The Templar Chronicles (31 page)

“Captain Mason is getting to that,” replied the Preceptor, the first words he’d spoken since Cade had entered the room.

“Right,” answered Mason. “Vargas was given a thorough medical exam by our own physicians and they discovered something the doctors at St. Margaret’s had not. A series of numbers were tattooed on the inside of Vargas lower lip. The tattoo was crude, obviously homemade, and the numbers were backward, as if Vargas had done it himself with the help of a mirror.

“After further investigation, we determined that the numbers were a set of GPS coordinates. They led us here.”

Another click of the remote and Vargas’ wide-eyed grimace was replaced with an aerial shot of a compound somewhere in the desert. Several buildings were surrounded by a wide fenced perimeter, with a single dirt road leading to and from the compound.

“It’s an old military base hidden in the canyons about thirty miles north of Santa Limas, abandoned and mothballed since the close of the Korean War. When my people looked into it, they learned that it had been leased to a holding company based out of the Caymans three years ago, roughly six months after Vargas disappeared from view.”

“Have your people been on site?” Cade asked.

Mason looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Yes. We set up operations around the perimeter and then sent in an advance squad to take a look around.” He paused, obviously struggling with how to express exactly what he wanted to say. “They…” He shook his head, and then looked down at the floor. “None of the team survived.”

The room was silent for a moment.

“Can you be a bit more specific, sir?”

Mason nodded. “We sent in a full squad, eight men. They were tied into the Ops Net, so we could see and hear everything they did in real-time. At first, things went just fine. They searched the few remaining structures and were getting ready to come back out when one of the team discovered a hatch in the floor of the base garage. The hatch appeared to lead to another level of structure, this one underground.

“The squad checked in and I gave the order for them to continue their search. They were preparing to descend into the lower levels when everything came apart.

“We lost the video feed almost immediately. We still had the audio, however, and we could hear several of the men shouting and firing at something that we suspect came out of the tunnel after them. Within seconds we’d lost contact with all of them.”

Mason paused, obviously still dismayed over the loss of his men. After a moment to get himself under control, he continued. “Another team was gearing up to go in after them when one man made it back out of the compound. Cpl. Jackson’s left arm was missing and he had a gaping wound in his chest. The medics got to work immediately but everyone knew it was a losing battle right from the start.

“Jackson was nearly hysterical, raving about a gateway to hell and the demons that had come boiling up out of it but we were unable to get anything of tactical value out of him before he passed.” Mason looked at each of them in turn. “I can’t tell you what he saw, but whatever it was, it scared him silly. Hell, he scared us, just by talking about it. And it took his life along with lives of seven other men. After that, the decision was made to have the second team stand down while we brought in the heavy guns.”

Preceptor Johannson spoke up again. “That’s where Echo comes in. I’m ordering you to accompany Captain Mason back to the site and determine just what killed those men. When you do, you are authorized to deal with it as you see fit.” He turned and looked at Cade. “Are you up to this, Commander?”

Cade nodded but said nothing.

Duncan wasn’t surprised; he couldn’t imagine Echo being sent out without its commander and he knew it would take more than a doctor or two to keep Cade from joining his unit when they were headed into danger. He was still wondering just how the Commander had pulled it off when Cade glanced surreptitiously in his direction and winked.

As the meeting broke up around him and the rest of the men headed for the door, Duncan found himself frozen in his seat, his thoughts whirling.

Good Lord, Duncan thought, he thinks I did it. He thinks I healed him!

But he knew he hadn’t. And that brought him back to the issue that had been bothering him ever since Cade had stepped into the room.

If he hadn’t done it, who had?

CHAPTER SIX

“Two minutes out, sir.”

The pilot’s comment carried clearly over the intercom and so Cade didn’t bother repeating the information to the rest of his team in the seats behind his own. They’d landed at the airport in Albuquerque twenty minutes ago to find the three Blackhawks waiting for them. The locals were used to military types coming in and out of Kirtland Air Base and didn’t think anything of the choppers. Cade and the rest of the command squad had taken the lead bird, while Captain Mason and the men of First squad climbed into the second. Their gear was loaded into the third Blackhawk and after that it had been an uneventful flight across the desert and through a maze of canyons to their present position.

Cade was stowing away the briefing papers he had been studying when the pilot broke in again.

“What the hell is that?”

Cade looked up and for the first time in a long while was greeted with an unobstructed view. Gone were the twisting channels of the canyons they’d been following. Now a large open valley stretched out before them. An isolated group of buildings could be seen alone in the distance; obviously the old military base mentioned in their briefing. To the east of the base, closest to them, he could see several mobile command centers and other assorted vehicles assembled into a makeshift camp, Mason’s staging area for the earlier excursion into the base. But what had caught the pilot’s attention was the swirling mass of charcoal-black thunderclouds that hovered low over the facility, storm clouds that twisted and churned with the urgency of class V river rapids. Green and silver lightning danced through the darkness, with the occasional bolt slashing down from the heavens to strike the fence that surrounded the base in a dazzling display of pyrotechnics.

Even stranger was the column of darkness that rose from the midst of it all like a water spout and seemed to be the source of the turmoil above.

Cade had seen storm clouds like these before, but never in this world. The fact that they were here, now, on this side of reality, chilled him to the bone.

But strangely, despite his apprehension, Cade also felt an odd sense of excitement grow in him at the sight. The clouds were the same as those in his recurring dream about the Adversary. While he had long suspected that the setting of those dreams might just be a real place, either somewhere here in the natural world or on the other side of the Veil in the Beyond, this was the first time he’d had even the faintest glimmering of evidence to support his suspicions. And if the clouds where real, then that fated confrontation with the Adversary might turn out to be real as well…

“Can you get a reading on those things?” Cade wanted to know. “Is that spout moving or staying steady?”

The pilot’s answer surprised him. “Get a reading? Man, that thing doesn’t even show up on radar. See for yourself.”

It was true. Glancing over, Cade could see that the pilot’s scope was perfectly clear, as if the thunderclouds didn’t exist. If they had been flying by instruments only, they could have flown right into the funnel without any warning whatsoever.

“Can you bring us in a little closer?”

The pilot glanced at him, the expression on his face unreadable. His tone left little to the imagination. “Yeah, I could. If there was any valid reason for doing so. But you’ve got to be…”

Cade cut him off. “Just do it. That’s an order.”

“Your funeral.” As the pilot moved to comply, Cade got on the radio to the other two helicopters.

“Blackbird Lead to Blackbird Flight.”

“Go Lead.”

“I’m going to check out those storm clouds. I want the two of you to hit the deck and start unloading the gear. I’ll join you momentarily.”

“Roger that, Lead.”

“I hear you, Lead. On the deck and unloading in three.”

“Blackbird Lead out.” Cade replaced the mike. Through the intercom he let the rest of the passengers know that things were going to get a bit hairy and then buckled up tight.

The pilot took them in as close as he dared, letting Cade get a good, long look. The helicopter bounced around in the wash from the funnel cloud, but the pilot was good and kept them on station. This close Cade could see that the funnel was stationary; like a shaft of light, it emerged from the ground in an open area on the far side of the base and shot straight upward. At a height of about four hundred feet it simply spread outward in a churning mass from its center, the way smoke will when it encounters a ceiling. Ground zero was obscured from view, so he couldn’t tell if the clouds were man-made, though he suspected they were not. He’d never heard of a piece of machinery that could do something like this and sorcery of this magnitude would have revealed itself in other ways.

Whatever it was, he had little doubt that it was intimately connected to whatever Vargas and his unknown colleagues had been doing at the facility and was determined to get to the bottom of it.

One last glance and then he turned away from the window. “All right. Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen enough.”

“Amen to that.”

But they wouldn’t get away that easily. As the pilot banked away from the funnel, a freak surge of wind swept over them, literally shoving the aircraft through the air as if brushed aside by the hand of a giant, tipping them over. Cade’s right-hand window abruptly became his floor and he found himself staring down through the glass at the ground far beneath them. He could hear the pilot swearing over the intercom as he fought the controls, doing what he could to restore command of the aircraft before they ended up strewn all over the landscape.

Just as he seemed to get things under control a bolt of silver-green lightning lashed out from the cloud above them, striking the helicopter somewhere behind the crew compartment.

Cade tensed, expecting the worst, but nothing happened. The lightning apparently had no effect. The pilot got the bird leveled out and they all breathed a sigh of relief as he turned back toward the landing zone.

Their path put the storm to Cade’s right and he turned to look at it again through the window. The clouds seemed to be more agitated than before, twisting and turning with greater violence. As he watched the clouds seemed to come together to form a face, a face that leered at him from out of those dark depths, a face full of anger and hatred and misery, a face to instill fear into the hearts of men.

That’s when the lightning returned, this time in earnest.

A second bolt followed the first. Then a third. And a fourth. Each bolt struck with near perfect precision, smashing into the base of the tail rotor. Sparks flew from the controls and the pilot yelled out in surprise as the board in front of him crackled with electrical discharge like the ghostly sheen of St. Elmo’s fire.

For a second time in less than five minutes, the pilot lost control of the aircraft.

An alarm began blaring incessantly as the tail rotor ceased to function, sending the helicopter spinning wildly on its axis. Thick black smoke filled the air around them, certain evidence that there was a fire somewhere in the aft section of the aircraft. The pilot’s hands and feet were in constant motion as he sought to overcome the rotation and land without smashing the aircraft, and all its passengers, into a million pieces.

Time shrunk down into milliseconds that moved at a snail’s pace and Cade felt oddly removed from the situation. He could see and hear the commotion around him; knew beyond a doubt that they were in mortal jeopardy, but his attention was drawn and held by the leering face in the clouds. It was there and gone again, so swiftly that Cade didn’t have any time to point it out to anyone else, but there was no denying what he had seen.

“Blackbird Lead is going down, I say again, going down.” The radio message broadcast over the internal intercom, notifying those aboard at the same time as those in the command center on the ground.

“Hold on!” the pilot yelled to those behind him as the bird continued its wild spiral toward the ground.

Cade did as he was told.

The chopper spun several more times and then slammed into the dirt just on the other side of the fence surrounding the base.

Then darkness swept over Cade.

*** ***

He came to only a few moments later, still strapped into his chair. Next to him, the pilot was being hauled out of the wreckage by several other knights. Groggy, but able to move under his own power, Cade managed to follow suit. Other knights were helping the rest of the team out of the rear section of the aircraft. As soon as he was clear, he turned his gaze skyward. The thunderclouds were still there, twisting and turning about themselves, but the face was gone.

The pilot was good; Cade had to give him that. He’d managed to get them all down on the ground in one piece. Short of a few cuts and bruises, and a broken leg for the hero of the hour, it looked like they would be all right.

The Blackhawk was a different story; its tail was broken off, its landing gear crushed, and its main rotor shattered into hundreds of pieces from the impact with the ground. As he walked away from the wreckage to the waiting HMMV that would take them to the trailer serving as a makeshift medical center, Cade had to wonder just what he had seen in the clouds overhead.

And what was waiting for them in the tunnels beneath the base.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After letting the medics give him a quick once over and being assured that nothing was unduly sprained or broken, Cade left the med trailer and made his way over to the forty-five foot mobile command center that Mason and his crew were using as a base of operations.

While he hadn’t been inside this particular model before, he was certainly familiar with such vehicles. He’d used them often during his days on the Boston Special Tactics and Operations team and even a handful of times since joining the Order. While he personally preferred working out of the open tailgate of his team’s SUV, he could understand the need for them on a prolonged op like this. This particular model was built on a Freightliner chassis and came equipped with a 450 hp diesel engine. It had workstations for eight and seating for eleven. In a pinch, the conference room could hold fifteen, though quarters would be tight. Interior electronics were powered by a 20-kilowatt generator and included satellite TV receivers, video surveillance cameras mounted externally on a 30 foot telescoping mast, UHF and VHF radios, mobile data computers, and other related communications and surveillance equipment, all of which were secured against intrusion.