by Jones, Rick
“And what about Perchenko? Any feedback from intercepted lines?”
“Plenty,” said Craner. “We confirmed Perchenko to be in Minsk, as we speak. And it appears the Russians have mobilized their sources to find him before we do. So we have our teams scouring Perchenko’s frequent haunts hoping to grab him as soon as possible.”
“Whatever it takes, Doug, find him. I need to know how many units are out there. Because if these devices go off, then this country will lose everything—it’ll lose its will, its courage, and its ability to sustain a national confidence in its government to protect.”
“I agree, sir.”
“In the meantime, we need to come up with solutions. And we need to come up with probable target sites despite the obvious, and cover those areas with as many bodies as we can provide. Use whatever is necessary to accomplish the means. I want you to look inside every mosque, temple, or Muslim holy site known for radical behavior. Those packages could be anywhere. And Dean?”
Dean Hamilton was the Attorney General whose resolve was as steely as the gaze from his bottle-green eyes that possessed the determination to outwit, outfight, and outmaneuver anyone within his constituency to achieve what he believed would be the best for the administration. To fight in the vein of rectitude by ruffling a few feathers on the political floor had become his trademark. And to fight Dean Hamilton on his level always promised a bitter struggle for those who always took battle against him. Not only was he remarkably virtuous, he was equally keen and anticipated what was coming. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“I want all available resources in motion. I want every field agent across this country in constant movement. And I mean constant. There will be no time to eat, drink or sleep. I want action, lots of action, and I want results according to those actions.”
Since Hamilton was in charge over the FBI, he would notify the directors immediately. “Yes, sir.”
“And, Doug.”
“Sir?”
“Find Perchenko.”
It wasn’t so much as a benevolent statement as it was a fervent order. The president’s stern measure made it abundantly clear should Perchenko be found before the American’s could ascertain any viable information, then the proverbial Sword of Damocles would fall upon the CIA Analyst’s head, since the accusing finger had to be pointed somewhere. “Yes, sir. We’re working on it.”
The president looked out the window over his left shoulder and noted the canopy of tree tops that covered the land in beautiful blooms in different shades of green. And then he wondered if he would ever see Washington again . . . Or if it would become a poisoned city due to nuclear fallout.
The president thought of a lot of things.
#
Los Angeles, California
1255 hours Pacific Standard Time
Nikki’s Tavern was a little hole-in-the-wall pub with a simple non-descript door leading from a trash-laden sidewalk that led into an interior that was as bleak and rundown as the surrounding neighborhood. Inside, the wallpaper had yellowed like old parchment and the ferns that dotted the floor space in the corners barely sustained life. High on the nicotine-stained ceiling, fans turned with a wobbled effect that made Kimball imagine the blade attachments weren’t too secure. Yet none of this mattered to him. Within this neglected establishment was solitude.
Looking down the long stretch of the tavern, he took note of the room’s gloominess that was thick with cigarette smoke that moved through the air in phantasmagoric shapes. Along the bar silhouetted against the backdrop stooping over their drinks, a few patrons sat quietly. In its unkempt isolation Kimball found a booth across from them, the table steeped in shadow and a much needed comfort zone.
In front of him seven shot glasses—five empty, two filled with dark liquor—were neatly positioned in front of him as he ran a fingertip around the rim of a full one, his eyes staring at nothing in particular. Somewhere somebody coughed—an unhealthy phlegm jag that sounded in the patron’s chest like a death rattle.
And then the bar fell silent, Kimball losing himself in thought.
For over a decade he was driven to find salvation; however, salvation always seemed more than an arm’s length away. Perhaps, he considered, it was because he was a man who truly did not find God to be part of his element, even though he wished it so. Whereas he could recite articles verbatim from military manuals as easily as a preacher could recite verses from the Bible, Kimball Hayden could not remember the first line of ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ which was the simplest of all prayers.
Unlike his team, Kimball was the unique cast that helped shaped the members of the Vatican Knights, who were groomed to be the Crusaders of a new age. Whereas they were developed by using humbleness as their shield and faith as their guide, Kimball only knew death and how to administer its techniques as if the art of killing was no more than an involuntary act. Yet in the eyes of his team and the Church clerisy, he was all but anointed.
But Kimball never felt so alone.
In a quick motion he brought the shot glass to his lips and drank—a maneuver that seemed automatic, and then aligned the empty glass alongside the other empty glasses.
Six glasses now stood side by side in a perfect row, all empty, a mere representation of his growing hollowness with one glass left, the last full glass a symbolic and tenuous hold that he wasn’t completely without hope. If he drank from it, then the line would be complete, the glasses fully drained, and with it the faith of receiving salvation forever gone since the well to draw from was now completely dry. With that final glass remained the last few ounces of hope.
Nevertheless, Kimball stared at the shot glass, tempted.
There’s nothing symbolic about it, he thought. It’s only a drink.
But by not drinking it, it gave him a reason for optimism.
So instead of imbibing, he fell back into personal reflection.
And what he reflected upon was the value of his purpose of having been assigned the pope’s personal valet, which was not without its reasons. He was chosen because he possessed the best tools to save the pontiff’s life if the situation ever presented itself, especially in today’s world where zealous enlightenment appeared to be on the rise. But Kimball knew he had to lay low. Absconding from government service might not bode too well for him if the Burroughs administration should discover that he was still alive.
As he traced a fingertip along the rim of the last shot glass, a male in his early twenties stopped just beyond the edge of the table, his fingers ticking off and counting down the empty glasses before focusing his gaze to the Roman Catholic collar Kimball was wearing, and then shifted to the priest’s eyes. “Excuse me, Father.”
Kimball raised the corner of his brow. “Something I can help you with?”
“Aren’t priests supposed to uphold a higher standard? Are you supposed to be drinking like this?”
Kimball looked at the guy in such a way that the young man took a step away from the table. He had encroached too closely into his personal space. Worse, he infringed upon his personal life with audacity. And then in a tone that was less priestly. “Hey, kid.” The young man hesitated as Kimball beckoned him closer to the table with his forefinger. “Come here.”
The young man came forward with every line, shadow and premature crease on his face spelling out that he had overstepped his boundaries and wished he hadn’t. There was something very different about this priest, something dangerously roguish.
The moment he stepped into close counsel with the cleric, Kimball whispered, “Look, I already have enough on my plate without people like you passing judgment on me. If you don’t like what I do, then piss off.”
The young man did not retort. He simply turned and walked out of the bar at a pace much quicker than when he entered.
Across from him, behind the bar, was a mirror smudged with layers of dust—a mirror that had not been wiped down in months, perhaps years. Staring back at him was the reflection of a man wearing a cleric’s col
lar, the image of a priest, a father, a man of the cloth. Perhaps the kid was right after all, he considered. Without the collar he would have been like anyone else in this bar—someone who was stooped over their drink and blending in with the shadows; people who were nondescript and without hope.
After glancing into the mirror one last time, Kimball pushed the last shot glass away, still full, and left the tavern.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Perugia, Italy
Just after Dusk
Although they were a cell totally separate from Hakam’s, they shared the same agenda. They were now soldiers in the eyes of Allah—six men who had fought admirably with the Republican and Revolutionary Guards, and later surrendered their national birthright and prejudices to fight under the one true banner of their God as jihadists, the only true soldiers.
However, not all were content with their station as combatants. Young and fit and full of the determination to fight, most kept a silent countenance with the exception of al-Rashad who, like Hakam, was an American-born Arab who gravitated toward the radical side of Islam. He was tall, six four, with broad shoulders and thick limbs. The slope of his brow and the massive muscle development gave him a simian appearance which was brought on by chemical evolution rather than ancestral inherency. By taking steroids he had become addictive to its fallout, the results unmistakable. And nobody dared to contest his often aggressive nature or cantankerous moods.
Through his own due diligence al-Rashad was tagged as the team leader of five men, all experts, each man with the commitment to surrender his life for Allah, which he respected. But to serve in the capacity to babysit a mother and her heathen offspring seemed humiliating. But al-Rashad was assured by the clerics from the Ponte Felcino Mosque that the service of his team would prove to be a great service to Allah. And that his team would impose a serious and heavy blow upon the United States and its Zionist ally, Israel.
How a woman and her children were tantamount in such an event was lost to al-Rashad. But he adhered to the cleric’s claim, believing his team to be a true instrument serving their God in a most important way.
As night was beginning to close over them, al-Rashad normally walked alone through the vacant warehouse, his footfalls echoing with a hollowed cadence that often gave the impression he was not alone when, in fact, he was. His men were stationed elsewhere on the second floor next to the holding chamber, a room fashioned with sheets of corrugated tin, steel framing, and a welding torch.
His captives, for the most part, were passive and quiet with the exception of the female child who cried on occasion, her sobbing a soft and haunting melody that carried throughout the warehouse like the moan of something long dead, of something caught in void between life and death. Hearing such noises often prompted him to take these measurably long walks. And for al-Rashad, these walks had become medicinal.
He never deviated from his path or course, always walking down the same dark warrens, listening to the same perpetual drip of water, smelling the same rancid odor of mildew and waste, but always ended up at the same grated stairway that led to the second floor balcony which gave him a westward view.
In the distance and beautifully lit by a semblance of lights was the Ponte Felcino Mosque. Its dome was perfectly rounded and its color, even in the shadows of the coming darkness, seemed to be emblazoned in gold. It was the home of his God. It was the House of Allah.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, al-Rashad relished the moment.
He would do Allah’s bidding, he considered, and he would do it without question. And when it came time to kill the woman and her children, he would do so as an integral part of the movement and wield the cutting blade himself. There would be no underlying guilt or warring of conscience. Since the easiest thing for man to do was to justify any act no matter how heinous the act may be, he saw that killing non-believers was an ordained task expected by Allah.
Taking one last look at the mosque, al-Rashad soaked everything in with an appreciative eye.
The man was completely at peace.
#
Raven Rock (Presidential Bunker), Pennsylvania
1700 hours. Eastern Standard Time
While the sun had already descended in Perugia, Italy, it had yet to settle on the eastern side of the United States.
Raven Rock was located on more than twenty thousand acres of federal land with its exclusive retreat situated on a plateau-like rise accessible only by helicopter. In the camp’s leveled base area, a single cabin was positioned in the center with three helipads located to the north, south and east points of the cabin’s central position. Aerial towers mounted to the rooftops maintained surveillance dishes capable of intercepting non-legitimate aircraft from several miles away. Anything remotely hostile would be targeted by predators, which were computer-manned by a military defense team from inside the cabin.
The landscape was completely unadulterated as the grass swayed with the direction of a light breeze, giving the terrain a constant undulating motion that rippled across the mountaintop, as if the land was alive. In communion with nature the conifers danced in performance, the concert of their limbs moving in a slow, hypnotic grace as the wind traced a cool breeze over the summit. Everything moved in perfect harmony.
From the east Marine One made its way toward the compound, the thumping of its rotors growing louder as it neared. When the helicopter poised itself over the north heliport, the down draft of the whipping blades caused the grass to ripple in tumultuous waves and the limbs of the pines to thrash about wildly in playful sparring.
After Marine One landed and the rotors stilled, the hatch door lowered and the president and his team took solid footing on the compound.
From a distance the quarters appeared rustic like a log cabin should, the wood bucolic in its appearance and the surrounding air pastoral. But the cabin wasn’t a cabin at all. It was a high-tech bunker. The building had blast-mitigation windows and a logwood veneer that covered the underlying walls of concrete casting and three-inch steel, rendering the stronghold impermeable to assault.
Inside, the interior was without standing walls to partition off rooms. Instead, it was a single large area with a security station manned by the defense team who could navigate the predators and maintain surveillance from their seated positions along the console. In the room’s center was a large cylindrical tube emanating from the floor, the huge cylinder not quite reaching the building’s ceiling, with stainless steel doors. As the president and his team neared the doors, an electronic eye caught their images and immediately processed the landmarks on their faces with facial recognition software, and automatically opened the doors, giving them access to an elevator spacious enough to hold them comfortably.
As soon as the doors closed behind the president and his team, the elevator descended two hundred feet into a hollowed cavern that served as the Comm Center.
When the doors parted they were met with a subterranean coolness, a vestige reminder that the air was constantly being filtered, purified, and re-circulated back into the atmosphere by computer-powered fans.
The room itself was large, circular, the ceiling above them a perfect rotunda of carved rock. In the room’s center was a large table with tracks of lighting suspended above it by metal framework. And positioned along the length of the walls hung several large viewing screens and display monitors.
Taking a seat at the table, President Burroughs was joined by his staff and other leading principals, who were transported to Raven Rock from other points of the country on earlier arrivals.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” stated the president.
Within moments the viewing screens attached to a flat wall of colored shale winked on, proposing pictures of extraordinary quality from technology that has yet to land on the public market.
What surfaced on the minimal-sized screens were the boasted images of the Presidential Seal. On the large multi-pixel screen hanging down from the metal framework and separa
te from the other monitors, was the image of CIA Intelligence Liaison Jaxson Wilhite.
“All right,” the president began. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. And thank you for joining us, Mr. Wilhite.”
Jaxson Wilhite operated out of the London base and worked in collusion with MI6, the United Kingdom’s highly esteemed Secret Intelligence Service. “No problem, Mr. President.”
“Mr. Wilhite.” The president leaned forward with his hands clasped together. “Please tell me you have something.”
Wilhite shrugged with a halfhearted gesture. “Mr. President, so far our sources in the Middle East, including Mossad, has turned up zero. Right now there is nothing on the chat lines to indicate that Arab insurgents attempted to move nuclear weapons across our border. And all intercepted data from the Middle East—and we’re talking from the guerrilla factions, as well as intel gleaned from the Palestinian front—has turned up empty. Whoever is running this campaign is certainly keeping an air-tight lid on it.”
It was not what the president wanted to hear. Intel is often, if not always, intercepted by unsuspecting agencies who believe their secured lines and untenable data resources could not be appropriated, which always made them vulnerable to American intelligence groups. But in this case there was nothing to garner, which was unusual given the circumstances and magnitude of the situation.
“And what about Hakam and his team? Any leads thus far?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
The president could feel his mounting frustration come to a boil, but held it in check with forced calm. “We have nothing at all?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. President.”