaping doorway. The doors lay in pieces on the deck. She stuck her head through the portal only to recoil at the over-powering smell of rot and mold. Her eyes could pick out interior details in the light coming through the windows and holes in the walls. She saw some old beer cans and assumed they had been tossed there by fishermen. There were broken tables and chairs, indicating that this once had been a dining room. Birds had built nests in the ceiling beams and decorated the floor with their droppings.

  She was overcome by a sense of incredible sadness. Despite the nastiness of her surroundings she found herself being drawn further into the boat.

  If only this old wreck could talk, what a story it would tell, she thought.

  She walked through the dining room into a space that must have been a lounge.

  Light streamed through the windows illuminating the old bar and overturned tables and stools. She tried to picture the bar filled with alcohol-fueled laughter and the clink of glasses, but the task was beyond her imagination. It was clear that this was a fool’s errand. The interior of the boat had been gutted of any trace of Kurtz or his treasure.

  She turned and walked out of the lounge, engrossed in her thoughts.

  As she stepped through the doorway into the dining room, her heart jumped at a glimpse of movement off to her right and the sound of a creaking board. Before she could react, she felt a quick stabbing pain hitting her shoulder.

  Her scream caught in her throat as the intense searing pain surged through her body. Her legs turned to rubber, her knees buckled, and the floor came up to meet her. As she lay on the floor with her limbs twitching involuntarily, she had the vague sensation of something hard and cold pressed against her neck, then came a soft puffing sound and a black curtain fell over her eyes.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Kurtz was dressed like a gangly version of World War II tank commander General George Tecumseh Patton. Twin pearl-handled revolvers hung from his hips. Three white stars emblazoned his shiny black helmet. The short-waist Eisenhower jacket buttoned tightly across his narrow chest was festooned with a rainbow of military service ribbons. Tan riding pants drooped from his thin legs. The steel-shod heels of his leather knee-high boots clacked as he strode across the wooden floor. He whacked the side of Sutherland’s bunk with his riding crop.

  “Time to move out, corporal.”

  He gestured with his crop to Krause, who unlocked the handcuffs from the bunk. He pulled Sutherland to her feet and re-cuffed her hands in front of her, then prodded her toward the door with his rifle. The skin between her shoulder blades was tender from previous jabs and the gun’s muzzle hurt. She stopped and turned to Kurtz.

  “General, please tell your soldier boy that if he pokes me one more time with his make-believe manhood, I will take his weapon and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

  Krause blinked at the low, menacing voice coming from the pudgy round face, and then he laughed and turned to Kurtz for reinforcement. The general chuckled and smacked his thigh with the riding crop:

  “Do as the prisoner requests or she’ll hit you over the head with the Geneva Convention.”

  Krause used his hand instead of his rifle to push Sutherland through the door and out into the gray darkness. The World War II army Jeep was parked outside the barracks with its motor running. A big Ford 250 pick-up with four militia men was parked behind the Jeep.

  The general told Sutherland to get in the back seat. Sergeant Paine sat beside her. Kurtz climbed into the passenger seat and Krause got behind the wheel. Kurtz raised his riding crop in the air and pointed forward.

  As they drove past the deserted barracks, Kurtz said airily, “You think I don’t know why you came here, corporal? Well I know all about my grandfather and Prester John. You came here to steal our property. Admit it.”

  Sutherland answered with her name, rank and made up serial number.

  “Military rules? I’m okay with that, but you might not be.”

  Sutherland didn’t like his tone, which was smug and threatening, but she kept her mouth shut.

  The two-vehicle convey drove past the mansion and through the ghost town. After about a mile the road began to climb through the woods, becoming steeper as it meandered back and forth in a series of ascending switchbacks. The road surface was dirt and gravel and studded with boulders, but the slow-moving vehicles made steady progress. After traveling nearly an hour, they emerged from the woods into an open area at the base of a high ridge.

  The general studied a large rectangle of paper for a few minutes and told the driver to keep going another hundred yards.

  “This is it,” he said. “Stop.”

  The headlights picked out a crumbling shed and behind it, rails emerging from the side of the hill. The mine entrance itself was almost invisible, a rectangular shadow partially obscured by brush that had grown around the opening. Kurtz got out of the Jeep and walked up to the entrance. He flashed his light on, showing a wall of weathered gray boards, and then ordered his men to give him a hand.

  At the general’s orders, a couple of his men used crow bars to remove the barrier. The boards easily pried away from the rusty nails holding them in place.

  Kurtz consulted the mine diagram again.

  “The main shaft goes straight in. There are four tunnels off to the right. We want the third one. Saddle up.”

  He strode into the mine with Krause, then came Sutherland and Sergeant Paine, followed by the militiamen. The tunnel sloped down at a gradual angle. The blockade had protected the interior of the mine from moisture and destructive forest creatures and the timbers supporting the walls and ceiling were mostly intact.

  They trudged in silence between the narrow tracks and encountered the first side tunnel about an eighth of a mile in. They kept moving, passed another opening after a few hundred yards, and after a slightly longer walk came to the third. A few yards beyond the opening, the main shaft ended in a blank wall.

  “Something’s not right,” Kurtz growled.

  He studied his diagram, and then wh
eeled about and with his entourage following, slowly retraced his steps, playing the beam of his flashlight on the walls. He stopped and studied a section of wall that seemed to be slightly indented. He borrowed a crowbar and pried away a slab of rock that was no thicker than a flagstone. Wood could be seen through the hole where the rock had been.

  He stepped back and handed the crowbar to a militia man, who pried away more of the flat rocks. Behind the façade was a wooden plank blockade similar to the barrier at the mine entrance.

  Kurtz led the way. The tunnel was smaller than the main passage, and went in for a couple of hundred feet before it ended in a wall of steel plates. Painted on the wall in red paint was a primitive drawing of a skull.

  “What the hell is that?” Krause said.

  “Indian hex sign,” Kurtz said. “Figures. They say Grand pop Hiram hired a bunch of Utes to keep an eye on the more valuable mines. They weren’t interested in gold or silver and could keep their mouths shut.” He stepped back. “That hoodoo won’t bite you. Take ‘er down.”

  The men took turns working the crowbars through gaps in the plates. Once one section was pried off, the others came down easily. After about ten minutes a gap around three feet wide, reaching from ceiling to floor, was opened in the barrier.

  As soon as the gap was opened Kurtz pushed through. There was silence, then something that sounded like a choking cry.

  “You all right, general?” Krause said.

  A mad cackle of laughter issued through the opening.

  “I’m more than all right.”

  The voice had a ghostly echo, as if it were coming from the inhabitant of a sepulcher. The militia men exchanged puzzled glances and nervously clutched their weapons.

  Krause said, “You want us to come in, general?”

  Kurtz answered simply. “No. I’m coming out.”

  He squeezed through the opening, an object wrapped in shreds of cloth clutched close to his chest. He removed the cloth and cradled in his arms was a cross around three feet long that seemed to glow with a green and yellow fire.