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  “ ‘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.

  Chapter Twelve

  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. I’ve 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 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 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.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  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 patrolling 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.

  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 massacr
e.”

  Jones shook his head in disgust. “We’ve still got a long 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 …”

  Both Jones and Yaz felt a chill run through them.

  “Christ, were there that many bodies burned into dust?” Yaz exclaimed.

  Fitz slowly shook his head. “Undoubtedly some were,” he said. “But not such a high number. But there’s more: According to the Army commander, apparently all of the people missing are women.”

  “Women?” Jones asked.

  Fitz shrugged. “That’s right: all the males—of all ages—in the village were killed,” he said, referring once again to the telex. “And there were some women killed, too. But at least one hundred and eighty-seven people—all of them women between the ages of fourteen and thirty-six—are missing. Gone. Vanished.”

  “Good God,” Jones whispered bitterly. “What the hell happened up there?”

  Fitz could only shake his head. “Either the raiders grouped all these women together and killed them somewhere else and their bodies just haven’t been found. Or …”

  “Or what?” Yaz wanted to know.

  “Or …” Jones answered the question soberly. “The bastards took them all with them.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nauset Heights,

  Three days later

  “MORE CHOWDER, YAZ?”

  Yaz leaned back in his chair and briefly squeezed his expanding waistline.

  “Maybe just a little,” he replied, caving in without much of a fight. “It’s so damn good, it’s hard to resist …”

  Dominique ladled out two heaping spoonfuls of the fish stew, then handed the pot to Hunter who doled out a third helping of his own.

  Yaz reached for a hot roll and slapped a pat of butter on it. “God, I haven’t eaten this good in years,” he said.

  “Neither have I,” Hunter mumbled through a mouthful of the fish chowder. “That’s scrod you’re eating by the way. Caught a bunch of them this morning out in the bay.”

  They were sitting in the comfortably rustic kitchen of the farmhouse Hunter and Dominique called home. Yaz had arrived earlier that afternoon, flown in by a United American Armed Forces helicopter that had met his airplane at the airport up in Boston. It seemed as if he and Hunter had been eating and drinking ever since.

  Yaz’s mission per Jones’s orders was to brief his friend on the strange goings-on in Nova Scotia, as well as the piece of videotape from Plum Island. It had been a tough decision for the Commander in Chief to make. More than eight months had passed since Hunter left active duty, and Jones had gone to great lengths to honor Hunter’s desire for privacy.

  Yet Hunter had greeted Yaz warmly on his arrival—they were friends, and it had been almost a year since they’d seen each other. However, at Hunter’s insistence, Yaz had put off discussing the bad news until after dinner.

  “Unless you’re here to tell me about an impending nuclear attack, it can wait,” Hunter had said to him shortly after Yaz stepped off the chopper.

  So instead, Yaz had gotten a tour of the farm and the fields, plus a ride along the beach in Hunter’s laughably rickety pickup truck.

  But now, as the three of them finished their dinner meal, Yaz knew it was time to get on with his assignment.

  Hunter caught the look in his eye, and reluctantly nodded.

  “OK,” he said, filling Yaz’s glass with an after-dinner shot of brandy. “Let’s have it …”

  Yaz threw back the liquor to steel himself, then took the next fifteen minutes to detail what was known about the Yarmouth massacre. Through it all, Hunter listened without speaking, taking it all in between refills of brandy. Only Dominique, who pretended to busy herself by putting the finishing touches on a dessert of homemade apple pie, showed any reaction to the startling news, gasping at several points in the story.

  By the time he got to the part about the “sea monster,” Yaz had downed three glasses of brandy and was working on his second piece of pie.

  Finally, Hunter spoke.

  “Well, I knew it must have been something heavy duty for you to come all the way out here,” he said. “What do Jonesie and the others make of all this?”

  Yaz shook his head. “No one has come up with anything near a rational explanation,” he said, finally pushing the pie plate away from him. “I mean, it was bad enough that whoever was responsible just utterly wiped out that village. But for them to disappear like that—walk back into the ocean?—and apparently take a hundred and eighty-seven women with them? It’s just too bizarre …”

  “And the women who were taken were just between certain ages?” Dominique asked.

  Yaz nodded grimly. “Between fourteen and thirty-six,” he said. “And we all know there are white slavers running around the world. But I’ve never heard of any of them abducting more than five or six people at a time.”

  “Neither have I,” Hunter said. “Usually, they’re just hit-and-run scumbags who can’t count past ten.”

  They retired to the back porch, where a pot of brandy-laced coffee was passed around. The fading light of the setting sun provided the customary spectacular sunset, with a slightly cool ocean breeze heralding the approach of another night.

  “All this gloom from Nova Scotia almost makes your monster story seem funny by comparison,” Hunter told Yaz. “Jones and Fitz must be going nuts.”

  “They’ve worn out the VCR watching the videotape,” Yaz said. “And I don’t blame them. I’ve seen it probably three dozen times, and each time, it looks like a frigging monster. A real one—solid, skin and all. His head just bobs up and down once and then boom! it disappears.”

  “Perhaps the famous monster finally escaped from Loch Ness?” Dominique said, brushing back her beautiful blond hair as she sipped her coffee.

  “That’s what Jonesie said,” Yaz replied with a laugh.

  “Well, that monster he better stay the hell away from Nova Scotia,” Hunter replied. “Sounds like whoever is on the loose up there would cut him up and eat him for breakfast.”

  Yaz took a hefty gulp of his own spiked coffee.

  “Jones was back and forth on whether I should even come out here and tell you all this,” he said to Hunter. “I mean, I’m the last one in the world who’d want to screw up your … well, your vacation. But …”

  Hunter held up his hand. “It’s okay,” he told Yaz.

  Yaz nodded, but he could sense the disappointment in Hunter’s voice. He felt like the guy who’d just crashed a birthday party, or more accurately, a honeymoon.

  “Well, Jones figured you’d want to know,” he went on. “He wrote it all up in a report that I have in my pack. Forty-two pages of it.”

  Hunter poured out three more cups of coffee.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And,” Yaz replied somewhat sheepishly, “he thought that maybe you could read it over, help us figure it all out …”

  Hunter immediately looked over at Dominique, who was staring right back at him. With just one glance, he read volumes in her eyes.

  “Well, the problem is that we’re trying to make this more than just a ‘vacation,’ Yaz,” Hunter told him. “It’s more like a retirement.”

  “I know,” Yaz replied. “And Jones knows that, too. I realize you’re out of the business, and I don’t blame you. But there’s just so many strange things going on …”

  Hunter barely suppressed a laugh. “So what else is new?” he asked.

  They sat in silence for several moments. Then Hunter took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Okay, I’ll make a deal with you,” he said finally. “I’ll read the report, roll it all over for a few days, and then let you know what comes out. How’s that?”

  Yaz could only shrug. “Well, that’s great,” he replied. “I mean I’m sure
Jones didn’t expect you to lead the charge, exactly.”

  “Well then, it’s settled,” Hunter said with a smile. “I’ll be like an adviser. A big-shot consultant. And of course, you’ll have to stick around here for a while, you know, to help me sort it out.”

  Yaz looked up at him and scratched his head.

  “Jesuzz, I don’t know, Hawk,” he said worriedly. “Jones thought I’d shoot out here and then go right back—either with or without you. He’s expecting me back tomorrow.”

  Hunter cheerfully waved away Yaz’s protests.

  “When’s the last time you took a few days off?” he asked his friend.

  Yaz shook his head. “I can’t remember back that far.”

  At that point, Hunter grinned and poured him another cup of coffee, thereby signaling that the debate was over.

  Dominique reached over and placed her hand on Yaz’s shoulder.

  “Like it or not, Yaz,” she said sweetly, “it looks like you’re the one who’s going to take a vacation …”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Near Boston

  Two days later

  HIS NAME WAS JACK Stallion, and as he gazed out from his office atop the fifty-foot-high tower, he was reminded once again that he was a man with a lot of responsibilities.

  Stretched before him, looking like a field of enormous tuna fish cans, were twelve huge fuel storage tanks, each one painted in a distinctive pearl white. Contained in the tanks was more than one hundred-thousand gallons of a highly volatile kerosene product known as JP-8 to the experts, jet fuel to the layman.

  As such, the dozen tanks of JP-8 represented the largest concentration of jet engine fuel in the northeast part of America.

  Like many things in the first few years after the Big War, jet fuel had been at a premium. But as the country gradually recovered, reserves of the precious JP-8 grew, as did its use. The increase in jet flights from the East Coast to the West and vice versa—the massive air convoys now contained as many as seventy or eighty airplanes—demanded continuous production of the JP-8 at a half dozen refineries on the eastern seaboard. This one, located on the shore just north of Boston in a small city called Revere, was one of the largest because of its proximity to the Hub’s huge airport.