Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “A doomsday cult’s out there, and I saw your men. They’re no match for Aum Shinrikyo, trust me on that. But you do have one ace up your sleeve to stop the cult from getting their hands on the jar.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Us.”

  The second helicopter touched down only long enough to allow its passengers to exit quickly. Asahara did so in the middle of a group of Tokushu Sakusen Gun commandos, following their motions as best he could and hoping not to slow their efforts. He had fit the earpiece Kuroda had given him into his ear and the chatter was coming fast now.

  “Six down!”

  “Seven!”

  “Eight and nine!”

  “Ten!”

  Sebastian Roy’s unprepared guards were being felled in just the effortless fashion Kuroda had promised. This was, after all, a holy mission, and Asahara wondered if his father was watching as he moved to enter the compound with his warriors.

  “How many, Indian?” McCracken asked, back on his feet in Roy’s chamber now.

  “Two choppers, Blainey,” Wareagle replied without needing to check the window. “One’s already dropped its passengers; the other should be landing soon.”

  “Thirty men, maybe a couple more, boss,” said Sal Belamo, his tone like he’d swallowed stomach acid. “Pros for sure.”

  “Stay down,” McCracken warned Roy, as the three of them started for the door. “We’ll be back.”

  Almost there just behind Wareagle and Belamo, McCracken saw Katie DeMarco following in tow.

  “Uh-uh, you’re staying here too.”

  She looked revolted by the prospects, stealing a glance back at her father who had slumped against a wall in the corner. Amazing, thought McCracken, to note how even the most powerful wilt when faced with the terror of combat. For the untrained and inexperienced, there was simply no way to describe what it felt like to be under fire by men determined to kill and trained to do so.

  “Looks like you were right, after all, old man.”

  “How’s that, young lady?”

  She smiled sadly. “Nothing much changes.”

  “Not today, anyway,” McCracken said with a wink.

  Despite Kuroda’s assurances, Shinzo had had trouble believing it would be this easy. The resistance his warriors encountered was feeble at best and wouldn’t have even reached that high if they’d had the opportunity to first practice this assault in a controlled environment.

  The group of commandos of which he was now a part entered the complex through the south, the others through the east and west, with the north side being accessible only via a sheer face of rocks. The rendezvous point was fluid, based on the ability of the warriors who’d fast-roped down under Kuroda’s command to eliminate as much resistance as possible and then funnel the rest here to the south. For his part, Asahara was to remain with the second wave of Tokushu Sakusen Gun warriors outside the heavy bulkheadlike doors just inside the compound.

  He’d wait here in accordance with Colonel Kuroda’s instructions. Time seemed to crawl, nothing but garbled splotches of exchanges going off in his ear, as the first wave of his commandos continued to encounter little additional resistance. Some sporadic exchanges of gunfire were swiftly quelled, with his warriors triumphing. Any stragglers would be forced this way to be concentrated in a cross fire from Kuroda’s force in pursuit and Asahara’s lying in wait. And, once all the security forces were neutralized, they would move on to a defenseless Sebastian Roy who would be utterly at their mercy—an asset until Pandora’s jar belonged to Asahara.

  He closed his eyes, settled himself with a few deep breaths, and instantly began to breathe easier when he opened them again.

  Until the sounds and cries of panic began to resound in his ear. They seemed to come from the whole first team of his warriors at once, followed by gunshots, wails of pain, calls for help, or warnings to others.

  What was happening?

  Time crawled again in agonizing fashion now, Asahara left to ponder his next move when the heavy door burst open and Colonel Kuroda stumbled through, heaving for breath and bleeding from a shoulder wound.

  “Sensei!” Shinzo managed.

  Kuroda staggered to the wall and laid his shoulders against it. “It’s them!”

  “Who?”

  “The same men . . .”

  “The same men who what?”

  Kuroda looked at him for what seemed like a very long time before responding.

  CHAPTER 89

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  Times changed. Places changed.

  But not the battle.

  And Wareagle and McCracken took to this one, just as they’d taken to all the others dating back to times long past but never forgotten. Nothing was forgotten, each piece of every war they’d ever fought leaving an indelible mark. In these moments, age was rendered meaningless in the face of purpose. There was no age, there was no time. There were only moments between kills both had long trained themselves to remain as indifferent to as possible.

  Something happened in the moments they slid about the corridors moving downward and out from the fortress’s top floor, the world slowing down, becoming surreal. Starting when McCracken lay in wait after glimpsing a Japanese man on a stealthy patrol.

  Aum Shinrikyo’s forces had penetrated the compound now.

  Additional footsteps pounded up the stairs from the level below, and McCracken dropped the nearest man with a single shot to the head from his pistol, then stripped off the silenced submachine gun slung from his shoulder. It took a pair of three-shot bursts to kill a second and third man in the stairwell, both plummeting down the stairs, dead.

  McCracken kept a mental count in his head, hearing the echo of gunshots indicating both Johnny and Sal were encountering similar resistance, and using the same element of surprise, in their sweeps. He’d seen it all before, more times than he could count: a superior invading force having too much confidence in their intelligence and reconnaissance to be prepared to face an opposition they’d never expected to encounter.

  Doomsday was going to have to wait for the members of Aum Shinrikyo.

  McCracken padded down the stairs as softly as he could manage, emerging on the second floor and propping himself in the dark cover of an adjacent alcove. Sometimes victory was about patience, which meant waiting for the next man to show himself instead of going on the hunt. Sure enough, the next pair of men converged from either end of the hall, hoping to catch him in a cross fire. But their initial barrage, the only one that mattered, singed the air above him when McCracken dropped to the floor, firing the Heckler and Koch submachine gun as he rolled to cut down both enemy gunmen in a single spray. At this range, the high-velocity bullets pulverized them even through their Kevlar vests, the lighter variety worn by high-end commando teams just like this.

  He bore no illusions it was going to be this easy from start to finish; it never was. No, McCracken had the very real sense the actual battle was still to come, and it would have to be fought with the element of surprise gone.

  Katie crouched on the floor, glad for the almost incessant drone of gunfire because it distracted her from the fact that her father was just ten feet away from her. She was ten feet away from the monster who’d made her into one too.

  “Alexandra,” Sebastian Roy, his shoulders slumped, said suddenly from a seated position against the wall across from her.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your name. Your mother chose it, the mother you killed, along with your brother.” Roy rose slowly, a portrait in utter calm. “I have a tape of what happened in Greenland,” he told her. “Would you like to see your friends all murdered, cut down as they slept? Would you like to see your leader running for his life, dying in the mud? That’s what happens to those who oppose me. You think this ends tonight? You think you’re up to killing me? You think that assassin who brought you here will do it for you?” Roy shook his head, slowly and surely. “I’m not finished yet, and now I see you’d
never be fit to succeed me. Because you’re too weak, a prisoner of emotions that have destroyed you because you never learned to control them.” Roy’s indifferent demeanor slid from his expression, replaced by a tight mask of condescending evil and power. “You want to know why Christian never stopped me, Alexandra? Because he was too scared, just like you are in the end without your assassin to back you up.”

  Katie sank to her knees, Roy breaking out into a wide grin when he saw the pistol in his daughter’s hand.

  “That’s better, Alexandra. Go ahead, prove me wrong. Show me how strong you really are.”

  “Are you sure, Kuroda-sensei?” Shinzo Asahara asked when Kuroda’s breathing steadied and his eyes returned to normal. “The same men from the building in New Orleans?”

  Kuroda grimaced in pain while nodding. “The very same. Ghosts, phantoms, spirits—I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “So what can we do to defeat them?”

  “They’re going to circle back to the rooms Roy occupies. We use that knowledge against them.”

  “What if they continue to advance toward us instead?”

  Kuroda shook his head, calm in his consideration of the enemy’s strategy. “They know we still hold the advantage, and their trick of surprise is gone. They’ll believe they can wait us out, so we will move to a plan of attack that makes that impossible.”

  “Attack ghosts, spirits?”

  Kuroda moved off the wall, shoulder straightening and arm extending as if he was never wounded at all. “Even the dead can be killed, Shinzo-san. A wise lesson for you to remember. Now, prepare yourself to move.”

  “Now?”

  Kuroda nodded. “I’m going to take you to Sebastian Roy.”

  CHAPTER 90

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  McCracken and Wareagle met up in the center of the first floor together, the last of the first wave of attackers dispatched on the floors above.

  “What do you say we slow the rest of them down, Indian?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing myself, Blainey.”

  That meant moving as far down the hallway as they dared, south toward the helipads, since that’s where the next wave of Japanese commandos would be concentrated. They closed and snapped off the locks on four different decoratively heavy wooden doors with steel cores to maximize their resistance to fire. The strategy had the dual effect of negating the enemy force’s still superior numbers, while making them vulnerable every time they had to blow or shoot their way through a barrier. Normally such a slowing ploy would be employed when reinforcements were expected. Even though that wasn’t the case here, it would serve a similar purpose by making the three of them, including Sal Belamo, much more effective fighters in comparison with an enemy thrown onto the defensive.

  Starting at a hallway junction two-thirds of the way to the exit leading out onto the helipad, they sealed that door, another, and then set to wait behind the cover of the next junction.

  “Nothing ever changes, Blainey,” Wareagle said, as they lay in wait behind the cover of a junction in the first-floor hallway.

  “If it did, they wouldn’t need us anymore.”

  Katie’s hand trembled, the pistol McCracken had slipped her wobbling in her grasp.

  “Go ahead,” her father said, a cold bitterness ringing in his voice. “Shoot me. It’s what you’ve been doing since Stuttgart anyway. Killing strangers in my stead. Well, here I am right before you. The real me, no more surrogates.”

  The gun continued to shake.

  “You can’t, Alexandra, can you? Because you’re weak, just like your brother was weak. I thought I could toughen him up, could make him hate me. Because if he hated me, he’d find the strength and resolve he needed to run Roy Industries when I was gone.”

  “Which only proves how little you knew your own son. Christian could never be made to hate anyone, and he never would have come into the company; he wanted to get as far away from you as possible.”

  Roy tried not to let his daughter see how much her remark stung him. “We’ll never know that for sure, though, will we, because you killed him. He died in that fire you set and now you can take his place.”

  “You killed Christian long before Stuttgart.”

  “Maybe you were jealous of him, Alexandra.”

  Katie’s eyes bulged in disbelief. “Jealous? Of what you did to him?”

  “Of my plans for him. That’s what I wanted you to feel so you’d want it even more. I always knew you were better fit to be my successor. That was always the plan. Was I wrong, Alexandra? Tell me, was I wrong?”

  The pistol quivered in Katie’s hand. She felt like a frightened little girl again, hearing the soft patter of footsteps in the halls beyond her bedroom, stopping at the door to her brother’s room.

  “I won’t shoot you,” she heard herself say.

  “Then I was wrong.”

  And with that Katie eased the pistol upward until the cold steel was squeezed against her own temple. “No, you weren’t.”

  An out-of-breath Sal Belamo joined McCracken and Wareagle just as the Japanese commandos neared the door behind which they lay in wait.

  “Where you been, Sal?”

  “Guess I’m not as young as I used to be, boss. Wait until you hit seventy.”

  “You said the same thing about me turning sixty.”

  “Good thing I’m a better shot than prophet.”

  The strategy they were about to employ had been a classic since the dawn of war: make a stand, fire until the enemy advances, and then retreat to repeat the process at the next strategic point—in this case using the compound’s winding, multilayered structure to their best advantage. It was a strategy well founded in all respects, except one.

  “You ask me,” said Belamo, “all they have to do is advance up a level and double back to take you from behind.”

  McCracken swung toward Wareagle, feigning shock. “How could we not have thought of that?”

  Just then the booby traps they’d set on the second floor were tripped, a series of ear-wrenching blasts sounding followed immediately by shrieks and screams. Wareagle had strung a trio of grenades together with simple twine he carried in his belt pouch. Loop the twine through the door frame and it would yank the pins from the grenades once the door was open. Three seconds later the boom had sounded, the effects of the blast magnified all the more by the closed confines of the hallway.

  Japanese commandos reached the first blocked junction mere seconds after the blast above. McCracken waited until three men were all the way through and their targets clear before he, Belamo, and Wareagle opened up with a barrage that dropped the trio before they could get off a single shot.

  Too easy.

  McCracken had barely formed that thought when a cascade of fire opened up on them from the other end of the hall. He cursed himself for never considering approach from below, a subbasement or crawl space layered beneath the compound’s structure. The first three Japanese commandos had been nothing more than decoys, sacrifices in the true nature of the samurai code; and McCracken, Wareagle, and Belamo now found themselves trapped in a cross fire as another group stormed through the original breech pouring bullets their way.

  Maybe he was too old, maybe a decade ago he would have considered such another route of potential access, and his whole plan wouldn’t have gone to shit. Now all McCracken could do was train his fire on the far end of the hall, while Johnny and Sal concentrated theirs toward the near. The submachine gun danced in his grasp, heat radiating off its barrel and fanning up into his face with smoke as he switched to three-shot bursts from automatic fire. He was vaguely conscious of the spent shells clanging to the hardwood floor, stubbornly remaining exposed long enough for his shots to find the three gunmen who’d expected to find easy targets upon their ascent from the basement. McCracken exhaled and took a deep breath, as he jammed yet another fresh magazine home.

  Downing this wave of attackers succeeded only in opening the route for yet
more surging out from both sides of the hallway again. With Wareagle taking point, they managed to beat back the assault from the original point long enough to get another heavy door sealed, enabling them to focus all their attention on the forces pouring up from the basement crawl space.

  Whoooosssshhhhhhhh . . .

  McCracken registered the sound an instant before an RPG obliterated the entire door and blew the splintery remnants and jagged chunks of wood into them. Another group of commandos charged in from that side of the hall, restoring the cross fire McCracken knew full well they couldn’t outlast forever. But for now the firing continued, the murky darkness broken by orange muzzle flashes that looked like campfires flashing in the night. Husks of the ceiling and chunks of the floor exploded in all directions amid the hail of bullets that puckered McCracken’s eardrums and left the air smelling of gun oil, bitter with smoke and a light bluish haze that lifted toward the ceiling like a vapor cloud.

  “Change in strategy, Indian!”

  “With you, Blainey!”

  With what seemed like endless twin waves of Japanese commandos coming, McCracken, Wareagle, and Belamo backed through the next door, managing to seal it and continue toward a set of stairs, lurching up them just as a second RPG blasted debris up the steps after them.

  At sixty, McCracken’s ears seemed to have borne the worst brunt of his years of blasts, bombs, and gunplay. They’d lost their tolerance for loud noises and stretches like this when sound was stolen from them grew longer each time. Not being able to hear cast the battle in a strange, surreal light, in the course of their pulling back toward Sebastian Roy’s hyperbaric chamber on the top floor of the complex built against the rock face of the mountain.

  Halfway up the final flight of stairs, Wareagle ejected both magazines from the twin submachine guns he was wielding and snapped two more home in blinding fashion, missing barely a beat. Belamo was more selective with his shots as they reached the top floor, pursued by the last half-dozen Japanese commandos.