Crown of Serpents (3 page)

The young Seneca warrior who had been denied Thomas Boyd’s scalp as a trophy, was one of the Indians pillaging the victim for items of value. He came away with the rebel officer’s shiny belt buckle, his hunting knife, powder horn, and a small leather booklet. The youngster fanned the English language pages inside the book and frowned. He had no idea it was Boyd’s personal campaign journal. He stuffed the booklet into his pouch thinking he could barter with it later. He then kicked Boyd several times in the ribs to awaken him for the march back to their village. The Seneca warrior still felt the officer’s scalp was rightfully his and that he would not be denied taking it again.

He did not have to wait long.

His trophy would come the very next day.

1

Present day. November. Early Monday morning. Cranberry Marsh.
North of the Hamlet of Romulus, N.Y.

T
HIRTY FEET DEEP inside a rock fissure, U.S. Army Major Robert “Jake” Tununda gained his footing on a ledge, gripped his rescue rope tight, and hugged the stone wall to catch his breath. As he inhaled, the stench of fresh human excrement rose from below and filled his nostrils. He shook his head, the odor somehow triggering a suppressed memory he had stored away for many years. His eyes glazed over for a moment and he remembered himself back as a young infantry captain leading an assault into a shit-filled al-Qaeda underground bunker in Afghanistan. The scene in his head ended in an atrocity he would never forget — his black moment in an otherwise illustrious combat career. Jake pressed his eyes shut and filed the thought back where it belonged, refusing to let it cloud the attempted rescue he was performing. Only now, he thought, as he crinkled his nose, there would probably be a dead body instead to recover below.

It had been about twenty minutes since he had turned north up Route 96 out of the central New York State hamlet of Romulus to continue his early morning rural drive. He had left his home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and was in route to Rochester, up on Lake Ontario. Deciding to kill the early hours of boredom, he had eavesdropped on his portable police and fire scanner, and to his surprise he had caught the tail end of a local emergency dispatch, complete with Global Positioning Satellite coordinates. The female dispatcher described a man trapped in a well or hole in a marsh. Upon her repeat page of the GPS coordinates Jake was ready with his Chevy Tahoe’s on-board navigation system. He typed in the sequence of Latitude: 42 degrees 47’28.04”N and Longitude: 76 degrees 49’51.12”W and found out he was right around the corner from where the victim was supposedly trapped.

Suffering not the slightest hint of hesitation, the 37-year-old former commander of highly trained combat infantrymen, moved into action. Attempting to rescue a stranger in a bad predicament was the embodiment of Jake’s personal make-up.

After following the directional waypoint on his navigation system monitor, he motored down a dirt road off 96. It was labeled Marsh Road on his screen. As more chatter filled the radio, Jake heard that the victim’s location was apparently on an island in the swamp and next to some old Indian grave.

Bringing his sports utility vehicle to a grinding halt, he jumped out, ran to the rear, and raised the back hatch. Unzipping his handy emergency duffel bag of gadgets and gear he switched his Army dress shoes for a pair of zip-up waterproof boots. He then pulled out his hand-held GPS unit and typed in the same coordinates to guide him through the marsh. Slinging his equipment bag over one shoulder, he followed the directional arrow on his hand-held unit and stepped foot into shin-deep muck.

After quickly trailblazing his way through a combination of marsh and brush, he entered a line of woods and soon arrived at the small island that matched the GPS coordinates. He was first on scene. He then located the supposed well, thought it looked more like an earthquake fissure, and tried to make initial contact with the victim, all the while anchoring his rescue rope to a tree.

Now, resting on the ledge after his climb down inside the shaft and his mind reset on his self-imposed task, he unclipped an already illuminated flashlight from a carabiner. He directed the beam down into a shimmering puddle of soupy red mud. Floating in the muck was a crosshatch of rotted wood, swamp grass, and several pieces of shale that had tumbled in from the surface.

“Anybody down here?” Jake shouted. It was the fifth time. He received the same response — echoed silence. He shifted his body and moved the flashlight beam further into the hole. He saw a black baseball cap partially submerged in the muck. Embroidered on the hat was a recognizable NASCAR logo alongside a familiar slanted white number three. Floating next to the hat was the top half of a shattered cell phone, its LCD panel grayed-out. Jake’s eyes followed the trail of liquid into a wider cave-like room. He bent down on the ledge to get a better view below.

There, lying face down in about four inches of muck was the motionless body of the man who had no doubt placed the call to 9-1-1.

“Son of a bitch,” Jake grumbled.

He let go of his safety rope and dropped into the water, the scum splashing his starched green uniform pants tucked into his boots. He slogged over to the body and squatted down as the flashlight beam centered on the back of the man’s head. Chips of bone and brain matter were pressed into wet hair where the top of the skull had been crushed. The man’s legs lay twisted at irregular angles. The smell of feces was heavy. The backside of the victim’s pants was stained with brown discharge. Jake swallowed back a gag. He knew it was useless to even take a pulse, but he’d go through the motions anyway.

Setting the flashlight on a rock so the beam illuminated the back of the cave, his eyes scanned the chamber — solid limestone walls, low ceiling, and a pile of rocks in a corner oddly shaped like a human figure. He looked down at the victim, grabbed hold of a shoulder and hip, and rolled the body onto its back.

The man’s wide-open eyes were frozen in a glazed death stare as bloody water rolled off his battered face. He wore a teeth-shattered grimace. Jake sized him up quickly. Unshaven, weathered face with sunken cheeks, mid-forties. A long gash over his eye revealed a thick mixture of blood and mud. The guy definitely took a beating on his tumble down the hole. Jake looked away, adding the dead man’s image to the mosaic of deceased in the storage cabinet of his mind.

He peeled off his rappelling gloves and set them next to his flashlight. Placing two fingers under the man’s jaw, he checked the carotid artery for a beat. There was none, of course. He pulled his fingers back and wiped them on his uniform pants before glancing down at the man’s abdomen. Plaid shirt covered with a black denim vest, a busted arm with a clenched fist across the stomach. Jake’s eyes narrowed as he noticed something clutched in the man’s hand.

He grabbed the wrist, turned it over, and exposed the palm. Prying the man’s fingers open, he revealed the bottom half of the cell phone. Shaking his head, he closed the hand back up. Then he saw something shiny — halfway out of the vest side pocket — some type of circular item bordered by elongated white wampum shells. He recognized the wampum right away as a common decorative addition to jewelry he had seen growing up on the Seneca Indian reservation.

He carefully pulled the item from the pocket and held it in the flashlight beam. A little larger than a half dollar, the shiny disk was clearly made of old hammered silver. Paralleling the outer wampum border was an inner border of small decorative holes — definitely an Indian motif he had seen in many past artifacts. And in the middle of the circle was a barely noticeable engraved outline of a buck with a full antler rack. Inside the deer’s body was a little squiggle with a head and eyes. It reminded Jake of a snake. Separately, the deer and the snake symbols were familiar enough, but arranged in this odd manner was a configuration he had never seen before. He turned the disk over to reveal a pin and clasp made of old materials. Still clinging to the pin was a shred of rotted green cloth.

He concluded the old item was a broach used to hold together the collar of a shirt or coat — quite common as a Native American dress accessory. Did this guy snatch it from the Indian grave above?

“Hello! Hello!” an excited woman shouted from topside, her voice echoing in the chamber. “Anybody down there?” A flashlight beam bounced into the fissure as Jake looked back up.

“Yes! Hello,” he shouted back, shielding his eyes.

“Are you okay? We’re here to help. Just stay calm,” the woman offered. “Are you on this rope line?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking. But the guy who was trapped down here is already dead!”

“What? Say again. Couldn’t hear you.”

“The victim is dead. The guy who called and said he was trapped, he is dead!”

“Who the hell are you then?”

Jake paused, then shouted back. “Jake Tununda, U.S. Army.”

2

Same time. High Point Mountain Casino and Resort, West of Kingston, Ulster County, N.Y.

I
MMACULATELY ATTIRED in a black, custom-tailored Italian suit, fifty seven year-old Alex Nero, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in New York State, stood alone on his penthouse balcony suite overlooking his mountain entertainment complex. He leaned over an iron railing and puffed on a Churchill-sized Cuban cigar. A single silver serpent attached to a necklace dangled from his open collared shirt. With troubled eyes, he gazed down upon the blue waters of Ashokan Reservoir spread out below. He then shifted to the distant beauty of the surrounding Catskill Mountains. A cool early morning breeze fluttered his shoulder-length gray hair as he watched the sun rise from the mist. The view had always lifted his spirits.

Not this morning.

Nero exhaled the nutty flavored smoke of his cigar then looked closer at the sprawling entertainment complex below. He nodded in somewhat self-reassurance at his greatest accomplishment to date.

Named High Point Mountain Casino and Resort after the mountain it sat atop, Nero’s gambling facility had just beaten Howe Caverns as the second most visited tourist attraction in the state, behind Niagara Falls. It even rivaled some of Las Vegas’ best gambling resorts and certainly put to shame any of the other Native American gaming venues elsewhere in New York. Located just west of the Hudson River near Kingston, this architectural wonder catered to New York City customers and high rollers from all over the world — mostly Saudi Arabian princes, Japanese executives, and European playboys.

An eighteen-hole golf course, a top-notch winery, a private runway, and a spa graced the base of the mountain along the reservoir road. Up on top sat the casino, the hotel, and a members-only, exclusive adult-entertainment club. Named Bucks & Does, the club catered to celebrities, athletes, politicians, and VIPs. Nero stocked it with the finest looking men and women money could buy. It’s where he did most of his political lobbying and where he had spent most of the previous night with a contingent of Seneca County officials from whom he would be purchasing 8,000 acres of land on the abandoned Seneca Army Depot.

Along with his core businesses at the top of the mountain was his personal museum named the Haudenosaunee Collection. This collection was ranked as one of the best in the world and where he spent most of his time in search of rare northeastern Native American artifacts. Nero had even constructed his summit facilities in a luxurious mountain lodge style of architecture reminiscent of the ancient Iroquois culture that once ruled the area.

High Point, he mockingly mused with a grunt, was an appropriate name for his flagship business. He had fulfilled his personal climb to the pinnacle of wealth, women, power, and political influence. He had everything a man with his ambition could hope for in a lifetime. But still it was not enough to quench his thirst.

Nero coveted a permanent place in history, just as his Onondaga warrior forefathers had done in defense of the ancient Confederacy. He too wanted that essence of historical immortality, to be known for ages to come. That would be the true High Point legacy, he thought — to never be forgotten in history. That was his ultimate goal.

And his path was almost complete. In the most recent Confederacy election, he had finally won the coveted title of Tadodaho or Head Chief of the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. It was a spiritual position he had sought for years. Granted he had to put some key people on his payroll, but he gained his desire. Always had.

The Tadodaho was a figurehead position held only by an Onondaga. It was a rubber stamp position to the chiefs of the other tribes and their outdated traditionalist beliefs. But Nero had grander plans. He aimed to change the position into the true dictatorship it once was. He sought complete control — authority over all the separate Iroquois nation-tribes, in and out of the state.

His ancient bloodline demanded it.

Securing his place as the rightful ruler, he would set in motion his ultimate objective of retaking all Iroquois lands stolen by the U.S. and New York State governments. He would centralize the pathetically weak and splintered tribal nations back into the powerful empire they once were and deserved to be again. He would wreak cultural and civil havoc, and claim a true sovereign confederacy right in the heart of the Empire State.