Blood Red Tide (Bad Times Book 2) Read online

  Blood Red Tide

  Bad Times Book Two

  Chuck Dixon

  This Book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2019 (as revised) Chuck Dixon

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.10 May 2020

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-844-7

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-845-4

  Contents

  1. An Idle Mind

  2. Widow and Orphans

  3. Ranger Hard

  4. The Fever

  5. The Recon

  6. At University

  7. The Real Neal

  8. Desert High

  9. Excavations

  10. The Morning After the Night Before

  11. Salt Lake City

  12. The Book

  13. Big Don

  14. Their Separate Ways

  15. To Sea

  16. Boats

  17. Money Trouble

  18. The Raj

  19. Alabama

  20. Ship Shape

  21. The Walk-in

  22. Shakedown

  23. Electric Avenue

  24. Left Behind

  25. Ojos Verdes

  26. The Island

  27. The Maelstrom

  28. Day at the Beach B.C

  29. Bad Fish

  30. Alabama Again

  31. Pirates of the Aegean

  32. Prey

  33. Owned

  34. The Diviner’s Boy

  35. Another Time in Rome

  36. Coming Around

  37. Meet the Phoenicians

  38. Boys Will Be Boys

  39. Mixed Spirits

  40. The Slow-Motion Race

  41. Lion at Bay

  42. Rhodes

  43. The Captain’s Course

  44. The Narrow Passage

  45. Miami

  46. Ramming Speed

  47. Below the Salt

  48. High Tide

  49. Fire on the Water

  50. No Mercy

  51. The Gods Smile, the Gods Laugh

  52. Colossus

  53. The Highest Bidders

  54. The Anomaly Dance

  55. No Time Like the Present

  56. Everyone Knows This is Nowhere

  57. Time to Kill

  58. Rhodes Redux

  59. Later in Cleveland

  About the Author

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  1

  An Idle Mind

  Hands reached for her from the dark. All around, faces streaked in red and white snapped at her with sharpened teeth, their expressions feral, their eyes glazed with hunger. She tried to run on the sand, but it gave way beneath her, trapping her legs. She clawed with her hands to free herself as she felt teeth enter her flesh.

  She came awake with a crash. Hands steadied her. “It’s just a dream, Caroline,” her brother’s voice, reassuring.

  She sat on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands. Where was she? The shabby motel room she and her brother had been sharing for the past week. A dismal little place on the highway north of Moscow, Idaho. Morry filled a plastic cup at the bathroom sink and offered it to her. Caroline Tauber sipped the water, hands shaking.

  “Same dream?” Morris asked and sat on his own bed. “A wicked variation,” she answered. “What time is it?”

  “Almost six,” he said and parted the thick curtains to let watery light in. It was raining again, and the hiss of tires on the highway could be heard through the streaked glass.

  “I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep. Let’s have breakfast, the greasier, the better,” she said and made her way to the shower.

  In the gaily-colored diner, they shared a booth in the back corner. There were a few long-haul truckers hunched at the counter over coffee. Other than that, the place was empty.

  “I have to do something,” Caroline said. A plate of untouched pancakes and sausage sat in front of her.

  “You need rest,” Morris said. “After all you’ve been through. You need more recovery time.”

  “My body is fine, Mo,” she said. “But my mind is another story. I’m still back there. In my head, I’m tied up in that cave wondering what’s going to happen next. Am I a goddess or Thanksgiving dinner? I need to refocus my brain. I need a reboot. I need to get back to work.”

  “Work on what? Sir Neal took our project away from us. And we took his nuclear reactor when we left. He’s pissed at us, and his people are looking for us. They’re asking questions everywhere we’ve ever worked. I’ve made calls. You’ve made calls. He’s gotten to everyone in our circle. We show ourselves, and who knows what the hell will drop on us?”

  “What’s he going to do?” She poured herself another glass of orange juice from a pitcher. Since she’d been rescued, she couldn’t get enough of it.

  “He’s a very powerful man.”

  “He can’t sue us. He couldn’t afford the exposure. He had us operating an off-license nuclear reactor at a hidden facility in Nevada. And two Iranian illegals straight off the terror watch list were maintaining it for us. Do you seriously think Sir Neal Harnesh wants to answer all the questions associated with that?”

  “He could have us killed,” Morris said, leaning over the table to whisper.

  “You believe that?” Caroline said, arching an eyebrow, meeting his eyes with mock gravity. “Kill us?”

  “Almost everything we did for him was outside the law. Federal, state, and county law. Hell, the laws of physics even! We were running a hot nuke reactor, generating massive amounts of electromagnetic energy and opening holes in the time/space continuum! You think a couple of simple homicides are outside of this guy’s reach?”

  “You’re buying into Hammond’s paranoid delusions.”

  “And you’re not?” He laughed. “Who’s been motel-hopping through the far west with her brother posing as Mr. and Mrs. Bernard T. Lowe of Brattleboro, Mass for the past month? Who would that be, sis?”

  She slumped back into the cushy booth bench with a sullen expression. Lee Hammond got them what he called their “bulletproof” identification. Driver’s licenses and registration for the ’09 Elantra they picked up in Ely three weeks ago. He even supplied them with a Visa card under the same name that he said was good for another sixty days. Using cash drew attention even though they had, literally, a carry -on case full of twenties and fifties in their room safe along with another half-million plus in a safe deposit box at a Wells Fargo in Sun Valley. Hammond insisted that the only people who used cash for a motel room were people on the run.

  “I have to work on something,” she said. “I have to get my brain firing on more problems. There are modifications I’ve worked out for the Tube. I think I can fine-tune it more closely to open windows in the past with a variable under sixty minutes.”

  “And what’s the point of that no
w?” Morris said. He was tired of this exchange. They’d been over it and over it for weeks. He wished she had a hobby. All Caroline had in her life for the past couple of years was the challenge of building and proving the theoretical device that had been in her head from childhood. And she brought her older brother along to bring it to life. The pair of them had spent every waking moment laser-focused on its completion. But Morris could walk away now. Caroline could never do that even if her life depended on it. And her brother was certain that it did.

  “This is the point.” She sat forward and spoke to her brother as though speaking to a child even though he was four years older, even though he had a wall of degrees and awards in a wide array of sciences and engineering. “If our first Tube had the kind of controls that would have allowed you to send Dwayne Roenbach and his team back to just after I ran into those aborigines, they could have interceded. The point is that Phillip and Miles would still be alive now.”

  “You can’t change that now. What happened has happened.”

  “You know that’s not true, Mo. You told me about finding that skull. My skull. I died back there with a bullet in my head. But sending the Rangers back changed all that, and they saved me. They changed the events in that cave a hundred thousand years ago, and here I am today back in the twenty-first century in Lottie’s Diner, Highway Ninety-Five, Moscow, Idaho.”

  “That’s true, sis. This is the proof of all our theorems, that time is not immutable. But, for whatever reason, we can’t open the Tube within the same window we’ve used previously or at any time before the first field we opened. Creating the open temporal field creates a barrier we can’t breach. We can only go back to times after our last breach. We can never go back and rescue Phillip and Miles. Their fate is written. I’m just grateful we were able to save you.”

  Her expression softened, her brow smoothed out, and the flare of irritation in her eyes melted away. She reached across the table to take his hands in hers.

  “I know it was hard on you, too,” she said. “All you could do was stay behind and freak out.”

  “And, even though you were gone for three days I had a whole month to deal with it,” he said. The Tube blew a hole in time that could remain open for, at most, thirty minutes. And it took a full forty-eight hours between each shot to power up the system. With setup and the time spent finding and recruiting the rescue team, Morris sometimes had almost a week between field openings. The stress had been nearly unbearable.

  “That’s why, next time, we have more control over the situation and closer, constant communication,” Caroline said. “We can do it more safely, with more redundancies built in. More fail-safes.”

  “Hold on.” Morris yanked his hands from her grasp. “Next time?”

  “We’re going to build another Tauber Tube,” she beamed. “A beta prototype, and this time we’re going to do it right.”

  2

  Widow and Orphans

  “Hey, Mom! There’s some beat-up guy asking for you!”

  The little boy left Dwayne standing on the front step to run back into the house, calling for his mother at the top of his voice. Dwayne stood waiting, aware that the kid was dead on about his appearance. He was still showing signs of the recent action. A livid bruise turning to yellow on his forehead. Scratches on his face healing to white scar tissue. The tattoo of freshly withdrawn stitches across his chin. The sunglasses hid the deep set of his eyes. He was still recovering from the punishment he took back in Nevada all those long, long years ago.

  It took him a few days to find Rick Renzi’s wife, now his widow. She and the three kids were living with her sister outside Cleveland in a neighborhood of split-levels that had seen better days, probably when Johnson was president. He told her on the phone that Rick wouldn’t be coming home. He didn’t offer details, and he was glad she didn’t ask for any. They had some unfinished business, and she told him to come by the next day.

  Lynn Renzi’s eyes were red, but she looked all cried out as she unlatched the storm door and let him in.

  “Sorry about Ricky,” she said in an off-hand way. It took Dwayne a beat to realize she was talking about the little boy. Richard Renzi, Jr.

  “Kids tell it like it is.” He shrugged and entered the pocket-sized living room. “I do look a little used up.”

  “You get that way going somewhere with Rick?” When she leaned back on the arm of a chair, Dwayne could see the swell of her belly under her cotton top. She didn’t invite him to take a seat, and he didn’t move to do so.

  “Yeah.” He waited, but she didn’t ask for more. “You told me you had something for me?” she said. “From Rick?”

  He took a fat manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was folded over and secured with a pair of rubber bands.

  She took it and unsnapped the bands. Her eyes widened as she looked at the stacks of banded cash inside.

  “It’s a hundred thousand,” he said. “It’s twenties and fifties, mostly. Don’t deposit it in the bank unless you get a safe deposit box.”

  “Is it real?” she asked. “I mean, stupid question, is it legal?”

  “It’s real, and it’s clean. But what the IRS doesn’t know can’t hurt it. Just don’t go crazy with it.”

  “Don’t think I’m terrible.” She met his eyes for the first time as she idly riffled the bills with her thumbs. “I love, loved, Rick, but he was always difficult. Even before he went in the Rangers when we were both kids. He was always moving. Like a shark. If he stopped moving, he’d stop living.”

  “I know,” Dwayne said, his voice just above a whisper.

  “But when you called to say he was gone, it was like I already knew, and I was relieved about it. I guess that makes me sound like a bitch.”

  “I understand.” And he did. Renzi was a hell of a soldier and a hell of a friend. His problem was that he sucked at everything else in life. That made it hard for anyone who tried to get close.

  “Well, if you don’t think I’m a bitch now then you’ll think it when I ask if this is all there is?” she said and gestured with the envelope.

  “No, there’s more,” he said. “I’ll send you an envelope like this every six months. But if I see a car newer than two years old in the driveway or find out you’ve been taking vacations in Cabo, you won’t see another dime. I don’t know you. But I know even decent people can get themselves in a shitload of trouble with this kind of cash. I owe it to Ricky. He loved his kids.”

  A shrill cry broke the quiet, and a girl of eight burst in from the foyer.

  “Ricky’s making French fries in the oven!” the little girl shouted with the deep satisfaction of a serial tattler.

  The woman stood and put a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. She turned to Dwayne.

  “So, we’re done here?”

  “Ricky didn’t know you were pregnant.”

  “I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want to hear any more promises. We’re done here?”

  “We’re done.”

  Dwayne was walking down the sidewalk to his truck when his cell rang. He didn’t recognize the name on the screen at first:

  Bernie Lowe.

  3

  Ranger Hard

  Charles “Chaz” Raleigh was near blown out. His body ran with greasy sweat under the heavy cotton running suit. It was supposed to be protecting him from the early morning desert chill, but now it was drenched and clinging to him. His lungs hurt, and his legs were on fire. For all of that, he was feeling good. He just ran ten miles in just over an hour twenty. And he was making good on his promise to Jesus to get his black ass back in better shape.

  Only a few weeks from what he called Operation Never Happened, and he’d dropped eight pounds and a couple of waist sizes. He wasn’t back in the same condition he was at Benning, but he was on his way. The first week was tough, but he pushed himself hard. He was mostly motivated by his promise to the Lord. But then there was Jimbo Smalls to answer to.

  Jimbo brought Chaz ba
ck to the Pima reservation with him and let Chaz crash in the double-wide set back off the road on acreage. That’s what Jimbo thought anyway. The real story was that Chaz wanted to watch over his former Ranger amigo. Jimbo took a shot to the head from a rock thrown by one of those little man-eating motherfuckers back in The Then. He got a wicked concussion and needed some looking after to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid to do more damage to his bruised brain; at least not for a few weeks.

  It was good for Chaz, too. He had nowhere to be and, thanks to the million-plus in cash stashed at the bottom of a padlocked chest freezer on Jimbo’s porch, no reason to be anywhere. He ran mornings and evenings and spent the rest of the time lifting weights, napping, and going through Jimbo’s mad collection of DVDs, mostly westerns—a big sixty-inch screen dominated one end of the largest room in the house. He promised Jimbo they’d go do some hunting next week when he was sure the Indian’s head was better.