She had been thinking how to answer the inevitable question.
“I wrote my friend that I was coming here to the old mine.”
“What about the PJ dollar sign stuff?”
She had expected the question.
“Shorthand again. P means Poor. J means that I need a job so I can contribute to your cause.”
He sat back, folded his arms and stared at her for a second before the grin vanished.
“Know what I think it means, corporal? It means you are lying.”
Sutherland shrugged. “That’s too bad, because it also means that you feel you can no longer trust me. So I’d like my motorcycle back and an escort to the gate.”
“You’re not going anywhere until we check you out. And if we find you are a spy, you will be brought up before a court martial.”
“You have no jurisdiction over me. I’m a volunteer.”
“The second you passed through the gates of this camp, you came under my authority. My word is the law here.”
Sutherland’s eyes narrowed behind the round glasses. She had had enough of this jerk.
“If you don’t let me go, this camp will be history.”
“Hah! What’re talking about?”
“I’ve frozen all your financial assets.”
“Bull crap!”
“Bull crap yourself. Check your accounts if you don’t believe me.” She gave him the bank name and account number and the quantity of money. “It’s a pretty pitiful amount, but I took it out and I’m the only one who can put it back.”
He stood up, placed his palms on the desk and loomed over her like an avenging angel. “I. Have. Had. Enough. Of. This.” He smacked the riding crop down on the desk and yelled for Krause, who was outside the door and ordered him to take her back to the jail. Krause grabbed her roughly by the arm.
“Wait!” she protested. “If I’m under military arrest, I come under the army rules for treatment of prisoners. Treatment at all times should be humane. I’m hungry and thirsty and I don’t like that dark hole. If I don’t get better treatment, you and your men will be on food stamps when I get through with you.”
They stared at each other. Kurtz knew better than to underestimate an enemy, and he didn’t like the idea that Sutherland knew his bank and account information. And she was right about the military rules.
“Take the prisoner to the barracks. Give her food and water.”
Krause prodded her back to the Jeep. They rode to the women’s barracks and he handcuffed her to her bunk. He called someone on his hand radio. Paine showed up a few minutes later with some power bars and Gatorade, which she handed to Sutherland without saying a word or making eye contact.
Sutherland thought that maybe she shouldn’t have threatened Hak. The general was even more delusional than she was. He was obviously mentally ill and she should have handled him with kid gloves, but she didn’t do well with threats. She could only wish that he still had a shred of sanity and would release her once he checked on the status of his funds. She closed her eyes and dozed off.
Kurtz paced back and forth in his study, occasionally slapping his thigh with his riding crop.
The message on Sutherland’s computer had sparked a long-forgotten memory. He’d been a boy when his father told him about Grandpa Hiram going to Afghanistan to look for a fabulous treasure. When he had scoffed at the story, his father gave him a book to read.
He scanned the shelves and his hand reached out for a book entitled, “The Emerald Sceptre.” He sat behind his desk and leafed through the pages he had first read with youthful excitement.
He had dreamed of the Prester John treasure for weeks after reading the book. He wondered if his grandfather had actually found the treasure and what he did with it. His father had said that Hiram moved back to the mansion after he returned from Afghanistan and stayed there until he died. The family had wondered why he didn’t retire to the comforts of New York instead of his played-out mines, but figured Hiram’s mind had become addled from travel fever.
All of a sudden, the shorthand equation on the computer made sense.
KURTZ=PJ$
Kurtz equals the Prester John treasure.
Maybe Sutherland wasn’t a spy. Maybe she was a treasure hunter and thought the Prester John treasure was on Kurtz’s property and had lied her way into the camp to get closer to it.
He sprang from his chair and went over to an oversized lift-top cabinet. Lifting the lid, he gathered up the yellowed sheets of paper stacked inside. Printed on the three-by-two foot sheets of paper were diagrams of the mines on the Kurtz property.
He spread them out on his desk and examined each diagram under a magnifying glass. Half-way through the pile he stopped and brought the goose-neck lamp down until it was inches from the paper.
His boyhood excitement came back as he saw, scrawled in pencil at the end of a mine shaft, a penciled circle drawn around two printed letters.
P and J.
The sight of the simple letters was like popping a cork in his brain. This was a gift from the gods! A treasure would give him the means to defeat the forces of darkness conspiring to humble his beloved nation. With advanced weapons he could foment revolution, destroy governments and shoot down squadrons of black helicopters. And he could return honor to the Kurtz name that had been stained by the antics of his drunken father.
A maniacal light glimmered in his eyes. At any given time, he thought he was the reincarnation of many long-dead military leaders. Patton. Napoleon. George Washington. Caesar. Alexander. But as his fevered brain imagined the future, it seemed that the blood of all the great leaders who came before him now ran through his veins.
He clicked on the hand radio that connected him with Krause.
“Make preparations to march as soon as it’s light,” he ordered.
“We’re we going?” Krause asked.
“On to glory, sergeant! On to bloody glory!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
After a smooth three-and-a-half hour flight at a speed of Mach.80 the Gulfstream G150 landed at Montrose regional airport. A gray Jeep Wrangler sat in the parking lot, keys in the ignition. Tied down on the roof rack were two long objects wrapped in fabric bags. Attached to the rack between the bags was a cargo box.
Hawkins got behind the steering wheel. Abby slid in next to him and started going over a checklist on her IPad. Calvin sat in back doing a weapons inventory. They headed south on Route 550, passing through the sleeping town of Ouray, and continuing on the Million Dollar Highway to the connection with the Alpine Loop. The Jeep followed the same route Sutherland had taken, but near the Kurtz property, they split off on a different route.
The road was narrow, winding, rutted and at times, non-existent, devolving into a root-bound track that ascended the mountain in a series of tight switchbacks that the Jeep had to edge around in fits and starts. As the Jeep moved higher, the tall pines thinned out, to be replaced by shorter trees, then shrubs, and finally, lichen-covered rocky slabs that were black with moisture. They entered an elevation where groping fingers of fog diffused the headlight beams and rendered them almost useless. Hawkins strained his eyes through the windshield, trying to follow an imaginary line up the middle of the road.
Abby’s voice broke his concentration.
“We’re here,” she said.
Hawkins braked to a stop, leaned on the wheel and stared at the swirling gray mists.