Authors: Jon Land
BOOM!
The chamber door burst open ahead of Asahara’s remaining commandos charging inside, leveled guns searching for targets when Johnny Wareagle spun around with the floppy frames of the two men still in his grasp.
Along with their submachine guns.
Wareagle found both triggers at once, opening up twin streams of fire at the final commandos and downing them as their shots flew wildly through the chamber sparking flame bursts against the ceiling where the oxygen supply had been freed.
One of the errant shots grazed McCracken in the shoulder, turning his arm numb and useless. The advantage all his now, Kuroda hammered him hard in the jaw and wrenched the pistol from his grasp. McCracken met the Japanese man’s eyes, saw his own end in them.
Until Katie DeMarco sprang from the wall, catching Kuroda by surprise as she brought her gun in close. The advantage was hers until Kuroda lashed a hand upward and knocked it aside.
But not far enough.
The bullet she’d managed to fire entered under his chin, obliterating his face en route to exiting his skull and rupturing the already damaged oxygen tank directly above.
McCracken, meanwhile, reeled backward, shocked by what he’d just watched Katie do. Their eyes met through what looked like a ripple in the air in the moment before the blast. The flames cascaded downward from the ceiling, swallowing Katie in their grasp and just brushing against McCracken before the airburst slammed him against the wall.
That final moment found Katie feeling warm, cushiony, her last conscious thought one of comfort because she could
feel
. Sad, terrified, and elated all at the same time, reminding her what it felt like to be alive even as the flames claimed her.
McCracken watched her vanish, disappear into the fire-wrought oblivion, as Wareagle hoisted him to his feet and dragged him for the door. Sal Belamo had Sebastian Roy in his grasp by then, and McCracken realized Shinzo Asahara was unaccounted for. At the door, as the ceiling and roof began to collapse inside the chamber, he glimpsed Asahara amid the spreading flames reaching for an object displayed in the alcove housing Sebastian Roy’s priceless collection.
“It’s true,” he said, sounding crazed, even militant. “It’s all true!”
Suddenly he was a boy again, running toward his father in a beautiful garden. But before he reached him, Shoho Asahara melted like a wax figure, the pristine setting disappearing as if it were a tapestry embroidered on the world. Shinzo looked down to see both his hands, the boy’s hands, normal again before he felt himself melting too.
Only charred and skeletal remains burned to the bone could be found amid the steaming, smoldering pile of debris when McCracken and Wareagle returned to the chamber after sprinklers doused the flames with water. All the chamber’s furnishings had been reduced to molten char as well.
But McCracken knew there’d be one item left whole amid the rubble. He found it in what had been a display of Sebastian Roy’s greatest treasures, not only whole but utterly and remarkably unscathed by the flames. Pandora’s jar was still standing where it had been before the blast had struck. It was dry as well amid the puddles around it, the sprinklers’ spray appearing to have somehow missed it altogether.
McCracken lifted the jar, expecting it to be heavy, only to find it light and even comfortable to hold.
“I’ve seen the symbols on the jar before, Blainey,” Wareagle noted from just behind him, regarding what Sebastian Roy had thought to be no more than an ancient Grecian artifact in the sporadic spill of the emergency lighting.
“On the temple pedestal this jar had originally rested upon,” McCracken acknowledged.
A picture of the jar, the largest and simplest in Roy’s esteemed collection, and its symbols had been included among those in the magazine article Blaine had flashed to Katie DeMarco on the plane ride, recognizing the very same symbols on that pedestal inside Pandora’s Temple. And now he was leaving with the jar it had been built to safeguard in his grasp.
“Not a bad souvenir, eh, Indian?”
McCracken and Wareagle stood in the shadow of the Vietnam Memorial, eyeing the latest, and perhaps final, names that would ever be added. Present now were the fellow soldiers they’d served with in Operation Phoenix and other covert ops during the same era. Names that had been missing until now.
Paul Basmajian was the last name added, a final gesture on the part of Hank Folsom as a token of Homeland Security’s appreciation for their efforts.
“Not bad for a bureaucrat,” McCracken noted. “At least he’s a man of his word.”
“A rare find these days, Blainey. Truly.”
“He wanted to know if we wanted to come back on a more official basis.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That he knows where to find us.”
“And does he?”
“Unless we don’t want to be found.” McCracken turned from the wall to regard Wareagle closer. “I don’t know about you, Indian, but I can’t see myself retiring to a gated community and playing golf all day. Hell, I don’t even know how to hold a club.”
“You grip it like a gun someone once told me.”
“Yeah, gives a whole new meaning to the term even par. What we call survival.”
Wareagle looked at him briefly before responding. “You didn’t tell Folsom about the jar, did you?”
“Nope, and I don’t intend to. Man’s not ready for that kind of power, the good guys or the bad guys.”
Wareagle stiffened. First McCracken thought he was atypically ill at ease; then he realized bitterness and angst had claimed Johnny’s expression. “It killed Baz, Blainey. It will kill far, far more unless something is done.”
“And it will be, starting with the immediate suspension of all drilling below twenty thousand feet, if Hank Folsom is to be believed.”
“Even if he is, is that enough?”
“It’s a start.”
“And Sebastian Roy?”
“Our next stop, Indian.”
Wareagle turned his attention back to the Wall, drifting to other places full of rotor wash, the stench of spoiled mud, exfoliated jungles, rice paddies, and endless death. For a moment, just a moment, McCracken thought he heard Hueys coming in for extraction, the worst time always being the very instant of climbing on board for the vulnerability it carried with it.
“I’m sorry about the young woman, Blainey.”
“I am too. Maybe that’s the only way it could have ended for her. Maybe it’s what she’s been trying to do all along.”
“Such words could just as easily be applied to yourself or me.”
“Good thing they’re not, I guess, Indian.”
“You couldn’t have saved her even if she had lived,” Wareagle told him.
“I figured that much out for myself, Johnny. But I look at her and what do you think I see?”
“Younger versions of the two of us.”
“More reckless, making all the mistakes we always steered clear of, making things personal being foremost on the list. That can carry you for a while but it always leads to the same place: nowhere.”
“She could have been your daughter. Or mine, Blainey.”
“In more ways than one.”
Wareagle moved his gaze from the Wall back to McCracken. “When do we head back to Greece?”
“I never said we were, Indian.”
“You didn’t have to,” Wareagle told him.
“After we deal with Sebastian Roy.”
Sebastian Roy faded in and out of consciousness, lost to the fog of sedatives as doctors in Madrid struggled to reduce his fever, stave off further infections, and stabilize his vital signs. He had no choice but to surrender to his dreams that came in fits and starts, often with what felt like interminable lags and other times following each other in rapid-fire fashion. There were snippets of Alexandra, both as a girl and as the vengeful, bitter woman who formed his final memory of her. There were memories of his family before the fire and nightmares about the burned form of his son rising from the ashes of the fossil fuel plant. There were brief glimpses of the bearded man, his black eyes like liquid pools trying to suck Roy in. And once, when he opened his eyes in the dream, the bearded man was standing by his bedside, looming over him like a ghost.
“Time to go home, Mr. Roy,” he said, and Sebastian Roy realized with a terrible fear that this visit wasn’t the product of a dream at all.
McCracken and Wareagle waited for Roy to come fully conscious, having set him in a lush chair in an even lusher library inside his compound atop the Pyrenees Mountains. The burnt odor hung in the air the same way smoke stains claimed the walls in patches. Few areas were untouched by the explosions and gunfire and water pooled in irregular splotches from ruptured pipes and portions of the sprinkler system that had been activated by the smoke alarms. The stench of must and mold permeated the air in stark contrast to rooms like this that remained pristine and elegant. The emergency generators maintained a measure of the compound’s lighting, though in flickering fashion.
Roy awakened to the sight of both of them, instinctively trying to pull free even though he wasn’t bound. “What is this? Why have you brought me here?”
“So you can be alone with your thoughts,” McCracken told him, the bitter scent he recalled from their last meeting seeming harsher and less antiseptic, like food in the first throes of spoilage. “Literally, once we leave. Everyone else is gone, and the Indian and I have made sure to disable all communications in and out. Should give you plenty of time to reflect on all your accomplishments and success, your hits . . .”
McCracken stopped to gaze about melodramatically, running his eyes over the most expensive furnishings money could buy before returning his eyes to Roy.
“. . . and misses.”
“The jar,” Roy realized.
“It was right here among all your other pieces, likely salvaged from the bottom of the Mediterranean God knows how long ago.”
Roy’s skin felt dank and clammy. The fever that had racked him in the hospital seemed to be worsening, light-headedness starting to plague him.
“No, that’s not true! It
can’t
be true!”
“I recognized the symbols on a pedestal inside the temple from a picture of the jar in that architectural magazine,” McCracken told him. “Biggest jar in your collection and also the simplest. Ivory colored, except for those dark symbols.”
Roy’s eyes bulged. He knew that particular jar all too well, so large he’d had to change the spacing of the shelves in his display to accommodate it. The very jar he’d offered to the green energy magnate Landsdale before he’d taken over the man’s companies.
Roy’s lips quivered, his whole body shuddering. He leaned backward, the chair seeming to swallow him.
He’d had Pandora’s jar all along!
McCracken started to back off, drawing even with Johnny Wareagle. “I don’t know how long you’ll be able to survive outside your chamber before the infections worsen. The power’s on and the computers still work, if you want to try putting the whole story down. Just remember you killed your family, your whole family now. It might have been your daughter who set the bomb in Stuttgart, but you lit the fuse long before that.” McCracken stopped, then resumed just as quickly. “Oh, and one more thing about your story, sir.”
Roy looked at McCracken blankly.
“Now it has a happy ending.”
They returned to Pandora’s Temple with a professional crew on board a craft almost identical to their original
Crab
. Wareagle kept his eye peeled out the windows the whole stretch after they slipped through the same vent into the cavern below, as if expecting the giant squid to make an appearance again.
For his part, McCracken held Pandora’s jar in a carefully padded case. The simple ivory-colored jar itself weighed extraordinarily little. Prior to making the trip back to Greece with Pandora’s jar in their possession, McCracken had watched as Captain Seven put the jar through every conceivable test, determining ultimately it was composed of materials clearly not of this world. X-rays, thermal scans, and all manner of high-tech diagnostics and analysis had further revealed nothing contained within the jar—at least nothing bearing any weight, mass, or shape. In those moments, McCracken was never gladder for the fact that the seamless, lidless nature of Pandora’s jar made it impossible to open.
And now it never would be.
“The tsunami that sank the temple in 1650
B.C.
must have dislodged Pandora’s jar and sent it drifting in the ocean,” McCracken said, even though he knew Wareagle was barely listening. “It settles on the bottom and, at some point, gets recovered by an archaeological or geophysical survey team. Ends up in Sebastian Roy’s private collection.”
Wareagle finally turned his way, shaking his head. “To have what he most wanted all along and not realize it . . .”
“Maybe that’s the whole point of the jar.”
“What?”
“Pathos Verdes built Pandora’s Temple to hide a weapon not fit for mortal man, capable of killing a god . . . and a planet. Could be the temple wasn’t needed at all. Could be the jar was capable of taking care of itself just fine.”
“Maybe the jar found us, Blainey.”
“Then let’s go treat it right.”
They used the craft’s single robotic arm and pincers to return Pandora’s jar to its pedestal, retracing their route out and climbing fast without encountering the giant squid again. After rising up through the vent, the underwater explosives experts McCracken had brought with him used those same pincers to lay powerful, shaped charges across the seafloor above the cavern housing Pandora’s Temple, concentrated in the areas around the vent.
McCracken personally triggered the blasts from closer to the surface to shield the craft from the shock wave and percussion. He felt only a rumble and watched as the underwater cameras they left behind revealed the sea itself seeming to cave inward in a rolling cloud of sand, silt, and sediment.
Then nothing at all.
When the cloud cleared on the screens before them, nothing remained but the darkness of an abyss that would keep the secrets of the sea safe.