CABAL

by Rick Jones

  Then they made dry runs driving the vehicles through streets deciding on paths of least resistance and quicker routes. St. Peter’s Square was observed for the greatest gathering of soft targets. Maps to the Apostolic Palace were pored over with every corridor and sentry station committed to memory. And every man under Raamiz’s command had his place in the scheme of things.

  Pathros would drive his vehicle to the checkpoint of the Vatican City State and set off the Semtex to clear the way of restrictions. He would be the first to enter Paradise.

  Then Easo would barrel his way to the Gendarmerie Station soon after and set off a massive explosion that would disable any quick reactions from the first-time responders, and create chaos.

  Then the third vehicle would make its way toward the steps of the Basilica and take out the soft targets, with the explosion drawing security to the site like moths to a flame, while the fourth van made its way uncontested toward the resident Palace. And those inside the fourth van, the foot-soldiers, would storm the hallways and combat their way to the pope with each man wearing a Semtex vest.

  On paper the plan was flawless. But since the human element was always unpredictable, they also understood that plans never truly went off as designed. There were always curves and unexpected delays. So they planned for these as well, coming up with two options for each possible change in the scheme of things.

  Along with the virtue of patience, preparation was just as important.

  So for the rest of the evening they would prepare themselves until their responses became involuntary. Then on the following day they would prepare themselves with prayer by praising Allah, who awaited them in Paradise. Then on the final day, they would become the actors in the stage production of a black drama that would ignite a world in turmoil.

  This was Allah’s will.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Syrian Desert

  Kimball had been in adverse situations before. The key to survival besides superior training was also to have an umbilical tie with those who served under you, so that everyone was on the same page and responded appropriately. The Vatican Knights were one such group who proved to be one of the best when working as a collective of one. Now it was time to see how uniform they truly were.

  Kimball was in one pickup manning his machine gun. Isaiah was in the other manning his, as well. And Samuel and Jeremiah served as drivers.

  In open terrain you could only run for so long and so far. But the advantage belonged to Sayed. He didn’t have a live cargo to carry. So the only option available to Kimball was a head-on strike, a sort of jousting match with the vehicles charging each other with passes trying to incapacitate the other. Only these passes would be lethal and deadly.

  When the dust cover of Sayed’s team neared, and when their vehicles came into Kimball’s vision as pinprick white dots moving across the landscape, Kimball lowered his lip mic and spoke. “You guys read me all right?”

  Everybody did.

  Kimball added: “You know what to do, people. Our priority is to protect the children and draw these people away. Questions?”

  There were none.

  Kimball slapped the roof of the pickup’s cab. “Let’s move.”

  #

  Sayed’s group followed the tracks, which continued on a straight path. But it was Sayed’s driver who pointed out the oncoming vehicles that headed toward them from the south.

  “What is this?” Sayed asked himself rhetorically. Then he leaned closer to the windshield to get a better look, as if an additional few inches would give him such a luxury.

  Two vehicles, both with mounted artillery, barreled toward them with a gunner and a driver. The gunner in the left pickup was a large man with broad shoulders and a thick neck. The one in the right not so, but lean nonetheless. Neither one was wearing the black garments of the Islamic State, but beige camo wear.

  Sayed eased back into his seat. “The actions of desperate men,” he commented softly as a slight grin surfaced.

  But Sayed would be wrong. He would be very wrong.

  In fact, he was about to discover how truly gifted the Vatican Knights would be on the battlefield.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Kimball’s unit drew closer at a speed of 110 kilometers per hour, or by American standards a speed of sixty-six miles per hour, with the gap between his team and Sayed’s shrinking with every passing moment.

  Three against two.

  The Islamic State against the Vatican Knights.

  The gap between them closing.

  Their speeds increasing.

  The points and sights of their weapons engaging the other.

  And then the Islamic State set off the first volley. Spent casings were spat from the sides of machine-guns as they went off with super-fast bursts of gunfire. Bullets pecked greedily across the sand in front of Kimball’s position in a vertical line that would eventually climb up over the hood, then over the roof, and eventually strike Kimball.

  Jeremiah, however, moved slightly left and eluded the approaching impacts as the rounds pocked and pitted the desert floor beside the vehicle with little puffs of sand. The pickup kept coming as Kimball stabilized his footing, directed the point of the weapon, and then set off his own barrage.

  Ammo rounds traversed the space between them that was too fast for the naked eye to see, unless they kicked dirt up from the ground as they skipped across the terrain. But Kimball kept his sights high, pulled the trigger, and felt the power of the weapon as it continuously vomited round after lethal round.

  Rounds struck the vehicle to Sayed’s right, the impacts pounding out holes the size of a man’s fist as they showered the hood and windshield. The driver and his armed passenger did a quick hot-wire jiggle inside the cab as rounds smashed their bodies and sheared away pieces. The gunner—after the vehicle started to veer off course and then threatened to tip and roll, which it eventually did as it tumbled across the surface in quick revolutions before coming to a stop—leapt from the bed and to the ground. Though the sand was soft enough to cushion his landing, he happened to roll into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Sayed’s. In a split moment too quick to react—other than for Sayed to drive his nails into the dashboard—the man was struck hard enough to drive a huge V-shaped dent in the front of the Sayed’s vehicle. The body went up and over the hood and cab, enough to clear the gunner standing in the back by two meters, the body rolling through space. But despite the damage to the vehicle they continued on.

  Now the playing field had been evened.

  Jeremiah, after the engagement, had veered wide to his right, looped around, and came up behind Isaiah, and became the second vehicle in tow. Now it was Isaiah’s chance with an unobstructed view since he was now front and center.

  Isaiah kept his sights high. But the volley was too high as the rounds missed and went overhead.

  Then like an old-fashioned joust, Isaiah and Jeremiah’s vehicles sped between Sayed’s vehicle and the second pickup, with the trucks passing between each other with less than a meter apart on either sides. They were that close.

  As soon as they drew distance between them, Kimball’s vehicle went to the left and looped around, while Isaiah's vehicle circled to the right, came about, and joined Kimball’s with both pickups once again heading directly at Sayed’s team.

  Kimball and Isaiah immediately sent off strings of gunfire. Bullets and rounds crossed the distance between them in time that was less than split seconds. Fired off rounds smashed one vehicle in the side and ripped it to pieces, the metal paring back. Windows shattered with tempered glass showering everywhere like jewels, as they reflected off the sun. Eruptions of red gore exploded inside the truck’s cab as lives ended in a hail of gunfire. And the gunner, who didn’t have time to respond with so much as a gaping of eyes or a dropping of his jaw, had been pounded to death as rounds punched holes through him with one bullet, in particular, shearing away a portion of his skull.

  That truck did not tip or explode in a dramatic
fireball. Instead, it simply rolled until it finally came to a complete stop and idled roughly.

  That left Sayed.

  Kimball and Isaiah continued on. And Sayed, now the center vehicle, passed between them. But instead of turning for a final joust, Sayed headed straight into the landscape and kept going at a speed that told everyone that he had no intentions of slowing down anytime soon.

  With Sayed moving on and the danger passing for the moment, Jeremiah and Samuel braked their vehicles next to the pickup truck that was idling roughly, until the truck eventually died with the last sounding notes of knocks and pings.

  Kimball jumped down from the pickup’s bed, as did Isaiah, and checked the cab. The driver and passenger were obviously dead, their bodies smashed into awkward shapes from the intense bullet blows, with red meat decorating the dash and interior panels.

  The mounted gun in the truck’s bed remained intact with an ammo box lying next to it. The bonanza to all this were the two fifteen-liter containers of fuel filled to capacity, which were lying inside the pickup’s bed.

  The other vehicle, however, did not provide such treasures. During the constant flipping of the vehicle the gun-pole snapped. Ammo went everywhere. And the gas canisters were damaged during the rolls, and the fuel absorbed by the sand.

  They placed the two canisters inside the bed of a working vehicle, along with the ammunition, and drove back to the spot where Solomon posted guard over Sisters Patty and Kelly, as well as the children.

  After filling the tanks with fuel and having several liters left over, Kimball realized that Sayed’s escape also closed certain options to them, like continuing west toward the Golan Heights. Sayed most likely knew this, so he would obviously send intervention teams in order to deny them their goal of reaching Israel. That left Jordan to their south. Though less hospitable than Israel, it was also understood that Jordan had no real love for the Islamic State, either.

  The good thing about that, the positive thing, was that the earth was less granular and more hard-packed, which would make tracking far more difficult. The godsend was that they now had the fuel to get them there.

  So Kimball outlined his reasons for this new change of direction and told them that the journey would be extended but safer, which meant that bellies would remain hollow for just a bit longer. And with children this could prove to be difficult since they had gone without food for two days already.

  But if changes weren’t made, then Sayed would be waiting for them.

  Plans were agreed upon. They would first drive west to throw trackers into believing that reaching the Golan Heights was still their agenda, then head south where the land was hard-packed so that tire tracks would be hard to define.

  They would juke and weave for a day, head to Jordan, and hopefully, while not too far from their border, the SIV would have a team in place to extract them.

  On paper it looked good. Everything always looked good on paper, the plans were always flawless. But Kimball knew that plans rarely worked as designed because something always seemed to disrupt matters.

  But they had no choice.

  Sayed was running north.

  An intercepting unit was coming at them from Damascus.

  The south was clear. Jordan had seen to that after one of their pilots had been burned alive by members of the Islamic State, which initiated constant bombardments of sorties in retaliation. Question was: would Kimball and his team be misinterpreted as the Islamic State while crossing the desert by Jordanian officials? Would Jordan respond with a deadly strike simply to wipe away a small caravan seeking salvation? Perhaps mistaking them as extremists scouring the terrain in search of areas to build guerilla strongholds close to their border. So many possibilities ran through Kimball’s mind, so many scenarios where things could go wrong.

  After the children had been loaded into the beds of the pickup trucks, along with Sisters Patty and Kelly, they headed briefly to the west, and then south towards Jordan.

  In the distance as they headed west, the sun was setting as the last few streamers of sunlight filled the sky with beautiful colors of creamy orange and mauve, soft colors that soothed and looked appealing to the eye. But as time moved along as it always did, the colorful blends eventually disappeared and were replaced with a dark canopy that was filled with countless numbers of pinprick lights.

  As soon as the landscape became absolute with darkness, that’s when they stopped for the evening. There would be no lights, no fires, nothing that would serve as a beacon in the night.

  The problem was that the children found little comfort under such circumstances because shadows often hid horrors, such as those equipped with sharp-bladed knives who looked for souls to steal. Sometimes the children would watch and wait to see if these demons existed or not. But for these children these horrors always existed. They had seen too many terrible things in their short lives to think otherwise.

  While sleep came to a few, others drifted off only to awake sometime during the night screaming from the images of bad dreams—usually seeing the gleaming length of a knife firmly grasped within the hand of a man whose rows of irregular teeth had yellowed and rotted—and had to be placated by the sisters with reassurances that they were safe. But they were nasty these demons. They were merciless and murderous and without contrition. And killing to them was nothing more than an entitlement steeped in the glory of bathing in another’s blood with drunken lust. So the children found little comfort in the nuns’ efforts to calm them.

  The night would be long.

  But as soon as morning came they would see this large man looking toward the horizon. He was wearing a collar like Father Jenkins, a cleric’s collar. And strapped to his thighs were two knives that were wicked and keen and meant to defend life rather than to take it away. And inside this man they started to see his Light, his illumination, and they began to see him not as a demon but as an angel. He was different because he was not cloaked in black garments but in softer hues. And when he spoke to others he did so without using curt measures or angry tones, nor did he govern others with manic gestures that were usually coupled with harsh words, but with a kind, though worrisome, timbre.

  This man was not the harbinger they had become accustomed to over time.

  This man was different.

  He was good and kind and caring—and he watched over them as if their welfare was more important than his own life.

  Then as the sun rose along the horizon, this man eventually became framed within its fiery disc that shone about his body like an aura. To Kimball it was just another sunrise. But to the children he was an angel who illumined as such with the light of his aura as bright as the sun.

  Here was their angel.

  Here was their salvation.

  Kimball continued to stand within the light.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Following Morning

  Syrian Desert

  Sayed did not run far. As soon as he took flight for the sake of self-preservation, he made sure that Kimball remained within his view after drawing a safe distance away. When Kimball moved, so did he. But Sayed always maintained an equal distance from Kimball the moment they started to move west, and then to the south, until Kimball’s team finally stopped for the cover of darkness.

  Through a set of binoculars, Sayed could see the two vehicles parked side-by-side and the people that clustered around them. He counted five soldiers, two nuns, and fourteen children. Farid was amongst the boys.

  Sayed then set his sights on the large man who stood sentinel on a sandy rise and was looking his way. What unnerved Sayed the most was that this man seemed to be looking right at him without the aid of any scopes. But from such a distance?

  “What do you see, Sayed?” It was his radio operator, Lukose.

  “The large man keeps watch over his flock.” He lowered the binoculars. “He knows we’re here. He sees us.”

  “Impossible,” Lukose returned vehemently. “He cannot see us unless he’s the devil’
s magician.”

  “Perhaps that’s exactly what he is,” Sayed responded evenly. “How else could he take out Hussaini’s team, and then turn around and do the same with us by taking out two of our mobiles and killing six in the process? Even when we have Allah’s support.”

  Sayed raised the binoculars once again and worked the lenses to zero-in enough to nearly identify the colors of Kimball’s eyes, which were fixed on Sayed’s position. Then he saw the cleric’s collar.

  A priest?

  Hardly. Sayed started to chortle.

  “You laugh, Sayed.” Lukose looked off in the same direction as Sayed. Those in the distance appeared as specks along the surface of the landscape, small and barely perceptible. “You find humor with this devil’s magician?”

  “I may have heard of this man,” said Sayed. “And so have you.”

  “Me? Not to my knowledge.”

  “He’s obviously a soldier. But he also wears the garments of a priest. Does that sound familiar to you now, Lukose? A soldier in priest’s clothing?”

  The radio communicator cocked his head. Vaguely. There had been rumors circulating among radical factions that when something was wrong with the world, then a man comes out of the shadows of St. Peter’s Basilica to make the world right again. His allegiance to God is a tenuous one because he is a priest who is not a priest. So to some he is an angel. And to others he is a demon.

  “If you’re right, Sayed, then he truly is the devil’s magician.”

  Sayed lowered the binoculars. “No,” he said. “He is but a man like you and me.” Then he ordered his radio communicator to contact the team running from Damascus, and to inform them that those in possession of Farid were now moving towards Jordan. So a new set of coordinates would have to be followed.

  When Lukose went to make the call, Sayed once again raised the binoculars and set his sights. The large man was still there with a pinning stare that was quite disturbing to Sayed, even from a distance. “Perhaps Lukose is right,” he stated softly to himself. “Perhaps you are the devil’s magician.”