Skyfire (7 page)

So, with typical deviousness, he solved the problem at the expense of others.

Hiring three men in a bar in Portsmouth, he offered them a small fortune to remove the warhead from the launcher. They foolishly agreed after he assured them that there was no danger present. Carting them to the island, he directed them from afar via walkie-talkie as they gingerly unscrewed the nosecone from the battered, rusting Soviet ICBM and retrieved the nuclear device.

The entire operation had taken more than twelve hours. Then, once the trio had placed the warhead into a heavily leaded canister, they walked back to Rook's cabin to demand payment. Keeping them at a distance, Rook explained to them with a cold rationality that he had lied to them and that they had been irreversibly irradiated.

Then he simply shot all three of them to death.

All this had happened a week before.

Now, on this morning, with his glass of whiskey swilling in his belly, he began to steel himself for the next crucial part in his plan; hauling the heavy lead-lined canister onto a raft he'd made and eventually sailing it back to Portsmouth.

Rook took another swig of the bad whiskey and, thus bolstered, pulled on his trousers and boots and walked out of the cabin, whistling as he turned toward the beach.

He never saw the axe, nor the man wielding it. All he felt was a cold yet sharp sensation on the back of his neck, which was replaced almost immediately by a gush of sticky warmth. He was dead an instant later, his collarbone, shoulder blade, and upper cervical vertebrae all neatly severed by one well-placed blow.

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The morning dawned bright and sunny over Nauset Heights.

Hunter was awakened by the first rays of the morning as they streamed into the farmhouse's bedroom. Instantly the warm light pried his eyelids open, reminding him of the big day that lay ahead. Moving with characteristic agility, he gingerly disentangled himself from the beautiful, naked form of Dominique and quietly slipped out of the large brass bed.

Silently moving down the creaky stairs, he reached the kitchen just as the automatic coffee maker was clicking on. A bowl of oat bran disappeared quickly enough, as did two cups of coffee. A trip to the head included a long, hot shower and a shave and, finally, he was ready to face the day.

Walking out to his fields, he couldn't remember the last time he'd been so enthusiastic. Today he would cut his hay crop, and all the indicators were looking good for the operation. The sky was clear, no rain was in the forecast, and the wind was at a minimum.

But still, he needed to conduct one last test. Pulling up a single strand of grass, he tasted it and found it was sweeter than ever.

That was all he needed.

He ran back to the house and made a quick radio call to a phone located in the firehouse of the small seaport

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village of Nauset, just a mile away. Several days before, three of the local militiamen stationed there had offered to help Hunter pull in the harvest, and now he was taking them up on their neighborly offer. Once his help was on the way, he started up his tractor, got the cutter working, and headed out to the east high field.

Minutes later he was happily cutting his first acre of pasture.

The noise of the tractor had awakened Dominique.

Now, through sleepy eyes and a cup of coffee, she watched from the side porch as Hunter steered the clanking beast through the field, slicing down swaths of hay in his wake.

She had never seen him so happy-so vibrant in the little things of life. He was dwelling in the inconsequentials, reveling in the little pleasures. She knew that producing the hay crop had nothing to do with money or survival.

Hunter had plenty of gold on hand, leftover payments from his days in the United American Armed Forces. In fact, harvesting the hay wasn't necessary at all-but that was the beauty of it. For the first time since she'd known him, Hunter was actually doing something he didn't have to do.

And that made all the difference.

She smiled and waved to the three militiamen who arrived in their Chevy pickup a few minutes later. They graciously accepted a thermos of coffee from her, each man trying his best to avoid staring down the front of her plunging nightgown. With a tip of their militia caps they walked out into the field, had a brief conversation with Hunter, and soon enough were wielding large wooden rakes and spreading the hay out so it could dry properly.

If the weather stayed good and all the hay was cut and spread on this day, then it could be bundled and stored and sold anytime after that.

The job was done by four that afternoon.

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The work had gone surprisingly smoothly-all three of Hunter's fields were cut and raked and bundled with daylight to spare. The only glitch developed when Hunter tried to pay the three militiamen at the end of the workday. All three adamantly refused any money. Still a novice concerning the customs of his neighbors, Hunter quickly realized that the trio was almost insulted when he tried to push a bag of silver on them.

It was Dominique who saved the day, suggesting that as a return gesture for their help they all gather down on the west beach and steam some clams. This they heartily agreed to do. A quick call down to the village brought the militiamen's girlfriends and two cases of ice-cold, newly bottled locally brewed beer.

By the time the sun began to set over Cape Cod Bay, an old-fashioned New England clambake was in full swing.

They all ate and drank and ate some more. When the sun finally dropped down into the bay, its fading light reflected off the warm water to give the illusion that the sky near the horizon was aflame.

Hunter sat on the beach with Dominique and watched the unusual natural display.

" 'Sky on Fire,' " he whispered, almost to himself. "If I died tomorrow, at least I'd go knowing that I was happy just living in this place .. ."

She looked deep in his eyes and smiled.

"Me, too," she said.

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Washington, DC

"I guess we were kidding ourselves," General Jones was saying as he uncapped his third beer of the evening. "I guess what we thought was peace was actually the calm before the storm."

Jones was sitting in the back room of a musty bar located near the edge of Georgetown. At the table with him was millionaire Soldier-of-Fortune Mike Fitzgerald, Captain Crunch O'Malley, and Yaz. In front of them were a gaggle of beer bottles, some empty, some half filled, some still waiting to be opened.

"Are we sure that this isn't just an isolated incident?" Crunch asked. "I mean, just because a bunch of bandits rough up a tiny village way the hell up in Nova Scotia doesn't mean the end of the world is coming."

"I'm convinced there's more to it," Yaz replied quickly. "I saw that village and it wasn't just 'roughed up.' It was leveled. I mean, absolutely destroyed.

There wasn't anything over three feet tall left standing. IVe been in combat.

I've seen the results of war. But I've never seen anything as completely devastated as that place."

"Plus there's the added problem that they-whoever they are-hit so close to the Kejimkujik prison," Fitzgerald added.

Jones wiped away the overflow of foam from his beer glass and then took a long swig.

"Well, believe it or not, that might have been a coincidence," he said, grimacing at the taste of the sour beer. "As 64

it turns out, just before I left to come here, I got a report that said while the main attack on Yarmouth was going on, a bunch of odd-looking characters were spotted about fifteen miles to the east, at a place named Barren Lake."

"Barren Lake?" Yaz asked. "I went fishing there once. What was going on up in that area?"

Jones shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "I just got a flash from Frost that said some people in the area saw a gang of about twenty guys in uniforms pulling something out of the lake at just about the same time the attack on Yarmouth was happening. The local constable became suspicious, so he followed them back down from the lake. But he lost track of them as soon as he saw the village had been snuffed out."

"You mean the attack on Yarmouth could have been just a diversion?" Yaz asked.

Again, Jones shrugged. "That's hard to tell," he replied. "But we have to assume that if the same people who leveled the village also sent an advance party up to drag God-knows-what from a lake, then they probably could have made an all-out assault on the prison if they had wanted to. My gut tells me they didn't realize they were so close to Kejimkujik."

Crunch took a swig of his beer and lit up a cigar.

"Sure is strange though," he said through a cloud of smoke, "especially when you consider that these bandits-or whatever you want to call them-really pulled off quite a disappearing act."

A sudden silence enveloped the table. Each man knew that Crunch was referring to the most puzzling aspect of the Yarmouth massacre: that despite the several military investigative teams that had combed through the destroyed town and the surrounding area, not one solid piece of evidence had been found as to how the mystery troops had arrived in the village or how they had left.

In fact, the only clue left behind by the marauders were the hundreds of footsteps found on the beach at Yarmouth. Strange as it seemed, they indicated that the raiders

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had literally walked out of the sea the night of the raid and withdrew the same way.

Yet no one had seen a single ship in the area.

"It couldn't have been a standard amphibious landing," Jones said, verbalizing what was on everyone's minds. "They would have needed three to four hundred troops to carry out that raid. But that bay is just chock-full with fishing boats, as is the entire coastline. The people in that area live out on the sea, for God's sake. Any ship large enough to carry four hundred assault troops would have been spotted from a hundred miles away."

"Plus no one saw or heard any choppers," Yaz added. "No seaplanes, hovercrafts, nothing. Just a bunch a footprints walking into the sea."

Fitzgerald took a swig of beer and let out a long, gloomy whistle.

"The attack on the village, these guys at the lake, then disappearing-it's all very weird," he said. "And I mean in a dangerous kind of way."

"Exactly," Jones replied, reaching for another beer. That's why I have the feeling that it's going to get worse-and weirder, if that's possible."

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Jones's prophecy came true the next day.

It arrived in the form of a videotape. Grainy, shaky, and out of focus, the footage contained on the tape had nevertheless captured a bizarre event that had occurred off the northern coast of the old state of Massachusetts, near a resort area known as Plum Island.

Quite simply, the videotape appeared to show a sea monster.

The tape-the crucial part being only three seconds long-had been sent to Jones by the head of the local militia of the nearest city to Plum Island, a place called Newburyport. The footage had been shot by two of his men who had been routinely patroling the ten miles of beach on Plum Island several days before.

The day in question had been windy, cold, and rainy, typical for the north shore of Massachusetts under the spell of a summer nor'easter. The men had just stopped for a smoke break when they spotted something about a half mile off the beach. At first it appeared as a blurry black form to them, its color barely distinguishable from the cold, dark gray sea. But after having been apprised about the massacre in Nova Scotia several hundred miles to the north, and asked to keep an extra eye for anything unusual off the coast, the soldiers immediately turned on the video camera they carried as standard equipment in their beach jeep. Adjusting the camera's zoom lens, they zeroed in on the object, hoping to get a better look.

What they saw astonished them.

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Now, Jones sat with Yaz in his Pentagon office, replaying the segment of tape over and over on his VCR.

"I just can't believe this . . ." Yaz repeated just about as many times as Jones played the three seconds of tape. "What could it be?"

Jones was as baffled as he. The tape was of poor quality-the camera the militiamen had used was old and prone to static, plus the weather and the late-afternoon hour combined to make the image look out of focus. Yet, what could be seen looked like the head of some enormous sea creature ever so briefly rising up out of the rough seas before stiffly splashing back down into them.

"The goddamn thing looks like every artist's conception I've ever seen of the Loch Ness monster," Jones grumbled, "I just never believed for a minute that the damn thing actually existed."

"In the old days, we could have had this videotape analyzed a thousand times over," Yaz said. "You know, to make sure that it's not an optical illusion or whatever."

Jones paused a moment to light his pipe, then he replayed the three seconds of tape.

"That's no illusion," he said, freezing a crucial frame which best showed the object's horselike head, flared nostrils, and scaly mane. "Monster or not, there's something definitely out there."

Jones finally switched off the tape and turned on the office lights.

Yaz was still shaking his head. "God, first the massacre up in Nova Scotia, and now this!" he said.

At that moment, Fitzgerald walked in. He had had an earlier showing of the strange video, so his worried expression had nothing to do with sea monsters.

Rather, it had to do with the telex he was holding.

"Just got this off the scramble wire," he told Jones, referring to the single sheet of yellow paper. "It's from the Nova Scotia Provincial Army commander.

They've recovered three hundred and eleven bodies from the massacre."

Jones shook his head in disgust. "We've still got a long 68

way to go before civilizing this continent."

"I agree," Fitz said through his thick Irish brogue. "But there's something else. That village had more than five hundred people in it-there's almost two hundred people unaccounted for . . ."