The Secret Cardinal

by Tom Grace

  “Very fat.”

  “Is the grass good?”

  “If it were any better,” Gates jumped in, “it would be illegal. You want a beer?”

  “The traditional answer to each of the four questions is yes,” the Asian replied, his accent now flawless middle-American, “after which the guest is offered a cup of tea.”

  “All we got is Baadog, but I gotta say it ain’t bad for cutting the dust out of your throat.”

  “Then Baadog it is.” The Asian turned to Kilkenny. “Lieutenant Gene Chun, SEAL Team One.”

  Kilkenny shook Chun’s hand and introduced himself. “Nice outfits, very authentic.”

  “Thanks. We didn’t want to stick out like American tourists.”

  As the other riders dismounted, Chun introduced the team Gates had recruited from U.S. Special Forces. Chun and a petty officer named Jim Chow represented the Navy SEALs. Paul Sung and David Tsui volunteered out of the elite Marine Recon, and medic Chuck Jing jokingly referred to himself as the lone Army Ranger. Rounding out the team were Bob Shen, Terry Han, and Ed Xaio of the Army’s Night Stalkers.

  As Kilkenny had requested, each volunteer recruit brought with him both the lethal skills of his chosen profession and the cultural and linguistic training necessary to pass easily for native Han Chinese. Some of the warriors were first-generation Americans; others counted laborers on the Union Pacific Railroad among their ancestors.

  “You guys have any problems getting into the country?” Kilkenny asked.

  “Naw. Our documents were rock solid. Nice touch with that National Geographic cover story. Thanks to that and a little creative packaging, our gear breezed through customs, which is a good thing considering what we’re packing.”

  “Nine-Eleven definitely has made traveling with nuclear material more challenging,” Kilkenny agreed. He turned to Gates. “Help these fellas get set up while I make dinner.”

  Kilkenny stoked the fire inside his yurt and began cooking a mix of steak and vegetables in a shallow wok as the team unloaded equipment and tended to the horses. By the time he finished cooking his version of Mongolian beef, the operators were stepping inside the yurt, cold beers in hand.

  “Grab a bowl and find some floor,” Kilkenny announced as he doled out the evening meal. “And make sure you have a clear view of that blank patch of wall.”

  “Why?” Chun asked. “We getting a movie with dinner?”

  “Something like that.”

  When everyone was seated, Kilkenny perched himself on a low wooden stool. Beside him stood a small table atop which lay a device that looked like an iPod mated to a medium-sized Maglite.

  “Gentlemen, I want to start by thanking you for volunteering for this,” Kilkenny said. “That you all responded to Max’s pitch so quickly illustrates the high moral character that I believe exists in the members of our elite profession—either that or you all lost big at one of the chief’s legendary poker weekends.”

  “Mission?” Han blurted out. “I thought this was one of those poker weekends.”

  The men shared a laugh, especially when Gates tossed a pack of cards to Kilkenny. The chief never traveled without a deck. Kilkenny opened the box and began cutting and shuffling the cards.

  “If you’ll pardon the expression, here’s the deal: mission first, cards later.” Kilkenny boxed the deck and tossed it back to Gates. Then he switched on the small projector to display on the wall a grainy black-and-white image of an Asian man in his early thirties. “This is Bishop Yin Daoming, or at least this is what he looked like before he was imprisoned in the seventies.” Kilkenny moved to the next image. “This is what a computer thinks Yin might look like today, but there’s no way we can predict what three decades in a Chinese prison have done to the man.”

  Kilkenny replaced the computer-generated image of Yin with a terrain map of the region.

  “We’re up here in Mongolia,” Kilkenny said, indicating a point in the eastern province of the landlocked nation, “and this zigzagging line is the route we’ll follow in and out of China. ChiCom air defenses are relatively thin in this part of the country, thanks largely to the fact that Mongolian military technology these days is just slightly better than it was during the reign of Genghis Khan. Our route is designed to take us through the weakest points in their radar coverage. I know the BATs are hard to spot, but no sense making it any easier for them. I’ll upload these waypoints into the nav systems as soon as we’re ready to go wheels up.”

  The next image was a satellite photo of Chifeng Prison.

  “At the LZ,” Kilkenny pointed to their landing zone in an uninhabited area northwest of the prison, “we’ll meet with our local support and split into two teams. Chow, Chun, Han, and Xaio are with Alpha; the rest of you are Bravo. Max will head up the Alpha team, which will dig in around the perimeter of the prison, scout the place for a few days so we can get the lay of the land, and set up our defenses in case we need to beat a fast retreat. I’ll be with Bravo handling prison insertion and extraction. We already have someone on the ground in Chifeng working with local contacts to procure uniforms, weapons, and vehicles. We’ll be working with her to collect these materials at our staging area. Two important points about our person in Chifeng. What we’re about to do won’t win us any popularity contests in Beijing, but Roxanne already has state’s-enemy status there, and the ChiComs want her, dead or alive. Second, she’s a personal friend of mine, and if you hit on her, you do so at your own risk.”

  “From you?” Han asked.

  “From her. She’s good people, so let’s make sure she gets out of China in one piece.”

  As they ate, Kilkenny ran through the finer details of his plan to liberate Yin Daoming and took questions from the team. The briefing lasted through their meal, and everyone switched to water after the first round of Baadog. No one was getting drunk tonight.

  After their meal, the team assembled the BATs and suited up for flight.

  “We’re gonna look like a Chinese luge team,” Han remarked as the men traded their civilian clothes for sleek, form-fitting SEALskin suits.

  “You’ll love these suits,” Gates assured him. “We started using them about a year ago. Full mobility, decent body armor, and combat electronics. Best of all, they’re good for fighting off the cold.”

  “How good?”

  “I did a HALO jump over Antarctica wearing one of these,” Kilkenny replied as he holstered a forty-five-caliber H&K pistol and sheathed a combat knife to his leg. “Double-digit subzero temps and I didn’t get a touch of frostbite.”

  “No shit?” Han asked skeptically. As veteran of many high-altitude, low-opening parachute jumps, he had endured bitter cold in weather less extreme than over the pole.

  “No shit.”

  “Amazing. These are about half the weight of our standard flight suits.”

  “Hey, what happens to the horses while we’re gone?” Chen asked as he patted the head of the gray mare he’d ridden out into the steppe.

  “I asked the family that leased us these yurts to look in on them, as we’ll be out in the field for days at a time following the wild herds,” Kilkenny said. “They’ll be okay.”

  The team broke into three groups, each with one of the Night Stalkers. Clad head-to-toe in dark gray, the soldiers donned helmets equipped with night vision and heads-up displays and climbed into the BATs. The seats were simple canvas hammocks bolted to the frame and fitted with five-point safety harnesses. Kilkenny appraised the aircraft as he buckled in—it was a significant improvement over the first generation. He followed the pipes that sprouted from the engine nacelle to their termini at tiny thrust-vectoring nozzles at various points on the fuselage. By rerouting engine thrust from the large opening at the rear of the nacelle, where it was used to power forward flight, to the nozzles, a BAT pilot could abruptly change direction during flight. The nozzles also allowed the aircraft to take off and land vertically. To the men of the 160th, the BAT was the special forces version of the Harrier.
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  Gates sat beside Kilkenny in the rear of BAT-2 and strapped in. Bob Shen was at the controls running through his preflight checklist. Terry Han and Ed Xaio were piloting BAT-1 and BAT-3.

  “We’ve got a full tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and we’re wearing sunglasses,” Gates said, deadpanning Elwood Blues’s pre-chase checklist.

  Eyes focused straight ahead, Kilkenny offered Joliet Jake Blues’s infamous response, “Hit it.”

  “RITEG is nominal,” Shen said flatly. “Switching engine on.”

  Starting with a low hum, the nacelle mounted to the spine above them quickly spun up, the sound increasing in both pitch and intensity. The horses grazing nearby trotted farther into the field. Sitting in an open-air fuselage, Kilkenny was quick to appreciate that the electric turbine emitted no exhaust. He was also thankful for the noise-canceling hardware built into his helmet that sampled the engine noise and produced an inverse sound to mask it.

  The internally shielded RITEG generated almost no externally detectable heat, reducing the threat posed by missiles designed to home in on the hot glow of fuel-burning engines. The aircraft derived another defensive advantage from its unique shape and use of nonmetallic materials. The BAT was not as stealthy as an F-117A, but its radar cross-section was roughly the size of a golf ball, making the low-flying craft difficult to detect amid the electronic noise known as ground clutter.

  When all three BATs had powered up, the Night Stalkers gave each other the thumbs-up sign and, one by one, lifted off. Third in the queue, Shen gripped the fly-by-wire controller mounted between the front seats and gave it a twist. The BAT leaped into the air as thrust-vector nozzles redirected the tiny engine’s output through the BAT’s space frame and outports under the fuselage.

  Shen let the BAT hover for a moment until he was satisfied that everything functioned as it should, then he flew the aircraft forward and into position off the left wing of BAT-1.

  “Satellite uplink on,” Kilkenny commanded, and an icon appeared on his heads-up display.

  SATELLITE UPLINK ACTIVATED

  “Message encrypt, three words: Isengard or Bust.”

  CONFIRM: ISENGARD OR BUST

  “Message confirmed.”

  SEND TO?

  “Bombadil,” Kilkenny replied.

  The three-word message shot into the heavens as a brief pulse of electromagnetic energy. Seconds later, after racing through a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit, the message sped back to Earth where it was captured by a cluster of dish antennas inside the Leonine Walls of the Vatican.

  “Bombadil? Isengard?” What was that all about?” Gates asked, his voice clear through the speakers in Kilkenny’s helmet.

  “Just letting my buddy Grin know what we’re up to. He’s not a regular operator, so we decided to encrypt our messages with references to books, movies, and songs that we both would get. In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf was held prisoner by Saruman at Isengard.”

  “So for Gandalf, read Yin?” Gates asked.

  “Yeah,” Kilkenny replied. “Chifeng Prison is Isengard, and Grin is Bombadil.”

  “I saw the movies, but I don’t remember anyone named Bombadil.”

  “Not everything from the book made it onto the screen,” Kilkenny explained.

  It was a cool, clear night with a waning moon hanging a few degrees above the eastern horizon. Thirty feet off the ground, the three BATs flew almost due south on the start of a five-hour journey that would skirt the edge of the Gobi Desert as it headed across the border into China.

  17

  VATICAN CITY October 20

  The funeral mass for Pope Leo XIV was celebrated six days after his death on a beautiful October day in Saint Peter’s Square. Donoher stood on the basilica steps studying the nearly half a million people who filled Bernini’s piazza and overflowed down the length of Via della Conciliazione, through the Borgo District, to the banks of the Tiber. The streets surrounding the Vatican were packed with millions more as the Church drew together during this time of grief. And around the world, billions watched or listened to what was the largest funeral in history.

  The pope’s body lay inside a simple coffin made of cypress, the sole ornament an inlaid cross and the letter M near the bottom of the lid, the design taken from the pontiff’s personal coat of arms. During the processional, the pallbearers—twelve tuxedo-clad papal gentlemen—had slowly borne the coffin out of the basilica on a red litter. They carried it past the wooden altar and set it in the center of an ornate rectangular rug laid atop the stones of the square. A tall paschal candle stood beside the coffin, and atop the wooden lid lay a red leatherbound book containing the four Gospel accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

  Three long rows of prelates clad in red vestments framed the sides of a rectangular space that contained the altar and the coffin, and behind these sat more than two hundred world leaders in a sea of funeral black. A choir dressed in white closed the back of the space, with the front open to the square. With a gathering so large that no building could contain it, the people themselves became the architecture, the true body of the Church.

  During a private ceremony before the funeral, the pope’s body was placed inside the coffin. Archbishop Sikora then drew a veil of white silk over Leo’s face, and Donoher blessed the body with holy water. At the pope’s side, Donoher placed a red velvet bag containing samples of the coins minted during his long reign.

  As Cardinal Scheuermann read a Latin eulogy of the pope’s many accomplishments, Donoher reflected on the last item he placed in the coffin—a brass cylinder containing a vellum scroll of that same eulogy penned by a master calligrapher. The scroll was a work of art in itself but more so for the deeds it represented. The Church in the late twentieth century faced many difficult challenges, but it was Pope Leo’s clear vision and steadfast faith that had helped change the world for the better.

  If pride was a sin, Donoher would permit himself this indulgence. He was proud of all the Church had accomplished during the reign of Pope Leo XIV, and of his role in those deeds now committed to history.

  He did not feel sorrow as the sun warmed his face while he stood on the basilica steps, overlooked by a procession of statues of the saints. He felt joy. The long suffering of his friend and mentor was over, and the wonderful soul that was the essence of that great man had at last received its blessed release and was now with God. For a man of faith, there could be no greater triumph than this.

  AS THE VOICES of the pontifical choir filled the piazza with the closing hymn, the cardinals followed the pope’s coffin back into the basilica, the procession passing through the great bronze doors in the center of its facade—masterworks by Il Filarete depicting Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the martyrdoms of Saints Peter and Paul.

  The cardinals moved solemnly up through the nave and filled the space beneath the great dome, surrounding the confessio and the baldacchino. The pallbearers paused in front of the great pier where Bernini’s statue of the mythical Saint Longinus stood bearing the spear that pierced the side of Christ, then descended the stairway into the grotto beneath the basilica. There, the sampietrini affixed red bands to the coffin lid with both papal and Vatican seals. The coffin was placed in a second made of zinc and a third of walnut that bore Leo’s name and his coat of arms.

  A humble priest, Pope Leo decided early in his pontificate to forgo the traditional papal interment in an ornate marble sarcophagus, wishing instead to be buried in the earth.

  “Lord, grant him eternal rest,” Donoher called out at the conclusion of the rite, his booming voice echoing inside the subterranean chamber, “and may perpetual light shine upon him.”

  As those gathered in the grotto sang “Salve Regina,” Donoher stared down into the pope’s grave and thought of another holy man in a dark hole, half a world away.

  18

  CHIFENG, CHINA October 28

  On the night they crossed the border, Kilkenny and the warrior
s rendezvoused with Roxanne Tao at the landing zone in the steppe twenty miles north of Chifeng Prison. Tao’s local contacts provided yurts to house the men and conceal their weapons and equipment. During their second night in China, Gates and the Alpha team dug into camouflaged positions around the prison and began reconnaissance.

  Kilkenny had lain low during the past eight days, sequestered in the yurts while the other members of Bravo team ventured into the city of Chifeng with Roxanne Tao, getting a feel for their surroundings. Inner Mongolia’s tourist season was all but over, and a Caucasian face would draw more attention than he desired.

  Kilkenny sat on the floor on the west side of the yurt—the men’s side—with his back to the fire. He was wearing his helmet, comparing Alpha team’s observations with information gathered by Chinese Roman Catholics on the heads-up display. The fresh intelligence confirmed much of what he had gleaned from the older data. It held no surprises.

  Chifeng Prison ran on a tight schedule. The guards worked in three eight-hour shifts each day. The prisoners started their day in the middle of the first shift and returned to their cells halfway through the third—sixteen backbreaking hours making bricks, seven days a week. Trucks came and went at scheduled times, processed through the two gates with the same security procedures. Kilkenny had confidence in the information he had, but he really wanted the one piece he was sorely missing—the precise cell housing Bishop Yin.

  “Computer off,” Kilkenny said, ending the review session.

  He stood and stretched, pulled off the helmet, and absently scratched at the prickly red whiskers populating his jaw line. In addition to the scrubby beard, Kilkenny temporarily had suspended several personal grooming habits in preparing for the mission, and the prison pajamas he wore while sequestered in the yurt exuded that fusty odor he associated with a high school locker room.

  Opposite the yurt’s door, on the north side of the circular dwelling, stood a traditional Buddhist altar. Kilkenny approached the domestic shrine—no different really from the religious items his grandmother kept atop her bedroom dresser—and offered a brief prayer of thanks for the people helping them.