I wasn’t out for long. Rachel shook me awake and even had the foresight to carry water up with us. She’d found an old coke bottle and some cans washed in from somewhere and filled them from the river. She was more careful this time and had laid on her belly instead of trying to wade in. One she wasted pouring on my head and that was what had woken me. I came up sputtering and nearly pushed her off the top of the ridge.
“Hey! What did you do that for?” I complained and looked at my bare feet. Oops. I shouldn’t have kicked off my shoes or left them down the sinkhole.
Rachel reached inside her shirt under her jacket and dangled the sneakers in front of my eyes. “You might be a super genius, Lake but you’re D.U.M.B.”
I snatched them from her hands and slipped my feet back into the ratty canvas and leather ASICS. Hamilton might have been richer than Croesus but she shopped at Walmart and Payless.
“Ready?” I asked and stood up. Rachel did a 360° and tried to recognize where we were.
“Any ideas where this is?” I asked heading for the same track down that I used before.
“It looks like the moon’s surface,” she marveled. “What a strange place. That mountain to the southeast might be Maglin’s Table.
“What’s that?” I slid down and held my hand out for Rachel but she managed on her own.
“Maglin’s Table is a flat plateau on the high desert, a part of the Badlands and the Buffalo Gap Grasslands. If that’s where we are, we’re surrounded by Federal Park and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It reaches all the way up to Alberta.”
“I thought we were in Colorado,” I said as I stepped down onto the small track that skirted the edge. I could see the scuff marks made by a hooved creature, most probably a burro. They were one of the few animals that could survive in these barren hills, washes, and arroyos. Further on, we came upon their manure but it was old and dried out.
“We were until you passed out on the plane. Then we took a detour to Uncle Redline’s and the Casino. We let you think you were still in Colorado in case you were thinking of ditching us.”
I didn’t say anything. Then, I suggested we follow the tracks as it would most certainly lead us to water. Eventually. We walked for a couple of hours heading towards the Mountain flat called Maglin’s Table where Rachel said the Snake River ran. The terrain changed more to a flat grassland with rolling hills and far off, I could see the massive brown lumps that dotted the land and became the humped coats of bison. They smelled us long before we smelled them and the bull lowered his head to paw slowly at the ground. His hooves dug furrows and sent clumps of dirt and withered grass flying behind him. Rachel stomped and began singing a chant.
Ta tanka ho
Yo hey hey ho
Ta tanka ho
Yo hey hey ho.
I understood her words, that she was calling the buffalo and honoring him. I was uneasy with her actions; he was over two tons of angry testosterone on the hoof. And he had big horns.
“Uh, Rachel, I don’t think he likes your singing,” I mumbled and just as the bull charged, I scooped her up and ran. Not back away from them but towards the bull which made two things happen. Rachel started screaming and the bull stopped in confusion as the puny two-legged creature---me---doubled in size as it came for him.
He threw up his tail, bellowed and swiveled around in a rollback that would have made a prize reining horse jealous. Within seconds, the herd was gone in a cloud of dust and flying divots.
I set her down and she yelled at me in Abenaki not Siouan but I understood that, too. My eyes widened. Some of the things she called me and promised to do were highly inventive. I knew why braves would rather die than be given over to the women of the tribe. I waited politely until she was done and then when after the fleeing buffalo.
*****
Cameron was livid. He stood in Hamilton’s office and screamed at her for losing the boy. Hamilton took his abuse without complaint. When he finally wound down, she nodded in agreement. “You’re right, Dr. Cameron. I put too much faith in my people’s programming. He was fine until the last session. Have you had any sign of the tracer?”
“A short signal for about ten seconds. Just enough to trace it to Oklahoma. But it was…odd,” he admitted.
“Odd?”
“It disappeared 10 feet into the air.”
“An airplane? Did they take him in an airplane? Why would that make the signal disappear?”
“There’s only three reasons, Director,” Cameron shrugged. “He’s underground, they removed it surgically and killed him or he’s dead.”
“I was under the impression you removed the failsafe option,” she said her voice deadly quiet. The door to her office opened and the man known as Chase entered without any announcement. Hamilton’s personal assistant hovered anxiously in the background. He looked as if he expected a firing squad for allowing in the NSA director.
“Shut the door, Jason,” she said curtly as Chase made himself comfortable. He was a tall man, handsome with cold eyes so gray that they appeared colorless.
“Director,” he greeted. “Dr. Cameron, I hear you’ve lost something that I’m interested in.”
“Oh, what would that be?" She growled.
“The boy you called your grandson,” he prompted. “The one you’ve kept under wraps for the last two years.”
“Why do you want him?” Cameron asked. “He’s just a fifteen-year-old boy.”
Chase threw down a vanilla folder and it slid on the Director’s desktop to reveal patents and blueprints from the US Patent Office, micro circuitry designs of computer processors, Wi-Fi routers and solar cells well beyond modern models out on the world market. All of them had been applied for and awarded to a company called Lake Enterprises LLC.
“Took a bit of digging but we’ve traced the ownership of Lake Enterprises LLC to an offshore bank account used by the CIA to front Black Ops back in the 90s, Director. Operations you were well aware of and in charge of.”
“I wasn’t with the agency then,” she countered.
“No, but your husband was.”
She snorted. “I had nothing to do with his covert activities.”
“Really? You used agents to spy on him and your son’s love affairs. That’s how you found out about him and Special Agent Strong.”
“What do you want, Chase?” She snapped slapping the folder, patents, applications and blueprints onto the floor.
He leaned forward. “I want the boy, his medical records and everything you have on him. From both of you. I want where he was when he escaped, his last known whereabouts and the last recorded coordinates of his trace.”
“Then what?” Dr. Cameron asked. “Do I get to continue my research on him?”
“Just what did you expect from him, doctor? A super soldier? Genius? Superhero? Just what is this child capable of doing or growing into?”
Cameron looked bleak. “That’s just it, Chase. I have no idea. He fooled me for thirteen years. I have no clue what he’s capable of.”
Hamilton’s cell buzzed and she answered it, her face remaining hard but her eyes burned with a brilliant flare. “He was spotted in a casino on the reservation in Oklahoma by a nurse after seeing an AMBER alert. She called it in and was offered $100,000 to kidnap him. A team is on its way out from Chicago.”
“Give me the address of the nurse, her name, the casino and whatever else you have,” Chase ordered flinging himself up out of the chair. He was headed out the door as he threw over his shoulder, “Dr. Cameron, you’re coming with me.”
Cameron looked at the Director but followed the agent out of the CIA building where an unmarked black SUV with blacked out windows and a driver waited. Both got in the back and Chase gave orders to drive to the airport on base where a Learjet was waiting. Twenty minutes saw them in the air with a team of agents already aboard.
Chase did not hand out any briefing folders and spent most of the flight napping. He opened his eyes exactly 30 seconds before the pilot announced that they were landing at the Pine Ridge Airport. Cameron wasn’t surprised to note that none of these men were of the group he used to track and hunt the boy two years earlier.
He cleared his throat. “You know this kid is Indian, right? He’s an expert tracker and knows to hide his trail.”
“Native American, doctor. We must be politically correct. Besides, I thought your programmers wiped out all his memories?”
“We did. Somehow, his brain is rewiring itself and negating that programming.”
“He’s 14, has no money, hasn’t used Dir. Hamilton’s credit card,” Chase shrugged. “He has limited resources.”
“Yeah? Then, how the hell did he get from Virginia and D.C. to Oklahoma and on a plane to the Dakotas?”
“He hitched a ride,” Chase said slowly.
“Our computer analyzed his estimated arrival between sightings and relayed that it was physically impossible unless he took a USAF jet, had a police escort to clear the roads and a helicopter to drop him out of the hatch. Last I knew, you couldn’t do more than 100mph on Interstates.”
“Really? What’s your explanation?” Chase sat up, his eyes curiously bright. “Does he twist time? Open a dimensional portal? Run as fast as the Flash?”
“Sneer all you want, Chase. He can open a rift; he calls it the Yellow Realm. I saw it once when he escaped us at the Clinic. He opened a door and stepped through. He and his great-grandfather. When he did that, no tracer signal got through. He vanished.”
“Why didn’t he use this trick to escape from your…custody in D.C.?”
Cameron shrugged. “We don’t know. We tried to get him to do it while wired but he couldn’t. Said he didn’t remember how and we couldn’t replicate the trigger. We couldn’t even recognize the activity of his brain. When we did a PET scan, the thermal image showed red across the screen. All parts of his brain firing at the same time and at an incredible rate. If we had a computer with half his capacity, I could solve every mystery on earth.”
“So you think this kid is a…god?”
“He very well could be,” Cameron said bluntly.
“Then we must be the God Slayers.”
The wheels touched down smoothly and Chase was up, out of his seat and heading for the door before the pilot’s announcement of ‘you have arrived.’