The Tenth Circle Read online

  THE

  TENTH CIRCLE

  A BLAINE McCRACKEN NOVEL

  JON LAND

  NEW YORK

  For the men and women of the United States Special Forces

  De Oppresso Liber

  Then, now, always.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE: LOST

  PART ONE: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART TWO: CROATOAN

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  PART THREE: THE WHITE DEATH

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  PART FOUR: THE MARY CELESTE

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  PART FIVE: THE TENTH CIRCLE

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  CHAPTER 95

  CHAPTER 96

  CHAPTER 97

  CHAPTER 98

  CHAPTER 99

  CHAPTER 100

  CHAPTER 101

  EPILOGUE: FOUND

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We meet again; you, me, Blaine, and Johnny back together for another adventure, thanks to the vision and dedication of the whole team at Open Road Integrated Media. That team is headed­ by the great Jane Friedman who provided me the ability­ to work with wonderful professionals like Pete Beatty, Libby Jordan, Rachel Chou, and Nina Lassam. I’m especially grateful to my agent Bob Diforio for bringing us together and, even more, to the one holdover from so many pages like this, my amazing and brilliant editor, Natalia Aponte. I’d hate to think where this or any of my books would be without her pushing me to be better each time out—not always an easy task when a series enters its eleventh book. Before moving on to hopefully greener pastures, Stephanie Gorton really helped bring this one over the finish line and I can’t think of anyone I trust more to help push me along the home stretch than Jeff Ayers.

  Because here’s the thing, the delivery mechanism for books like this might have changed, but one thing hasn’t: a great story is a great story no matter how you read it, and I’ve done my best to deliver just that here. While you’re sitting where you are, and I’m sitting where I am, I can picture you turning the page and predict you won’t stop reading until the final one is flipped.

  Only one way to find out if I’m right or not. (You can let me know at www.jonlandbooks.com!) So I’m going to shut up now so you can get started.

  A hero is no braver than an ordinary man,

  but he is braver five minutes longer.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PROLOGUE:

  LOST

  Roanoke Island, North Carolina: August, 1590

  “Where could they have gone?” Governor John White asked, his voice quivering as he paced about the abandoned camp in the fetid summer heat. “What could have become of them, in the name of all that is holy?”

  White knelt to smooth the land, as if it might yield some clue as to the whereabouts of the entire colony under his command, the ground mist hiding the trembling of his hands. The overcast sky and thick canopy of tree cover had bled the light from the clearing, the grayness of the scene befitting his mood. White’s fear, apprehension, and building grief knew no bounds, since his own daughter and granddaughter had been among the colonists.

  Now among the missing.

  The fort the colonists had occupied was gone, leaving behind only earth berms and rotted logs where cabins and structures had once stood. As if a vast storm had swept in and swallowed everything in its path, including the men, women, and children who had lived here.

  “No trace, no trace at all,” he said out loud to himself, as the others who had accompanied him from the ship watched him wipe the tears from his eyes. They had arrived at dusk, the shadows of the coming night making the overgrown brush look like spectral monsters snapping at the air with their leaf-like teeth. The only other hints of the fort’s existence were some still-standing posts and beams, forming the shell of the exterior wall. The land was overgrown with weeds and dead brush, and a sour, spoiled odor hung in the thick air rich with the hum of black flies and mosquitoes typical of August this far south in the new land. This was actually the second colony to be based on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina, the first having been abandoned due to insufficient supplies and incessant battles with the local native tribes who proved less than hospitable. White had resolved to avoid both of those maladies this time, as evidenced by the fact that his own daughter and son-in-law were included among the colonists. They’d had a child shortly before his ill-timed return to England, a daughter: White’s grandchild, Virginia Dare, a fact that left his insides knotted and gnarled like a bad cramp.

  “No sign of any of them, Governor,” noted Thomas Glanville, captain of a privateering expedition who had ferried White here from England for a considerable price.

  “My granddaughter,” said White softly, sadly, “the first English child born in the Americas. I left her here along with the other one hundred fourteen colonists three years ago with a promise to return in no more than one. I left them to their deaths. This is my fault.”

  “We don’t know they’re dead, sir, not for sure.”

  “Today would have been her third birthday,” White said, his expression grim and spine stiff as he lingered over the remnants of the well the colonists had dug to supply them with water. With the camp so close to Albemarle So
und, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, they were able to find water just a dozen feet down. But it must have gone dry or soured, because a replacement well had been dug farther up a rise on a natural earth berm. “We must find what became of her,” he continued. “We must find what became of all of them.”

  Life had proved so harsh here that the colonists had convinced White to journey to England to plead for them to be able to come home. His long-delayed return sprang from a winding journey full of false starts and aborted voyages that had waylaid his plans to make it back sooner. He had dreaded giving his people the unfortunate news that their request had been turned down, and now he dreaded something much worse.

  “No sign of the signal you described, sir,” a sailor whose name White had forgotten reported, returning after a careful survey of the area. White noted that the man had trimmed off the sleeves of his thick canvas shirt and rolled up the legs of his woolen britches to his knees. The other three sailors who’d accompanied White and Glanville to the colony had done the same, perhaps regretting it since their exposed flesh sent the buzzing insects into a feeding frenzy.

  “Signal?” asked Glanville.

  “If anything befell the colonists,” White told him, “my instructions were to leave a Maltese cross on a tree. The fact that there’s none can only mean …” He let the remainder of his thought dangle in the air amid the hot, misty breath trailing each word from his mouth. “Whatever happened here,” he finished finally, “must have happened very fast.”

  “Well, I did find something else, sir,” the sailor resumed, leading White toward the southwest corner of the camp.

  While the other sailors continued their check of the perimeter, White found himself before a still-standing post of the fort with the word Croatoan carved into its surface.

  “What is it?” Glanville wondered.

  “An island nearby.”

  “Could it be that the colonists sought refuge there, Governor?”

  “Possibly,” White said, feeling a flicker of hope rise in him, “but it could also be a reference to the local native tribe known to be friendlier than the others.”

  White ran his fingers over the etching, hoping the depth and condition might yield some clue as to how long ago it had been carved. He had known natives of this new land who could discern such things, but for him it was just conjecture further complicated by the sky darkening ahead in promise of a storm, a big one judging by the feel of the air.

  The governor turned his gaze that way, addressing Glanville as he did. “How bad a blow are we looking at, Captain?”

  “Bad, sir.” Glanville seemed to sniff the air. “Very bad.”

  White nodded, his expression turning even grimmer as the color washed from his face. “Then we have little time to continue the search, to—”

  He stopped suddenly, something about the ground between this tree and the replacement well grabbing his attention. White retraced their path, stopping over a slightly raised mound. He knelt and smoothed his hand over the earth.

  “We must go,” he said, rising stiffly. “Our decision is made. No more lives can be placed at risk.”

  “You paid me to do a job, Governor,” Glanville started. “I’d prefer to see it done.”

  “It is done, Captain. The colony is lost. Hope was lost long ago. They’re dead, each and every one of them, my family included.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Yes, I do.” White inhaled deeply and blew out more breath caked with steaming mist. “Now we must be gone from here. And fast.”

  “You speak as if we’re in danger, sir.”

  “Because we are. Whatever killed my people is still about, Captain, still hungry for more death. I feel that in my bones too.”

  The sky rumbled with the first hint of thunder. The wind shifted to the northeast, blowing in a swatch of fog from the nearby sound.

  “Feel what, Governor? I’ve never backed down from a fight and those natives you mention will get more of a battle from my men than any fifty you left behind.”

  “It wasn’t natives, Captain. The fate that befell my people was the work of no man.”

  “What then?”

  White looked away, swinging about in the rain that had begun to dapple the air. “It will all be in my report, along with a warning to Sir Walter Raleigh and the crown itself.”

  “Governor?”

  “That no Englishman ever set foot on this cursed land again. And we must get back to your ship before we join the colonists in the same fate.”

  Glanville held White’s stare as best he could through the thickening fog that stole from him sight of the sailors still patrolling through the weeds and overgrowth.

  “What is it you see, sir?”

  “Not what I see, Captain, so much as what I don’t.”

  That’s when the first gurgling scream sounded, followed by a second, and a third. Then gasps from the sailors lost to the fog at the camp’s outer perimeter.

  Then nothing.

  Glanville went for his sword, but White jammed a hand down on the hilt.

  “It won’t help. Trust me. We must run.”

  “I can’t leave my men! I can’t—”

  But White grasped his exposed forearm and yanked Glanville into motion, away from where the screams had come.

  “Now, Captain, now! Before it’s too late, before there’s no one left to tell the tale!”

  Glanville gave up on his sword and fell into stride alongside White. Lightning bursts cut through the fog, illuminating their path as branches and brambles scratched at their faces and tore at their clothes, the Roanoke Colony lost behind them.

  Bay of Gibraltar, Atlantic Ocean: 1872

  “I know that ship,” said Captain John Moorehouse, his voice stiff with concern, as he lowered the spyglass from his eye and turned to his mate. “She’s the Mary Celeste.”

  The Dei Gratia’s second-in-command, Abner Devereaux, joined Moorehouse at the foredeck under a crystal-clear sky and calm winds. They’d never sailed together before, Devereaux having joined the crew as a last-minute replacement for the regular mate who’d fallen ill suddenly. Devereaux had heavy-lidded, hooded eyes and, during the voyage across the Atlantic from New York, had been prone to keeping to himself, in contrast with the gregarious Moorehouse’s penchant for staying close to his men.

  “Her captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs, and I had dinner the night before we both set sail from New York,” Moorehouse continued, having first spotted the Mary Celeste yawing. Now he watched her come into the wind and then fall off, the currents having steered her into the Bay of Gibraltar between Portugal and the Azores. “She’s floundering, out of control.”

  “Where’s she bound?” Devereaux asked.

  “Genoa with seventeen hundred barrels of American alcohol in her holds,” Moorehouse told him, comparing that to the Dei Gratia’s cargo of an almost identical number of barrels filled with petroleum.

  “I see no distress signal,” said Devereaux, squinting and shielding his eyes from the bright afternoon sunlight.

  “What say we see if she responds to our call?”

  “Aye, sir,” the mate said, and grabbed a silver hailing trumpet, heavy and large at eighteen inches in length, from a nearby hook. Reflexively, he wiped its mouthpiece prior to raising the instrument to his lips and blew hard three times to blast a signal. Devereaux waited for a response and when none came he tried again with the same result.

  “What say we board her,” said Moorehouse, “and see what we can see?”

  “She’s abandoned for sure,” Devereaux reported after supervising a search below deck of the three-hundred-ton brigantine’s cabins. “No sign anywhere of the captain and crew.”

  Standing on the deck of the ghostship, Moorehouse stiffened. “Benjamin Briggs had his wife and little girl with him. His mate, Albert Richardson, is as goo
d a seaman as I’ve known.”

  “Well, they left in a hurry, sir. Fast enough to leave their oil-skin boots and pipes beyond.”

  “Pirates, then,” Moorehouse groused.

  “I think not. Her holds are intact, the cargo undisturbed. I did find this.”

  Devereaux handed Moorehouse a tattered, leather-encased ledger.

  “The captain’s log,” Moorehouse noted. “This should tell us something anyway.”

  “You said she was bound for Genoa.”

  “I did.”

  “Strange then that the course the captain had laid out was bound for England, a port not far from Chislehurst.”

  “That makes no sense,” from Moorehouse, his discomfort worn in something between a scowl and a frown, the hot sun carving fresh fissures in his already-leathery skin.

  Moorehouse gazed about the abandoned deck of the ghostship, eerie in its desolation, every yaw and creak exaggerated by the silence.

  “Mutiny perhaps,” suggested Devereaux.

  “You find any trace of liquor on board?”

  “None, besides what leaked out of a cracked barrel in one of the holds I checked.”

  “Because Briggs forbade it, a God-fearing man who never touched the drink and chose his crews from among men of a like mind. I’ve never known a mutiny not fueled by the spirits.”

  “What then, Captain?”

  “Rig the ship for tow. We’ll string her to port with us.”

  “There’s something you’re not saying, sir.”

  Moorehouse had hoped his mate wouldn’t see the new sense of hopelessness he felt flashing in his gaze. “No captain would leave his logbook behind upon abandoning ship. I believe he and the others were taken or …”

  “Or what, in the name of Christ?”

  “Something made them vanish, chief mate, vanish into thin air.”

  Chislehurst, England: 1872

  Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, better known as Napoléon III, was bedridden when his dour-faced visitor, Henri Jaubert, arrived. Since being released from a German prison in the wake of France’s disastrous defeat in the war with Prussia, his health had deteriorated sharply. That war had been waged at his urging and under his command. So its miserable failure had not only branded him first a prisoner of war and then an exile, but had also marked the end of the Second French Empire. A new republic had now replaced it, adding to Napoléon III’s misery, further exacerbated by a chronic lung infection and a knifing pain riddling his extremities for which doctors had yet to find the proper treatment. He alternated between terrible bouts of sweating and equally racking chills, and was given to fits of delirium that left him lost in the illusion he still ruled his beloved France. But that condition now threatened to forestall his plans to seize back the crown with the help of the actual cargo of a ship that was now two weeks late in arriving at port here.