Last War Dance Read online

  Last War Dance

  The Destroyer #17

  Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

  For Thomas and Tyler Hering…

  A winning pair of aces in my book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TWENTY-FIVE FEET DOWN they began hitting the bodies. The big scoop that had followed the workers down into the Montana earth, devouring the loosenings of dynamite and pick, spilled out bones from its soil-dripping jaws.

  Cracked skulls there were, large and small and some so tiny they looked as if they had come from the necks of monkeys. Limb bones, some cracked, some whole, some smashed into sharp white fragments. You could walk in the crunch of bones that dry summer afternoon in 1961.

  The workmen asked if they should stop.

  “No,” said the government supervisor from Washington. “I don’t think so. I’ll check, though. Jeez. All in one bunch, huh?”

  “So far,” said the foreman. “In the last scoop.”

  “Jeez,” said the supervisor again and disappeared into his gray trailer, where everyone knew he had a telephone without a dial that he didn’t talk about and a safe hidden under his bunk that he didn’t talk about and an assistant who carried a .45 automatic and didn’t talk to anyone.

  The foreman turned to the workers, who had been standing around waiting for a decision. “Whaddya want from me, already?” he asked in an accent that was strange for the prairie country. “You know what kind of a contract dis is. Who else digs hundred-foot holes in da middle of prairies? Don’t waste your time waiting for the supervisor. Don’t even wait for him. He’s going to say, ‘Go back to work.’ Guaranteed. When he come out of dat trailer, he’s going to say, ‘Go the other seventy-five feet.’”

  A crane-operator climbed down from the cab of his crane and picked up what looked like a fragment of a whitish bowl.

  “Who could do such a thing? Who’d wanna do such a thing?” he asked, looking at the remnant of the small head, which fit into the palm of one hand, and at the cracked hole in the back of it. Then he started to cry. He placed it gently on a small rise and refused to dig farther.

  “You gotta,” said the foreman. “It’s part of da contract. No stoppages are allowed on dese kind of contracts. They’ll pull your union card.”

  “You can take your contract and wipe your nose wit it! Dat crane don’t go no farther,” he wailed in heavy Brooklynese.

  Other machines stopped, and picks stopped, and there was silence in the prairie.

  The government supervisor came running out of the gray trailer. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right,” he shouted. “Go ahead. Don’t worry about the bones. They’re hundreds of years old.”

  “You hear dat?” yelled the foreman into the hole. “He says the bones are hundreds and hundreds of years old.”

  “Then how come dere’s a piece of lead in dis skull and a small hole in it? How come, huh?” yelled back one of the workmen. “And here’s a woman’s beads or something. How come da bullet?”

  “Maybe she fell on a piece of lead. How should I know?”

  “It ain’t hundreds of years.”

  “So if it’s yesterday, already, what do you care?” yelled the foreman.

  “Because I care,” said the worker.

  “You’ll never work on one of these again,” the government supervisor said angrily, “But all right. If you men have to be shown, we’ll find someone who will explain to you that we’re not just ignoring a mass murder.”

  Late that afternoon a U.S. Air Force helicopter settled down on the site, and a white-haired man with a magnificent tan got out. He spoke with the soft quiet of authority and the simplicity of real expertise. There had not been one mass murder there, he said, but two. They had happened thousands of years apart.

  The later one occurred in 1873—one of the last Indian battles, if it could be called a battle. A U.S. Cavalry troop searching for a Sioux raiding party came across the peaceful Indian village of Wounded Elk and massacred the men, women, and children. Hence the bullets in some of the skulls.

  This happened at the time when the government was first becoming ashamed of its treatment of the Indians. So the massacre was kept quiet, and the punishment for the cavalry troop was to dig a hole fifty feet deep and bury the incriminating evidence.

  But at twenty-five feet they discovered older bones, and the captain ordered them to dig no farther but to bury the victims at that level.

  “Where’d da older bones come from?” demanded the crane-operator.

  “Well, do you see that child’s skull over there on that little mound?” asked the white-haired man, pointing to the head that had brought the recent tears. “It was killed in Indian fashion. They would grab a child by its feet and bash its head against a rock.”

  The crane-operator looked disgusted. “Dat’s awful,” he said. “When’d dat happen?”

  “The best estimate is between ten and fifteen thousand years ago. Those are rough parameters, but in this prairie, twenty-five feet down equals roughly fifteen thousand years. Indians didn’t bury their massacres beneath the ground you see. They left them on ground level.” His voice carried that little dancing joy of amusement, but there was no other amusement at the deep prairie hole.

  Eyebrows were furrowed, and the eyes of these men with rough, weathered faces showed deep pity. Fifteen thousand, a hundred thousand years meant little when they thought about someone swinging a baby by its feet to bash its head against a rock.

  “In da later massacre,” began a man, leaning thick arms on the handle of a pick, “the one with da cavalry how come youse guys know about it, when da government wanted to keep it like, secret, you know. How come?”

  “Yeah, how come?” asked the crane operator.

  The white-haired man smiled as if a clear fact were always a pleasure, even when it concerned the murder of a baby. “It is in the archives of the old Department of the Army, which is now the Department of Defense. We knew where this site was, but we didn’t think you’d hit it exactly. The odds against hitting it exactly were millions to one, considering the original location was fixed by star and by very distant landmark. This is a big, big prairie.”

  “Yeah. You can say dat again. I ain’t sure where da hell we are,” said the crane operator.

  “You’re not supposed to,” said the foreman. “Whaddya think, dey got us city guys on dis job because dey like Brooklyn or something? A shit-kicker might know just where he is. C’mon. Let’s go. You got your answer. Back to woik.”

  The crane operator returned to his cab, and other machines started. The helicopter left the prairie, where there was again the hammering noise of civilization.

  The workmen continued for two weeks, digging to exact specifications, and then went on to another site, hundreds of miles away, where they dug another hole, whose only purpose was to confuse them about the location of the first.

  The supervisor from Washington and his quiet assistant with the gun stayed on at the first hole. After the excavators came the men who built the metal structure for the concrete. And after the concrete was poured, a perfectly round hole hardened exactly one hundred eleven feet deep in the Montana prairie. The supervisor and the man with the gun stayed on.

  After the concrete came the skilled technicians who completed the wiring for the giant underground silo. And after them, in three stages, on Air Force flatbed trucks, came the missile. Putting it in place was like constructing an eleven-story building underground with a jewelers loupe. This too was completed, and the supervisor and the man with the gun watched the technicians go.

  It was winter when the large box came in the tractor-trailer. The driver was the white-haired man who had answered the diggers’ questions. His tan was still magn
ificent.

  When he entered the gray trailer, the government supervisor stood to attention. “General Van Riker, sir,” said the supervisor.

  The white-haired man blew the chill from his fingertips. He nodded toward the safe, whose dial peeked out from under a bunk.

  “Do you understand all that?” he asked.

  “I’ve had time to study it, sir,” said the supervisor.

  General Van Riker looked to the quiet man who carried the gun. The man nodded.

  “All right,” said Van Riker, lowering himself lightly into a folding steel chair. “You know, we almost canceled during that bone incident. You should have prepared for the possibility of the bodies. I shouldn’t have had to come here before I was supposed to.”

  The government supervisor raised his hands in a shrug. “For all the workmen know, this is an ordinary missile with an ordinary head. They were spooked by the bones, that’s all. The crane operator held a little funeral for one skull, I think, the day after you left.”

  “I know they think its an ordinary ICBM. That’s not the problem. I just don’t want this to be the silo they remember. That’s why I’ve sent them all over these prairies, digging more holes. Just to confuse them. But that’s neither your worry nor your fault.”

  General Van Riker nodded to the safe again. “C’mon, we’ll need that.”

  From the safe the supervisor brought two clipboards with notes and diagrams. General Van Riker recognized them immediately. He had written them. He had never commanded so much as an infantry platoon or a single airplane, but he had written those plans. And on the day he devised a two-man, two-day all-weather installation of an underground missile—as opposed to the usual method requiring multitudes and weeks and ideal conditions—he had been promoted to lieutenant general in the United States Air Force from a laboratory in an Atomic Energy Commission installation.

  Before he had left his civilian post in the AEC lab, Van Riker had also designed something else—what one think-tank scientist called the loser warhead because you use it when you lose one of two things: a world war or your sanity.

  Now in this Montana prairie Van Riker was bringing both his theories together.

  The supervisor donned his cold-weather gear, and with the clipboards under one arm, he joined General Van Riker and stepped out into the subzero winter night.

  The quiet man who carried the gun watched the two go to the truck and back it up to the tarpaulin-covered silo. He turned off the light in the little trailer to let his eyes adjust to the darkness but all he saw was a large metal arm extending from the back of the van. A large, dark canopy seemed to glide slowly along what appeared to be a pulley device on the arm, finally stopping over the tarpaulin.

  In the morning the quiet man saw that the dark canopy was a small air-filled workshed. Van Riker and the supervisor emerged only to grab a few hours sleep when darkness fell again. Then they went back to the canopy workshed.

  On the second day when darkness fell again. General Van Riker returned to the trailer and said to the quiet man, “Go ahead. Do you want a drink first?”

  “Not during work,” the quiet man said.

  “How about after?”

  “I drink bourbon. Make it a double.” The quiet man unholstered his .45 caliber automatic, checked the clip and the chamber, dry-fired it once, then returned it to its shoulder holster with the safety off.

  “I know you drink bourbon,” said Van Riker. “You drink a lot of it.”

  “Not when I’m dry.”

  “I know that, too. You have long periods of abstinence. You’re very capable of it.”

  “Thank you,” said the quiet man.

  And Van Riker smiled his joy-of-fact smile, the same smile that came from knowing that the Montana prairie contained the bones of two massacres and that at twenty-five feet in this prairie the original bones must be about fifteen thousand years old.

  Outside, the quiet man felt the chilling nip of the Montana winter night, felt the canopy of ice-clear stars above him, and crunched his way forward in moonlight so bright he could almost read in it.

  “Oh,” was all he said when he saw the site. Where the tarpaulin and then the workshed had been was now a huge block of marble five feet high and stretching almost fifty feet across. A giant block of statuary marble in the middle of a prairie. Rising about a foot and a half above it was something dark. He went to the marble, which came up to his chin, and saw that the something dark appeared to be a round brass cylinder.

  “Up here,” came the supervisor’s voice. “I’m up here. General Van Riker said you’re supposed to help.”

  When the quiet man hoisted himself up onto the block of marble, he saw that he was standing next to a giant bronze circle, which appeared to have raised letters.

  It was a giant plaque. It felt funny to walk across the lettering. He had never walked on a plaque before, and he wondered absently whether the raised letters were cutting into the soles of his boots.

  He motioned to the supervisor that he wanted the clipboards, then took them silently and clipped them securely to his belt.

  “Van Riker said that when I gave you those clipboards, you would explain the reason for those two holes over there, said the supervisor, pointing to the other side of the marble base, where there were two dark holes, three feet in diameter, like mini-silos. There’s no reason in these plans for them. But General Van Riker said they were essential and that you’d tell me.”

  The quiet man nodded for the supervisor to accompany him across the plaque to the holes.

  “Will you say something?” demanded the supervisor angrily. “Van Riker says you’re going to give me an explanation. I told him it would be the first time I ever heard you talk. Now, talk.”

  The quiet man looked at the three-foot holes and then at the supervisor he had lived with for so long without looking, without talking, making an effort not to listen to anything more important than a request to pass the salt. He had even stolen the picture of the supervisors family that had been on his desk because he did not wish to look at the three young boys and smiling woman. He had thrown the picture, frame and all, into the maximum-disposal bags that were burned at the site every day.

  “There’s a reason why I didn’t talk to you all this time,” said the quiet man. “I didn’t want to get to know you.”

  He brought the .45 out of his shoulder holster and put the first bullet between the supervisor’s eyes. The heavy slug sent the head snapping back, as if a baseball bat had collided with it. The body followed. The supervisor hit the plaque. The body twitched violently and then was still. The quiet man returned the gun to the holster but did not put on the safety catch.

  He dragged the supervisor’s feet over to one of the holes on the side of the marble monument, then dropped the feet over the edge. He grabbed the shoulders and pushed them toward the feet, and the supervisor’s corpse slid down into the hole, his head only eighteen inches from the top of the bronze plaque, which looked like a giant blowup of a penny atop a match box.

  When the quiet man reached for his .45 again, he felt the wetness of the handle and realized his hands were covered with blood. He knelt on the plaque and leaned down into the hole, the gun stretched out in front of him. When it touched the supervisor’s head, he fired three times. The splattering bone fragments, brain, and blood gushed up into the quiet man’s face as he fired the last rounds of certainty.

  “Shit,” he said, putting the sticky gun back into the holster.

  “Did he fight back?” asked General Van Riker when he saw the bloody face and right arm of the quiet man.

  “No. I just got some of him back at me when I put in my certainty shots. It’s a mess.”

  “Here’s your drink. Without ice because I figured you had enough cold out there. The clipboards, please.”

  The quiet man took the glass and looked at it. He did not drink.

  “How come there are two holes, general?”

  “The other is kind of a filter chamber
for the first one. Bodies tend to rot and smell, you know.”

  “Well, I was thinking…since you’re obviously the guy who designed that missile warhead…I mean, I’m no expert on missiles, but I know that two men in two days don’t install ordinary warheads. I mean, that had to be some kind of specially designed warhead. As little as I know, I know you don’t arm a missile like you put a bullet in the chamber of a gun.”

  Van Riker interrupted. “So what you’re saying is you think that anyone who could design that sort of easily installed warhead could certainly design a single burial cylinder, and you suspect the second cylinder is for you. Correct?”

  “Well, yeah. Correct.”

  “And you think we killed the supervisor like the pharaohs used to kill the workers who constructed the pyramids.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Do you know what kind of warhead that is?” asked Van Riker.

  “No.”

  “Do you know whether it’s even nuclear?”

  “No.”

  “See? You don’t know enough to be killed. All you know is that it’s something special and where it is. And even the pharaohs didn’t go around killing people who only knew where the pyramid was located. Frankly, if I were capable of killing, don’t you think I would have handled the supervisor myself? Why would I need a man from your agency?”

  “Well,” said the quiet man who still had not brought the glass to his lips.

  “I see,” said Van Riker. “You have been trained to be thorough beyond thorough, and you defend yourself as though others do the same. Like firing several shots instead of one. I heard you.” Van Riker nodded thoughtfully and slowly took the glass of bourbon from the quiet man. He drank half of it.

  “Okay?” he asked giving back the glass. “Not poisoned.”

  “Okay,” said the quiet man, but when his glass was filled again, he did not drink until the general had first taken a drink from it.

  “It’s this whole thing,” he explained apologetically. “It’s been spooky since the beginning. From the bones on, it’s been spooky. I mean it was bad enough having to live for so long with a man I was going to kill, but I can’t tell you what those old bones did to us. Little babies! Those Indians must have been something, general.”