American Craftsmen Read online

  “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.

  Lit
tle enemy probes of my power prickled my nerves, but like gunfire, they also guided me to their point of origin. A voice in my head: “Allahu akbar…?” Then, “Greetings friend, in the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful.” Shit, the fucker could think in panglossic, and with an annoying British accent. I preferred not to have much time for talk.

  “Pretty pagan surroundings for ‘Allah,’ friend.”

  “Necessary for my little trap.”

  “You’d better spring it soon. I’m just about there.” I cocked the hammers of three spells in my mind: a parry, an external thrust, and an internal one. I would have to improvise the specifics.

  “We practitioners should not kill each other,” said the sorcerer. “We should stay in our own land, our own power.”

  “Right,” I said. The tarp rippled in the night breeze. I came to an L in the maze, turned right, and found myself at the lintel. I used a small mirror to peer into the room beyond.

  Through the doorway was a long hall that had once been a temple. The sorcerer sat in a beat-up lawn chair where the altar to Assur-Marduk should have been. His head was framed by a back wall bas-relief of the god’s bull horns, symbols of the long gone Taurean Age. Amidst priceless objects, the sorcerer wore a Red Sox jersey and shorts. His teeth were mostly gone, his eyes stared up at the sky and seemed half-blind. Unarmed? Probably preferred craft-on-craft action.

  I raised the MP5, prepared to turn and shoot.

  A cold hand of craft squeezed at my lungs. “Break hand,” I said, using my first spell.

  Another hand of force reached for me and made my gun feel too heavy to aim. With the MP5 dangling from my right arm, I spun around the corner and drew a circle around the sorcerer with my left forefinger. “Move air.”

  The laws of thermodynamics are funny things. They don’t forbid most of the air from moving away from one’s head; they just say that it’s more likely the universe will expire before that happens randomly. A weatherman can put a spin on the forces and probabilities of nature. I was good at tweaking the improbabilities and making them happen.

  The sorcerer gasped, but he could still think up mischief. I pointed my left hand straight between my target’s eyes. “Short sharp shock.” The sorcerer jerked rigid. A lot of these backwoods magi had trouble thinking of their minds as mechanisms. They wasted time on hallucinations and ignored the raw synapses.

  I moved closer to the sorcerer. That hadn’t been too bad. Now to kill him.

  I could not take him prisoner. Confining such a man, much less putting him on trial, was prohibitively difficult. My orders might violate the law, but the law didn’t know about the craft, which was a damned good thing, given what the law used to do to craftspeople.

  I held my MP5 inches from the old man’s head.

  The sorcerer ceased convulsing and sat bolt upright, eyes fixed on me. I sought a protection to employ. The sorcerer cackled at me like a dirty old farmer at Internet porn.

  I didn’t shoot. No further malevolent energies sought me; I could afford to grant a few seconds. “If you’ve got any prayers to say, say them now.”

  The sorcerer closed his eyes and spread his arms wide, palms out. “You are here to take me out. Fine, I am old and ready. But I am going to take you out too. Not kill, just stop.”

  Threats were not the prayers I had in mind. I leveled my gun and shot the sorcerer between the eyes.

  The report echoed down the ancient hallways; in a red burst of craft, the sorcerer’s spirit left. Mission accomplished, I considered my exit.

  No exit. The cool night air rustled the tarp, carrying the sound of automatic weapons fire and a crushing sense of dread. My gun shook in my hand as I waved it in the dead sorcerer’s face. “What have you done?”

  A voice like a recorded message played in my mind. Feel that, ferangi? We know your family, your country. Your Left-Hand ancestors were an abomination before God. You can violate our land, parade your filth in front of us, even take our lives, but you will not take our magic. You will not take our souls. Feel it, ferangi.

  I felt it. Successive explosions of fear, then pain, then a gaping, aching nothing.

  A bearded man, hands outstretched, stands as a human shield in front of his house and a veiled woman; then hands and body are ripped with agony, and both man and woman fall into the dusty doorway.

  A mangy dog bares its teeth, then whines in final, crippled terror.

  A little girl wearing only a “Hello Kitty” T-shirt runs and screams down the street, then her heart bursts as two rounds pierce her chest, and my own heart screams.

  I felt the curse. Driven by the power of the sorcerer’s self-sacrifice, my team saw enemies everywhere, and killed every man, woman, and child they saw. The sorcerer’s own death spared him the karmic consequences of his heinous magic. Each murder instead became a cancerous part of my own mind.

  In the dungeon of my skull, a voice like my own laughed at the curse, and the murders. The voice of the Left Hand, trying to get out.

  Part of a wall tumbled stones at my feet. The dig started to slowly cave in—a dead man’s craft switch. Nothing that I couldn’t have outrun, if I cared to. I didn’t care. I was dying inside, over and over again.

  A rip like a Little Bird’s guns. At the other end of the room, the point of a KA-BAR slashed open the tarp. A soldier peered through the newly created gap. “Captain. Where are you?” It was Master Sergeant Zanol.

  “Sergeant, I ordered—”

  Zee jumped down to the floor. He dashed toward me and pushed me out of the way of another cascading stone. “I don’t give a fuck, sir.” Zee pointed his rifle at me. “They’re … I … you’ve got to help them.”

  After that, my memory was a jumbled slide show. Zee gave me a lift up and out of the excavation, then scrambled up after as I ran across the tell for the town. I hurtled down the mound’s side and screamed into the snap-snap of bullets, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Goddamnit, cease fire!”

  Far too fucking late. Night vision showed me the cooling bodies of women and children everywhere. My team was staggering around, covered in the sacrificial blood, starting to realize what they had done. I couldn’t let that realization sink in. “Valkyrie, immediate pickup. That’s ASAP. Over.”

  Like someone half-asleep, Doc protested on the com. “Captain, I think there’s some wounded civvies here. Should I treat?”

  “Negative, repeat negative. Withdraw.”

  “You heard him,” yelled Zee, voice nearly breaking with rage and despair. “Move out!”

  We jogged to the pickup point. We climbed back in our ground-hovering copter and started home.

  I grabbed the chopper’s transmitter. Duty still compelled me; I mouthed the necessary words to base. “Ike, this is MAC-66. We need immediate steam vac, MC 9146 4211.”

  “MAC-66, this is Ike. We’ll need to clear that with Mamie.”

  “Negative, Ike,” I said. “I’m calling this, priority Alfa, Last Best Hope.”

  “Roger that, 66. Wilco. Over and out.” It would be easier to explain a mistake from the air than what we had done. I would be destroying a town and ten thousand years of history to do it. I didn’t care.

  I clamped my jaw shut until it ached. Each death exploded in my head. If I opened my mouth without something to say, I’d start screaming and never ever stop again.

  I had to maintain appearances, if only for my men. But they wouldn’t leave me alone. “Captain, what happened back there?” asked Doc.

  “Nothing. Understand? Nothing happened,” I said. “You fired at some bad guys. We withdrew. That’s your report. You’ll speak of this to no one else.”

  But it would have taken more craft than I had left to convince my sergeant. Zee’s face was in his hands. He was sobbing.

  * * *

  We landed back at the base. Dawn was coming up over the dead land like an interrogator’s lamp on my soul.

  As we left the copter, Colonel Hutchinson was already on the tarmac and moving right into my face. “Capt
ain, what the hell is going on? Where do you get off calling in an air strike? We aren’t even supposed to be there!”

  I gestured over my shoulder, like a drunk at a bar passing the bill. “Colonel, my team…”

  “Oh, of course.” One of Hutch’s supernatural talents was to calm and reassure in a crisis. “Good work, men. Get your gear stowed. I’ll debrief you myself at 0800.”

  But my team didn’t look calm or reassured as they left me. Some looked back at me with silent questions and confusion. Sergeant Zee’s red eyes never left the tarmac as he crossed it.

  The colonel spoke in a low voice. “Now, Morton, what the fuck happened out there?”

  I held at attention, silent and steady, until the last member of my team was out of sight in the hangar. Then, my legs buckled, and I crumbled to the ground, retching, trying to be sick, but nothing was coming up.

  Hutchinson put her arm on my shoulder. “Dale, I’m sorry.” But her craft couldn’t reach me. “Dale? Captain Morton!”

  The dungeon voice in my mind said, Kill her. Kill them all.

  I struggled back to my feet. We know your family. Cease fire! “I’m stopped,” I said, my mouth like a computer reading a speech. “Done.”

  “Good. Now, what happened?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m done with this. All this. The military. Life. Done.”

  Hutchinson smiled, shook her head. “Some R & R…”

  “Done done done.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “No, right this fucking minute.” Cold fire flew out from my hands. “I resign. Discharge me now.”

  Hutchinson said, “Sword.” As if they were expecting this, two men ran across the tarmac and tackled me. The craft fizzled in my hands. With nothing more to say, I screamed into the face of one of the men. I hated that face, but had forgotten why.

  Hutchinson nodded, a sedative went in. I roared, but didn’t care enough to fight it. Being knocked out just made it official. I was done.

  All the way back to the U.S., every time I woke up, I screamed until they knocked me out again.