The Shield of Darius Read online

  The Shield

  of Darius

  a Unit 1 Novel

  Allen Kent

  The Shield of Darius: A Unit I Novel. Copyright © 2012

  by Allen Kent. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the cases of brief quotations imbedded in articles or reviews, with attribution shown. For information address AllenPearce Publishers, 16635 Hickory Drive, Neosho, MO 64850

  AllenPearce Publishers © ©

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Allen Kent

  Weavers

  Kent, Allen

  ISBN978-0615846743

  Cover Design: Jillian Farnsworth

  Allen Kent © 2012

  To my father,

  who opened my life to the world

  and its wonders

  Acknowledgments

  I am most grateful to my team of readers, my wife Holly, Anne and Richard Clement, Diane Andris, and Jim and Erica Farnsworth, whose invaluable editorial assistance improved this book immeasurably. Special thanks to Richard for his assistance with Farsi transliteration, and to David Farnsworth who provided me with a map of 1970s Tehran to refresh my memory. Bill Center regaled me with stories of flying 0-2s over Laos during the Vietnam Conflict when we flew together in the Air Force, and helped shape the character and background of Eddie Warren. And special thanks to the people of Iran who I learned to love during my years living there, and to a fascinating country I promised to return to, at least in my imagination.

  The Shield of Darius

  Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - - the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

  Donald H. Rumsfeld,

  Department of Defense news briefing,

  February 12, 2002

  This is the story of one of the unknown unknowns.

  ONE

  Nothing in the lush green countryside surrounding Ben Sager suggested his day would end so badly. It was unusually warm in England’s County Dorset, with only a wisp of horse-tail clouds brushing the top of the gray stone tower that rose above him on the low, grassy hill.

  Ben turned the brochure in his hand to orient the diagram to match the castle ruin, glanced from the page to the crumbling structure, then back to the drawing. The gate and keep were to his left, with a long section of toppled stone wall stretching across in front of him into an overgrown mound at his far right. The river was behind him and the small wood of thick pines to his left. He nodded with absent satisfaction, comfortable that he was properly oriented. Flipping the pamphlet to its back, Ben read the brief narrative, learning that Roger de Caen, Bishop of Sarum and Abbot of Sherborne, had built this hilltop fortress overlooking the River Yoe in the early twelfth century. The paragraph claimed that a succession of proud English noblemen had inhabited Sherborne Castle since but as Ben scanned the ruin with sad amusement, he saw little to suggest its early grandeur.

  Whew, he thought. These places must have been cold in the winter.

  “Hellooo….Dad!”

  A small dark figure appeared atop one of the crumpled battlements and swung an arm in long, exaggerated sweeps, then darted down the far side without waiting for a response. Though too distant to be seen clearly, the figure had been PJ. At ten, he was a carbon copy of his father – short and wiry with a shock of black hair that waved naturally over his forehead. Ben waved back at the empty wall and smiled at how much the boy reminded him of himself at that age.

  Genetically, PJ seemed to have ignored the fact that he had a mother. He drew gene for gene from Ben’s store of Roma ancestry, a line that after immigrating to American from the old Yugoslav Republic, had bred without compromise until Ben broke the chain, captured by the allure of an Irish beauty while a graduate student at the University of Virginia. Kate’s hair was as black as his own, but she had the creamy, flawless skin and deep green eyes of County Cork. And each time Ben shot baskets with PJ, he wished his son had picked up an inch or two of his mother’s height. At 5’9” Kate was two inches taller than Ben, but none of it had gone to their son.

  Ben turned and flopped onto the grassy slope beside the river, gazing across its mirrored surface at a manor house that stood surrounded by live oaks on a hill opposite the castle. He never ceased to marvel at how much England looked like it should. With the expansion of Sager Technologies into Leeds, he now visited the British Isles three or four times a year, always finding the countryside and villages to be calendar perfect. When he mentioned the observation to Kate, she laughed.

  “You’re just too used to big dirty cities,” she said. “No place is that unspoiled anymore.” But now that she was coming with him and they were taking an extra few weeks to get into the countryside, she admitted he was right.

  On this outing they had rented a camper – what the British call a caravan – and driven north from London to Stratford and Coventry. Then southwest through the quaint stone villages of the Cotswolds: Chipping Campden, Stow-on-the-Wold, and Bourton-on-the-Waters. Constable landscapes with storybook names. Tidy thatched cottages surrounded by manicured gardens, nestled along narrow cobbled lanes that left the villages to wind into the countryside between neatly trimmed hedges and gray stone walls.

  At Trowbridge the evening before, PJ and his sister Jennifer had walked unattended through the campground, listening to soft English accents and feasting on McVitty’s Jaffa Cakes and Cadbury’s chocolate. Ben could very comfortably live here. If he could get the company through another ten profitable years, the kids would be in college and he just might be able to buy a place like the one across the river. Not quite that imposing, but one where he could settle down with Kate in peaceful country style and fish for trout in a stream like the River Yoe.

  The warm softness of the grass and quiet ripple of the river soothed his travel-weary back and legs and tugged heavily at his eyelids. He dozed for a moment, then forced his lids open and glanced at his watch, jumping quickly to his feet. Four-fifteen! They wanted to make Seaton on the coast by dark and needed to move. He turned down the bank and started toward the stand of young pine and oak that stretched across the bottom of the hill to the small lot where he had parked the camper. Kate and Jenn might already be in the van, but PJ? Finding PJ could take some time.

  Ben turned along a path that skirted the wood leading toward the front entrance to the fortress. At the edge of the trees in front of him, a man in khaki slacks and jacket with a bright yellow scarf tied about his neck stepped into view, then retreated back into the shelter of the trees. Ben stopped and peered into the shadows, straining to follow the man. His movements had been too quick. Too conscious – as if he had been startled to see Ben and was dodging away. For a long moment Ben watched the spot where he had disappeared, then chuckled and shook his head. The poor guy probably had a son like PJ and was in the middle of some medieval war game, assigned by his son to storm the castle without being seen. Given the slow tourist day at Sherborne, it was a good time for hiding games. When the Sagers pulled into the parking area an hour earlier, their caravan had been the only vehicle in the lot.

  As he entered the trees along a path that led toward the parking area, Ben ducked low and peered between the thatched branches of the pines for the other tourist. The first glance had been fleeting, but the man looked Middle Eastern
. Not swarthy enough to be East Indian, but darker than north Mediterranean. Arab or Persian, which added to Ben’s curiosity. He did not share the aversion for that part of the world that had been conditioned into most Americans by a decade of Iraqi and Afghan conflicts and the on-going Palestinian debacle. Ben had spent all but one of his high school years in the Middle East where his father had been on a three year assignment with the U.S. Information Agency in the Iranian capital of Tehran. The years in Iran just before the Shah was deposed had affected him more profoundly than any other period in his life. He didn’t admit it much. It wasn’t always smart in today’s America to speak kindly of Iran. But he loved the rugged country and its exuberant, passionate people, an affection he sustained by continuing to study the country and its language as something of a hobby. Someday he was going to get back, taking Kate and the kids with him.

  He did not find the man in the castle wood. Instead, a young woman appeared suddenly among the trees to his right, dressed in blue jeans and a bulky sweatshirt, pushing toward him through the branches with an anxious face. She saw him and beckoned frantically for him to come. Ben jumped forward, feeling the blood course to his temples as he sensed her alarm.

  “Mr. Sager? Mr. Sager?”

  He nodded quickly.

  “Please come. You must hurry!” Her voice carried the thick inflection that matched her black hair and olive skin and confirmed Ben’s assessment of the origin of the man in the trees.

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Your son, sir. He has fallen from one of the towers and is hurt very badly. We must hurry!”

  “Where is he? You haven’t moved him....” Ben scrambled after her, thrashing through the pine boughs toward the parking lot, the pressure that had seized his chest at the sight of the woman growing to a frantic pounding.

  “We have him in our van…to go to hospital,” she gasped back over her shoulder. “My father and your wife are with him.”

  “My God, you shouldn’t have moved him!”

  The woman had reached the edge of the lot and was dashing toward a cream colored van that stood near the entrance to the drive, its sliding panel door half open. Across the lot, the Sager caravan still sat alone beside the ticket booth that faced away from him toward the iron-gated entrance to Sherborne Castle.

  “Here! Hurry please!” She stopped breathlessly beside the door of the van.

  Ben reached her and squinted into the dark interior. A small huddled figure lay motionless on the seat, covered with a faded brown blanket.

  “PJ?” He leaned inward and reached for the boy’s shoulder. From the rear of the vehicle to his left he sensed a faint blur of motion and the back of his head exploded in a numbing burst of colored spots – then blackness.

  TWO

  Katherine Sager felt none of her husband’s amusement as she walked slowly through the ruins of Sherborne Castle. But she did feel the sadness. She could hear her grandfather rocking slowly in front of the fire in the parlor of his rambling red brick home in Endicott City just west of Baltimore, remembering the old country.

  “I tell ya, Katie,” he would say, his brogue as musky after thirty years as it had been the day he stepped off the boat from Dublin. “It’s a sad day in Ireland!”

  He would look wistfully into the orange glow of the growing pile of embers and draw long melancholy puffs of fragrant purple smoke from his gnarled burl pipe. “There’s naught left for a lad to do there, Katie. Such a lovely place, and it’s goin’ to ruin.”

  This wasn’t Ireland of course, Kate thought as she pulled Jennifer closer to her side and looked up at the broken overhang of the ruin’s northwest tower. But it felt like it. Tuesday they would catch the Pembroke ferry for County Cork and she would finally see Ireland for herself. Times had changed for the better, but it must be like this. Strength given way to decay in a land of soft green fields and quiet streams.

  “Mom, let’s sit down. My legs are killing me.” Jenn tugged at her arm, pulling her to a large flat stone that sat in the castle’s open courtyard. “Where’s PJ? I think he must be with Dad.”

  “They’ll find us if we just sit right here. Let’s rest until they come. It’s almost time to go.”

  Jenn seemed satisfied and plopped down on the stone, collapsing as though she might never move again. Kate smiled and stroked her daughter’s short-cropped dark hair. Jenn was more bored than tired. Somehow Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral hadn’t appealed to her in quite the same way they had to Kate. At Stonehenge, Jenn had circled the monoliths at a slow saunter, taking pictures with her iPhone and complaining that she couldn’t go into the circle, then sat in a moody funk until the rest of them were ready to leave. Getting to the sea tonight might bring the girl back to life.

  Jenn rocked backward and laid her head in her mother’s lap, looking up at the woman’s face with unveiled admiration.

  “Am I pretty as you, mom?”

  Kate laughed and brushed a wisp of hair from her daughter’s cheek.

  “Prettier. You were spared my freckles and big mouth.”

  “Dad likes your mouth. One day I heard him say that you had hot lips.”

  “You did, did you?”

  Jenn nodded seriously and studied her mother’s features from below. “He was talking to Uncle Raymond and they were saying what they liked best about you and Aunt Mary.”

  Kate arched her brows. “And what else did they say?”

  “Nothing,” Jenn shrugged. “They saw me listening and shut up.”

  “You know too much for your age anyway,” Kate said, thinking how much more quickly girls were growing up than when she was twelve.

  “I know I want to look like you,” Jenn said. “You’re pretty.”

  As Kate Sager sat on the rock in the courtyard of Sherborne Castle, she was pretty. The week in the camper had released the natural wave in her ebony hair, and she hadn’t put on makeup since Coventry. But her large eyes that tended toward an emerald green in the late afternoon light and her mouth that was more full than large, seemed to improve as they returned to their natural state. Jenn took after her, just as PJ was a clone of his father. Kate knew as she looked down at her daughter that Jenn would become a beautiful woman.

  Kate had not grown up pretty. At Jenn’s age, Katie Fitzgerald had been awkwardly tall and gangly with wavy black hair that seemed to have an aversion for barrettes and was in constant disarray. To the boys in the Dundalk neighborhood of east Baltimore where she had been raised as the youngest daughter of an Irish longshoreman, she had been “the scarecrow.”

  “Don’t let the scarecrow touch you! She’ll give you the cooties,” the neighborhood boys shrieked and sent her running home in tears. Her mother would fuss and insist her father chase the hooligans down and throttle them. But the big dock worker simply wrapped his girl in his burly arms and assured her that someday they would be chasing after her. He saw in his daughter what the girls in the neighborhood sensed. Someday Katie Fitzgerald was going to be serious competition. By high school her classic features had grown into themselves, but it was too late for the boys of Dundalk. She dated only occasionally, and had decided she wanted college and a career.

  “You’re dreamin,’ lass,” her mother said when Kate announced following a school career day that she intended to have her own business. “It’s hard enough for a girl to get a good teaching job here in Dundalk. You need to be thinkin’ about settling down and startin’ a family.”

  “I’m not staying in Dundalk. And I can wait to have a family.”

  “And who said you could be goin’ off somewhere else?” her mother retorted.

  Again the big dock worker interceded.

  “Don’t be placin’ your own burdens on your daughter, Elsie,” he said, and Kate’s mother fumed and spouted and left the two alone to talk.

  “You’re bitin’ off a big bit o’ ambition,” he said, looking at her so directly that she knew this was going to be one of his serious talks. “There’s still not much room
for a woman from Dundalk in the world o’ business, and it’s a mean one. You’ll have to fight for everything you get.”

  “I don’t want to fight for it,” she said. “I just want to be good enough to deserve it.”

  “You can be too. But you’ll still need to be plenty tough. Deserving it won’t be enough, and some bloke’s not going to move over and make room for ya’.” Until he died, her father had kept Elsie Fitzgerald from smothering the girl’s ambition, and Kate had remembered his warnings.

  She found Ben Sager on the baseball diamond at the University of Virginia where her high school grades and SATs earned her a full ride in business. She was drawn to the field by her father’s obsession with the game, a passion he had passed along to Kate after her older brother rejected the American pastime for football. Together, Kate and her father had gone to every weekend Orioles’ game for four seasons, crammed into the right field bleachers where the Irishman recounted the exploits of Cal Ripkin Jr. and Frank and Brooks Robinson to anyone seated nearby who would listen. Kate shared his joys during the Orioles’ glory years, and his anguish when what seemed like a dream year ended in a stunning defeat in the play-offs. When his heart and liver finally succumbed to relentless abuse, she continued to go on her own, so captivated by the game that her passion prompted a teenage letter to the editor defending Earl Weaver when the Baltimore Sun lambasted the manager for moving Ripken to shortstop. The next season both she and Earl were exonerated when young Ripken won the MVP award. Kate loved the game and everything about it.

  Ben had also been in the College of Business, a second year MBA student who had tried his luck at professional baseball after a sparkling college career, but learned after three grueling years in the minor leagues that he had neither the talent nor the disposition for big league baseball. He had come to Virginia to pursue his second passion – information systems design. To the chagrin of the College of Business, Ben had declined an assistantship with the business school and accepted one with the baseball team coaching the infield. Kate came to the first few scrimmages to get a feel for the year’s talent and found herself watching the new assistant coach instead. He was exotically handsome with dark, deep set eyes, smooth well-defined features and black hair that seemed to naturally fall into place. His finely muscled body moved effortlessly in his uniform, and Kate watched him exercise the infielders with open admiration.