The Vengeance of the Tau

Epilogue

“When does it end, Indian?” McCracken asked Wareagle outside the mansion, when all the explosives had at last been planted.

“With those who began it, Blainey, as we saw tonight.”

“We got lucky tonight.”

“Did we? Or is this merely the way of all things? My people have a legend that tells of a demon who rises to wage war on an entire tribe. The tribe fights bravely with its most valiant warriors, but to no avail. The demon’s evil cannot be overcome. It is fueled by the killings as it consumes the warriors’ spirits with their flesh. When all is over, and the demon has consumed all of the tribe, his lust is still not satisfied. His hunger insatiable, he consumes himself.”

“Evil doesn’t always destroy itself, Indian.”

“But it inevitably leaves us a means to help it on its way.”

Blaine’s stare had turned reflective. “It left Rothstein a means, too, and I can’t help thinking that he had things more right than we ever did. I can’t help thinking that maybe I just should have left him and his Tau alone to finish what they started.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I was afraid it would leave me — us — with nothing to do.”

Wareagle smiled ever so slightly. “Each battle we face leads us to the next one. My people have a ghost dance, Blainey, in which the spirits recognize them and inscribe their names on the totem of our ways. There is a similar totem for our ways in the hellfire, a black granite slab incised with those whose journeys ended in the jungle. But the names of the ones we lost, the ones who traveled the jungle with us, are not there. I wonder if they can rest or if they are lost, as my people would be if the spirits bid them no regard.”

“They knew the rules, Indian. What we did over there never happened, no accounts made in Uncle Sam’s daily log. The steps of our ghost dance were different.”

“Except I never performed it with my people, Blainey. With you and the others, yes, but never with those Joe Rainwater wanted me to stand up for. And since our work in the hellfire can never be acknowledged, perhaps my name remains inscribed nowhere.”

“Better nowhere than that black granite slab.”

“True enough. But I must stand up for my people now. In my own way, my own time. I must be faithful to all that remains a part of me.”

Blaine frowned. “Maybe that’s my problem. Somehow I feel I wasn’t true to myself in destroying Rothstein.”

“It wasn’t Rothstein you destroyed so much as the White Death. You came to understand that true essence lies not in proposed ends, but in prescribed means. The White Death was wrong, Blainey, it was evil. Anyone who reached out to grasp it, then, could only be the same.”

“But more people are grasping, Indian, if not for the White Death, then something else.”

Wareagle smiled ever so slightly. “In the hellfire, we entered the dark world and survived it. When we returned, the world above lacked many things but at least it always had light. Somewhere.”

“The trick sometimes is finding it, and it seems to be getting harder. Less of it out there, if you know what I mean.”

“Not less light, Blainey, just more clouds we must part to find it. And this time, perhaps, we have a chance to part the greatest one of all.”

McCracken nodded. “Just maybe we do.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Melissa protested.

She stood before the narrow opening on the bank of the dry riverbed that she and Blaine had climbed out of ten days before, stood before it as if to block the way down. She had been mounting arguments ever since McCracken had informed her of his intentions. But this last-ditch attempt seemed to be her most determined.

Blaine and Johnny looked at each other before McCracken spoke. “I think we do, Melly.”

“Please,” she begged, “not until I have an opportunity to explore what lies beneath the chamber we found. Let me figure out when it was built and by whom. The Nazis didn’t choose this site randomly. They came here because the chamber was already in place! They came here because they suspected what this site truly holds!”

“All the more reason to bury it forever.”

“The Nazis didn’t have time to explore what else might lie down there. If they had, if we could …”

McCracken shook his head.

Melissa turned her impassioned gaze on Wareagle. “Talk to him. Please!”

“He is right,” Johnny said softly. “All that can ever be allowed to emerge from here is what we have seen already. We must prevent any further evil from escaping. Further discoveries can only serve to release more secrets the world is not yet ready to bear.”

Melissa’s eyes bulged in response to the Indian’s last words. “You believe it, then. You believe my father was right. You can feel it. You know it. This really is hell.”

“There are many hells,” Johnny explained after exchanging a quick glance with McCracken. “This is one of them.”

“And I suppose the two of you plan to blow all of them up?” she said cynically.

Blaine looked at Johnny, thinking back to the conversation they’d had before the mansion and the White Death had been destroyed. “The world will never run out of its hells,” he told Melissa.

“Please! You don’t know what you’re doing, I tell you!”

“No, Melly. I think we do.”

They entered the tunnel that led into the storage chamber minutes later, weighted down slightly by the necessary supplies. A work crew hired by McCracken and supervised by Sal Belamo waited back near the find itself to level the land soon to be ruptured and pitted by the explosion. Otherwise, the invitation would always be there for future parties to try to find and explore what Blaine had come to feel quite certain was better left alone. The crew would not only level the land, they would also disguise it so that it would blend in with the rest of the surroundings. Virtually no trace whatsoever of the discovery would be left behind, even to aerial photography.

Melissa insisted on leading the way, for her own good as well as theirs. With the proper equipment and lighting, the trek should have been much easier, but her legs were lead-heavy and her mouth dry beyond water’s ability to help. She waited for them while they set the explosives within and around the chamber, feeling in her heart that far more than its contents would be lost to the world when they were set off. Blaine and Johnny were careful to plant the charges to ensure that the contents of the cavern would be entombed, not exploded, even though samples taken from containers bearing stockpiled nerve and chemical agents had revealed that the years had stripped them of their potency.

The three of them emerged into the light of the dry riverbed with plenty of time to spare, and waited. Remote detonation wouldn’t work, given the logistics involved, so they had set the timers to the one-hour mark. The blast at that moment came as a mere rumble that barely shook the ground about them. It was enough, though, to tell Blaine and Johnny that they had been successful, that the final remnants of the Third Reich had been sealed from the world at last.

And that all doorways leading to what might have lain beneath them had been closed forever.