Cannibal Gold (Bad Times Book 1) Read online

  Cannibal Gold

  Bad Times Book One

  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: 978-1-64202-842-3

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-843-0

  Contents

  1. Dwayne Roenbach

  2. Chaz Raleigh

  3. James “Jimbo” Small

  4. Rick Renzi

  5. The Rundown

  6. The Mission

  7. Dr. Morris Tauber

  8. Mission Creep

  9. Caroline Tauber

  10. The Land Of Beer And Pretzels

  11. Camp Nowhen

  12. Standard Time

  13. One Night In Bedrock

  14. Running Late

  15. World Of Hurt

  16. Fight Or Flee

  17. Back In The Now

  18. The Margins

  19. Night Falls

  20. What Goes Around

  Author Notes

  About the Author

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  1

  Dwayne Roenbach

  Dwayne hated his job but loved the money.

  He was making a tax-free five grand a week and all the perks that came with guarding a guy with a gross worth of just under two billion.

  Travel. Fine food. Even if he ate in the kitchen, it was the same stuff they were serving in the formal dining room. And a clothing allowance that netted him a closet loaded with only the best threads. Not bad for a guy who never made better than E-8 after ten years in the Rangers.

  The only downside was the boss was a royal asshole. He was one of those bastards lucky enough to be born into money and smart enough to increase the pile by a factor of ten with real estate, part ownership in an NFL team, a chain of car dealerships and a dozen hospitals. The guy woke up every day a few million richer without ever lifting a finger. All the dude did was party here and party there in his off-time, and his whole life was off-time. Wheels up for his private jet at a moment’s notice and Dwayne tagged along with the personal chef, personal trainer, and the personal life coach.

  Dwayne’s function was personal protection.

  The boss referred to him as “my samurai.”

  The guy had no real enemies. He was no high-profile high-roller. As much of a prick as he was, he never screwed anyone over and wasn’t particularly political. But he wanted muscle nearby, and Dwayne had the cred and sure looked the part with his Ranger muscle, 6’4” height, 20” neck, desert squint, and fast hands. The guy hired Dwayne away from Sullivan Security Systems where he had been working mostly casino security for Sullivan in Biloxi. It was secure but thankless work.

  The work was a breeze. Just look frosty. Be close when the boss wanted and vanish when he didn’t. Maybe the boss thought Dwayne would be handy if any shit ever did hit the fan. Maybe guys with money just want to live longer to enjoy it. Dwayne couldn’t fault him for that. Only why would you want to live a longer life if you had to spend it as an asshole? But then assholes didn’t see themselves that way.

  Dwayne could have cruised to forty and retired with all the cash he squirreled away. Maybe buy a gas station or a laundromat back in Pensacola. Would have been sweet.

  Until that night at Bellagio when the boss coldcocked the cocktail waitress.

  The boss was losing big at an exclusive hold ’em table in a room set aside for money guys. A punk who hosted a hit cable reality show was at the other end of the table and roostering after a series of hot hands. He snickered every time the boss blew a call and made remarks to the pretty boy seated next to him, then they’d both titter. The boss’s chips went from a wall of stacks to a piddly pile. It wasn’t the money he was losing that was torqueing him. Every cent on the table wouldn’t keep him in socks for six months. What did that matter? It was the fey punk in his kiss-my-ass hat and celebutard mouth that was rubbing the boss the wrong way. A weak attempt at macho had the boss going all-in on a pair of tens and losing the pile to the braying punk.

  On the way from the room, he took it out on the poor redhead whose only mistake was holding a tray of comp appletinis and offering them to the wrong guy at the wrong time. He drove a fist into her face hard enough to send a false eyelash airborne. The girl, all hundred pounds of her, went down to the carpet in a spray of vodka.

  The boss crouched over her with his face red and lips twisted. He cocked his fist back for a second shot, but Dwayne snatched his wrist and easily held the punch in place. Casino security was there but looking everywhere else. You spend enough money and you get a lot of leeway on this floor.

  “That’s enough, Jefe,” said Dwayne.

  “No one touches me,” said the boss.

  “For your own good,” said Dwayne.

  “You let me go, or I’ll fire you.”

  “You’ll thank me in the morning.”

  “You’ll be gone in the morning,” said the boss. “You’ll be gone, and you’ll be ruined. No one will hire you. I’ll make sure of it. You’ll be working at—”

  Dwayne never did hear where he’d be employed in the future because the next sound the boss made was a high-pitched animal squeal when his elbow was suddenly turned the wrong way around. That ended in a gasp when Dwayne twisted the arm farther and the shoulder separated with a pop you could hear over the slots clanging.

  Security stepped up and dragged Dwayne to the deck. And then more security. The Vegas cops were called. Dwayne came around in the back of a police cruiser. No one ever told him how many real cops and rent-a-cops it took to get him there. His best guess was that they were at company strength.

  The sweet life was over and there was no going back.

  He’d banked thirty grand, but half of that had gone to a lawyer who got his case dismissed. And he’d run through the rest fast enough unless a paying job came up soon. The dwindling bank balance and the clothes on his back were all he had. Everything else was back at the boss’s house in Malibu, and he wasn’t going there again. The restraining order made sure of that.

  Dwayne camped at a sixty-bucks-a-night trucker’s hotel out on the 15 near Nellis. He bought some clothes at a big ’n’ tall and picked up a Car Trader to find a new ride, but that just made him think about the H2 and the Viper the boss used to let him borrow. Mostly he drank beers and sunned by the scummy pool out back of the motel and listened to the heavies flying overhead to and from the miles-long strips at the airbase a few miles north. Took him back to Kandahar when his only worry was an IED. Now he had real shit on his mind. Like the rest of his life. He lay there and sucked back on his Coors and sniffed the air, rich with the tang of high octane aviation fuel cast off by the traffic booming into Nellis overhead.

  A lot of days went by like that. Easy and slow.
>
  The nights were longer. He was dating a waitress at the Hooters on Tropicana. But she started giving him shit about getting a job, so he cut that off. She was part of his downtime. He didn’t need to hear how he fucked up when he was trying to forget exactly that.

  So he had plenty of spare time to review the facts and weigh his options. He’d fucked himself out of a golden opportunity. Really, truly fucked himself. A phone call to Sullivan confirmed that. Danny Sullivan told Dwayne he was blackballed, burned, and generally filed under bad news.

  The boss had seen to that. No one would touch him now. And if Dwayne pushed it there was a phony statutory rape charge hanging fire back in Mississippi. Not even the outfits that prided themselves on being bad boys would touch him—the ones with foreign contracts to watch over oil fields or mining operations. Dwayne even thought about re-upping for Rangers, or maybe even regular army. He could easily be an instructor at Benning or elsewhere. He put that decision off till he was down to five large in the checking account. He’d pissed in his own pool and had no one to blame but himself.

  He ran ten miles every morning before the sun came up. A shower, shit, and shave, and he walked across the parking lot to the IHOP for coffee and eggs. He was avoiding Hooters for now. Dwayne was in his usual booth studying the Car Trader and sipping his second refill. The Trader was two months old by now and most of the cars probably sold. He only brought it so he’d have somewhere to look while he ate. Someone slid onto the bench seat across from him.

  “Dwayne Tyler Roenbach?” asked the man. “Not if you’re a lawyer,” Dwayne replied. He didn’t look up. 2008 Chev Avlnche. Lw milge. 350. 4wd. BO

  The man laughed, then stopped when Dwayne didn’t join him.

  “Pat Mulroy suggested I see you,” the man said. He was on the underfed side and peered at Dwayne from behind eyeglasses. His hands looked soft and they twitched on the tabletop.

  “Where do you know Pat from?” Dwayne folded the Car Trader closed.

  “He was a consultant on some government projects I was working on,” the man said. “I’m private sector now but when I had need of a certain kind of help I contacted Pat.”

  “How is he?”

  “If you know Pat, then you know he never says how he is. Or where he is.”

  Dwayne knew. That is, he knew that no one knew much about Patrick Mulroy that Mulroy didn’t want them to know.

  “He said you were a big help to him a few years ago,” the man continued.

  Peshawar. One evil night. Mulroy was in the kind of corner that only a platoon of Rangers could get him out of. They left half the unit behind that night. And ten times that number of jihadis.

  “So, let’s cut the shit and the mini-moves,” said Dwayne. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Morris Tauber, and I need—”

  “Someone who can keep their head when it turns nasty,” Dwayne finished for him.

  “To put a finer point on it, Mr. Roenbach.” Tauber’s nervous smile evaporated. “I need a man who can take a small team into the most dangerous place on the planet and bring all of them back alive. No back-up. No support. No communications. There and back without incident or casualty. And keep it all to himself. Forever.”

  “Like where? There’s a few places I’d rather not revisit.”

  “I can assure you.” Tauber’s nervous smile returned. “That your assignment will not take you anywhere you have ever been to before.”

  The drive was dull and Dwayne dozed through most of it. Doc Tauber wanted to keep his mystery intact and he had little to say. Their route took them into the afternoon sun riding west out of Vegas on a two-lane as straight as a string in a Land Rover badly in need of an alignment. The two men had zero in common. They talked some about their hometowns and the weather in Nevada. They ran out of small talk and Dwayne wasn’t much in the mood anyway. All he wanted to know about was the job, and Doc was turning it into theater. The doc tried to break the awkward silence by turning on the radio. NPR, of course. Dwayne was unconscious within thirty seconds.

  It was desert dusk when a change in the road surface brought him awake. Three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan made Dwayne sensitive to things like that. He came around with a start. His hand clutched for the pistol grip of his rifle, but it wasn’t there. They were climbing a rutted road that twisted up between rocks and scree. After a half-hour, he could see they were approaching a tall structure that rose spindly and black against the streaked sky of the orange sunset. The road leveled out. As they pulled closer on the rutted trail, Dwayne could see it was a steel tower structure holding a globe about sixty feet off the sand. The globe was polished sheet metal and looked about ten feet in diameter. The ball caught the final rays of the dying day and cast an oily sheen from its surface. From the center of the globe, a steel rod rose another thirty or forty feet. The rod was secured in place with guy wires all around. It was topped by a flashing strobe.

  “Is that a lightning rod?” Dwayne asked.

  “It’s a Tesla tower,” the doc replied. “Awesome, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like a ride at a state fair,” Dwayne said.

  Tauber laughed. Not a condescending chuckle at Dwayne’s ignorance, but an open, honest laugh that surprised them both. Dwayne decided that he liked this geek.

  The Land Rover pulled up to a trio of Quonset huts on the roof of a mesa. The collection of sand-blasted and sunbaked buildings were near the lip of the escarpment they’d been climbing up over the past thirty minutes. There was a dirt bike and a beat-to-shit Acura there. What looked like an old cargo container was partly buried in a high humpback dune beyond the Q-huts.

  As Dwayne and the doc got out of the Rover, two guys stepped from one of the huts. They were short and dark. One was bearded and wore a Welcome to Reno t-shirt. The other was clean-shaven, except for a Saddam mustache. He wore an aloha shirt in a pineapple pattern. They studied the newcomers for a few seconds and went back inside without saying a word.

  “That’s Parviz and Quebat,” Tauber said. “They’re Iranian.”

  “They got a convenience store in there?” Dwayne said.

  “No. They’re nuclear physicists.”

  “Iranian nuclear physicists?”

  “They stay here all the time,” Tauber said. “They’re kind of on a watch list. And they can’t go home because they’re homosexuals.”

  “That must be a tough beat,” Dwayne said.

  He followed Tauber as the doc trotted away toward the tower rising into the gloom.

  “Nicola Tesla was a genius,” the doc said. “Greater than Edison. A seer. He invented the idea of this tower over a hundred years ago with the intention of projecting broadcast energy via electromagnetism. Imagine a network of these across the country drawing power from the air and providing inexpensive energy to anyone. And all without a single wire.”

  “So, it’s a lightning rod,” said Dwayne. He began to wonder if this was a job or an investment pitch.

  “In a way,” the doc said and slapped the base of a steel leg. It created a soft thrumming sound in the guy wires leading away from the globe.

  “A massive power surge is required to jumpstart it. The surge runs to steel rods driven a hundred and thirty feet into the rock below the tower. That creates a cone of electromagnetic energy around the globe that spreads across the entire compound.”

  “Uh huh,” Dwayne said. He was checking the perimeter around them. Force of habit. The compound rested on the edge of a rocky mesa that dropped off to mile after mile of flat, featureless desert. In the dark, it looked like the land on the approach to Baghdad. Empty and quiet. The dark was closing in as the sun set quickly. The horizon would soon be invisible.

  “That EMP lasts only seconds. But it’s enough to power the Tauber Tube which is here,” said the doc as he walked across the compound to the rusting cargo container. The opening and six feet at the front of the cargo box were exposed, but the remaining fifty feet or so was buried in a high pile of freshly dug sand. Ther
e was a steel vent at the crest of the pile, and a thin trail of vapor escaped from it. An old Case backhoe sat on a trailer in some greasewood nearby.

  There were two dirt bikes standing up under tarps by it. Tauber threw the door lever down and pulled at a hatch cover set at the end of the container. The squeal of the hinges echoed off the rocks all around. Doc grunted with the effort. Dwayne lent a hand, and the door swung wide. A gust of chilled air escaped from the dark interior.

  “And this is what you want me to guard?” Dwayne asked.

  “I didn’t bring you out here to guard the Tube,” the doc said. “I need you to go through the Tube.”

  “A time machine?” Dwayne asked.

  “In its simplest terms?” Tauber said, “yes.”

  The half-buried cargo container served as an entryway to a block-walled chamber that was a thousand square feet minimum with a twenty-foot ceiling. Exposed vents poured cold air down into the room from above. This chamber was at the heart of the hill of fresh earth. There was a computer workstation set on a steel table. Doors to some rooms lined one wall. One door was open, and Dwayne could see a row of tiled stall showers. There were some pieces of equipment covered with cloths along another wall.

  The farthest end of the big room was dominated by a row of thick, concentric coils with a corrugated steel platform suspended on the inside of the coils as a floor or walkway. There was enough clearance to allow a man to walk into the coil array without stooping.