The Left Hand of God

The Knight Nurses of the Order of St. John

Book 1.5

By M. L. Tapper

For Aaron

Bob could not forgive himself for thinking the crime scene smelled like a barbecue pit. The cross still smoked, and so did the corpse. An already too hot mid-morning sun shone over the crucified man’s left shoulder directly into Bob’s eyes.

Beyond the charred man on the cross, green hills in full leaf rolled away into the distance, wave upon wave of emerald under a dazzling blue sky. South Carolina had woods and mountains, lakes, and the ocean. Bob had found it hard to imagine a more beautiful place. He had grown up on the edge of the desert. The greenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains had been a huge relief from the taut emptiness of the scrub and sand. A man could take a deep breath here, and his lungs didn’t feel like they were turning into jerky.

The others of his team, in their black windbreakers, SHERIFF stenciled in white across the back, walked across the field in a line, picking up bits of evidence, some of it pieces of men and women, and put them in plastic bags. Clouds of flies buzzed over the un-bagged human offal. The mosquitoes kept to the shade of the trees and other vegetation. Standing in the sun might cook you, but at least you wouldn’t get bitten while it did.

The circular field where Bob supervised his team was also decorated with bits of cars and trucks and firearms, both long guns and handguns. Some of them still looked usable having survived the night’s terrors in one piece. In the center of the field, a black depression, ten feet across marked the site of the largest explosion. Everything and everyone had been blown back or up or both from that circle. The charred markings of smaller explosions dotted the periphery of the field, and beyond those, the bodies of those who had been gunned down running away. A turquoise blue pair of fuzzy dice, still connected by string, hung over the branch of a maple sapling like a holiday ornament. The edge of a truck headlight was half sunk into an oak tree just beyond the sapling.

Bob scanned the branches of the oak and near the top a white hood, snagged by an eye hole, flapped like a flag of truce in the gentle morning breeze. The Klan’s surrender had come too late.

Deputy Christmas whistled to him from the dense brush to the north of the site.

“We found it,” he said, his head disappearing once more into the thick cover.

Bob sighed and picked his way through the scrum of the Sheriff’s forensic team and the state police troopers who had come to secure the site. As he pushed into the thicket, he snagged his polyester blazer on the thorns in the brush. In exasperation, he yanked himself free, tearing a pocket completely off the jacket, leaving it impaled on the bush beside the path.

“Buffalo Springfield, this time,” Christmas said, pointing to the boom box on the ground. “Last thing they heard.” He lifted the cassette with the tip of a pencil from its cradle in the boom box. The cassette was homemade. The label on it said: “KKK” and the date in black marker.

“I’m guessing gunfire or explosions were the last thing they heard,” Bob replied, squatting next to the boom box. “What else is on the tape?”

“Nothing. Just the one song looping.”

“No demands? No manifesto?”

“Just the song.”

“Our bombers do have eclectic taste,” Bob said.

“I don’t get it,” Christmas replied. “I mean what’s the message? There has to some kind of twisted logic to this.”

Bob shrugged.

“Or not,” he said. “You don’t want to try to go too deep into the mind of somebody as disturbed as this.”

“Somebodies,” Christmas corrected. “There’s no way this was one person.”

Bob nodded, conceding the point.

“There just has to be a message, something we’re not hearing,” Christmas said, absently bouncing the pencil and cassette against the boom box.

“Maybe, don’t join the Klan?” Bob offered.

“This whole thing is, what, an anti-recruiting scheme?”

“Hasn’t been very effective so far,” Bob replied.

“True, the victims are also a special kind of nuts,” Christmas allowed.

Bob nodded once. “Tag it and bag it,” he said indicating the tape and player.

He was happy to take off the ruined jacket, but he was still too warm. The Carolina sun baked him, sweat running along his stomach and back.

“This makes four?” Bob asked.

“Yes, detective, four. That we know of.”

“Don’t imagine scenes like go unremarked,” Bob said. “We would have heard about this even on the other side of the country. Burning guys on a cross do kind of draw attention.”

“I suppose.” Christmas said. “I wish it was,” he added “across the country, I mean. These things are freaking me out.”

“Do your best,” Bob replied.

He nodded, this time to himself and walked back to his car. The whole crucifixion thing was overkill. It wasn’t having the effect they had hoped.

Boredom, not discomfort, was the greatest enemy of the sniper. Bob had been three days in his bolt hole, an eight-foot-long shallow grave tucked under the root ball of a fallen hemlock tree, waiting for the KKK to assemble. The tree provided excellent hard cover to his west, while affording him an unobstructed view of the target to the south. He had placed his homemade land mines in an arc twenty feet over his left shoulder, so no one could sneak up on him, even during, especially during, the operation. The hole was covered with dead branches and leaves, strewn haphazardly over a camouflage tarp that was his roof. At the foot end of the shelter was a deeper trench, another three feet deep, that served as his latrine. The night he had arrived to take up residence, he emptied a quart bottle of skunk scent, on sale when deer were not in season, in a circle around him. This would not only keep local fauna away, it would allow him to perform bodily functions without fear of detection.

The Klan often used dogs to sweep an area before they mustered, and heavy skunk scent, little diminished by the passage of three days, would make him invisible to their noses. Inside his “nest,” the literature often referred to a sniper’s hiding place as a nest, the reek was so strong he had trouble choking down the protein bars he had brought to eat, and the formidable heat of the Carolina summer was little diminished by the shade overhead.

He had run out of sticks to carve. He was slowly making a chess set while on sniper duty. The rooks and knights were the hardest to carve, but also the most satisfying. He had wanted to use light and dark wood rather than paint the pieces white and black, but all of the sticks in his last two nests were pine. There were walnut trees somewhere in the woods to make the black pieces, but he hadn’t found any. He was finishing another bishop when he heard a twig snap outside of his blind. His hands froze before slowly moving to his rifle.

Another twig snapped. He noiselessly lifted his rifle stock to his shoulder and waited, trying to control his breath while his heart hammered in his chest. He could not be taken, could not be arrested. One prisoner and the whole game would be up. A low growl to his right told him a coyote had stumbled onto him. The skunk scent must be wearing off.

He had to imagine the next part, because he couldn’t see any of it from his hiding place. There was a furious scrambling in the leaves followed by a deer blowing and twigs snapping in the distance. When the movement was far off, there was barking and howling.

The pack had a successful hunt, apparently. The deer scent and not his scent had brought the coyote so close.

He sipped from the plastic water jug, and the water tasted like the jug. Bad water, bad food, cramped space, bored out of his mind, This was how the fight for justice went. What he really wanted was a cape and the power of flight, zooming in on the racist dipshits like the sword of an archangel while a full orchestra played his theme music and he struck heroic poses over the unconscious forms of his vanquished foes.

In the movies, the foes were always unconscious, never killed outright. Rendering someone unconscious for any significant time without causing them permanent brain damage was damn near impossible. He remembered being called to the scene of a domestic disturbance where the battered wife had finally had enough and hit her husband with a cast iron frying pan. It caved in his skull and left him unable to speak or do much of anything except drool, but he had it coming.

No swelling string section, no blasting hip-hop, not even an old-timey banjo background. Only blood and a better world. Blood and soil, my ass, he thought, remembering the Nazi chant. We’ll drain their blood into this soil.

He sighed, he farted, and the ambient smell in the nest was so bad, he didn’t even notice the fart.

Between the wet ground and his own drenching sweat, it felt as if it would rain at any moment, a torrential downpour that would smell like untreated sewage right there in a hundred twenty cubic feet.

It could be worse, though. It could always be worse.

When he was six years old, his family had fled the drug cartel wars in northern Mexico. His father bragged to his mother that they would be traveling to the US in luxury, no sneaking over the border at midnight. They had secured places in the trailer of a big truck heading north. The coyote assured them all the right people had been bribed and that the truck would simply drive over the border, unsearched and unmolested, to drop them off two hours later in Arizona. But when they arrived at the designated meeting place there were so many people in the trailer, there wasn’t room to sit. Bob, then he was called Miguel, clung to his mother’s legs and tried not to cry. His big sister, Antonia, whom he always thought so brave, was still, whispered words of encouragement to him that let him know she, too, was terrified.

The truck smelled like a cattle barn at the ranch where his father had worked. His young mind registered the smell without assigning it any value, at least not at first. There were muttered prayers, men fanned the fetid air with their straw hats. An hour into the trip the road became so bumpy that people were flung around the trailer, crashing into each other and the walls. Babies cried, some people screamed, others shushed the screamers. The pitching and bumping came to a sudden stop with the terrified crowd thrown first toward the front of the trailer, then violently backward. People coughed in the dusty stillness. Miguel had fallen underneath a heavy woman who strained to get to her feet. He crawled to his mother, who was holding Antonia, blotting a gouge in the girl’s forehead with her skirt and looking angrily at her husband kneeling beside them.

“Luxury,” she hissed. The man was silent.

The real panic began moments later when they heard the sound of a big diesel engine straining, then receding in the distance. Everyone waited for the doors to open, and when a few minutes later they did not, the people in the trailer surged as one body toward the doors. That smell, acrid, like vinegar, carved itself indelibly into Miguel’s memory. The terrified energy that launched the first assault on the doors fizzled to shouts and loud conversations, plans to break through. There was crying and praying and many people slamming against the doors, but the heat and the now thick air in the trailer drained away their resistance. Miguel fell asleep working hard to pull air into his chest.

He never found out how long he slept. His next memory was of blinding light and a man’s voice saying something in a language he didn’t understand. He spent days in the hospital. A nurse spoke Spanish to him and brought him ice cream sometimes. He did not remember her name, only that there was something strange about her eyes, that they were beautiful and unlike any eyes he had ever seen. One day a border agent named Dupuis came to get him from the hospital. The man spoke broken Spanish. He brought Miguel home to his wife, Valerie, who taught him English and made him Eggos for breakfast. Valerie and the agent, Noel, were kind to him. They changed his name to Robert, but everyone always called him Bob, which confused him until he understood it was a nickname. He learned, in time, that his real parents and his sister had died in the trailer, along with everyone else. That he had survived, Valerie always called “our miracle,” and sometimes she called him her “miracle boy.”

Little Bob learned early on that any mention of his previous life was “naughty” and could get him sent to his room. He was told to forget everything before he came to live with Valerie and Noel. In time, he began to learn that the Dupuis disliked a group they called “beaners.” Beaners were lazy. Beaners were sneaky. Beaners were thieves and drug dealers. Bob grew up hating beaners. He was ten when he found out that beaners were people like him, like his parents, like his sister. He punched a boy at school who called him a beaner. When his parents were summoned to the Principal’s office to pick him up, they were angry at him for fighting, but they explained to him that beaners were Mexicans, not like him, of course. He was not Mexican anymore.

Bob had more and more trouble in school, more fights. He was “running with the wrong kind of kids,” his father said. His parents sent him to a military academy. After high school, he attended Norwich University as a cadet, and served six years as an Army Ranger, and was discharged as a Captain. While he was in the Army, he returned home to Arizona only three times. Valerie cried and cooed about how tall and handsome he had become, what a fine man. Noel was distant, taciturn, disinterested, although the last time Bob had left them, Noel hugged him, something he had seldom done, even when Bob was a child, before turning his back on Bob and walking away.

After leaving the Army, Bob applied for a job with the Greenville County sheriff’s office, where the Sheriff, himself, recruited him into the Left Hand of God. He became the Sheriff’s indispensable lieutenant, and together they had planned three other attacks on the “racist alt-right.” Tonight’s mission would be their most ambitious: they would kill an entire rally of Klansman. “Kill them all,” said the coded orders.

The Knights of the White Camelia had sponsored the rally along with the Klan. It was to be held in a field that had been cleared along a flat bench of land two-thirds of the way up the side of a mountain. The Klan would put security on the road up to the site and have members watching it from above on the mountain top as well as patrols with dogs along the perimeter. Sometimes there were drones overhead.

The Left Hand’s plan was to strike from three points. One team would eliminate the sentries uphill from the venue, another team would deploy the explosives, and a third team would conduct “mopping up” operations: killing any survivors or others who tried to flee. Bob was a member of the second team and tasked with assisting the third, if they needed it. His nest was seventy-five yards downhill from the field, but the small rise made by the overturned tree gave him a line of sight to the proceedings.

As night fell and trucks parked on the grass, Bob put on his headset, checked the magazine on his rifle, and scanned the field with infrared binoculars. Somewhere above, he knew the first team was killing the sentries, a job that had to be done silently; he suspected with blades rather than firearms. If that part of the attack went badly, he would know right away from the ensuing chaos.

He watched as several Klansmen hoisted a huge cross which thumped loudly as it fell into a hole dug to support it, packing earth and gravel around it to keep it steady. The men had not yet donned their hoods, so their meeting had not officially come to order. Through the jumble of excited male voices, Bob heard the expected racial epithets. He heard the President’s name more than a few times. He pulled up his black face mask and sighted in on the rocky bump at the western end of the field.

Ten days ago, there had been a real rock there, something left by the receding glaciers thousand of years before. The set-up team had replaced three rocks in the field with hard plastic replicas. The inside of the new “rocks” was filled with a grainy white powder, a substance used for exploding targets and available at gun stores everywhere. When his bullet penetrated the rock, it would detonate the powder, which acted like a primer for heavier explosives dug deeper into the ground. These bombs were funneled and shaped to expand from the center of the field. On top of each charge were three foot-square plates of quarter-inch steel. The bombs had been modeled after roadside IED’s in Iraq that had done so much damage to American military vehicles. In this case, there was nothing between the shrapnel and its victims, no vehicle, no armor. “Maximum lethality,” the bomb designer had said. Bob had no idea how powerful the explosions would be, only that he would be within the danger zone when it went off and would need to take appropriate precautions.

A quavering guitar lick floated out from the hillside, and Buffalo Springfield began singing. The Klansmen all turned toward the sound, some drawing pistols. Several pops, like small arms fire, sounded across the field. Bob knew these were only firecrackers, but they had the desired affect. All of the men sprinted toward their vehicles, the only cover, at the opposite side of the field. Bob pulled the trigger, ducking his head an instant later when the central bomb ignited.

The ground shook, and the tarp over his head split cleanly in half as if with a single knife stroke. A powerful blow on the top of his helmet threw him to his back. He reached up to find that shrapnel had split his helmet but not touched his scalp. Miracle Boy. The ground shook two more times. He buried his head after the second explosion and counted to ten. Even with his head tucked, the light of the explosion flashed angry red through his eyelids. Now it was time to charge.

He was stiff and dizzy from his time in the ground, from the explosions, but he crouched, the rifle sight to his eye, the barrel sweeping left and right. Debris filtered down through the trees and low moaning echoed from the mountainside. When he had finished checking his end of the field for survivors, he flashed his penlight twice and walked onto the grass. Smoke hovered above the bodies and the pieces of bodies. Another figure in black to his left fired toward the ground by three parked trucks, and the moaning stopped. Two more people emerged from the hill above. One was carrying a katana with a black blade. When he reached the nearest body, he lifted it by the hair, drawing the sword back.

“No.” A muffled command came from a man in a smooth iron mask. “If you cut off the heads, the press will say this is ISIS or Al Quaeda. They’ll find some way to blame Muslim terrorists. We want them to know we’re local,” he said in his muffled voice.

The man with the sword dropped the body. Two more figures in black drove the now abandoned cars down the access road to create a blockade, while several others dressed, then wired the Grand Wizard, hood and all, to the huge standing cross. When this was done, the man with the iron mask poured gasoline at its base and lit it with a smoldering pine branch.

“Clean out your sites. Dispose of the gear. No contact on the web for at least three weeks.” He touched the Grand Wizard’s robes with the flaming branch, setting the corpse ablaze before the flames could reach it on their own. Without another word, the figures in black melted into the woods. Bob filled in his sniper nest, disarmed the land mines, and hiked a looping six-mile path to where he had stored his car. He hurried home to shower and shave, in order to be ready for the call that would come from the dispatcher.

On his way back to the office from the crime scene, Bob stopped at Cappuccio for his morning cafe-au-lait. The denizens of the Sheriff’s office reveled in the appalling quality of their own coffee, and Bob was over trying to pretend he liked it. He sat at a table by the door of the cafe, sipping and reading the email messages on his phone. When he heard the chair on the other side of the table scrape, he reflexively reached for his side arm, his hand making it almost to the holster before he registered a young woman in jade green medical scrubs holding the back of the chair, nodding to him to ask if she could sit. Putting his free hand back on the table, he set down his phone and leaned back. The woman was of average height, with black hair in tight curls. Her brown eyes, though, were unemotional as a cat’s. Her nurse’s badge had a pin affixed to the bottom border: a black circle with a white Maltese cross.

“Please, join me,” he said. His voice was husky, so he cleared his throat and tried not to stare at her badge.

“I’ve been reading about your handiwork in the paper, ‘Bob’,” she said, reading the name on the paper cup in front of him.

“I’m afraid you have me at a loss . . .” He paused, waiting for her to furnish the name.

“St. Paul,” she said after a moment. “Aurora St. Paul.”

“Detective Robert Dupuis,” he answered, extending his hand. She took it and shook. Her grip was like a bear trap.

“I heard about the attack on the Klan. No survivors?”

“None that we know of,” he admitted, shifting his weight in his chair.

“From what I hear on the radio, there was nothing left but white hoods and body parts.”

Bob shifted again, looked longingly at the exit, and turned back to face her.

“There was a crucifixion,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

Aurora said nothing. Her gaze did not waver.

“It looks like they had put together a couple of telephone poles,” Bob said, “going to set them on fire. From that spot you could have seen it burning cross all over the valley.”

“I hear that people did see it all over the valley,” she said. “With a man on it.”

“We think he was the Grand Wizard. Coroner says he was dead before they nailed him up there.”

“Lucky him,” Aurora said. Her stillness was more threatening than if she had burnished a weapon.

“We’re on the same side, I think. Fewer Klansmen makes the world a better place. Don’t you think?” he said, pointing with his cup toward her badge.

“Not for mortal men to judge,” she answered.

“Before you get too high up on that horse, I seem to remember that the Order of St. John has plenty of blood on its hands,” he replied, leaning forward toward her, still avoiding those disturbing eyes.

“I made a special trip for this, so listen up. Whatever the Left Hand has planned for the rally, cancel it.”

“I’m late for a meeting,” said Bob, draining his coffee and rising.

“I expect I will see you again, Detective,” Aurora said. He didn’t answer. He turned and left, scurrying out the door as if chased by a rabid dog.

Bob tried to make himself invisible as he slunk into the conference room. The Sheriff, however, stopped in mid-sentence. “Nice of you to join us detective,” he said before returning to the screen at the front of the room. “We have a group of serial killers here or more likely members of a terrorist organization. Until recently, we thought it was a Hispanic group, El Hogar.”

Bob bit the inside of his cheek, trying not to chuckle.

“Turns out, we had it all wrong. I got a dispatch from the feds this morning. The group calls itself LHOG, an acronym for the Left Hand of God. They organize on the Dark Web and target right wing groups. I’m guessing that’s why they’re the left hand of God. Communist terrorists, that’s what we’re looking at here, social Marxism.”

“Aren’t commies, atheist though?” asked a deputy in the front of the room. “Why would they call themselves the Left Hand of God?”

“We’re dealing with homicidal nut jobs,” the Sheriff answered. “You can’t look for logic with these types, just ideology. They want power over their political enemies, simple as that. This is garden variety fear mongering and intimidation on a big scale.”

“This was, as you all know, the fourth attack. Like the second one in Gatlinburg, they burned a guy on a cross. Both of these attacks were against KKK dens, that is the smallest organizational unit. The first attack, the one the press is calling “The Night of Terror,” was against The Aryan Nation. Twelve assassinations, all simultaneously undertaken at twelve different locations. We know this group has at least a dozen members and is well-organized and funded. The feds think they may have infiltrated the group’s forum on the web, but we still can’t find the source of their money. I know you all want to do this investigation in-house, but the stakes are too high at this point for us to go it alone.”

Several people around the table grumbled and shifted. The Sheriff held up a hand.

“We are going to continue our investigation, but we’re going to be paragons of inter-agency cooperation; do I make myself clear?”

The grumbling dissipated.

“One hundred twenty-three people,” the Sheriff said, looking from face to face among his officers. “They have killed one hundred twenty-three of our friends and neighbors.”

Drew Mack, the only Black deputy, tensed and looked at the ground.

“Detective Dupuis will coordinate the teams. Get your assignments from him. Dismissed.”

Bob moved toward the front of the room amid the scuffle of chairs and murmured comments. In ten minutes, he had dispatched teams to interview the relatives and coworkers of the victims. He walked into the Sheriff’s office and closed the door behind him.

“We have a big problem, Don,” Bob began.

“The country is being overrun by racist motherfuckers; yeah, we’ve got problems,” the Sheriff said, half turning toward the window. “Every time we take out twenty, thirty more spring up. They’re coming out of the woodwork, or I suppose, from under their rocks . . .” His voice trailed away, his eyes slowly closing. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.”

“There’s a Hospitaller Knight in town.”

The Sheriff swiveled to face Bob.

“Are you sure?”

“Maltese Cross and everything. She’s pretty small, working at the hospital, maybe. I would never have picked her out, but she found me.”

The Sheriff rolled his eyes. “What does the Great and Powerful Oz want from us?”

“Have you ever seen one, Don, a Knight, I mean?”

“I’m sure they’re terrifying.”

“If they’re here, there must be a reason.”

“I don’t believe for one minute in all that reincarnation, secret society mumbo-jumbo. Who knows what they really want? They pay the bills; we do the wet work. That’s how it goes. As long as the offshore accounts are funded, they can dance in a circle naked for all I care. When one of those holier-than-thou assholes actually gets involved in an operation, I’ll be impressed.”

“They don’t just show up for no reason, Don,” Bob said again. “You know that.”

“Look,” the Sheriff said, placing his palms on the desk. “This is about the future of civilization. If these alt-right animals continue to grow their movement, to build their power base, we are all well and truly fucked. We have to wipe them out; it’s as simple as that, no survivors to tell the tale. It’s not personal, it’s to protect the progress we’ve made over the last two thousand years.”

“It’s personal to me,” Bob said, remembering his life as Miguel Rendon, his parents and his sister dying in a locked trailer truck in the desert.

“What I know is that in three weeks the New White Citizens Council is meeting in Charleston. Prentiss Gilchrist is speaking and the whole alt-right is creaming itself to hear him spew about the superiority of the white race. Security will be ridiculous, and we don’t have enough time to set up a decent perimeter. Our guy on the inside says they aren’t backing down because of the attacks. They’re looking to lure us into a fire fight. The local LEO’s are all in their pocket. We could take out close to a thousand of these roaches at one time here. That’s what I’m thinking about, not some crusader nurse. Get your head in the game.”

“Was that part about the feds on the web true, or was that just for local consumption?”

“I’m afraid it was. We’re going to have to set up other communication channels now, too.”

“I know a guy,” Bob began.

“I don’t want to know any more. Make it happen. Operational security first.”

“OPSEC, right.”

Bob’s forearms itched under the black Tyvek suit. The hood and mask made his goggles fog, and if he had to run, the booties over his sneakers would have sent him sprawling, but as he lay on the roof of a cheap hotel, looking through a spotting scope at the stadium below, he was at least reassured that none of his DNA would be found here, even if the local cops were to locate this sniper nest. Operational security demanded first that none of them get caught, alive or dead.

The nightmarish scene below was one he had witnessed on previous missions: skin heads, swastikas, and coded tattoos, all the insignia of the growing racist movements in the US. A group in SS officer uniforms goose-stepped to the area immediately in front of the makeshift stage, which was a flatbed truck parked over home plate with a podium in the center and huge speakers on either side. Bob could see it all, first through the spotting scope, and then through the scope on his rifle. Like everything else in his kit, the rifle and the scope were flat black to match the rubber rooftop.

With a range finder, he measured the distance to the podium at twelve hundred yards. Bob tilted the rifle slightly upward to put the crosshatch on a spot eighteen inches above the microphone. Assuming that Gilchrist would be wearing body armor under his suit, he knew that a head shot would be his only option. He checked his watch and tapped the send button on his radio three times, receiving three taps in return.

He could not see the truck parked across the river, but he had been with the cell that had tested it. One cell of anonymous engineers designed it, he and three strangers tested it, and now a different, equally anonymous crew would deploy it. The tarps would come off the truck, revealing the huge air compressor and wheel of PVC pipes. The design had been literally child’s play, with engineers using “potato guns” as the launch vehicle. The “potatoes,” though, were homemade fragmentation grenades. The launchers were arranged on a six-foot wide wooden wheel, like a gigantic Gatling gun. As the wheel spun, the compressor would shoot a grenade from each tube. There would be no explosion from the launch, nothing to see from the weapon’s discharge, only the heavy chugging sound of the compressor. The grenades were timed to explode in the stadium; that had been tested in a meadow back in the mountains. Once they had decided on the correct angle and distance, they ran tests to ensure the grenades did not explode before reaching their targets. The goal was not terror, but death.

Bob and two other snipers were set up on rooftops around the stadium to pick off people fleeing, those not killed in the initial blasts. Bob’s first shot, though, was to kill Prentiss Gilchrist. He was to take the shot at the sound of the first explosion, to hide the report from his rifle. He used a flash suppressor, but realistically he could only fire four or five rounds without risking detection, even in the mayhem of the fusillade from across the river.

He slowed his breathing, bringing his right index finger alongside the trigger guard and waited.

The roar of the crowd signaled Gilchrist’s arrival. He beamed, extending his right hand and arm out while the crowd yelled “Sieg Heil!” Gilchrist’s smile turned crooked then, and instead of moving to the podium, he took a step back. Two men in tactical gear dragged someone toward him. The small figure was clad in the same fatigues and vest as the men dragging her. She could have been a member of a SWAT team but for the white crosses on each shoulder. When he made out the tight black curls on the figure’s head, Bob’s stomach lurched. This was the Knight, St. Paul. The goons stepped back, one of them handing his sidearm to Gilchrist. Bob swiveled his rifle to Gilchrist’s head, knowing that even the slightest movement at this distance would ruin his chance for a kill shot. The Knight turned her head listening to something in the distance while Gilchrist raised the pistol.

Then time slowed so violently that Bob could feel the pause between each beat of his heart.

St. Paul snapped the zip ties that bound her hands. The crosses on her shoulders began to glow, then she began to glow, white, like burning phosphorus. Above the stadium, explosions further lit the night sky, erupting harmlessly high over the crowd. Within this crescendo of light, Bob saw the figure of Gilchrist dissolve into an oily, black cloud, a shadow that spread toward St. Paul. Even in the suffocating slowness, Bob’s eyes could not follow the speed with which St. Paul moved to—and through-- that shadow, a blade of light sliding into the center of the blackness. As the brilliant blade exited the back of the shadow, it rocketed through the wall of the stadium in a slight arc before plummeting into the river. Steam rose from the point where the light had hit the water, and a white-gray cloud rolled across the river like a blanket.

As time erupted back to life, the body of Prentiss Gilchrist fell quivering on the dais, a bloody gash through the center of his chest. People screamed and ran in every direction. Bob tried to focus, scanning the exits and finally taking aim at a bald man with a swastika tattooed on his head. Before he could pull the trigger, Bob’s scope went black. He lifted his head expecting to see someone there, but he found only a piece of cloth, draped over the scope of his rifle, black polyester that looked familiar. He flipped the cloth aside, pulling the rifle to his shoulder and swept the roof with the scope. He had no time to chance a shot into the crowd if someone had detected him on the roof. Again, he reminded his overwhelmed mind to focus. He broke down the rifle, splashed the area where he had been laying with bleach, and ran toward the ladder on the east side of the roof. He had turned to descend when he realized he was still holding the piece of cloth that had covered his rifle sight; it was from his jacket, the pocket torn off in the brush at the KKK site on the hillside.

For long moments, his limbs refused to move, and when he was finally able to make his way down to the alley below, he was shaking. At the bottom of the ladder, he stripped off his Tyvek suit, bundled it into the backpack that held his rifle, and tossed it into the back seat of a derelict car parked next to a dumpster in the alley. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and tried to still the vibration that started in his chest and amplified out to his hands and feet. When he had calmed himself enough to walk again, he made his way toward the mouth of the alley, which emptied onto the street in front of the hotel.

He emerged onto the lighted sidewalk, and behind him the derelict car came to life and drove out the other end of the alley. He moved toward the front door of the hotel, single-minded in his goal to get back to his room, and to collect himself before reporting to the rest of the group. He needed time to decide how he could explain what he had seen.

As he pushed through the double doors, an arm slipped through his. The arm belonged to a middle-aged woman with platinum blond hair worn in a Fifties style permanent wave. She was tall, and her high heels made her taller than him.

“You look like you need to buy me a drink,” she said, steering him toward the hotel bar. She maneuvered him into a booth and ordered them both martinis. “I like classic cocktails at a moment like this, don’t you?” she asked, discretely turning away from him to check her makeup in a compact mirror. “Bob, darling, you are just a fright. Breathe, man.”

“How do you know my name?” The words came out in an exhausted monotone. Perhaps I’m going into shock, Bob thought.

“I know a great deal about you, Bob. May I call you Bob? I can call you Miguel if you like. Hell, I can call you the King of Spain if you want. What’s in a name, really?”

Their drinks arrived, and as the woman lifted hers to her lips, Bob looked into her pale blue eyes. They were bottomless and old, out of place, even on a woman in her forties. Her lipstick stained the rim of the glass.

“You’re one of them.”

“Barbara of the Fourteen Holy Healers. You can call me Babs. Actually, don’t ever call me that; it’s my poor attempt at levity, I’m afraid. Barbara will do. If by ‘them’ you mean the knights, no, I am not one of them. I’m just their little helper.” She sipped and gave him a forced smile.

“Is St. Paul alive?”

“Aurora is just fine, darling. She’s on a boat right now headed down the Ashley River and out to sea. I expect she’ll be home by morning and back at the hospital for orientation the day after that.”

Bob’s head stilled, frozen, he was frozen. Barbara lifted his chin to look full into his face.

“Stay with me here, young man. I have a message for you to give to your friends. The Left Hand of God is going to be in a cast for a while. No more missions, no more operations until you hear from us. Do you understand? Nod your head or something, Bob.”

He would have sworn his neck creaked as he nodded.

“But this, the missions, they’re everything. We’re saving the world. How can you just ask us to stop? I’ve devoted my life to this cause.”

Barbara laughed politely, a tinkling sound, her face a picture of amusement.

“Just one life, though, darling. From my perspective, that’s really not so much. And I’m not asking you to give it up; I’m pulling the plug. The Left Hand of God is all finished unless or until we need them again. We have, as they say, bigger fish to fry.” She crossed her legs and sipped her drink. “People like Gilchrist, well, he’s not really a person in any sense you’d understand, they’re the real threat. The rest of those jokers couldn’t find their asses with a road map. They’ll fall into squabbling and bickering and crawl back under their rocks if we can get rid of all the Gilchrists. That’s got to be our main job, right now, Bob, and there isn’t any place for the Left Hand of God in that.”

Bob pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

“No more money?” he asked, his voice tremulous.

“Those accounts in the Caymans are completely empty, yes. Your Sheriff will be unhappy, I’m afraid.” Barbara puffed out her bottom lip, cartooning a sad face. “He’s not a man the Order is comfortable with anyway. He’s more than a little cuckoo.”

“You may be right about that,” Bob conceded.

“You, on the other hand,” Barbara said, smearing a drip of condensation on the table with her finger, “might have some potential.”

Bob’s brows became a single, solid line.

“Potential?”

“Oh yes, darling, we may have a use for a man with your skills, but you’ll have to eschew your penchant for wholesale violence. You think you can do that? I do love those old words like ‘eschew,’ don’t you?”

“I dunno,” Bob said, his gaze wandering to the middle distance before snapping back to the woman’s face. “You really think it’s all about the leaders? Not the thousands of rank-and-file assholes?”

“Their leaders are—not to be melodramatic-- not of this world.” She said the last in a feigned basso profundo to give it emphasis. “They are the Returned. You’ll learn all about them if you join us, but you have to renounce your connection to the Left Hand. No renunciation, no invitation; that’s the deal. If you say no, I’ll do this great sleight of hand trick, and you’ll forget we ever talked. Isn’t that neat?” She popped both olives into her mouth and beamed at the bartender while holding up two fingers. The bartender nodded and began making two more martinis.

Bob looked at her a long time.

“When do we get started?” he asked.

“Finish your drink, darling,” Barbara said, patting his hand. “You don’t want to waste a good martini. Gilchrist is gone and none of the Returned are within our reach at this moment. You have the luxury of being perfectly safe and with me.” She laughed her polite laugh, and Bob’s neck loosened a bit. He finished the martini in one long pull.

“To the Order of St. John,” he said, holding up his glass

“Oh, you,” she said. She finished hers as well, just as the bartender brought another round.

The Sheriff debriefed Bob in the front seat of his pickup truck, which was parked at a pull off on State Route 11, well used by locals who liked to hunt deer out of season. At night. With a spotlight. No such miscreants were in evidence, when the Sheriff handed Bob a beer. The pine woods smell mixed with car exhaust and diesel fumes, through their open windows.

The rumbling of traffic was the bass line to the night sounds of the forest, but the quality of each one was so different from the other, that they could not have been part of the same music. It the sound of two different bands, one passing and one approaching, at a parade. They played in different keys and meters. While the discordance was hard to listen to, it was also mesmerizing, a disaster in stereo. Bob and the Sheriff sat, each one wrapped by the noise of the queer music, lost in their own thoughts, miles apart from each other with only three feet separating them on the truck cabin’s front seat.

The Sheriff was more taciturn than usual, inserting long silences into their conversation, He was distracted and had to ask Bob to repeat himself.

“Sounds like a pretty crazy night,” the Sheriff said, finally.

“It’s hard to even talk about. It doesn’t seem real,” Bob replied.

“Start from the beginning, again,” the Sheriff said, not looking at Bob. He sipped his beer. This time he did not interrupt with questions, just nodded and looked straight ahead at something beyond the windshield.

Bob went back over the part about being the rooftop, that he had Gilchrist in his sights, but then his scope was covered, and the Knight had appeared down in the stadium on the stage, and it all went sideways.

“The grenades exploded above the stadium. It was like they were hitting something or being set off somehow,” Bob said, shaking his head.

The Sheriff blew out through his nose and continued to stare straight ahead.

“And you think that little woman, that nurse, did that?”

“She was aware of them coming before they even dropped. It looked like she heard them coming.”

“Does that sound like a reasonable explanation to you?”

“No,” Bob admitted. “It doesn’t. But I know what I saw.”

“And now all the money for Left Hand operations is gone,” the Sheriff ground his molars. “And we’re stuck here with our dicks in our hands while these redneck thugs run our country into the ground. All of a sudden, out of the blue, we’re no longer relevant.”

“I told you about the message two days ago. That Knight said not to go through with the mission. But we went ahead anyway. Maybe that’s why they pulled the plug. Barbara, the woman at the hotel, she said we were on indefinite hold.” Bob could read the frustration in his mentor’s eyes, but there was something else there as well. “What does it matter? Gilchrist is dead.”

“What does it matter?” the sheriff asked, raising an eyebrow. “Thousands of vermin were left alive in the wake of this disaster. That’s why it matters. We were supposed to put a serious dent in their numbers, at least the worst of them. Instead, we got one man.”

“Barbara said he was the one that really mattered anyway.”

“Barbara said,” the sheriff began in a mocking tone. “You were with the group that tested the grenade launcher, weren’t you?” He turned to face Bob, who tilted his head at the abrupt change of subject.

“That’s right. I know the grenades were ready to go. We timed all the fuses, the trajectory, everything. There’s no way they could have blown up on their own that high up. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“No way at all,” said the sheriff, turning to look at Bob. There was real pain in the man’s face. “A system we tested and vetted just happened to fail, the mission failed, and we lost our funding, all on the same night. And the guy who brings me all this good news is you. What’s the common denominator here, detective?”

“What are you saying?” Bob’s empty hand clenched into a fist as his voice rose. “I’ve been in this from the beginning. You think I had something to do with what happened at the arena? You really are crazy. How many times have I put my life on the line? Hell, I’ve been wounded —more than once. These are my people these animals are trying to hurt.”

“That’s the thing, son,” the sheriff said in a soothing murmur. “Betrayal always comes from a place you don’t expect. It’s nothing personal, but this cause is bigger than you and me, bigger than any one person.”

“This is bullshit,” Bob said, reaching for the door. There was a bright light, a cataclysm, then the sheriff’s boot pushing him out onto the road. His ears were still ringing when he hit the gravel and the fire in his chest bloomed and all went dark.

Aurora’s face floated by him with others dressed in black. He was moving, or perhaps he was still, and the ground was moving. Images blurred by and were gone into the darkness. He dreamed of his apartment, the bare walls, the motel furniture, the empty refrigerator. He was so thirsty, he went to the kitchen for a glass of water, but no water would come from the tap. He took the empty glass and opened the door to the bathroom, but the room was gone. In its place was a tunnel, gray and smooth with an arched ceiling. At the end of the tunnel stood a door taller than a man, round with a locking wheel like a bank vault. He spun the wheel to the left and heard the tumblers click. The door hissed as it opened a crack, and he heaved it wide.

Beyond the door loomed a library with stacks rising to the sky. Ladders and mezzanines provided access to the upper shelves. He craned his neck but could not see the very top. It disappeared beyond the ladders. His shoes echoed on the polished wooden floor that smelled of dust and linseed oil. Medieval weapons hung on the wall at the end of long room. Two staves, each with a spear and axe at the tip, crossed above a wooden shield.

“Halberds,” he heard himself say. “That’s what they call those.”

“Correct,” a feminine voice replied. “Fourteenth century pieces.” Then the woman was talking to someone else. “Did you show him the whole library? Oh. That was a good idea, thank you. Now off you go. He’s about to wake up, we don’t want to put him out again.”

A hand, warm and dry, smoothed Bob’s hair away from his head as a piece of wet, coarse sponge grazed his lips, and he sucked the water from it greedily.

“Time to wake up,” the woman’s voice said. “Eyes open, a little at a time.”

Bob tried to obey, but his eyelids were so heavy, and each time he cracked them a little, his stomach crawled toward his mouth.

“Gonna puke,” he said, and speaking scraped something raw in his throat.

“I can fix that,” the woman answered. She brushed his forearm while doing something with the intravenous line. Almost like magic, the nausea passed. “Try again,” she said.

He drew in a breath and pushed his fluttering eyelids open. The room was dimly lit, but he could make out the figure looking down at him, Aurora St. Paul.

“Welcome back,” she said, and smiled. “We thought for a while you were going to leave us.”

As he awakened more, Bob became aware of all the things stuck to, or into, his body. He grimaced.

“Zero to ten,” Aurora asked.

“Huh?”

“Sorry, how is your pain, zero to ten?”

“I don’t,” he winced.

She fiddled with his IV again, and a warm wave passed over him from his chest to his head, and he slid away.

This time he slept without dreams. His eyes came open without effort, but the room was lit only by the lights on machinery around his bed. A man with salt-and-pepper hair, combed straight back away from his face, sat in a chair along the wall, his legs crossed at the knee. He cradled a leather-bound book in his left hand. As Bob coughed, the man stuck a finger to mark his place.

“Ah, Mr. Dupuis. Can I get you something to drink? You must be parched. IV fluids just aren’t the same as drinking, eh?” The man’s English was accented, Italian, perhaps.

Bob nodded. He gulped at the water the man held out to him, coughing and sputtering, before slowing himself to sip and sip and sip. “Jesus, that’s good.”

“It would be, ah, more polite not to blaspheme in a monastery,” the man said. The emphasis on the word “polite” made the man’s accent stand out even more.

Bob tried to apologize as he sipped, which made him cough and spray some of the water on the man.

“Yes, well,” the man said, “I suppose you have just returned to us. Allowances will have to be made.”

He pulled the cup of water away and reached to Bob’s wrist to take his pulse with a surprising gentleness. After looking at the monitors behind the bed, the man cradled Bob’s head in both hands, as if he were going to kiss him. Bob tensed before he realized the man was feeling along his neck and jaw, looking into his eyes. Bob followed the other man’s eyes up and down, side to side. Like Barbara, his eyes were old and fathomless.

“Checking your extraocular muscles,” the man said. He tapped something on a computer keyboard on a cart next to the bed. “I am the . . .” He paused, searching his mind for the right phrase. “The night nurse. I am also the Abbot here. The Knights call me Peter.” Peter pulled his chair up to the bedside and pressed a button to raise the head of the bed so that Bob could look at him. “The man who shot you is in custody, charged with your murder.” Peter raised one hand. “They have not found a body, but someone,” the corners of his mouth curled upward, “apparently filmed him shooting you and pushing you from the truck. The anonymous cell phone footage was emailed to the state police. For all practical purposes, Detective Robert Dupuis is as good as dead. I believe the state police have already found much evidence to tie the sheriff with the recent spate of killings.”

“He wouldn’t be that careless,” Bob said. “He was fastidious about destroying his trail.”

Peter’s head toggled back and forth.

“Mistakes happen. Mistakes can be made to happen,” he trailed off.

“I see,” Bob said.

They passed several minutes in silence.

“What now?” Bob asked.

“Now, I’m afraid, I have to admit that the Left Hand of God was a miserable failure. I was, if you can pardon the very poor pun, the program’s godfather. It was my idea, but my detractors were right. We didn’t suppress the ugliness and hate, not really. We empowered other evils, and we put some good men and women in a completely untenable position. We fight hatred always, but we should not fight it in the same way we deal with the ignorant and the misguided. I should have known that. For what I have done to you and others, my heart is full of regret.”

“What happens to me?”

“That’s up to you,” Peter replied. “Aurora feels you could help us here, although she admits to barely knowing you. She is an excellent judge of character in my experience.” He chuckled to himself, laughing at what was apparently an inside joke. “We will have work for you, if you want to join us, young man. You can never be a Knight of the Order of St. John, we are born to this duty, were born to it, centuries ago.”

“So it’s not just an urban myth.”

“As you will learn if you stay, almost all of us began our journey in the First Crusade at the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. We have been brought back many times over the centuries to fight the Returned. You will learn of them as well.

“Gilchrist?”

“Oh yes. He was one of many. We oppose their plans for our world, and so we fight, lifetime by lifetime.”

“And Gilchrist represents their, uh, plan? The way they want the world to be?”

“Not all of it,” Peter said, nodding, but that’s the general idea.”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“Most of us are not people of faith anymore. We all have patron saints, people whose courage and daring we have long admired, but we take their names only as a constant point of reference from life to life. And we are all healers.”

“Doctors?”

Peter scoffed. “Healers, not Treaters. We comfort and attend the sick and afflicted; we bring them peace and respite. We share their pain and their fears in order to carry some of their burden. We don’t poke and prod them and insult their intelligence. We certainly don’t prescribe ways to live their lives. Healers in the greatest tradition, that’s what we aspire to be. You will become a healer if you stay, even if you can never be a knight.”

“I will be a nurse?” Bob tried to imagine doing the things he had seen nurses do. “I’m really better with a sniper rifle,” he said.

“Alas, we will need that, too. But one thing at a time. The surgeon,” Peter said the word as if it was something distasteful, “tells me you will recover, but you will not have the full use of your left arm. We will do all we can to help you, whether you decide to stay with us or not. I’m afraid, however, once you take your final vows, this is a lifelong commitment.”

Bob thought about it for only a moment.

“I’m in,” he said. “When do we start?”

Peter’s smile was a dazzling thing, spreading across his weathered face like dawn breaking.

“Welcome, Brother Bob.”

“Brother Miguel,” he said, feeling his own smile blossom. “Miguel Rendon.”

Other K-Nurse books available from Amazon.com:

The Road to Damascus:  K-Nurse 1

But a Wandering Voice: K-Nurse 2

The Singer of Thrace:    K-Nurse 3

Coming in July 2022!

Between the Dragon and His Wrath: K-Nurse 4

Coming in October 2022!

In the Wilds and Mountains I Hunt:  K-Nurse 5

Coming in December 2022!

In Thy AbsenceK-Nurse 6

Scheduled for release in May of 2023

M. L. Tapper is the Award-Winning author of The Vials of Our Wrath. He lives, works as a nurse, and writes speculative fiction from the home he shares with his wife Susannah, stepsons Arthur and Felix, and several STET pets, in Vermont.

You can find out more about the author and his books at MarkLeoTapper.com. Sign up at the website to receive news of events, new K-Nurse releases, and download deals.