American Craftsmen (2 page)

For a long mission, another man might carry amphetamines or other stimulants. I carried only one pill: a black cyanide capsule. And in case I hesitated, there was an exception to the Stonewall chip. One man in the unit would have the order and the means to kill me rather than allow my capture. I bet it was Sergeant Zee.

I felt the
g
s as the copter veered right. “Sir,” said Nguyen on headset, “we’re about two klicks from the target location, approaching from due south.”

I didn’t look up from my equipment. “Keep flying north, full speed.”

“But the target is…”

“He’ll run,” I said. I moved forward again for a face-to-face.

“But we’re coming in quiet,” said Nguyen.

“He knows that we’re coming.” The pilot looked at me, horrified at this hint of a security breach.

I viewed the ground through the copter’s night-vision screen. Sure enough, far ahead on the lone road leading out of the village, a jeep raced toward the north. In night vision, the jeep glowed bright green with heat, but in my vision, the target burned red with craft. Perhaps if the target had tried to flee quietly without throwing sand in our faces, he would have made it, but that wasn’t magi style. “That’s our man. Try not to lose him.”

“Yes, sir.”

If the target was talented enough, he would shake us with some sorcerer stealth unless I could guess where he was heading. That’s why I was here, and not some Predator drone—this chase required craft and intuition.

Where will he run to?
My objectives liked old ground. Any other place, I could just pick out the nearest ruin, but here in the Near East ancient sites with occult potential dotted the landscape. Wait, there on the map, straight down the road, a familiar name. Drones had seen some recent small-unit activity in the area, but that wasn’t what concerned me. I stepped back to show the map to Doc. “Isn’t there an archeological site here?”

“Yes, sir, an Assyrian settlement near the town. Looters have been digging pits during the recent unpleasantness.”

“Pilot, head to MC 9146 4211.”

“Roger, wilco—wait a minute. He’s off the scope, sir.”

“Understood. Circle the point where you last saw him for ten minutes. Then, head to MC 9146 4211 on a curved vector, veering thirty degrees west of true until midpoint.” I didn’t want the target to see us pursuing in a straight line behind him, and I didn’t want to beat the target to the site.

I called up maps and photos of the dig on my handheld. Yes, an old tunnel excavation into a nasty temple to Assur-Marduk—the target would like that. And something more organized than looting had been going on in the last two years, with the maze of tunnels opened up to the surface, then covered from view with a series of tarpaulins.

I turned to Sergeant Zee and pointed at my map. “Let’s run through the mission. We’ll insert a few kilometers downwind of the town, here.” It was a small town with a long Arabic name, and before that a Greek name, and before that something in Assyrian. And something else before all that. Every place they sent me was like that. Small towns with large history lessons.

“Don’t make me pronounce it right, sir,” said Zee. “I just forget them all afterwards.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Our objective won’t go to the modern town. The drones have spotted activity just to the west in the excavated mound.”

“What kind of activity, sir?”

“Hostile activity.” Zee didn’t need to know about the other aberrant sandstorms and equipment failures. Like me and many of my ancestors, my target was a weatherman. “Vulture will clear the entrance to the dig. Then, you’ll all cover the town and any approaching bad guys.” Any
conventional
bad guys.

“You’re going into the tell alone, sir?”

“That’s correct.” Odd that Zee knew the word
tell
.

“An ancient city? Hmm.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I’ve seen some strange missions, sir. A crypt in the bottom of a mine in Bosnia, a temple older than the Mayans in Central America. I don’t like that kind of strangeness, but it doesn’t frighten me.”

“I hear you, Sergeant.” The man was saying that he understood something about craft ops—that I could rely on him not to panic in the face of magic and to keep his mouth shut afterwards. That I could talk to him. That I didn’t have to go into those ruins alone. But craft was different from most military secrets. Besides, I preferred to hit the target myself. A mundane soldier was just somebody I’d have to protect.

“We’ll talk afterwards,” I continued. “So we understand each other, no one else is to enter the ruins under any circumstances. You understand my orders, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

Having completed my checklist, I prepared my most important weapon—my craft. I focused on my breathing to find my center. I hit the mute button on my senses. The chopper engines, the camouflage colors, the smells of fuel, equipment, and sweat—all perceived through foam insulation. Very internal, intimate time, turn the lights down low, baby. Some of this quiet bubble was common to most elite soldiers before a mission, but some of it was the peculiar meditation needed for my power.

Ritual and formula were just two possible focal points for magic. The essence of craft was to hold two exact images in one’s mind at once—the thing as it was and the thing as it would be. Then, still holding the images, the craftsman placed the word of action between them. To do all this instantaneously required talent, practice, and energy.

But with my power running high, one of my natural gifts showed itself without effort. The team’s auras flickered around me; the small letters of their sins, scarlet
a
’s of petty fornications and
k
’s of military duty, tried to distract me. I ignored them. In my bubble, I waited. I was alone; nothing else existed. I felt the craft energies flow up and down my spine. More than enough juice for one sorcerer. I was ready.

Nguyen signaled: two minutes. I resurfaced. I mumbled a prayer to an absent God that, this time, my team would just face flesh and bullets, leaving the more powerful horrors to me.

“Get ready.” The copter slowed to a hover. “Move out!”

The metal door flew open with a slide-slam and we were down the ropes and fanning out through clouds of dust in a scattered deployment. Better for this sort of op that, until it was done, the aircraft not touch the ground, or stick around too long. The pilot swooped away like a bat copter from hell. My night-vision goggles gave the world a greenish hue. Unlike most Special Operations Forces, this unit had no video equipment. No recording of a craft op would ever be made; no amount of operation review could justify the inevitable leak that would endanger all practitioners.

“Let’s move.” We started jogging toward the tell. I loved the desert at night. Human beings seemed like a blot on its purity. Cumin, nutmeg, cardamom, lamb, exhaust. Sure enough, the inevitable smell of Middle Eastern cuisine mixed with diesel wafted over from the town, making me hungry and queasy at the same time. I hoped the civilians would, unlike their smells, stay at home. Home, and safe from me and my team.

We found cover behind the piles of moved earth. An all-weather tarpaulin, the first of many over the dig, made a tentlike roof to the mound entrance; its loose corners wagged or flapped in the wind. Someone had organized the digging and the tarps, creating a flimsy yet safer ceiling for their ancient home.

Two bad guys stood guard at the entrance, talking, one in a burnoose, the other in a deracinated uniform. Doc listened with a parabolic mike (a craft op standard) and sent me their text. “Heard chopper. Concerned.” Not concerned enough by half. They were lighting cigarettes, which glowed like flares in my night vision. But the guards didn’t glow with craft. Vulture lined them up in his silencer’s sight. Conventional means for conventional people. Always better to take life with a bullet, as the law of karmic return was more lenient and indirect with nonmagical action.

Two bullets snapped. Unavoidable sounds, but they didn’t matter. Any target worth his craft would be tipped off at this point.

I let go of the breath I had held. “Thanks, Vulture.” Then I turned to Doc. “Keep the site sequestered. Talk any civilians out of coming near. We want zero casualties for us and them. I’m going in. Sixty minutes. Mark.” No craft duel had ever lasted longer than an hour, if the craftspeople meant business. Simply not enough energy in one person to go longer at full throttle. A battle with multiple practitioners relieving each other in shifts could go on longer, but that didn’t happen very often. If I wasn’t back in an hour, I was dead, or a danger to my own team, or something worse.

*   *   *

Outside the hangar, Colonel Hutchinson shook her head at her other favorite killer, code name Sword. In contrast to Morton’s dark features, Native American cheekbones, and expressive mien, Major Sword’s blond hair and nor’easter gray eyes framed a long angular face of iron. That face had just gotten harder. Poor boy was understandably pissed.

Sword pointed at the red horizon, eyes on Hutchinson. “Was that my mission that just took off, Colonel?”

“No,” said Hutchinson, “that was Casper’s mission that just took off, Major.”

The major’s real name was Michael Endicott. If he had known Casper’s real name, he would have been more pissed. The major’s ancestors were the Endicotts of Salem. Sure, he could serve under her, a Hutchinson, descended from that notorious heretic woman—hell, the boy actually seemed to like and respect her. But she doubted he could extend that tolerance to Captain Morton. The pagan Mortons with their “craft” were anathema to the Puritan Endicotts and their “gifts of the Spirit.” A shame, because she was fond of both Dale and Michael, and would have loved to see them fight together against enemies foreign and domestic. But ever since 1628, when John Endicott and his men had attacked Thomas Morton’s colonial settlement, the two Families had feuded, and had even tried to exclude each other from the secret covenant that George Washington had made with all the craft Families in return for their service during the Revolution. Then the Left-Hand Mortons had scared the shit out of everyone, and the Endicotts had never let the later generations of Mortons forget it.

“Casper went under your orders, Colonel?”

Hutchinson knew where this was going. “My orders came from higher up, Major.”

Endicott looked about to shrapnel. “Permission to speak freely, ma’am?”

“What the hell is it, Michael?”

“Hutch, don’t these sudden changes in assignment bother you?”

“They sure seem to bother you,” said Hutchinson. “But you never appreciate assignment by farsight.”

“This is different.” Endicott lowered his voice. “If the Peepshow and our PRECOG can’t agree, it means something powerful is blocking one of their farsights. The general says it could be a sign that
they
are back.”

Hutch snorted. Michael’s father, General Oliver C. Endicott, had never liked Sphinx or her Peepshow, kissed Pentagon farsight ass, and was close-to-discharge insane about the imminent return of the Left-Hand Mortons.

“OK, Michael. Never mind that those evil kin-fuckers have all been exterminated. Let’s hold that branch of ancient history over the heads of the modern Mortons like a cudgel, make them keep toeing the line, never let them above the active rank of captain, because God knows they haven’t saved our asses enough to trust them again.”

Endicott’s face cracked into a small grimace. “It’s not like that, Hutch. Just don’t be surprised if something goes wrong.”

Hutchinson’s tough heart skipped a beat. Dread, then anger, used up her remaining patience with all things Endicott. “That had better not be an oracle, Major.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good. Then get packing, soldier. You’re due in Prague tomorrow.”

“Prague?” Poor boy sounded positively wounded by the new assignment; Hutchinson tried not to chuckle.

“Yes, Prague. I’ll brief you in the conference room in one hour.” She hesitated, trying to separate the threads of command instinct from an almost maternal concern, until she found they agreed. “But I’m keeping you here tonight.” Because she refused to be surprised if something went wrong.

*   *   *

At the entrance to the dig, my feet came to an unordered halt. A ward, very formal and fancy pants. If I broke the ward’s craft circuit, it would trip an alarm back to its maker. I said “
break
.” That would certainly get the target’s attention, even if his mundane guards hadn’t.

I stepped under the tarp and scrambled into the maze of passages. Glowing LEDs that hung irregularly along the broken walls gave me a twilight view without the night-vision device. The lights were on, so someone was home.

Why the hell did my duty always seem to take me to confined spaces, sometimes far, far underground? At least the dirt was no longer overhead. My family had reason to fear live burial.

The tell was not large in conventional space. But ruins that had been around this long had aeons of unconventional space to move through. Over the crumbling mix of stone and mud brick, ghosts of buildings shimmered with gold, lapis, and tapestries in my peripheral vision. I ignored most of the lavish details, focusing on those bits of translucent décor that might guide me through the maze to a former temple, palace, or crypt.

Then, out of the ether, two horrendous Assyrian genii blocked my way. Blood dripped from their eyes, gore from their teeth. My heart hammered for fight or flight.

After a second, my pulse continued to race with self-disgust. Obvious fakes. Nonhuman spirits, if they existed, must be rare. I stepped forward, then froze—what could these images be distracting me from? Ah, there, behind the one on the right, a trigger that would probably cave in this portion of the dig. But no trap that I could sense beyond that. If this was designed to make me waste energy, I wouldn’t bite.
OK, we’ll be trapped for a while together—some nice intimate time to exchange craft secrets.

I ran through. The walls collapsed behind me. But the cave-in was a shit job, and I would still be able to squeeze through or climb out, if it didn’t get any worse.