Rogue Warrior: Holy Terror Part 21

"I could have killed you a dozen times," said Backa.s.s. "You've been lucky. You've always been lucky. You complain about not having luck, about Mr. Murphy, but you're the luckiest son of a b.i.t.c.h I know. You were lucky in China, in Thailand, in Las Vegas."*

"What about Las Vegas?"

"I gave them the money, d.i.c.k. It's always been me."

"You were too much of a wimp to take a shot at me yourself."

Backa.s.s laughed. He'd started moving up the corridor. The minions around me prodded me to follow. We walked up past the point where I had entered the corridor, continuing up the sloped hall for about ten feet before turning left into a hallway so narrow my shoulders touched both sides. This led to an even narrower staircase. The steps seemed to be bricks and were so shallow only about half of my foot fit on the treads. I was in the middle of the pack; if I played bowling for tangos, the best I could do would be to tumble two-thirds of them, leaving Backa.s.s to fry us at the bottom with his Minimi.

Five or six times we reached landings no bigger than the chair you're sitting on, reversing direction to continue upward. Then we came to a corridor similar to the one we'd started in, turned left and found another set of staircases. A string of thin, rectangular LED units illuminated the treads. There was enough light for me to see the thin wire that came up along the staircase-the detonator wire.

We reached another corridor, this one a succession of zigzags, before finding yet another staircase. Here the walls were farther apart, though I had to lean forward slightly, my head just brus.h.i.+ng the ceiling rafters. The steps curved-we'd reached the dome and were moving up toward the cupola. I hoped Trace would be waiting at the top, MP5 ready.

"So you hate my guts, huh?" I said. "How'd I manage to make such an impression? I don't even know you."

"There are many of us, Marcinko, an army of people you have f.u.c.ked. Some are Muslim. Some are Asian. Some are American. A number even were part of your navy. We're members of a very large club-people screwed by d.i.c.k."

"I don't screw people. I treat everyone equally-"

"Like s.h.i.+t."

"Well, at least you read the books."

I stopped, putting my hand on the wall and pus.h.i.+ng a forlorn breath out of my lungs. Any EMT within listening distance would have called a stretcher.

"You're getting old, Demo d.i.c.k. A has-been. I'm doing you a favor," snorted Backa.s.s from above.

"How's that?"

"There's nothing more pathetic than a broken-down old sailor. Look at yourself. You can't even walk up a flight of stairs. You're a wreck."

I wheezed louder.

"When you saw me in Cairo I was a boy," he said. "But you let your man shoot me even so."

"When was that?"

"When you kidnapped my father."

Of all the things I've ever done-and there have been many-I've only kidnapped one person in Egypt.

"Azziz was your father?"

"How did it feel to shoot a child, Marcinko? Did it make you feel good? But I didn't die."

The incident he was referring to had gone down when I was on Uncle Sugar's black payroll with Green Team, a successor to Red Cell. We'd been sent into the Cairo slums to apprehend Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin from his flop there and take him to a place more likely to induce candid discussion. Azziz was a sc.u.mbag of the highest sort, a terrorist before it was fas.h.i.+onable to be a terrorist, a truly sick psycho who'd organized several plots against Westerners.

A boy-his age was somewhere between twelve and sixteen-had popped out of the hallway just before we hit Azziz's pad. Nasty Nicky Grundle popped the kid with a silenced MP5 before he could give us away. We thought at the time that he was one of the bodyguards, but I have to admit he didn't show a gun. It was certainly possible that he was an innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not pretty, but war's like that. Ask any of the sixty-five people in New York, Chicago, Houston, or D.C. Azziz killed before we bundled his a.s.s off to face justice.

"I wasn't the one who shot you."

"You do remember. Good. Allah was with me that morning," Backa.s.s continued. "In many ways. Only one of your man's bullets. .h.i.t-and that in my shoulder. I still have the slug."

"I'll have to tell Nick he should take some target practice."

"I was taken to live with my mother's uncle, adopted-and trained to fulfill my fate. The crusader side of my family believed I was with them, but I have worked since that day to achieve my vision."

He rattled on, spewing the usual self-delusional bulls.h.i.+t about being anointed as the savior of his religion and his people. You'd think an egocentric maniac would at least make an effort to be original; just once I'd like to hear one of the chosen say, "I don't know if I'm really G.o.d's choice, but f.u.c.k it; I'm going for it anyway."

To fill in the backstory: Backa.s.s was hustled off to one of his European aunties to recuperate. For his protection, he was given the ident.i.ty of a cousin who had died two years before of typhoid. The rest of his background-the connection with European aristocrats, etc.-that the security agencies relied on when they checked him out came from this part of his family. He'd led a double life from that morning in Cairo.

If not sooner.

I let him gloat for a while, making sure he had the conceit juices flowing.

"So, is this your funeral pyre, or do you have an escape plan?" I asked.

He just laughed.

"How are you going to blow us up? I take it I saw rocket fuel down there. As I understand it, that stuff won't ignite on its own."

"Still full of yourself, huh, d.i.c.kie?"

"Well if you're so much in control, how are you going to do it?"

Backa.s.s simply turned and continued walking up the steps.

The breeze in the pa.s.sageway had gradually picked up, and the air became chilly and damp as we went. I started to pick up the pace, closing the distance between myself and Backa.s.s. But I'd played the tired old f.u.c.k a bit too hard; a turn of the staircase later and he was already outside. One of the two guards above me jogged toward the exit. I waited until only one was left in front of me, and then sprang, grabbing his leg and pulling him down, rolling to the side and firing my pistol with my left hand into the a.s.sholes behind me.

Yes, I'd given up my hideaway Glocks. But a monk's habit is big enough to conceal many things, including a seven-shot PPK .380.

The little gun sounded like a runaway subway train. Because the staircase was so steep, the guards behind me couldn't elevate their weapons properly, or at least not quickly enough to avoid getting shot. I didn't have that problem.

The machine gun the tango had been carrying clattered by me on the staircase. I took a swipe at it, but the law of gravity has more pull than the law of necessity, and I missed. As I ducked down after it, guards from somewhere below began firing. A shower of stone splinters and lead filled the landing. I grabbed for the machine gun and pulled it up to fire just as they turned the corner. About mid-blast, my face seemed to catch fire and I fired blindly, working the gun back and forth. I lost my balance and tumbled down, six or seven steps. By the time I landed, all of the other gunfire had stopped.

I had to use my thumb to open my eyes. Blood covered my hand when I finally managed to see. I'd been hit in the face, chest, and neck-I could feel the pain-but since I was still breathing, I figured it had been by stone shrapnel from the centuries-old wall. There were four bodies near me on the landing, and another two on the steps behind the bend. One of the men had a Model 12S Beretta with a fresh magazine taped to the spent box; I grabbed it, loaded, and started trudging up toward the door. A helicopter began pounding the air in the distance.

The cavalry, I hoped.

Burp gun in hand, I burst through the open door into the night, pirouetting around the jam onto the walkway at the base of the dome. The helo had dropped into a hover on the other side of the dome, over the Left Transept.

It was a civilian helicopter, not an Italian military chopper. Backa.s.s's escape plan.

As I started to cross the roof, a fusillade of bullets erupted from the columns at the base of the dome. All I could do was duck.

So where the h.e.l.l was Trace Dahlgren's pretty little b.u.t.t, anyway? Why wasn't she waiting there to save mine, as she had so many times before? To find out we have to backtrack to the small room where she had found herself with the nuns as the security forces closed in.

Backa.s.s hadn't replaced all of the Vatican security team, but Trace was in neither a position or a mood to start trusting any of them. And she knew they would feel more or less the same about her. The nuns, on the other hand, did trust her, and the feeling was mutual. As soon as they saw they were cut off, one of the sisters-the oldest and frailest, by Trace's description-pushed Trace to the back of the pack and then walked to the door. In a voice barely above a whisper, she told the first security people to arrive that the terroriste had gone through the door behind them, which led downstairs.

"St. Peter, preserve us," she cried in Italian, falling to her knees, supplicating St. Peter to save his church. The rest of the nuns, Trace included, dropped as well.

How much was an act and how much genuine prayer is hard to say. But it surely saved Trace's life. The first two guards-Backa.s.s plants, as it turned out-hesitated just long enough for four or five others to come up behind. The old nun rose and hobbled forward, urging them to do G.o.d's work and rid the church of the terrible devils who had disappeared down the nearby staircase.

"Si! Si!" yelled the men, and together they ran off in the wrong direction, as most of us do when we're chasing the devil.

Trace kissed each of the women, imploring them to warn the pope not to come to the church.

"Where are you going, sister?" asked the oldest nun.

"I need to get to the roof."

"The elevator and stairs will be guarded by now." The nun took her by the hand and led her through the chapel to a side door that would take her to a set of stairs rarely used; when she reached the fifth landing, she could turn left and find the pa.s.sage to the dome if she wished, or go the other way and get out onto the roof.

"G.o.d is with you," said the nun in Italian. "But just in case, have your pistol ready."

Trace leapt up the stairs. When she reached the landing the nun had told her about, she started for the dome. But she heard someone ahead, and so turned and went out onto the roof. She made her way across to the other side of the dome, climbing to the large windows. Even without people shooting at her, climbing up the outside of the dome wouldn't have been all that easy, so she decided to go inside and use the rope we had taken from the cupola. She figured there was no sense worrying about alarms now and broke the gla.s.s on the nearest window. She climbed down to the base of the windows, then hung over and jumped down to the balcony. Unfortunately, the jump was a bit higher than she thought, and she hit the floor so hard she keeled to the side, sending her pistol flying from her hand.

Inconvenient, given that two security people were just coming through the door twenty yards away.

Fortunately, about the last thing either man expected was a flying nun careening through a window into the dome. Trace jumped to her feet and grabbed the rope we had left tied to the safety fence around the railing. One of the men took aim, but the other shouted at him not to fire; Trace didn't stop to ask whether he was worried about hitting her or the frescoes nearby. She swung out over the s.p.a.ce and s.h.i.+mmied up the line like a rat climbing from the hold of a sinking freighter as the water closed in. She pulled herself through the window of the cupola, then sliced the rope with her Emerson knife so the men couldn't follow.

Trace got out the laser communications gear and set up to transmit. She couldn't get a connection right away-and then still couldn't. She figured it was just Murph s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with her head, until she realized that something was in her way: an approaching helicopter.

She waited as the chopper came in. Somewhere around here I made my play inside, though she didn't hear it because of the noise from the rotors. Finally she was able to make the connection and, without waiting for a confirmation from Doc or Danny, began broadcasting the fact that there was a bomb in the cellar of the basilica.

Which brings us to the point where I was mistaken for a rabbit in a shooting gallery, more or less.

My eyes were puffy from the stone and plaster splinters and caked half-closed with blood. If I could have seen any better, I probably would have been more careful. I might have stayed down, or at least thought about finding a different way to the other side. But everything beyond five feet was a blur, and maybe because of that I thought there were only one or two people firing at me. So when the bullets stopped sparkling, I emptied the Beretta at the shadows.

When I reached the bodies, I found not one or two but five. I hunted through them for a fresh magazine that would fit the gun, finally finding one.

"Don't bother, d.i.c.k!"

The shout was punctuated by a rifle b.u.t.t to my neck. The gun and magazine flew from my hand and careened across the roof. I followed it, sprawling against the tiles.

"Too late, d.i.c.kie!" yelled Backa.s.s. He held up a large metal box. Then he laughed, and threw it down. "Too late!"

He sprayed his Minimi around me as I scrambled away. I scrambled around what looked like an oversized telephone booth a few yards from the dome. I reached beneath my monk's outfit and took my last pistol, another PPK. By the time I went to return fire, though, Backa.s.s had run back toward the chopper.

I stumbled after him. The helicopter's two floodlights played on the roof, framing him for me. As he grabbed at the door, I fired.

Between my blurry eyes and the bad angle, my first two shots missed high. I could hear a crusty old master chief's voice loud and clear in my head: "Excuses are for whiners, you no-good s.h.i.+t-for-brain a.s.shole idiot. Keep at it until you plug the SOB, and then plug him some more."

So I did. All of the subsequent subsonic rounds, personally handcrafted by Doc Tremblay, struck Backa.s.s square in the back.

All the b.a.s.t.a.r.d did was throw down his gun and jump into the chopper. The son of a b.i.t.c.h had a bulletproof vest on under his clothes.

I cursed, then whipped the gun at the helicopter as it started to back away.

Trace had watched the whole thing from above. Figuring that her backup pistol wasn't going to be taking a helicopter down, she dug into the backpack we'd left with the com gear looking for something to take the helicopter down with. All she found was the miniflare set.

When the helo started to rise, she waited until the hatch at the rear was open and level with her and fired. The flare tailed left a few yards-right into the c.o.c.kpit. Trace saw a little flicker of flame, but from her perspective it looked as if the flare had bounced against the Plexiglas and been extinguished.

I could tell right away that it had gone through the window. The helicopter tilted on its axis as it moved away, bending over as if it were a drunk. Then its tail whipped around and it began to climb, seesawing in a three-dimensional weave across the sky. Finally it pitched forward and plummeted downward, bursting into flame just before it hit the ground.

The glow of that fire warmed me from two or three miles away.

The reality set in-we were standing directly above a pile of explosives big enough to send us to the moon and dig a hole to China. And the timer had already been set.

*The bottles held liquid explosives similar to rocket fuel. The boxes contained a plastic explosive made mostly from PETN, which will ignite them and produce a pretty good explosion on their own. The pads were more plastic explosives. There was also a network of blasting caps to get everything rolling, though I couldn't see it from here. In layman's terms, this is one big f.u.c.king ka-boom we're looking at here. Not as good as a nuke, but still pretty big.

*See Rogue Warrior: Vengeance.

15.

The box Backa.s.s had had in his hand consisted of two toggles, neither of which was marked. Presumably it had set off a timer, though he hadn't thought to include operating instructions with the unit. Switching the b.u.t.tons the other way was just as likely to blow the bomb up immediately as shut it down.

But what the f.u.c.k.

I popped them. Nothing happened. I ripped the wires out of the box. Nothing happened again.

End of problem? Or the calm before the storm?

I started racing toward one of the doors back into the church. A pair of Vatican security people popped out when I was about ten feet from it.

"There's a bomb downstairs, in the area near St. Peter's Tomb," I yelled. By the time they reacted I was by them. A second set of guards met me just inside, but they too let me pa.s.s, either because they understood the warning I was yelling or I just seemed like too much of a madman to stop.

Vatican security people were flooding into the cathedral, augmented by Italian soldiers, carabinieri, and members of Digos,* the counterterror unit of the Ministry of the Interior. As I ran out into the nave, a pair of riot police grabbed me, but were warned off by a familiar bark.

"Yo! He's with us," said Danny. It doesn't matter what language they're speaking; police officers understand each other, and the carabinieri let me go. Danny and Doc were flanked by two members of ROS, the carabinieri SpecOp unit.

"The bomb is below St. Peter's Tomb, in the area they closed off to tourists after the other incident," I yelled as I ran toward the entrance to the crypts. By the time I got up near the altar area, security people were already working to undo the fencing that had been installed to prevent anyone from using the underground entrance in St. Peter's Tomb.

"I hope that's not your blood," said Doc, huffing as he caught up to me.

I pulled out the box Backa.s.s had used and shoved it into his hands. "What do you make of this? How's the bomb wired?"

"You're changing the subject."