Apocalypse Ark

by Don Pendleton

  Myrtoan Sea, aboard the Oceanus

  CLAUDIO BRANCA HAD never cared much for geography in school, but he had learned more from necessity while planning his crusade to liberate the Earth from Satan’s grasp. It was peculiar how the human mind could focus on details once deemed irrelevant, once it had fastened on a sacred cause.

  He’d never heard of the Myrtoan Sea, for instance, but was now aware of its significance, although most modern maps failed to identify it. Lying between the Cyclades and the Peloponnese peninsula of mainland Greece, it granted access from the Aegean Sea to the larger Mediterranean and beyond, to the Atlantic Ocean, if he sailed west as far as the Strait of Gibraltar. That was not the plan, however, not this time. Branca was traveling approximately half that far, call it 550 miles.

  To sunny Sicily.

  How long before they landed? Branca had done all the calculations in his head. Captain Anatolakis boasted that the Oceanus had a top speed of thirty-seven knots, translating to forty-three miles per hour. Reaching Sicily, therefore, would take the better part of thirteen hours—two of which were already behind them. Branca had arranged for a reception on arrival at Catania, on the Ionian Sea, and for an escort on the Autostrada A18 to Messina. From there, another ferry would convey them to the Italian mainland, at Villa San Giovanni, and they could embark on the mad race toward Rome.

  Geography. It was a marvel how the pieces fell together with a solid plan in place.

  Branca had certain qualms about the aid he had enlisted for their brief passage through Sicily, and it had cost him dearly, but the bargain proved that even abject sinners had a role to play in earth’s final redemption. He hadn’t informed his Pontifex that they were dealing with the Mafia. Why burden Marcellus with another problem, when he had so much to think about already? It was strictly cash for services rendered, no questions asked by the Sicilians. Had not Christ himself been known to sup with whores and lepers?

  Of course, the mafiosi claimed allegiance to the Vatican, if it was even possible to view them as religious, and the irony of that didn’t escape Branca’s attention. It delighted him, in fact, using one of the Scarlet Whore’s own factions to bring her down. What better way to prove the maxim that all things work together for those who love God?

  Michele Sansovino joined him at the ferry’s forward rail, staring away toward Crete before he voiced a question. “Do you trust these people where we’re going, Claudio?”

  “Trust doesn’t enter into it,” Branca replied. “They’ve been well paid.”

  “They’re bandits,” Sansovino said. “I know their kind.”

  Indeed. Sansovino had involved himself with the Camorra, a kind of mainland Mafia based in Naples, before a brush with death had led him to Custodes Foederis. This day, the skills he’d learned as a felon served the Lord, and all was forgiven.

  “You can watch them for us,” Branca said. “At the first sign of a betrayal, be prepared to act.”

  ‘’We’ll be outnumbered and surrounded,” Sansovino said.

  “But we still have the Ark,” Branca replied. “And God is with us.”

  “Amen,” Sansovino said, then muttered something to himself that sounded like, “I hope so.”

  Branca watched him go, then turned back to the open sea, thinking, I hope so, too.

  Temple of Immaculate Conception, Ios

  BISHOP MARKOPOULOS SIPPED from his glass of retsina, enjoying the flavor of the resinated wine. He had earned a few moments of relaxation, Markopoulos believed, and there was nothing in the scriptures that forbade a soothing taste of alcohol.

  Having settled that, he allowed himself to think once more about his recent visitors. They had moved on, were miles beyond his humble parish now, and he had done his best for them. Whatever happened on the road to Rome, no one could say the Temple of Immaculate Conception had not done its part for the crusade. Markoupolos hadn’t been privileged to glimpse the Ark, of course, but he hadn’t expected to. If one thing could be said about him without fear of contradiction, it was that he knew his proper place.

  The atmosphere was more relaxed, now that the Dei Legatus had moved on with his soldiers and their cargo. Hosting them had been an honor and a burden, all at once, particularly with the bishop’s knowledge of the violence that had trailed them from the dusty wastes of Ethiopia. Markoupolos had been prepared for trouble on his own turf, but it hadn’t come to pass.

  At least, not yet.

  He still had sentries posted, watchers idling in the island’s capital and on the beach at Chora to forewarn him of a raiding party, but there had been no alarms so far. Perhaps, Markoupolos allowed himself to hope, they would be spared the mayhem that had claimed their brethren in Addis Ababa, Massawa and Çorlu.

  If not, Markoupolos had guns and ammunition, had disciples who would spend the last drops of their blood to hold the temple against any infidels who sought to desecrate it. Each had sworn a solemn oath to God that they would die before betraying Him. Their afterlife in paradise depended on fidelity to that vow and the church itself.

  Not that Markoupolos was in a hurry to depart this earthly life. With the retsina’s flavor on his tongue and sunlight streaming through his window, there could be no doubt that life was sweet. A gift from God, in fact. But gifts could be surrendered to the greater need, the greater good. Again, Christ was the ultimate example, facing death for all the sinners of the world, in knowledge that the vast majority of them would finally reject his sacrifice and plunge headlong into the fires of hell.

  No longer relaxed, Bishop Markoupolos reached out for the retsina bottle and refilled his glass. Another wouldn’t make him drunk, by any means. And if he grew a little tipsy, what of it? Flesh was weak, divine forgiveness infinite. Markoupolos strove for perfection, but had yet to reach it.

  He closed his eyes, imagined sailing on the blue Aegean. Not for Sicily and Rome, but simply traveling to parts unknown, with the whole world spread before him, ripe for exploration. So it would be when the final battle was concluded and the smoke cleared to reveal a new earth, freed from dominance by Satan and his imps. Markoupolos hoped he would live to see that golden morning break, and would stand among the victors, crying Hallelujah to their Lord.

  * * *

  THE PAVED ROAD running north from Manganari, following the stony spine of Ios, petered out after they’d driven about a mile. From there on, following a dirt and gravel track that raised a rooster tail of dust behind them, Bolan thought they’d have been better off to rent a Jeep. Their Peugeot 206 hadn’t been made with off-roading in mind, and Bolan didn’t know how well the car had been maintained or whether it was good for the round-trip.

  Of course, there hadn’t been a Jeep available, and Bolan couldn’t say if he and Halloran would make it through the round-trip to their target, either. War was all about the calculated risks, weighed against their potential rewards. Sometimes you couldn’t draw and were compelled to play a shaky hand, against the odds.

  One good thing about the awkward lurching drive was that they met only a couple of civilians on the way. Most of the island’s year-round residents were found in Chora, with the rest clustered in smaller, scattered settlements. To Bolan, that meant there would likely be no innocents hanging around the Temple of Immaculate Conception, getting in their way when trouble started.

  And if prior experience was any indicator, that would be as soon as they arrived.

  A half mile from their destination, with the temple still concealed behind a lumpy range of hills, they stopped and nosed the Peugeot into a rest stop, cautiously maneuvering the car until they had it pointed back downhill, toward Manganari and their rented boat. If things went badly and they had to flee with shooters on their heels, the seconds wasted on a clumsy three-point turn could make the difference between survival and a shallow grave.

  When he was satisfied with the Peugeot’s position, Bolan sp
ent another moment with his weapons. He was carrying the AKMS and the Uzi SMG, hoping that some degree of stealth could be preserved, but wanting to be ready with an autorifle if it went to hell. He had grenades for backup, if the opposition forced them to abandon all hope of a quiet probe.

  If they got lucky, found the team from Axum at the temple catching up on rest, whatever, they could finish it on Ios, but he wasn’t counting on that kind of break. If there was any kind of comm link between Bolan’s quarry and their leadership, the Ark gang had to know that they were being hunted. Even if they didn’t manage to communicate with Rome, that just came down to common sense. He wasn’t selling any of the opposition short on smarts, simply because he didn’t buy the basic tenets of their faith.

  One thing the Executioner had learned from grim experience: he didn’t have to share the views of any given cult, sect or denomination to accept that others were sincere—even fanatical—in their beliefs. If any individual or group proclaimed that they were killing in the name of Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, Satan, or the Easter Bunny, Bolan took them at their word and did his best to stop them in their tracks.

  To stop them dead, before their madness claimed a higher body count.

  Sincere belief could wreak no end of havoc when it graduated from discussion into action, spilling blood. That was the world where Bolan lived, and every predator received some variation of the same response. The universal language understood by thugs and terrorists from California to Calcutta, from Tasmania to Tokyo.

  Hot lead, cold steel or cleansing fire.

  “Ready?” he asked, and got a nod from Halloran.

  With Bolan leading, they began to climb the final hill.

  Custodes Foederis Headquarters, Rome

  “I’M ONLY SAYING that we need to be more careful,” Marco Gianotti said. “You need to be more careful.”

  Mania Justina glared at him with a look of petulant confusion. “I don’t understand why he is doing this,” she said. “Does he suspect something? Does he know something?”

  “I’ve already told you everything he said to me,” Gianotti replied. “He’s worried about the Concilium, not you. But with surveillance on Troisi—”

  “Yes, yes. It comes back to me. But why? What can I do? You say I can’t warn Ugo.”

  “Absolutely not,” Gianotti confirmed. “Who knows what he might do? If he confronts the Pontifex, it will be obvious the warning must have come from me or someone on my team.”

  “Why did this have to happen now?” she asked him, almost whining. “We’re so close to changing everything. Rewriting history.”

  Gianotti knew what she meant to say, and didn’t bother trying to correct her. Why waste time and breath explaining that, while it was possible to change the course of history, events already in the past could not be altered?

  “Tomorrow or the next day,” Mania Justina exclaimed, “after the Ark arrives in Rome, it won’t make any difference what Janus thinks of Ugo. Will it?”

  “Well...”

  “I mean, the sinners will be swept away!”

  Gianotti had no response for that. Should he remind Mania that she had, herself, been sinning most egregiously on a daily basis, with Troisi and with him? Clearly, her thoughts were focused on a different set of sinners, infidels and servants of the Scarlet Whore. It seemed that she was making no allowance for the possibility of failure.

  If the Ark was intercepted short of Rome, or if it had no power when the moment of unleashing came...what happened next?

  Asking that question, even harboring the smallest doubt of God’s almighty power, was an act of blasphemy, but Marco Gianotti couldn’t shake his nagging fear of failure. Even though his faith was strong, he knew from history that many End Time prophecies had fizzled out on the appointed day. From Saint Clement’s prediction of the Second Coming in AD 90 to the “Great Disappointment” of October 1844, on to Y2K, dozens of predictions for the day of Christ’s return had fallen flat. If faith alone was enough to save the world, the job would have been done two thousand years ago.

  But he could hope, offer an earnest prayer and watch his back where Janus Marcellus was concerned.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and kissed her pouting lips. “Try not to worry.”

  “Do you love me?”

  Marco smiled. “Who wouldn’t?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Temple of Immaculate Conception, Ios

  The Twenty-third Psalm kept running through Brother Halloran’s mind as he trailed Matt Cooper between two stony crags and got his first view of their target.

  The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.

  No pastures here, of course. No visible water, either, unless you counted the Aegean, two miles off to their right, or east, three miles away to the west. Their chosen battleground would be a sun-bleached rocky hillside, where the blood of fallen men would simmer in the unrelenting rays and bake onto the stones.

  His blood? Perhaps.

  Cooper stopped in front of him, crouching, and turned to catch his eye. Halloran knelt beside him, conscious of the prayerful pose and hoping that it wouldn’t be interpreted as mockery.

  “The aerials you showed me indicate two exits,” Bolan said. “North and west. We need to cover both of them, so nobody gets out and slips away. You have a preference?”

  “It makes no difference to me,” Halloran said.

  “Okay. I’ll circle to the north, then. You go east. Ten minutes and we go.”

  Halloran synchronized his watch to Cooper’s, reminded of a scene from some commando movie that he’d watched in childhood. Had it been The Guns of Navarone, which also had been set in Greece? Was this how fragments of a life returned to haunt a dying man?

  I’m not dying, Halloran thought. At least, not yet.

  His exit on the east was closer than the northern door Cooper planned to cover, so he stayed in place and watched the tall American move out. It still surprised him that a man so large could move so swiftly, gracefully, almost without a sound. Beside him, Halloran felt like a plodding amateur who had been dropped into a deadly game light-years beyond his capability.

  But he’d survived this far, and wasn’t finished yet. Not while an ounce of strength or faith remained.

  When it was time, Halloran moved off to his right, winding between more boulders, careful not to let his submachine gun tap or scrape against the stones. He wished there had been time and opportunity to pick up a suppressor for the M12S, but he would do his best with what he had.

  Who was around to register the sound of gunshots, anyway?

  On Ios, you could never tell. The noise might echo for a mile or more, though likely not as far as any of the tourist beaches. Say a villager got curious, decided to alert police. How long would that take? Could they even pinpoint the location of the shots without triangulating gear? And then how long before an officer arrived? Words of the psalm came to him unbidden: Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.

  And the feast was about to begin.

  * * *

  TOO MUCH RETSINA, Bishop Markoupolos thought. He’d nearly tipped the bottle over, reaching for it to refill his glass, which would have made a mess and brought at least one of his people on the run. Still, if his reflexes were quick enough to catch the bottle and retrieve it, could he really be intoxicated? And regardless, was there any harm in that?

  Everyone needed to relax sometime, even a bishop of a church engaged in bringing on the Great Apocalypse. Perhaps he, most of all.

  And what about the young men traveling to Rome, where some of them at least would almost surely die? What prospect did they have for any rest and relaxation on the road? Little to none, he thought, and poured himself another glass of wine on their behal
f.

  “Ad vitem et victoria,” he told the empty room. To life and victory!

  The glass was at his lips when one of his brethren burst in, wide-eyed, gasping as if he’d run a mile instead of ten or twenty yards. “Intruders on the grounds, Your Grace! Inside the temple!”

  “What?” Markoupolos wasn’t aware he’d dropped his glass until it smashed and splattered on the concrete floor beside his swivel chair. “What did you say, Stefan?”

  “Intruders! Armed! Hurry, Your Grace!”

  Markoupolos absorbed the warning, oddly conscious of the way Stefan preserved his formal manner of address despite his panic. Only as he bolted upright from his chair, half staggering, did he observe the pistol Stefan clutched in his right hand.

  The sight of it reminded Markoupolos to grab his own weapon, ripping open the lower left-hand drawer of his desk to retrieve the Heckler & Koch MP-7 submachine gun resting there. It was a marvel of technology, scarcely sixteen inches long with folding stock collapsed, weighing barely five pounds with a 40-round magazine in place. Its revolutionary HK 4.6 mm rounds could penetrate standard body armor but yawed on impact with soft tissue, causing greater damage than most other pistol and SMG rounds. With a full-auto cyclic rate of 950 rounds per minute, the MP-7 was a certified man-breaker.

  Which would help Markoupolos only if he survived to use it.

  Stefan teetered in the open doorway, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, anxious to be away. Markoupolos turned toward him, gun in hand, and ordered, “Show me the intruders!”

  “Yes, Your Grace. This way!”

  The bishop emerged into the corridor, still without any enemies in sight. It crossed his mind that Stefan might be tricking him somehow, but why? To what end? Then his nostrils caught the first faint whiff of gunsmoke and he frowned.

  Shots without sound? If that were true—

  A second later, gunfire echoed through the temple and Markoupolos felt his heart lurch, kicking into double time. There was no trick, and no mistake. They were under attack.