Death Chants by Craig Strete Read Free Book Online Page B

the silent figure
driving the jeep, I felt threatened and wished I had a weapon.
    We went past a
large storage shed and he turned the wheel abruptly to the right.
    Two men lounging
beside the shed sprang into action. They jerked on ropes and a steel shuttered door slid up. The
jeep slowed, righted itself, and we shot into the open doorway.
    As soon as we had
made it inside, the heavy doors clanged shut behind us with a bang.
    The lights went on,
flooding the dimly lit interior with blazing light.
    A tall man in a
business suit sat on a chair, flanked by heavily armed men of the 315th Air Commando
Group.
    My driver got out
of the jeep and walked away, not looking back. He lit a cigarette and strolled behind a stack of
ammo cases.
    "Don't bother
getting out of the jeep, Lookseeker," said the tnan in civilian clothes. "I won't keep you very
long."
    "Who are you? Why
am I being detained?"
    The man winced.
"Hardly detained. Let us say, momentarily delayed. I'm Hightower. I'm with the CIA."
    "Somehow, I'm not
surprised," I said.
    "You know, this is
a war we could win. I want you to know that I honestly believe that. I don't think I would like
to see it end prematurely. We still need more time."
    I studied him. He
had a lean face, a killer's face, but a kind of sadness suffused his features. He projected a
fatherly aura, ra­diating charm and warmth that probably did not exist.
    "What does this
have to do with me?" I asked. The eagle shrieked and flung itself at the bars of its cage as it
had done many times before.
    He smiled and I
felt a cold wind, as if something had stirred ilie air above a grave. "Let us say that civilized
as we may seem, America is no more civilized than we choose to be. Do we make war with logic and
precision and science? The Pentagon would have us believe so. But you and I, Lookseeker, we know
differ­ently. Hitler had his astrologers. Eisenhower had a rabbit foot in his pocket throughout
the war. War brings out the mystic need lor answers in the most civilized men."
    "I am surprised.
You seem to know what my mission is. I was told that no one would know," I said and I knew this
was truly a dangerous man. And a dying man as well. I could feel it, almost see it glowing
beneath his skin, an unstoppable cancer, a shadow riotously burgeoning with dark
unlife.
    "How I know is
unimportant. But make no mistake about it, my friend, I am deeply concerned by what you are about
to do. I don't like it. I detest it just as I detest all of the tired old mystical, religious
mumbo jumbo of the past. I am an irreligious man. Winning is my religion."
    "If you were to ask
me, I would say you are a very religious man," I said, borrowing some of the eagle's wisdom. "If
you were not, you would not so deeply fear what I am about to do."
    The man jerked as
if struck. His face grayed and he looked down at his hands. They were white, long and pale, like
blind worms from a subterranean cave. There was a pallor about the man that suggested that he
seldom saw the sun, sitting like a spider in his dark web, spinning dark nets to entrap his
prey.
    "Perhaps you are
right," he said and he looked at me strangely. "You are not what I expected."
    He looked at me
carefully, as if trying to figure out just how dangerous I was by the way I looked.
    I did not make an
intimidating figure. I have long, black, very unmilitary hair. I am not tall, neither am I
particularly hand­some. My face is too thin, my eyes are too large with things that walk through
the thousand thousand dark nights of man. The military uniform I wore was much too big for me.
Hollywood would never have cast me as a warrior or a medicine man. In my own way, though, I was
both.
    "I think you
expected to see an old man, rattling skulls and waving feathers and chanting mysterious chants.
Something like that."
    "Yes." His smile
was almost real now. "Perhaps, if you looked like a fake, I might be more inclined to dismiss you
as a