The Ark had power. It had changed the ancient world and it could do the same in modern times, but on a broader scale. God’s sacred gift to humankind had been forgotten and ignored for centuries, while false prophets led millions from the path of righteousness to sure damnation and the fires of hell.
All changing soon, unless...
It seemed unthinkable, but still the notion nagged at Bishop Sultan’s mind. Would God permit the infidels to win, after his loyal believers had done everything within their mortal power to secure the victory for His sake? And if so, what did that say about their faith? Was it misplaced?
Sultan stopped short, muttered a prayer of supplication as he realized how close he’d come to blasphemy. Mere doubt alone could weaken people. It could erode their very souls.
He felt a sermon coming on, was sitting down to sketch an outline of it, reaching for his fountain pen, when voices from the courtyard startled him. Rising, Sultan started toward his office window, but a blast of gunfire stopped him in his tracks. Quickly retreating to his desk, he reached inside the upper left-hand drawer to find a Walther PPQ pistol, one of its fifteen .40-caliber rounds already in the chamber. Its double-action trigger with the integrated safety meant that all the bishop had to do was aim and fire, if enemies confronted him.
But first, before he joined the fight, he had to make a call.
His hands were trembling, and he nearly dropped the satellite phone as he tapped in the digits one-handed, darting anxious glances at the window all the while. More shooting from the courtyard was punctuated by a bullet drilling through the window glass, ripping a furrow in the ceiling of his office. Bishop Sultan dropped behind his desk, kneeling as if in prayer, but wholly focused on the LED screen of the phone clutched in his hand.
Ringing.
“Answer!” he rasped. “For God’s sake, pick up!”
Finally, on the eleventh ring, his plea was answered. Small and distant came a voice he barely recognized. Instead of salutations, it said, “This line is not secure.”
“No matter,” Sultan blurted out. “You know who this is?”
“Yes.”
“We’re under fire! And yesterday there was a raid in Ad—”
“I know that. We cannot help you.”
Startled by his sudden anger, Sultan replied, “I know that! I didn’t call to ask for help. I’m warning you!”
“Message received,” the distant voice acknowledged.
And the line went dead.
Furious, Sultan fought an urge to hurl his sat phone at the nearest wall. It would have been a pointless, childish act, counterproductive at the very least. Instead, he ought to call the Sedem Illustratio, alert the Pontifex and Reginae.
Sultan was fumbling with the sat phone’s buttons, punching in a second number, when the office door burst open, slamming back against the wall.
* * *
THE TEMPLE OF the Guiding Light reminded Bolan of the Spanish missions he had seen in the American Southwest. It was a hollow rectangle, the spacious courtyard in the middle paved with slate, except where spiky aloe plants rose waist-high out of arid flower beds. The walls were plaster, painted beige and faded by the sun, beneath a brown tile roof. Bolan and Halloran had scouted the location with a drive-by, noted two guards at the red front door, and drove on past.
“I didn’t see their guns,” Bolan remarked.
“You wouldn’t, on the street,” Halloran said. “Civilian ownership of guns is banned by law throughout Eritrea, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist, of course. Official estimates claim there are twenty thousand guns floating around illegally—that’s one for every two hundred people. Unofficially, who knows? The street price for an AK-47, as of last week, was 250 U.S. dollars.”
“Pretty cheap,” Bolan observed.
“Ah, but that’s roughly one-third the average citizen’s yearly income.”
“No sniping from the neighbors, then.”
“As for the Keepers,” Halloran replied, “you’ve seen how they greet uninvited visitors.”
Passing by the south side of the temple square, the two men saw a wooden gate that led directly to the courtyard. No guards on the street there, though for all they knew an army could be waiting on the other side. Still, it was better than approaching from the front, with sentries raising the alarm and maybe hauling automatic weapons out from underneath their muslin robes.
Predictably, the gate was latched from the inside. A muffled 3-round burst from Bolan’s Uzi dealt with that and sent the shattered latch flying across the courtyard. As Bolan led the way inside, two Covenant Keepers in casual denim leaped up from a bench, reaching for weapons hidden underneath their loose shirttails. Bolan stitched one across the chest and put him down, but number two got off a hasty shot before the Uzi caught him with a second burst.
And that was all it took.
Three doorways opened on the courtyard from surrounding temple wings, all of them spilling gunmen within seconds flat. Bolan met them with autofire, Halloran joining in with a Beretta M12S submachine gun he had packed before they left Addis Ababa. Ducking, rolling, with bullets whining off the dark slate paving stones around them, Bolan and the brother fought back with everything they had. Their human targets dropped, sprawled, slithered in a spreading lake of blood, while cartridge casings rattled on the pavement.
Amid the firing, Halloran called out to Bolan, “Can you hold here, while I check the bishop’s office?”
“Go for it,” he replied.
Halloran was up and running, Bolan not at all surprised that he’d found some way to research the temple’s floor plan in advance. Bishop Yegizaw Sultan was the man they wanted, and Bolan only hoped that Halloran could bag him alive. If not, it came down to another wasted gamble, and they still might not be able to get out.
More shooters kept on coming through the courtyard doors, like clowns emerging from a circus funny car, except that all of these were armed and bent on killing any trespassers they found on temple property. Right now, with Halloran already out of sight, the list came down to one: Mack Bolan, feeding a new magazine into his SMG and reaching for a frag grenade in hopes that he could shave the odds.
* * *
IT PAID TO do your homework in advance. Halloran knew where Bishop Sultan ought to be, unless the cleric had already found an exit from the temple, fleeing for his life. He might not be a fighter like Bishop Astatke, back in Addis Ababa, but there was only one way to find out.
Halloran crashed the office door and saw a figure crouched behind the bishop’s desk. He’d memorized Yegizaw Sultan’s face from various surveillance photos, would have known him anywhere, along with every other ranking member of Custodes Foederis. This was Sultan, absolutely, and he’d caught the man alone.
But not unarmed.
An instant after Halloran bulled through the door, his quarry raised a pistol, squeezing off a rapid double-tap from twenty feet. His aim was off, a product of his shaky hand, but even so the bullets passed within an inch or two of Halloran’s left ear. He answered with the short Beretta SMG, firing one-handed as he dived behind a sofa to his right.
Poor cover there, Halloran discovered, when the slugs from his opponent’s pistol started punching through it, raining plaster from the wall behind. Halloran wished that he had one of Cooper’s grenades, but hadn’t thought to ask for any when they left the hired car on the street a half block from the temple. As it was, the only tools at his disposal were the power of persuasion and a dose of deadly force—always assuming Sultan let him raise his head to try a shot.
Halloran didn’t speak Tigrinya, and his Arabic was spotty, but he knew that English was the third official language of Eritrea. He tried it, calling out to Sultan from his hiding place, “You can’t get out of here. We’ve got the place surrounded.”
Bluffing, but it couldn’t h
urt to try.
“I don’t expect to live,” Sultan replied. “My sacrifice is nothing if I take you with me.”
“All we want is information,” Halloran replied. “It needn’t cost you anything.”
“Except my soul! Damn you for tempting me, you spawn of Satan!”
So much for negotiating, then. Halloran heard a sound of scuffling footsteps and propelled himself across the floor with knees and elbows, scuttling toward the far end of the sofa, where he’d have a line of fire across the bishop’s office. If he hadn’t timed the move too late...
He cleared the couch as Sultan charged around the near end of his desk, blazing away with his black semiautomatic pistol. It seemed loud as thunder in the confines of the room, a heavy caliber in rapid-fire, but wasting rounds before the bishop realized his target had already shifted places. With a shout, he brought the gun around to bear on Halloran, and met the small Beretta’s rising muzzle spitting fire.
Halloran’s stream of Parabellum manglers ripped across his target in a rising arc from groin to throat. Fighting for his life, he had no time or opportunity to angle for debilitating flesh wounds, much less blast the gun out of his opponent’s hand as if it were a Hollywood production with the mayhem all precisely staged. Halloran saw the bishop spin, his legs folding under him, and hit the floor with force enough that blood sprayed upward from his wounds.
Crouching beside him in another second, Halloran was poised to shake the dying man and question him while any trace of life remained, but he was already too late. The cleric’s glassy eyes stared off a thousand miles beyond the ceiling overhead, perhaps in search of Paradise.
A hand grenade exploded in the courtyard, trailing screams behind its thunderclap. Halloran rose, was turning to rejoin the fight and Cooper, when he glimpsed something on the bishop’s desk. A satellite phone, he surmised, from its chunky antenna and larger-than-usual size. With a grim smile on his face and cautious hope in mind, Halloran snatched the phone and then retraced his path to the battleground.
* * *
BOLAN WAS STANDING in the midst of an open-air slaughterhouse when Halloran reappeared on the scene. The human tide had broken moments earlier, his Uzi fire and shrapnel slicing through the ranks till there was no one left standing before him. Two of those who’d come in late and died immediately were the robed men who’d been standing watch out front.
All gone.
Now Halloran was back without the bishop, a grim expression on his face, a sat phone in his hand.
“What happened?” Bolan asked.
“I couldn’t talk him out of dying,” Halloran replied. “But I have this.”
“His phone?”
“I’ll get the numbers from its memory. Perhaps if we can trace them—”
“I can help with that,” Bolan replied, thinking at once of Stony Man Farm. “We’d better get on the road, though.”
Sirens emphasized his point, still several blocks away but closing fast. At the Toyota, Halloran told Bolan, “If we pass them, you shouldn’t be seen.”
“Backseat,” Bolan agreed, and piled in through the left rear door. Halloran slammed it shut behind him, slid into the driver’s seat and powered out of there while Bolan lay below the line of sight from any passing vehicles.
He used the time to look over the sat phone Halloran had lifted from their quarry, now deceased without spilling the beans. The phone was fairly new but relatively simple, as befitted an instrument that might be passed around through more or less uneducated hands. Its memory gave up a list of numbers on command, outgoing calls from Bishop Sultan to whomever, with nary a country or area code to be seen.
“He’s calling other sat phones, maybe cellulars,” Bolan advised, seconds before a cop car passed them going in the opposite direction, siren peaking, then diminishing in Doppler drama.
Halloran, when they were clear, asked Bolan, “Are they traceable?”
“It’s worth a shot. I’ll have to reach out to a buddy in the States.”
“We all have masters, eh?” Halloran said. There was the faintest echo of a smile behind his words.
“Associates,” Bolan corrected him. “Do you see any more police?”
“Not yet. Another mile or so, and I will find a place to stop.”
“Suits me.”
Ten minutes from the temple battleground, Halloran turned once more, then stopped the car. Bolan sat up to find them in a spacious parking lot adjacent to a some kind of marketplace. He came around to the Corolla’s shotgun seat—the Uzi seat, in his case—and produced his own sat phone from hiding. Turned it on and angled the antenna, checked reception on the screen, then started tapping numbers on the keypad.
On the far side of the world, a bland voice answered, “Good day. How can I help you?”
“Striker calling,” Bolan said. “And scrambling...now.”
He thumbed a switch to scramble his transmission, heard the hiss of static for a moment, then the voice returned to say, “We’re scrambled. How may I direct your call, sir?”
“I’ve got something for the Bear.”
“Affirmative.”
More clicks, and then a voice he recognized. “Long time, no speak,” Aaron Kurtzman said. “What’s the flap?”
“I need locations for a list of cell or sat phone numbers, if it’s possible.”
“Should be,” Kurtzman replied, “if they’re in use. If not, we’ll monitor until they activate, and call you back.”
“Sounds good.” Bolan began to read the list of numbers, eight in all. Long seconds passed before his friend and contact spoke again.
“We have two active at the moment. One’s in Rome and stationary. Number two is on the move through...let me double-check this...yep, it’s Konya Province, Turkey.”
“Right. I’ll see what I can do with that,” Bolan said. “Keep me posted on the others, will you?”
“Sure thing. And before you go...have you been following the news?”
* * *
“ATTACKS?” HALLORAN ECHOED Bolan’s word as if the term was unfamiliar to him.
“Half a dozen, as of now, and they’re anticipating more,” Bolan confirmed.
“By members of Custodes Foederis?”
“Two confirmed so far. They’re guessing on two others, but the timing and coordination make it pretty clear. I guess they’ll have to work from DNA in Boston and Montreal, getting IDs on the others.”
“It’s begun, then. I had hoped that they would only try to use the Ark, without employing any other tactics.”
“And it’s still our focus,” Bolan said. “We can’t be everywhere at once.”
“But all those lives—”
“Word’s out, okay? The FBI and MI-5, RCMP in Canada, Brazil’s DPF, they’ve got the Keepers covered. Rounding up the leaders for interrogation, shadowing the flock.”
“It isn’t good enough,” Halloran stated. “You must know that.”
“They’re doing all they can, under the law,” Bolan replied. “The rest comes down to us.”
Halloran heaved a weary sigh, then said, “You’re right. What of the phone numbers?”
“Two were active. One in Rome, the other one someplace in Turkey. Konya Province.”
“But in transit?”
“Right. You’re psychic now?”
“Hardly,” Halloran said. “It only stands to reason that they must be moving westward, toward Çorlu.”
“Because...?”
“It’s the location of the sect’s Turkish church. More specifically, the Temple of the Resurrection, under Bishop Mehmet Akdemir. The raiders would consult with him, of course, en route to Rome.”
Bolan considered tipping off Brognola, having him get in touch with someone from the Turkish National Police to drop a net on Akdemir an
d company, but what would happen to the Ark in that case? Did they want an international incident blown up in headlines and streaming on CNN hourly, if there was any other option?
As if reading his mind, Halloran said, “There could be panic in the streets, you know. And certain churches, if they thought the Ark existed and was being used for evil.”
Bolan tried to picture it and came up with only a vague image of people milling in the streets. The closest thing to a religious panic that he knew of was the Indian phenomenon of temple stampedes that killed dozens, sometimes hundreds, at regular intervals. Those, he understood, normally started out as shoving matches or a crush for handouts, then turned deadly. If large numbers of religious folk believed the Day of Judgment was at hand—or that their sect was threatened by a band of heretics—how might the scene play out?
In carnage, sure. What else?
“We’ll need a charter flight,” Bolan said.
Halloran nodded. “We should find something at Massawa International. The name exaggerates its greatness, as you may imagine, but they do have private charter services.”
“To Turkey?” Bolan asked.
“I hope for El Nouzha Airport, in Alexandria. From there, it is approximately seven hundred miles to Istanbul. Çorlu lies westward of the capital, en route to Turkey’s border with Greece and Bulgaria.”
“Right, then,” Bolan said. “It looks like we fly.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bilecik Province, Turkey
Claudio Branca grimaced when his sat phone uttered its demanding thrum of sound, certain that it could be only bad news. He was on schedule, moving toward his target on the course agreed in countless planning sessions; there was no reason for anyone to call him for a simple update or to tell him he’d done well.
Therefore, a hitch.
He answered brusquely, gave nothing away. “Ciao.”
And recognized the voice that greeted him by title, rather than by name. “Dei Legatus.”
God’s Lieutenant.
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