Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  The lead car crested over the hill and began its descent, brake pads squeezed and tortured. The dust thickened once more, caking its windshield. The driver sprayed washer solvent and the glass cleared under the force of the wipers, only to brown quickly again. The process became constant and unavailing, Thurman ultimately rolling down his window to better his own view.

  The road leveled off. The convoy started across the valley. There was no longer even the semblance of a trail to aid them and the cars bucked accordingly. Shocks strained to their utmost, the cars continued on, passengers jostled, shoved up against the roof and then snapped back down. In one of the trailing cars, the massive Goza held his hands to the roof to cushion his skull.

  The lead car’s driver hit a patch of soft earth and felt his tires sink. He revved his engine, rocked the car from forward to reverse and back again until he felt the tires regain their hold and push forward. The convoy settled onto a straightaway, an unimpaired stretch of the valley lying ahead in the blowing dust.

  Twenty yards later, the lead car simply sank into the yielding ground, all four wheels dropping at once.

  “What the …”

  Thurman’s voice was lost as the ground gave way, the whole car swallowed by the earth, lost to the hood line.

  “Doors won’t open!”

  “Windows, then! The windows!”

  The engine sputtered, barely enough power salvaged to drive the windows down. Slowly they descended and finally jammed against the supporting rubber.

  Thurman was the first to pull himself out and back to the surface.

  “Shit!” he bellowed.

  Upon seeing the lead car eaten by the dust, the car immediately behind it had screeched to a halt too fast for the third car to avoid it. A metal-jarring crunch jolted the occupants of both vehicles, who poured out to inspect the damage. The radiator of the third car was hissing gray smoke. The back end of the second was bent inward and lost to a deep bank in the valley floor, nose tipped upward as if to gasp for breath. The fourth car had tried to avoid it all by swerving and had ended up buried in a sinkhole half as deep as the one in which the lead car was mired.

  “Get the weapons!” Thurman shouted at the troops scurrying from the vehicles. “Get the weapons!”

  Trunks were snapped or pried open, heavy guns yanked out behind the determined pull of powerful arms, while the two Arabs and Rijas swept the ancient grounds with their rifles and eyes, wary of an ambush. The rest of the group rushed to gear up behind the cover of the cars’ ruined carcasses and natural depressions in the earth.

  “Birdsong!” Thurman screamed, looking for the tracker through the gathering dust. “Birdsong!” He shielded his eyes and continued to search, to no avail.

  “He’s gone,” Ling reported, pistol in hand.

  “Son of a bitch!” Thurman scowled.

  He heard a whizzing through the air, a biting sound like the wind cutting itself. He dropped instinctively into a narrow furrow within the pit where the lead car was wedged and readied his M-16. He cautiously raised his head and swept his rifle from side to side.

  The first series of screams came from the right. Thurman followed the sound to the men who’d been unloading gear from the trunks. An arrow lay imbedded in Goza’s shoulder and another in the leg of a Russian named Perochin.

  A third man tried to duck away, squeezing a load of ammo in his arms. An arrow took him in the hamstring. He crumpled and the ammo went flying, including a grenade separated from its pin.

  “Down!” Thurman bellowed.

  The explosion blew apart the car with the ruined front end. It became a flaming carcass that spewed chunks of glass and metal into the air when the gas tank ignited. More screams sounded.

  Thurman lunged out from the depression that had swallowed the lead car and joined Ling and Rijas behind a pair of boulders.

  “Those caverns,” he said, pointing to the pockmarked hillside facing them from the west. “That’s where the arrows came from. Ling.”

  The tiny Vietnamese was already zigzagging back toward the heaviest concentration of the team. Thurman watched him disappear into the dust. Seconds later fifty-caliber machine-gun fire split the air, echoing through the valley as it sought a bead on the mysterious openings in the hillside. With fifty-caliber fire covering them, the two Arabs burst up and fired five forty-millimeter rounds each upward. Four of the shots were dead on target with the caverns and four others close enough. Huge plumes of dirt and debris were blown out of the hillside, showering down in avalanche fashion. When the shower cleared, some of the black openings had disappeared altogether while others had become even wider, jagged tears in the hillside’s structure.

  Thurman crept off to check on his casualties. The wind sounds mocked him and kept Birdsong’s warnings about defiling the land alive. Thurman stilled his massive frame briefly in a depression and focused his thoughts on the rational. Birdsong had placed at ten the number of opponents who had entered the valley ahead of them. The archers among these who’d been in the caverns had surely been taken by the strafing barrage. So Thurman calculated the opposition had been reduced to seven at most.

  His count put his own mobile force at ten now, including Goza, who had somehow pried the arrow from his shoulder. The grenade blast had taken two lives and added another wounded to the other two who’d been shot by arrows. Fortunately their entire arsenal remained intact. The element of surprise that had worked for McCracken was expended. The tables were about to turn.

  Staying close to the ground, Thurman bolted out and helped drag one of the Russians to safety, keeping an eye peeled toward the hills at all times. In actuality, McCracken’s forces had hampered them only minimally; Thurman would have posted men at the rear of his group’s advance anyway. Now it would be the wounded who were given that task. He made sure the three men who qualified were well armed and properly placed as Ling readied the remainder of the force to move.

  “Cover our rear,” Thurman ordered, before rushing up to join the others.

  Chief Silver Cloud was smoking a long wooden pipe in his tepee when the flap parted and Birdsong stepped through.

  “Sit, my friend,” the chief beckoned.

  The tracker moved toward him and removed his hat, revealing a shock of graying hair. “I did as you instructed.”

  “They went along?”

  “Couldn’t get into the valley fast enough.”

  “Of course, and their weapons must be many.”

  “Indeed.”

  “That is a pity.” The old man smiled between puffs.

  “I told them I was Pawnee.”

  “They believed you?”

  “I guess to them,” Birdsong said, “we all look the same.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  The Valley of the Dead’s confines worked like a wind tunnel, twisting the desert-dry dust about in all directions. The long drought had scorched the land, and it shed its anger by coughing itself into the air.

  At the head of the procession, Thurman simply gritted his teeth and pressed on. His team could see ahead, but not very far. Their arsenal of weapons should more than compensate for this. McCracken’s Indians might have held a logistical advantage, but as soon as they showed themselves in any number his commandos would be free to slice them down at will.

  Thurman’s experience with guerrilla-type fighting was nothing compared to that of Colonel Ling, who’d mastered the art of it in Vietnam. For this reason he had sent Ling on slightly ahead to serve as scout. Ling had been on the other side of this form of battle often enough to sense from where the enemy’s next strike would be coming. Thurman could barely see him out there ahead in the dust swirl. He strained his eyes to catch sight of the small man and almost jumped when Ling appeared right in front of him.

  “Trouble,” the Vietnamese said through the whipping dust.

  The old depressions in the ground had been easily camouflaged. Wareagle had taken three braves with him for this particular task, and in laying the groundwork he had the
odd sensation that he was repeating part of the very strategy the original defenders of this valley had employed.

  The wind made it tough to hear the men passing atop them, but Johnny could feel them and knew the braves could as well. There had been no set signal to rise, just an apportioned amount of time to wait after the last set of boots had passed overhead. Wareagle lurched out from his hiding place beneath the ground mere seconds ahead of the three other warriors. Spread well apart, they vanished into the wind for the next stage of the plan.

  Ling pointed out the Indian figures hidden in the brush up a slight rise that gave way to the last of the valley. Thurman continued on briefly before dropping into a crouch, opening up with his M-16. The rest of his men joined in instantly and the gunshots echoed in a continuous rattle through the hills.

  “Cease fire!” Thurman signaled finally, the echoes lingering after his men had obeyed. “Hold positions. You two, with me.”

  Thurman led Goza and Rijas forward into the cloud of gun smoke that sifted through the dust. The stink of gunfire hovered over them every step of the way as they neared the brush.

  “Fuck,” Thurman muttered.

  What was left of the targets they’d been firing at hung from the trees. Other remnants lay tied to bushes. Pieces of straw and fabric were still fluttering through the air, caught by the whims of the breeze.

  “Fuck,” Thurman said again.

  Dummies, scarecrows …

  “Four more men missing!” a voice bellowed from the rear of the pack. Taken while we were firing, Thurman realized, gnashing his teeth. “No more games,” he said to Ling. “And no more hiding places. Let’s finish them.”

  And Thurman led the way south over the rise into the last of the valley atop a dry riverbed. He was careful of his footing once the parched remains of what had once been the bottom began crackling underfoot, testing the land for more potential traps. The remainder of his men followed him onto the plain confidently, Goza bringing up the rear, the Arabs and Ling in the middle with Rijas.

  Suddenly Thurman heard the now familiar whizzing noise through the air and dove for the ground.

  “Arrows!” he screamed. “Down!”

  Thurman had been right about the arrows, but wrong about their intended targets. They surged through the air, tips aflame, coming up strangely short of his troops. Thurman rejoiced at first until he realized the purpose of the fiery arrows.

  “No!” he bellowed and lunged back to his feet.

  Too late. Just as similar ones had done in the legendary battle over a century before, the flaming arrows ignited the kerosene freshly soaked into the ground around the plain. The hard-packed brush and weeds, bone-dry from the drought, quickly became an inferno and effectively sealed Thurman and the remainder of his team in a ring of fire.

  They spun around, weapons firing furiously at nothing.

  “Stop! Stop!” Thurman ordered.

  The enemy wanted them to panic, giving in tantamount to giving up. The front wall of the flames was the weakest, showing several breaks.

  “There!” Thurman pointed. “Through there! Out that way before they come! Take them as they charge in to finish us. Go!” he instructed, urging his men on when they were reluctant to leave him. “Go on!”

  Weapons poised, Thurman brought up the rear to provide cover. When the last man hurled himself forward through slight cracks in the front wall of flames, he backed up to allow for the same running start his troops had utilized. He peered through the wall of fire for something to leap for.

  And realized his men were gone. Thurman slid close enough to the flames to feel them licking at his flesh. Eyes starting to water, he squinted and saw a dark ditch rimming the front of the fiery plane, the ditch his men had plunged into when they lunged to safety.

  A crack snapped through the air and the leather of a bullwhip closed on Thurman’s throat and yanked backwards. His weapons dropped from his grasp as he flailed upwards to tear the whip’s death wrap off. Backpedaling, he felt his legs go out from under him and his head hit the parched ground hard. Then the whip was torn free, taking some of his flesh with it.

  “Get up,” a voice commanded.

  Thurman rolled onto his side and saw Blaine McCracken standing there with him inside the ring of fire. He had discarded the whip but something else was gripped in his hand—tied to his wrist, it looked like.

  “Get up, Thurman.”

  Thurman propped himself up slowly, feigning weakness in order to prepare himself for a lunge toward his lost weapons. He sneaked a glance at them.

  They were gone.

  “It’s been a long time,” Blaine continued.

  Thurman rose to his feet. McCracken tossed him the other end of what was tied to his wrist, a thick leather strap.

  “Tie the thin edge around your left wrist, just like this,” Blaine ordered, and held his up for Thurman to see.

  Thurman held the strap, but that was all.

  “No more games,” he said staunchly, jutting his jaw forward.

  “This is the way it has to end, Thurman, just like it did over a century ago.”

  Thurman stiffened and tied the edge of the leather strap around his wrist. Blaine tossed a shiny, hand-molded knife his way. It thumped down on the hard-packed ground beneath him.

  “Second chances,” McCracken told him. “Take your best shot.”

  Thurman leaned over to pick the blade up. The flames licked at the air in the circle of flames around them, so even and symmetrical they looked as though an artist might have painted fire onto the landscape. The wind blew the heat inward, drenching both men in waves of sizzling gusts.

  “We’re improvising here, Thurman, but I think it’s good enough to satisfy the spirits.” Blaine made sure Thurman could see the knife’s twin grasped in his own hand.

  “You’re a fool,” Thurman said, handling the knife nimbly and sticking out his massive chest.

  “Tell me who you’re working for and maybe I’ll let you survive this.”

  “You really are a fool. Who do you think saved your life in that library by turning on the lights?”

  “Why’d you bother?”

  “Because we needed you,” Thurman said, and whirled in at McCracken with knife leading.

  McCracken anticipated the move perfectly and tugged on the strap connecting them just as the big man committed to his thrust. The move dragged Thurman off balance and sent his swipe terribly off target. Blaine sliced at him as he surged by and the blade caught his side, Thurman just managing to arch from its path. He swung and tried to fool McCracken by yanking. But Blaine countered by entering into the move and kicking Thurman under the chin.

  He followed the strike with a thrust of his knife. Thurman, learning fast, used the leather strap to expertly deflect the blade and then wrapped it around Blaine’s wrist. A quick tug provided the opportunity for an equally quick lunge. McCracken used his left strap arm to block it and took a nasty gash on his forearm for the effort.

  Thurman backed off, grinning. “I’ve learned a little over the years.” Blaine grimaced in pain, trying to judge how much he could rely on his strap arm now. Sensing weakness, Thurman could either go for the kill now or prolong things by waiting until an opening was more evident. Probably the latter.

  “What do you mean you needed me?”

  “To find the boy for us, after he disappeared.”

  And then Blaine realized. “You were the ones who took over Operation Offspring … .”

  Thurman jabbed again with his knife. McCracken backed out of its way and kept backing up, avoiding swipe after swipe until the highest flames licked at his back.

  “Where’s the boy, McCracken? Hand him over and you can walk away from this.”

  Thurman was trying to reel him in like a fish, wrapping the leather strap around his wrist to draw him closer, daring Blaine to strike at him with his own knife.

  McCracken finally took the bait and lashed outward. Thurman used the strap to capture the blade in a tight loop a
nd yank. Stripped from Blaine’s hand, it skidded across the hard-packed earth and stopped near another section of the flames enclosing them.

  “I’ll find him anyway,” Thurman sneered.

  And then he lunged. Blaine moved when the tip of the Thurman’s blade had nearly found his stomach. Thurman felt only air where his target had been and went surging by. Instead of stopping him, McCracken used the now tightly wound strap to hurl the big man around toward the wall of fire he had been ignoring in his desire for the kill.

  McCracken heard Thurman’s agonizing screams as he entered the flames, his knife totally forgotten as the fiery pain stretched mere moments to seeming hours. He was still screaming, covering his eyes, when McCracken yanked him out at the same time he snatched his own blade up off the ground. Thurman was still in motion when Blaine slashed the knife across the right side of his face, the slice almost identical to the one scarring the left.

  “Now they match,” Blaine taunted.

  Thurman’s mouth dropped in shock, about to scream when McCracken kicked his legs out and held the knife poised over his throat.

  “Son of a bitch,” Thurman rasped, the blood running out of the gash.

  McCracken brought the blade down closer.

  “Live or die, your choice. Who are you working for? Who’s kept Operation Offspring up all these years?”

  “Go to hell.”

  McCracken jammed the blade down, buried it in the fleshy part of Thurman’s upper arm, just a flap on the outside of his tricep but enough to hold him just where he was. The big man screamed.

  “Who?” Blaine demanded.

  “Fuck you! You should have died in Cuba. I told him I could handle this myself.”

  McCracken felt something shift deep in his gut. “What do you know about Cuba?”