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  Seat of Power

  I N T E R C E P T

  A Jack Coyote Thriller

  Season 1

  J. S. Chapman

  Seat of Power

  I N T E R C E P T

  A Jack Coyote Thriller

  Season 1

  J. S. Chapman

  Copyright © 2018 by J. S. Chapman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Weatherly Books

  Chicago, IL, USA

  This book is licensed for your personal reading enjoyment and may not be resold or given away to others. Reproduction in whole or part of this book without the express written consent of the author and/or publisher is strictly prohibited and protected by copyright law. Short excerpts used for the purposes of critical reviews is permitted. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  From the Author

  If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

  «»

  George Orwell

  Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

  1

  Cochise County, Arizona USA

  Saturday, February 7

  “HEROES DON’T SIGN up to be heroes. They’re made.”

  In his delirium, Jack Coyote remembers saying those words to a lady with a quick temper and a foul mouth. They argued over it. Shouted unforgiveable words at each other. And broke up, hard feelings strong. A few weeks later, she was dead. His life fell apart. He contemplated putting it back together, but after deciding there was no resurrecting the reputation of John Jackson Coyote, he struck out on a journey of resurrection and revenge. For him it was personal. He had a score to settle.

  For now, he is preoccupied with more pressing matters, such as staying alive and taking one halting breath after another. It is true what they say about death and dying. His life literally flashes before his eyes in a cinematic series of images that grind through the sprockets of his memory, starting with his childhood and abruptly ending in a hail of gunfire. Thirty-two years of living from day to day is longer than most people can imagine yet much too short in the scheme of things. His mother died at thirty-two. It looked as if he would, too. He was too young to die, he thought. Yet other men in the service of their country die even younger.

  Gradually, in a haze of confusions, he becomes aware of his surroundings. He is traveling in a truck that spirits him down a bumpy road through an arcade of tall trees and taller skies. The trees are bowed inward, forming the vaulted ceiling of an earthly cathedral. He lies sprawled on the bed of the truck, shuddering uncontrollably beneath a coarse woolen blanket. Blood seeps into the blanket. His blood. The driver up front barks back at him, ordering him to hang on. Jack remembers him now. He was the man who carried him out of the blazing ranch in New Mexico.

  Several months ago, Jack got caught up in a web of corruption. The seat of power—occupying some hundred-square miles tucked between Virginia and Maryland—was being overrun by a select group of madmen who moved chessmen across a game board, callous about the consequences their actions would bring about. It had always been like this, of course. Corruption had always flourished in Washington, D. C. This time it was different. This time their secret cabal could bring everything crashing down, though not with missiles or bullets, instead with a single keystroke.

  Thrown on the pyre of sacrifice, Jack Coyote had become a man of little consequence, forced to resurrect his name even if he died in the process.

  He peers through the small grimy window at the rear of the truck. Through it he can see a dirt road speeding away and mountains rolling in the distance. It is dawn. Or it is dusk. He doesn’t know which. He has lost track of time. The truck is well used. The interior is filled with tools, cartons, and bins. The joists rattle. The axles grind. The undercarriage creaks. The stink of oil and gasoline fills his nostrils. His fingers twitch beneath the blanket. With each twist and turn of the truck, and each bump of the tires on the road, he becomes aware of twinges. The twinges escalate into throbs, and the throbs into searing pain. He takes stuttering breaths. His teeth chatter. He begins to shiver. He closes his eyes, shutting out the cabin around him. And grits his teeth against waves of agony.

  When next he opens his eyes, the sun is overhead. The truck follows choppy bends in the road, slogging past scrubby trees and dry grasslands. The road is washed out in sections and crumbling from the forces of time and nature. Hummocks and hills—interlaced with valleys, canyons, and trails—hang like drapery from a cloudless sky. The terrain becomes steeper and the climb more treacherous. The truck stops often, allowing the driver to come around to the back of the truck and press water to Jack’s lips, check the makeshift bandages, and lay a hand on his forehead. His eyes are kind and filled with worry. He grips Jack’s hand, imparting strength, and tells him again to hang on just a little bit longer. He gets out, swings the rear doors shut, and recommences the journey.

  Jack’s thoughts go back to the woman he broke up with ... how long ago was it now? ... eight months? Their last words were bitter words. She had argued with him about the concept of heroism, claiming anyone who signs up to serve his country is a hero. Jack disagreed. Only a man who faces death but goes into the breach where the battle is fiercest can be proclaimed a hero. Even then, he does not make a conscious decision. Instead he heeds a higher call. He has two choices. To run or to fight. He chooses to fight, to act selflessly, to protect a buddy, a stranger, his family, and if he’s very lucky, a nation. He does not call upon an unknown deity to spare him. He does not consider the costs to himself or his family, not for a single second, for in that second hangs the balance between life and death. And so he charges headlong into battle even though he knows the odds are heavily stacked against him. If he comes out alive, he will be wounded of body or mind or both. But given the same choice, he would do it again, the mark of a true hero.

  Memories come to him. Of the ranch, the enclave, and the fellowship of deluded men. Of the chants they murmured from the subterranean depths of their madness. Of the creed they blindly followed. Of the messianic prophecies they yearned to fulfill. Of the high treason they set out to commit. Millions would suffer for their greed and their callousness. They didn’t give a damn. They were hell-bent on destruction, utter and complete.

  Immediately after Jack took down the madman who had his finger on a button designed to unleash fury, a volley of bullets spun him around. The firepower hit him three times: thigh, shoulder, and side. After collapsing in a mound of senseless flesh, he prepared for the inevitable. He would have died in a pool of his own blood but for the strong arms that lifted him up and carried him away. Others rushed to the fore, roaring and taking potshots into the night. His rescuer fired back and sent them scattering for cover. A woman went down. Then two more men, one shrieking in agony and th
e other dead where he fell.

  Hobbled as he was, his rescuer managed to haul him to the truck, the night mud-black but the ranch house burning with floodlights while men scattered helter-skelter. Jack elbowed his way into the back of the truck and there fainted on the cabin floor. As he drifted off, he remembered the words. His words. Heroes don’t sign up to be heroes. They’re made. Had he the strength, he would have laughed. As it was, he groaned. How silly he had been to argue a point he knew nothing about. No man is a hero. Each is a coward in his own way. Though his veins flowed with the blood of his Apache ancestors, Jack Coyote never thought of himself as a hero. Now he never would.

  The truck roared off, leaving the ranch behind in a blaze of inglorious vanity as one by one the explosive devices inside the launch control center detonated, leveling the silo and the subterranean bunkers, and taking with them the men who thought they could rule the world from a computer console.

  As he lay on the truck-bed, grimacing with every jerk and lurch, Jack has scattered memories of what occurred shortly before the shots rang out. Incompatible memories. Of a girl and a kiss and a jaunty walk. The kind of scene you see in movies, when a man and a woman flirt with each other, where the girl isn’t as naïve as she pretends to be and the man knows she isn’t but plays along.

  She walked into the room first and entered blackness. It was a trap. Something hard smashed down on Jack’s shoulder followed by the pop-pop-pop of a handgun instead of the bang-bang-bang of a semiautomatic. He instinctively grabbed the tittering girl and spun her into the line of fire. Her nimble body took most of the bullets, though the shooter did not know it and neither did the lady.

  Within seconds, the pain caught up with him, his strength failing fast and his legs giving way. He would have been surrounded and captured, or worse, executed with two well-aimed bullets drilled into the back of his skull. But strong arms lifted him up, arms he remembered from childhood when he was carried off to bed and tucked beneath layers of blankets, there to hug his favorite stuffed bunny before falling peacefully asleep with his thumb stuck between his lips.

  A wise old man once taught him an invaluable lesson. Life is simple, he said. Sometimes you succeed. Most times you fail. Sometimes it’s stormy. Eventually the clouds part. Sometimes you win the race. Other times you fall flat on your face. But no matter how tired, how hurt, or how dispirited you are, you will always get back up because your soul is stronger than your body, and where the soul speaks, the will listens.

  Jack doesn’t know if it’s true, but he will soon find out.

  The truck stops. The motor dies. The driver gets out, drags his useless carcass of a body out of the cabin, hoists him over a strong shoulder, and carries him to sanctuary. Though he has never been here before, he knows where he is. He has been delivered to where his fate was stamped on his soul thirty-two years ago, here in the land of his forefathers.

  His mother’s wisdom comes to him. It is this: Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are and will always remain a man of the People. To the People you will return. From the People you will draw strength. It is written on the wind for all Eternity.

  He is carried through a squat doorway into a cool abode where he is rolled onto his back, there to lie in languid suffering. He opens his eyes. Faces hover above. He hears himself croak and then speak. “Where are we?”

  A distant voice answers. “Near the Dragoon Mountains, nearly five-thousand feet up, where nobody will find us. You’re safe.”

  With these spoken words, he lets everything fall away.

  His five-times great-grandfather Big Gray Coyote had lived in the deserts and mountains of the mighty Southwest, in what was now Arizona and New Mexico, and Sonora and Chihuahua, on lands that belonged to the People for more generations than could be counted, all the way back to the beforetimes when the snowbird flourished and dinosaurs roamed the earth. Then the White Men came. Buffalo hunters with their guns. Legions of blue-hatted soldiers. Settlers with no other place to go but West. All determined to run the Chiracahua off the lands given to them by the Great Spirits. It was here, not very far from Apache Pass, where he had been brought, a man who wants to die, a man who has become the target of a nationwide dragnet.

  A natural freshwater spring runs through the pass. In his fevered stupor, Jack can hear its rippling waters along with the calling of birds, the screeching of hawks, the who-wee of the winds, and the hoot-hoot of the night owl. He clings to the sounds as a man who yearns to succumb to the weaknesses of his body but does not want to leave things undone, things like vengeance and the uncovering of truths and the unmasking of bad men, simple things like that.

  He awakens on a low bed made up of layers of blankets, so close to the ground that his fingers touch the humming earth. Slowly he becomes aware of other things. He lies naked in an Apache hogan framed with logs and covered with mud. A firepit occupies the center. The roof is underpinned with rough-hewn rafters. The ceiling is vented for smoke. Drinking vessels line makeshift shelving. Native artifacts swing by pegs from curved walls: cured buffalo hides, eagle feathers, war bonnets, handwoven blankets. The hogan is roughly the size of a large bedroom within which several people can assemble, eat, drink, and regale stories accompanied by laughter. No one regales stories in his presence. They only creep around on moccasins or bare feet. The odor is pervasive, that of Mother Earth and Sister Sky.

  Jack was taught long ago that the lands to which he has been spirited were named for one of the greatest Native American chieftains in written history—Cochise—his name synonymous with bravery. It was here, long before the People were transported in defeat to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation under heavy guard, where the proud Chiricahua Nation subsisted on the hunting of wild game, of plants gathered from the ground, and of corn and other staples sewn on a few choice acres. Seasonal migration was the habit of the People and the way of the Spirits. Nothing but hot desert and cold mountains stretched from Apache Pass in the east to the Dragoon Mountains in the west. The Chiracahua stronghold of Cochise had been ideally situated for skirmishes. Sentinels guarded the approaches from on high while down below, raiding parties launched strategic attacks on soldier forts, mounted patrols, and marauders. Deeds done and casualties few, they retreated into the hills and valleys where few White Men dared trespass. After Cochise fought the soldiers until he could fight them no more, he was secretly buried in the boulder-filled canyons.

  A medicine woman prays over Jack’s wounded body, chanting the songs of old and practicing the rituals handed down to her from her grandmothers. To his condemnation or his exaltation, her chants force him to stay on the paler side of the spiritual divide when he would have preferred the darker. Had he been able to speak, he would have told anyone who cared to listen that heroes are never completely heroic just as cowards are never completely cowardly.

  The sun rises and sets. In between, the moon rises and sets. And the chants of the gray-haired woman go on as she strives to heal both the body and mind of Jack Coyote, whose name—unlike that long-ago chieftain—will forever live in ignominy rather than esteem.

  Later, he cannot calculate how much later, he senses the soft hand of a woman he knows, the woman who loves him more than any other woman, an indomitable woman who had always stood by him. Try as he might, he cannot bring her name to mind. Or the name of the man who left his side to bring her here.

  The Apache revered the land and the animals living upon it. Those things beyond their comprehension were assigned to the Spirits. In the beginning nothing existed. No earth, no sky, no sun, no moon. Only darkness prevailed. Then light shone upon the land. Nature thrived from north to south and east to west. Winter came as it always came, and from winter, the blossoms of spring. Life endured as did the Apache until they were driven out and scattered across the landscape as cactus needles upon the desert.

  Jack lingered. He was never completely unconscious. There was no all-consuming blackness. Shades of gray always remained. Sounds, sensations, and visions came and
went. Voices arrived from the farthest reaches of a tunnel. Voices of old. Voices of his ancestors. He wanted to go to them, but something stopped him. Something like stubbornness. And something else like honor.

  Much later, he is lying prone on the roughness of wool, pressed onto his belly. The songs of the medicine woman have stopped. Instead the pungent tang of alcohol fills the air. A sharp incision makes him whimper. A deeper incision forces him to cry out. A strong pair of hands clamps down on his shoulders and holds him still as the scalpel probes. Soon he is slapped down into profound darkness. The pain rolls him over into whiteness. He becomes a child again and sleeps.

  He awoke. Through the door flap, he viewed grasslands and deserts covering the base of a broad range, and ponderosa pine and Douglas fir soaring at higher elevations. He saw a mountain lion, or perhaps she was just a figment of his imagination. He accumulated the evidence of where he was and under what circumstances, and with a turbulent awareness, drifted back and forth between dreamland and reality. He absorbed the sounds surrounding him. Rustling movements and low murmurs. And someone moaning. The moans came from himself. He felt the pressure of a strong hand, sometimes gripping his arm and other times cupping his brow. A gentler hand brushed back his hair and murmured endearments. Day turned into night, and night into day. Stillness enveloped him while pleas and supplications came and went.

  The trip he was on was a long one and full of terrors. The hogan was filled with the aroma of pipe tobacco and the infusions of broth cooking over slow-burning kindle. He was fed the broth, spoonful by spoonful, until he wanted no more.

  The chanting of the medicine woman droned on. She wore a hat made of buckskin, weather-worn from decades of use, and a medicine shirt embroidered with the symbols of sun, moon, stars, clouds, lightning, rain, and snake. She shook a gourd that rattled with stones, the figures painted upon it resembling earth and sky together. Hers was a tradition that went back thousands of years, passed down from man to woman and woman to man, sometimes combining the old ways with the new, and science with tradition. She should have given up on Jack Coyote, but she was a stubborn old woman with a weathered face, crooked teeth, and melancholy eyes that gazed down on him with compassion.