New Rome Rising

by Rene Fomby

  ※

  With the hinge pins pulled from the inner door to the palace, Jack checked the infrared signatures from the drones one last time to make sure the coast was clear all the way to Tulley’s bedroom. Other than a single signature just outside of what he assumed was a door into the room, not a soul was moving about the palace. He checked his watch. Awfully early for everyone to have gone nighty-night, but he supposed they must have had a long and eventful day. Hard work, terrorizing an entire planet.

  Jack gave the signal, and Bravo Team yanked the door back into the tunnel. As he went through, Jack noticed that the door had indeed been padlocked. Good thing the professor was right about the hinges. A little luck never hurt anyone, but I’ll take careful preparation any time.

  With his infrared goggles still in place, Jack searched the courtyard for anything that might indicate an area alarm, but got nothing. He pointed across the way with his left hand and they scampered quickly and silently across the open courtyard to where an archway led them into the warren of rooms that had made up the living quarters for the Ottoman Sultans for over four hundred years.

  “Almost there,” Jack whispered into his headset, motioning for Alpha’s sniper to take the lead, and pointing out with two fingers the location of Tulley’s guard.

  The sniper used a dentist’s mirror to peek around the corner, creating a mental image of the guard’s location. Pulling out his silenced 9mm pistol, he thumbed off the safety, holding up three fingers of his left hand.

  Three, two, one, he ticked off, then, taking a giant step out into the hallway, he planted three quick rounds into the center of the guard’s forehead.

  But as the guard slumped to the floor, dead long before he hit the ground, his finger caught on the trigger of his automatic rifle, releasing a short spray of bullets, and the sharp retorts from the rifle echoed throughout the tight hallways of the Harem complex.

  127

  Basilica Cistern

  The random gunfire hadn’t hit anyone on the team, but Jack knew that far greater damage had been done. He was the first through the doorway into William Tulley’s bedroom, but already Tulley was out of bed, the detonator clutched in his left hand, his thumb on the button.

  “How did you manage to get past my guards?” Tulley demanded, still blinking the sleep from his eyes.

  Jack held up his left hand, motioning with his right for his men to stay back. “Look, Tulley, let’s discuss this …”

  “What’s to discuss? I warned you, I warned you all, if you even set one foot inside of New Rome’s walls, I’ll detonate the bomb.”

  “No, wait, it doesn’t have to be this way. We made a mistake, all right? But even you have to admit we had to try, given all that’s at stake. So look, we’ll just go back out the way we came in, leave the city to you. No harm, no foul. What do you say?”

  Tulley laughed, but the effort made his head throb, a sharp lightning bolt shooting through his brain. For a long second, he almost dropped the button, but then he gritted his teeth and recovered. “What do I say? What do you mean, what do I say? I have the Nanteos Cup, don’t you see? The Holy Grail. I’m immortal, the radiation can’t hurt me. But you? I’m afraid you’re not so lucky.” And with that he pressed the button.

  the lost church

  128

  USS Carl Vinson - Tuesday

  “What just happened? What the hell just happened?” Sam stared at the monitor in front of them, horrified. Jack’s helmet cam had caught every detail of what had happened inside the room. Tulley standing there with the detonator. Pressing it. But what exactly had happened outside the Harem? “Did the bomb just go off?” she screamed. “Is everybody in Istanbul dead?”

  Sanders was immediately on his phone, talking in choppy sentences, and held up a hand to cut everyone off so he could hear. Finally, he closed the call and turned to face them.

  “Okay, I don’t have the final word on this, but here’s what I think went down. Tulley obviously believed his bomb was the real McCoy, so we’ll go with that for now. And that fact—the existence of a real dirty bomb—that fact was at the very heart of all our operational planning for the mission. Which meant, unless we did something to neutralize it, to keep it from going off, the mission had less than a twenty percent chance of succeeding. Which on the flip side meant there was an eighty percent chance of effectively signing a death warrant for tens of millions of people, and maybe sealing off the entire Bosporus Strait for at least several generations. The president wasn’t impressed with those numbers, so he vetoed the mission.”

  “Vetoed it?” Sam stopped to catch her breath. “But then, how—”

  “How did it get the greenlight? Easy. I disobeyed a direct order from the president and pushed ahead with the plan regardless.”

  Sam was feeling lightheaded and reached for a chair to sit down. “So you’re saying you had the military authority to override the President of the United States?”

  “No, Sam. I didn’t.”

  The mood in the room was becoming increasingly unsettled, and Sanders noticed as one of the officers moved to slip in behind him, ready to make an arrest, while another moved over to secure the main exit to the room.

  “Hold on, boys and girls, hold on. Hear me out.” He pointed to the monitor, where Jack and his men already had Tulley trussed up and ready for evac. “But first things first—”

  He plucked a small walkie-talkie off the conference room table and keyed the mike. “Red Leader, you ready for your ride? We have Gnats launching right now, rooftop rendezvous in five.”

  “Negative, Vinson.” Jack’s helmet cam shifted toward the outside windows. “Our package is not cooperating, and the gunfire will likely bring unwanted traffic our way any moment now. Have them meet us in the courtyard just west of here. And no touchdowns, we’ll load from a hover position.”

  “Roger that.” Sanders paused to study a color map of the palace. “Does this courtyard have a fountain in the middle?”

  On-screen, Jack sprinted to the western window and looked out. “Affirmative.”

  “Okay, expect first Gnat in four. Vinson out.”

  Sanders set the walkie-talkie down and turned back to face Sam and the now-frowning cluster of naval officers, who had taken advantage of the slight delay to form a secure circle around him.

  “No need for that.” Captain Dawkins stepped forward to stand beside Sanders, waving them off. “Bob didn’t authorize the mission. I did.”

  129

  USS Carl Vinson

  Sanders stared at the floor as Captain Dawkins continued. “The president vetoed a mission plan that promised only a twenty percent chance of success. Fair enough. But then Sanders came to me with a revised plan, one that took full advantage of the Carl Vinson’s electronic warfare capabilities.” He glanced over at Sanders, who nodded for him to continue. “As you know, electronic warfare is the cutting edge of modern military armament. It includes everything from simple signal jamming, to radar ghosting, to electro-magnetic pulse generation, something that can knock out every computer, phone or other electronic device for miles around. When Sanders explained to me the problem with the bomb, the risk of not getting to Tulley in time before he set the damned thing off, I proposed we simply jam the detonator circuit by flooding the area with massive amounts of electronic radiation, using every frequency north of ultraviolet and south of infrared. It’s kind of like those old radio stations that were set up just over the Texas border inside Mexico in the early part of the twentieth century, blasting music, ads for miracle elixirs and all kinds of other programming all the way to Chicago. If you owned a radio station and they stepped all over your signal, there was nothing you could about it—everyone’s radios simply blasted whatever was coming out of Mexico.”

  “But wasn’t that pretty risky?” Sam asked. “What if the signal you sent set off the bomb by mistake?”

  “Good question, ma’am. But there wasn’t really any risk of that. You see, ever since the days of Edison and Marc
oni, nobody has ever relied on a simple analog trigger for anything that’s all that important. Think about it, even your garage door opener at home has a rolling digital code. And Tulley would never have taken a chance on that, the chance that the bomb could be triggered by some idiot driving by talking on his C.B. radio. So, by flooding the airwaves with massive amounts of radiation, fed by our own nuclear generators here on board the Vinson, we very effectively nullified any possible wireless signal he could have come up with. Stepped all over his signal, replacing it with our static. The only frequency we left open was our comms channel connecting us to the insertion force.”

  Sanders used that as a cue to jump in. “Operationally, we flipped the switch on all that the moment our assault team stepped out of the underground tunnel. The insertion plan called for a maximum of one minute from insertion to egress. They actually pulled it off in fifty-two seconds, so there was no chance anyone could have ever figured out what we were doing in time to alert Tulley. And, in the end, it looks like we were right. Tulley did manage to trigger the bomb, but the signal from the detonator switch never got to it to set it off.”

  Sam was shaking her head, trying to take it all in. “But—what if you were wrong? What if the bomb really had gone off?”

  “Then we would have been wrong,” Captain Dawkins answered. “And I probably would have been court-marshalled for my part in all of this, and spent the rest of my life in a military prison. But you gotta understand, Ms. Tulley, there was no doubt at all about what was at stake here. From the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the way down my chain of command, we knew that if we didn’t shut this thing down tonight, by tomorrow we’d be facing a global war that would likely destroy the entire planet. And that’s not an exaggeration, it’s a cold and hard fact. The Muslims are already on the move. Iranian and Iraqi troops are mobilizing on their northern borders, Indonesia signed an order for all Westerners to leave the country within two days, Pakistan just signed on to an alliance with the Caliphate less than an hour ago. And, even if the bomb had gone off, even if that meant the loss of tens of millions of lives, that is nothing compared to what a war between the West and Islam would bring us. Even assuming we won, that wouldn’t happen unless we annihilated almost every pocket of Muslims left on earth. Think about that for a second. Ten or twenty million Muslims, killed by Tulley’s dirty bomb? There are two billion practicing Muslims in the world. And once a war got started between us and them, it wouldn’t be over until we killed every single one of them. And that’s not even mentioning what they would have done to us in the meantime. So that’s what was on the table tonight. We played the numbers, hoping our electronic countermeasures would work. But the real numbers were something else entirely. The real numbers were the billions of innocent lives that could be lost—would be lost—if we didn’t shut this whole thing down right here and now.”

  The room got very quiet, the sheer scale of a possible Third World War finally sinking in to everyone in the room.

  Sanders finally broke the silence. “I think what Captain Dawkins just said is, he had the operational authority as captain of this ship to make the command decision to proceed with the modified mission. But, more importantly, he had the ethical responsibility as a member of the human race to roll the dice tonight and take the chance.” He looked up at the monitor, where William Tulley was being manhandled up to a seaman leaning out of the side hatch of the first Black Gnat, followed almost immediately by Commander Jack. “You know, most of you are too young to remember this, but there was a particular play on words that sticks out in my mind from the whole Richard Nixon Watergate crisis, and that phrase is ‘Plausible Deniability.’ It means that as long as Nixon continued to speak in code language with his criminal henchmen, he could somehow continue to deny that he had any knowledge of their actions. So that applies here. Captain Dawkins and I made the hard call in the field to greenlight this mission. If it failed, the blame fell squarely on our shoulders, and we would probably spend a good portion of our remaining years in some cold, dank cell in Leavenworth. Assuming there were very many years left in this world for us to spend. If, however, we succeeded, the president could claim full credit for our success, as he will, and as he should. We exist to serve the president and to serve our country. And in the end, that’s all that matters. I made a pledge when I joined the Marines a long lifetime ago that I would gladly give my life in service to my country. Every one of you did, Ms. Tulley and Agent Larson excepted. So that is what was on the line tonight. If we had failed, if the bomb had detonated, then I would probably be in chains right now, as would your captain. But even if that were so, I would gladly make the same decision again, because the Marines, the Navy—this is no place for cowards.”

  The room went quiet again, everyone considering whether they would have had the courage to make that call. For Sam Tulley, though, the answer was easy. A year ago she had been on the verge of giving up on America, disgusted by the corruption that existed at the very highest levels of tiny Blair County, Texas, believing that it was simply a small reflection of the kind of corruption that existed on even higher levels. At much higher levels.

  But now she was sneaking a peek into the souls of two of the most powerful men in her government—men who could with one word order the deaths of millions—and in all honesty, she found her own self lacking. She had fought legal battles, financial battles, even faced the very real likelihood of being burned alive in a fire, but never had she found herself burdened with the kind of battles where millions, billions of lives were at stake. The kind of burdens these two men faced almost every day. Tears streamed down her face as she thought about that kind of courage, the level of patriotism and honor that shored up these two men’s hearts. With every single breath they took, with every insignificant sheet of paper that crossed their overburdened desks. And for the first time in well over a year, she felt blessed to be just a small part of it.

  130

  Houston

  Harry Crawford, like most young professionals, got his news straight from the Internet. Faster, no extra monthly bills, easier to pull up extensive background info on stories that up front seemed a little too shallow, a little too headliney. But as a budding new attorney in Houston, he’d finally realized that the Internet was way too national and global in scope, way too light on local stories, the stories that might someday turn into lucrative cases for the firm. So he’d buckled under and signed up for the e-edition of the Houston Chronicle, and whenever he could, he’d check out the late night news, as well. With everything that was brewing across the world right now, it was no time to be out of the loop, so he grabbed an IPA and flipped on his 42-inch television, all he could afford right now. Maybe, just maybe there would be an interesting update on his case. And—unfortunately—there was.

  “More on what’s happening on the Istanbul situation later in the newscast. But for now, we have disturbing news in the refinery bombing story. The United States Attorney in the case, Evan Draeger, was found dead today in his office, the victim of an apparent suicide. A note was found on his desk, indicating that the alleged terrorist bomber, Nabil Rahum, was in fact innocent, framed by the attorneys for the refinery and its insurance carrier. More on this story as it develops.”

  Harry took a long cold swig of his beer, staring hard at the screen even as it switched to a commercial for a Toyota summertime promotion.

  131

  USS Carl Vinson - Wednesday

  Sam Tulley was putzing around the cabin, making sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind, when Sanders knocked and entered.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing anything?”

  “No, no, come on in, Bob. What’s up? Any more news from Istanbul?”

  “Yeah, just wanted to let you know we have both Tulley and his daughter in custody. The plan right now is to put them up on trial at the Hague for war crimes, although I’d personally just as soon drop them in the middle of the North Atlantic and tell them to swim home, like we did Bin Laden.”

&nb
sp; “Hey, that’s great news! Did the rest of Tulley’s people put up much of a fight?”

  Sanders grinned. “Naw, they raised their little white flags faster than the Frenchies in the Second World War. We had a couple of minor skirmishes here and there, but within the hour the Turks started pouring through the gates and our guys just grabbed what they needed and bugged out.”

  “What about the baby, Mary Ellen’s daughter? Did you locate her?”

  “We did, and now we have to figure out what the hell to do with the kid. Her mother isn’t likely to see anything like daylight ever again, so the girl’s going to need a home. At this point, you’re probably her closest other relative.”

  “Well, that ain’t gonna happen, not in my lifetime,” Sam responded with a nervous laugh. “But there is her grandmother, Margaret. Raising the baby might give her something to do, now that Maddie’s heading back to Texas with me. I’ll ask her what she thinks and let you know.”

  “Thanks, Sam. But from what Gavin tells me about your family, I understand it may be more than a little awkward for her grandmother to take that on.”

  “Margaret’s a lot tougher than she lets on. Plus she has absolute legions of servants fawning around, falling all over each other trying to get noticed, so it won’t really be all that much work for her. I could barely convince the staff in Siena to let me even feed Maddie. I won’t miss that one little bit.”

  “Hmph. Well, I’ll remind you of that next time we see each other,” he told her with a chuckle. “Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.”