Pulse

TWENTY

As King looked at the laptop screen, sifting through the information taken from Manifold's turncoat techie, he tuned out the repeating metal on metal clink and stream of curses following them. With a half hour to kill and their gear safely stowed on board the Crescent— Delta's very own stealth transport — the team gathered at their usual premission spot next to the Delta hangar bay. Two metal poles, each protruding from a square sand pit, forty feet apart, marked the official Delta horseshoe court.

King sat in one of three lawn chairs, in the shade provided by the massive hangar.

The metallic clink of a horseshoe striking a pole sounded out.

"Damn you," Rook shouted. "Another ringer."

"That's game, right?" Knight asked as he walked the forty feet between the two sand pits. Despite being the shortest and lightest of the Chess Team men, he was also one of the most skilled and deadly of the group, especially from a distance. He liked to say he was only good at three things: being a sniper, horseshoes, and women, but he was one of those people who seemed to be good at everything he tried. So when he walked with his short-legged confident stride and flashed his charming, squinty-eyed smile, no one complained… much. Rook sometimes took issue with the pint-sized, dapper-dressed Romeo, as the two were polar opposites, but their tiffs usually ended with laughter.

Bishop, terrible at horseshoes, was almost always paired with Knight, to keep the team game fair. But Rook and Queen weren't much better and the outcome was almost always predictable. If the game wasn't intended merely as a way to unwind before a mission, Rook's blood pressure would skyrocket. Being the front-runner in the race for the world's worst sore loser benefited the team on the battlefield. He never surrendered. But there was no such thing as a friendly game of Monopoly with Rook.

"I'm out for now," Queen said, as she plopped into the chair next to King while Bishop stood watch and Rook and Knight started a fresh one-on-one match. She quickly tied her hair back, looping the blond waves into a tightly wound bun. The early summer North Carolina heat, combined with the black fatigues the team wore, had her sweating, even in the shade. After splashing water from her drinking bottle onto her face, she peeked at King's laptop. "Find anything interesting?"

He just stared at the screen, chewing his lower lip.

She placed her hand on his. "Hey."

King looked up. He hadn't seen her approach or heard her talk. "Sorry. What?"

"What are you looking for?" "Answers."

"You're wondering why they took your friend. Why they took his artifact."

"It just doesn't make sense," King said. "Why would Manifold be interested enough in an artifact to kill dozens of people and then destroy a multimillion-dollar research facility to cover their tracks? What could George have to do with all this?"

"How well do you know him?"

King shot a Queen a look.

"Don't give me that look. The path to truth isn't always comfortable." She gave him a shove. "You know that better than anyone."

"The man is terminally trustworthy, honest, and forgiving… and I was going to let him marry my sister." He looked her in the eyes. "You already know how that turned out."

Queen nodded. They all knew about Julie's death. An air force training flight. She never saw combat, but served with distinction. As King's early inspiration for joining the military, they all knew her story. He kept a photo of her on him at all times. "He's family. A brother."

"Then he's our brother," she said.

King smiled and nodded. "But I still don't know why they wanted him."

"What was he working on?"

"It was a U.N. dig. Not even his project. He was brought on as a specialist." King brought up photos of the Nazca dig site and the nine-headed geoglyph. "He said this image represented the Hydra."

"Like the mythical Hydra? Hercules and all that?"

"That's the one. You know it?"

"When I learned Greek for Delta I took Greek history and mythology, too."

"Then you're going to love this. Beneath the central head, here" — King pointed to the large stone head at the center of the geoglyph— "George found something, a head. Reptilian. But it was just an old statue. Felt like cement. Nothing worth killing for." He looked Queen in the eyes. "So why would a multibillion-dollar genetics company go to all that trouble for a stone?"

"If it wasn't a stone."

King squinted at her.

"The Hydra myth says that Hercules buried the cauterized Hydra head beneath a stone. It doesn't take much of a leap to assume he'd pick a really dry place as the Hydra lived i n — thrived i n — water. It made its home in a swamp. It's really not all that unreasonable. Salamanders regenerate limbs like the Hydra was supposed to. Some salamanders grow up to six feet in length. That's today. Twenty-five hundred years ago, animals grew a lot bigger. They hadn't been hunted to extinction and their habitats were still intact. So maybe it was simply an oversized salamander with the disposition of a komodo dragon. Who knows? The real point is: Did George think it was important?"

He thought for a moment. "Yeah."

"Then forget the salamander and assume it was the real deal. Manifold obviously is, too. The ancients certainly did. The ancient Greek scholar Apollodorus wrote a text titled Library. In it he recorded all of Greek history, from the fall of Troy to roughly one hundred nine B.C.

The golden fleece, the Argonauts, the Iliad, Ulysses, they're all in there. Here, I'll show you."

She took King's laptop, placed it on her lap, and opened the Firefox Web browser, which connected to the Internet through the airfield's wireless network. Within thirty seconds she had what she was looking for. She handed the laptop back to King. "This is a translation of the original Greek version of the Library. I highlighted the portion on Hydra."

King read through the text.

King couldn't conceive of such a thing actually living, but it was clear that Manifold saw the Hydra as the genetic version of the Rosetta stone. If Pierce really had found the immortal head of the Hydra, then in a very crazy way, all this made sense. He couldn't think of any government on earth that wouldn't kill for it. But they wouldn't have to. Manifold would simply sell the formula and make a fortune.

A loud metal ping sounded. The first of the nearly silent horseshoe match. "That's right, sucka," Rook shouted from forty feet away. "All tied up." He lined up a shot, grinning like a kid hopped up on Pixie Stix.

King's wristwatch beeped. He stood as Rook loosed his final shot of the match. The horseshoe sailed through the air, flipping over itself. As it began its descent King reached out and plucked the hard metal horseshoe from the air. "Time to go."

"What's that make it?" Knight said with a grin. "Forty-three games to nothing?"

Bishop chuckled.

Rook's mouth dropped open. "You could've let it hit the ground."

After dropping the horseshoe just shy of the metal pole, King smiled and headed for the side entrance to the long hangar.

As the team gathered their shed clothing and followed him to the hangar, Rook added, "I swear, we better find King's buddy soon or there is going to be hell to pay."