CABAL

by Rick Jones

  The chamber was empty but for the exception of two bodies. Close to the wall lay the body of Father Jenkins. In the center of the room lay Hadee Kader. The priest had been shot multiple times with obvious chest wounds. Kader, however, had been killed by a deep stab wound between the shoulder blades.

  The shadows were empty.

  The children were gone.

  And so were the people who took them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The man in the bell tower scouted the terrain from the church’s highest point. To the south of their position was a dust cloud the color of desert sand that was being stirred up. It was obviously the telltale sign he needed to realize that vehicles were running far and fast. Then the lookout bracketed his hands around his mouth and shouted down into the nave.

  It took Sayed nearly a minute before he responded. “What is it, Shaheed?”

  “To the south,” he cried. “Two vehicles moving fast.”

  “How far?”

  “Two, maybe three kilometers at the most.”

  Sayed turned quickly on his feet and barked orders to move. Shooters were to man the mounted weapons on the rear of the vehicles. Drivers would drive fast and true. And he would get the boy. If he failed, he knew he would come under the wrath of Mabus.

  And Sayed liked his head right where it was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When the pilot of Chopper One neared the extraction point he saw two things: One, Kimball and company were not alone. On their heels approximately two kilometers to their north was a running convey of three heavily armed vehicles. And two, a brutal sandstorm was brewing from the pilot’s south, which meant that he would have to circumvent the storm by flying north or northwest. But the airspace in that part of Syria was essentially a no-fly zone since Russia and France were flying sorties against ISIS strongholds.

  The pilot would have to fly south and then west, a much longer journey that would certainly bring their fuel stores to the limit.

  The pilot hit a toggle switch and spoke into his lip mic. “Golden Retriever, you have a significant tail less than two kilometers north of your position and closing fast. Vehicles times three. All heavily armed. Do you copy?”

  There was a short moment of white noise and static. Then: “We’re aware, Chopper One. Make sure that chopper’s ready to go.”

  “Copy that, Golden Retriever. Have you in my sights.”

  From the rear, a great wall of sand was closing in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Fourteen children, two nuns, and five Vatican Knights certainly made for a tight squeeze in the two vehicles that were appropriated from the Islamic State at the church. But children were small and took minimal space, a definite blessing in such a circumstance. What wasn’t a blessing, however, were the three vehicles that quickly approached with the gap between them closing at an exponential rate.

  Kimball manned the .50 caliber in one pickup, Isaiah took control of the other. The children were huddled inside the vehicles’ beds or inside the cabs with Sister Patty in one truck, and Sister Kelly in the other. The other three Vatican Knights positioned themselves at the rear of the pickups using the tailgate as a shield, and leveled their weapons.

  The pickups took the hard ruts and bumps, making the ride one of difficulty.

  Behind them the pickup trucks spread out so that all three were side-by-side each other, and closing. From the middle vehicle came a short burst of gunfire, but the rounds peppered the ground far behind Kimball’s units.

  In the distance, a helicopter. Behind that, an ominous looking wall of approaching sand.

  Kimball called over his shoulder. “Punch it, Jeremiah!”

  “Got the pedal to the floor already!”

  Then came another volley of gunfire. This time a bullet took out a light in the rear and smashed the assembly piece. The group was now in range.

  Kimball directed his .50 caliber on the approaching vehicles, took aim while trying to balance himself as the truck bounced wildly over the rough terrain, and pulled the trigger.

  The sound was loud and fast as the weapon went off with a succession of firing rounds. Bullets stitched along the ground before the center vehicle, which caused the pickup to veer wide to its left and bump the adjacent vehicle with the impact drawing them both off course. But the action was short-lived as both pickups quickly corrected themselves and pressed on.

  Inside the beds of both pickups, children cried as they cupped their hands over their ears—some were sobbing, others wailed, and there wasn’t a single dry eye among them as Sayed’s group drew closer.

  Kimball and Isaiah sent off additional volleys as their weapon vomited out spent casings. The Knights also sent off shots from their positions, the MP7s adding to the assault.

  Then Sayed’s group followed with barrages of their own. All three weapons went off simultaneously, and some of the bullets missed Kimball with shots so close that he could hear some of the rounds pass by his ear as waspy zips and hums.

  Then the gunner in the center pickup brought out the holy grail of weaponry, an RPG. The shooter raised the weapon to his shoulder, placed Kimball’s vehicle within his sight, and pulled the trigger. The launched grenade corkscrewed through the air and headed towards Kimball’s vehicle.

  Kimball called out. “Jeremiah! Evade left! Evade left!”

  Jeremiah swung the wheel wide to the left. And just as the vehicle maneuvered the grenade missed its intended target and exploded some forty meters away.

  So the shooter began to load another.

  And this time he would not miss.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The chopper pilot knew that time had run out. Regardless if the Vatican Knights made it to the extraction point, the terrorists would never allow them to board the chopper. Sayed’s team had drawn too close and would gun the children down as they tried to make their way to the chopper’s bay.

  “Golden Retriever, Chopper One will run interference. Do you read?”

  “You get on the ground, Chopper One! You get . . . on . . . the ground!”

  “No can do. Time’s run out. You can’t get everyone onboard without taking multiple casualties.”

  “Do not run interference, Chopper One! I say again: Do . . . not . . . run . . . interference!”

  “A storm front is coming in from the south. Stay close and take the advantage of its screen. Move south, then west. You can make it.”

  “Chopper One—” The pilot shut off the radio switch, killing the connection. And then he lowered the throttle so that the chopper was several meters above the desert floor. Sand moved explosively upward beneath the wash of the rotor blades as fast-moving eddies of dust moved like swirls and vortexes.

  The pilot then passed over Kimball’s team and advanced toward Sayed with the chopper flying horizontally, but with its nose dipped toward the ground so that the blades were at a 45-degree angle. The pilot’s idea was to run the blades through Sayed’s transport, metal against metal, with the blades of the chopper slicing and dicing like a hot knife running through a cake of butter.

  The chopper closed in at incredible speed.

  The pilot’s face remained passive and neutral, showing no emotion.

  The blades swung in blinding revolutions, their edges sharp.

  And then the pilot saw the odd corkscrewing trail of smoke as a grenade zeroed in and leveled off. The pilot tried to rear back. Couldn’t. The nose lifted enough to show the craft’s underbelly and tried to bank. But the grenade found its mark and hit the chopper square. The body of the helicopter erupted into a fireball. Licks of flame and black smoke charged skyward before dissipating. The rotors broke into myriad pieces and blew outward with centrifugal force, the broken fragments becoming deadly projectiles that committed no damage. And then the chopper fell to the desert floor as a tangled wreck.

  The Vatican Knights, the children and Sisters Patty and Kelly, were on one side of the wreckage, and Sayed and his team were on the other. The wreckage cont
inued to burn. Smoke continued to rise. And hopes of survival diminished with one group, whereas the hope to kill in the name of Allah rose in the other.

  And then came the prickle of something against their skins. Sand was moving through the air, lightly at first, like a soft caress, and then it became increasingly sharp and stinging like the bites of insects.

  Sand moved in like the curling waves of an ocean, eclipsing everything in its path. The storm sounded like a train hurtling through a tunnel at Mach speed, loud and booming. And visibility was no further than a few meters, ten at the most.

  The pilot knew, thought Kimball. The pilot knew.

  He called out to Isaiah, who was sitting in the truck less than three meters away, and shouted as loud as he could while indicating to his pickup with a pointed finger. “We’ll take lead!” he cried. “Follow behind at five meters and don’t lose sight! We’re moving south, then west!”

  Isaiah shot him a thumbs up. Gotcha!

  Then Kimball went to both vehicles, first going to Sister Patty’s group, and then to Sister Kelly’s, asking them to keep the children low and safe.

  They were moving on.

  Laboring onto the bed of the first pickup, Kimball slapped the roof of the cab and Jeremiah headed south according to the directional gauge inside the vehicle, with the second pickup not too far behind.

  The world was entirely brown with no floor or ceiling, just . . . brown.

  From a distance everyone watched the fire of the chopper burn out as if it had been snuffed like the flame of a candle’s wick with a mighty blow.

  Sayed’s group could not be seen, which meant that they could not be seen by Sayed.

  So Kimball’s team moved south drawing distance between them.

  But this was Sayed’s terrain.

  His territory.

  And Kimball knew that they couldn’t run for too long. This journey was but a temporary reprieve to their problems, not the solution.

  As they drove south, Kimball looked at the children and at their tiny bodies as they huddled against one another like a group of fledglings not yet ready to fly. They were covered against the storm, yet the cloth that covered them was as frayed and as fragile as they were.

  And Kimball felt for them. All of them. Children needed to play. To be happy. And they needed to wake up every morning in bed knowing that their world would be safe. And in return for this they would give their parents an indescribable love.

  That’s what you need, he thought. That’s what you deserve.

  But these children had no one to share this particular brand of love with because their parents were killed by the hands of ISIS.

  Kimball wondered why such things in life were so unfair.

  Then he could hear the voice of the pontiff answer within his mind, a hollow-sounding answer as if speaking from a great distance: There will always be a battle between the Light and the Dark, he could hear him say. So when life becomes unfair to those who deserve better, then it takes people like you to make life for those much better.

  Beneath the garment that covered his face with the exception of his cerulean-blue eyes, Kimball sighed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A desert sandstorm lasting two to three hours is referred to as a haboob, which this was. Sand and granular-sized grit bombarded the pickups with near-scouring effect. But Sayed’s group waited the storm out by waiting inside their cabs. But since the vehicles remained idle, sand had pooled around the wheels and bogged them down, a minor problem.

  As the storm began to taper off with the tail-end a mild breeze, Sayed and his ISIS unit vacated the trucks and gave quick examinations of the buildup surrounding the tires. Some of the sand levels went as high as the wheel well, while other levels barely reached the bottom of the tire’s rim.

  “How long to dig us out?” Sayed asked Musha.

  Musha gave a half-hearted shrug. “Twenty, thirty minutes at the most.”

  “See it done.”

  “Yes, Sayed. Right away.”

  As Musha barked orders to galvanize the team into action, Sayed stood looking to the south. The sky still had a dirty-looking tinge to it, a brownish filth that appeared to float lazily. Whatever tracks were made by the escapees had obviously been covered over without so much as leaving behind a trace element. The haboob had seen to that. But the landscape of Syria was wide and barren with little places to run or hide.

  I will find you.

  And then Sayed sighed, the man frustrated. He was close to grabbing the son of Mabus—within meters, in fact. But Allah had sent upon them a haboob as if it was a plague. But Sayed didn’t question the will of his god by asking ‘why.’ He never asked why. He accepted all things as the will of Allah with blind faith—which never required any proof at all—and unquestioning obedience.

  Sayed closed his eyes and listened to the soft whispers of mild breezes that passed his ears. Everything was calm and serene. And it was these small periods that he relished most. These little slices of peace in between so much violence.

  But I am a soldier of Allah!

  His eyes snapped wide, showing angry laces of red stitching that tracked along the whites.

  Then he took a step toward the south. And then another. He remembered the large man standing in the bed of the pickup manning the mounted weapon. It was clear that he was wearing the collar of a priest, that white band that shone so starkly. But his garments were that of a warrior.

  You’re no priest, he thought. So who are you?

  What . . . are you?

  Nabi Sayed would soon get his answers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The two pickup trucks went approximately seventy kilometers before one of the vehicles stalled.

  “I’m surprised it took this long,” said Jeremiah. “With all the dust and wind.”

  Kimball jumped from the pickup’s bed, traipsed across the sand, and reached Jeremiah just as he was lifting the hood of the vehicle. Sand had worked its way to the engine from underneath and had apparently dirtied the leads.

  “Old machinery that’s a piece of rubbish is what she is,” Jeremiah commented. Since he was a Brit, his accent had that refined quality about it.

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Just the leads need cleaning, that’s all.”

  Kimball looked to the north. Though the terrain had marginal rises and falls to it, it was quite barren with the exception of primal-looking rocks that gave the area the look of a Martian landscape. The sky was the color of tan, a tinge of unsettled dust. But the best news was that there were no revealing signs that someone was giving chase.

  They were alone out here.

  But where is here? Kimball asked himself.

  Since a canopy of dust still hovered high, Kimball wondered if Isaiah had the ability to contact Home Base through the sat-phone. As he moved toward the other pickup that was parked approximately ten meters away, or thirty-two feet by American standards, Isaiah had intuited what Kimball was about to ask him, so he held up the sat-phone.

  “I’m trying,” he said. “But this”—he pointed skyward at the dust screen—“is just as bad as heavy cloud cover.”

  “We need a fix on our position,” stated Kimball. “More so, if we were followed.”

  “I’m pretty sure the haboob covered our tracks.”

  “I agree. But I’m sure this isn’t a unique situation for them, either. They live here. They know how to track.”

  And there were other problems as well. The children being one. They were starving, in fact—having fed off the meat of a dead mule until the meat finally went rancid two days earlier. Another was fuel, or the lack thereof. And of course, a dwindling water supply. They would ration their intake from their canteens discovered inside the vehicles, while offering most of the water to the children and to the nuns.

  For sure things were looking bleak, really bleak.

  But they were also alive. And in this Kimball took comfort.

  “Keep trying,” he told Isaia
h.

  “Of course.”

  “And get back to me when you do.” Kimball made his way back to the stalled vehicle hoping that Jeremiah was spot on about the leads being dirty. If not, then it would be nearly impossible to load up twenty-one people in one vehicle and try to get across this desert.

  Jeremiah was still working on the wires and ends, blowing the dust off the leads and then rubbing them clean with his thumb and forefinger, then giving additional blows for good measure, he then attached them to their proper link-ups.

  “How’s it going?” Kimball asked him.

  “She may be ugly and she may be old, but she’s a corker, she is. We’ll get her back on track soon enough. No worries.”

  “I’m worried about what’s coming our way,” he answered. “And something else.”

  “Yeah. And what’s that?”

  “Food. Water. Fuel.”

  “I hear you.”

  Kimball raised a hand and placed it on Jeremiah’s shoulder. “Get this thing going,” he said softly. “We need to be on the way before the wolf gets a whiff of our trail, yeah?”

  Jeremiah nodded. Doing what I can, boss . . . As fast as I can.

  Kimball gave Jeremiah a couple of camaraderie pats on the shoulder and made his way to the second pickup truck where Sisters Patty and Kelly had gathered the children. They were passing around a canteen that Isaiah had discovered inside one of the pickups, with the children being advised by the sisters to drink judiciously from it since the supply was limited.

  When Kimball walked up to the gathering, the children recoiled from his presence and embraced one another as a tight-forming collective of arms, legs, and the saddest eyes Kimball had ever seen in his entire life.

  “They’re afraid of me,” he said to both sisters.

  “That’s because you’re a man in dress,” said Sister Kelly, indicating Kimball’s battle wear. “In you they see war, violence and chaos. And when they see those sheathed knives attached to your thighs, I’m sure they have the remembrances of seeing their parents die all over again.”