by Ada Scott
My brows furrowed. “Just like that? It seems too easy.”
“Look.” He slowly pulled his hands out from under the desk and laid them flat on the surface. “When I first heard Vito’s voice on the TV, my blood boiled. I was ready to nuke whatever city he was in just to get at him. Fuck collateral damage. Fuck you, fuck Eliana, fuck a million people. You know?”
I nodded.
“But Kendall pulled me back. If I did that, I would have become what I hated so much in the first place. I’d be no better than Vito himself. She said that if you lived like that for too long, with nothing but revenge and taking joy in the suffering of others… you’re bound to create what will destroy you. Vito created me, and I am going to destroy him, but I’m better than him because of her, because of our kids. I will not take away whatever it is you’ve found this week.”
One by one, my muscles relaxed and I breathed a sigh of relief, attempted-poker-face be damned. The tension dropped from the air, and Dan sighed even louder than I did.
“I’m sorry-”
Jace dismissed my apology with a wave of his hand. “If I thought you were a threat to Kendall, I’d rip your head off with my bare hands. I get it. Just don’t ever come into my office with that look on your face again.”
“OK.”
“So, instead of nuking a city, I found a better way. You want to know what it is?”
“Sure.”
“Well, before I killed him, I was going to use Eliana to force Vito to publicly confess his… history and rat out as much as he could on the remaining Families, but when I spoke to him it became clear that he really didn’t care for her at all. He said to kill her, watch him coast into the Oval Office, and see how the fuck that worked out for me.”
“I met him at The Smoke Devils’ HQ on Wednesday. I think he gave me this bruise. He said since his announcement about Eliana, his approval ratings were through the roof.”
“He was there? Fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s a small world. Anyway, he admitted to me that he was the one that pulled the trigger on my parents. He remembered me in the back seat of the car, even if I didn’t remember him from there. He came and visited me in the group home to tell me the Picollis ordered the kill on my parents because he thought I might grow up to be a thorn in their sides, but he had no idea what I’d become, obviously.”
“But why the fuck would he do that? That’s a stupid plan.”
“I put it down to him being a sick fuck,” said Jace. “Anyway, I had to change tack, so I’ve arranged a meeting in his bunker with the bosses of the remaining Families. I’ve said it’s time to end all this bullshit, I’ve made my point. Let’s just do some business and make some money.”
I looked from Jace to Dan, who offered no insight, and then back to Jace. “What?”
“It’s happening tonight.”
“Sir… Jace… tactically… uh… that’s not a good idea.”
Jace smirked. “Oh I know. Right now Vito’s sitting there thinking about what a moron I am, and how popular he’s going to be when he invites everybody to come and shoot me. Imagine that, taking out the greatest threat to the Mafia in a few seconds of machine gun fire. Fuck that, I’m not going.”
“So why arrange the meeting?” I asked.
Jace’s smirk remained. “That bunker. It’s a pretty safe place, ex-government property. Fifty years ago it was usable as a fallout shelter for the President and his essential staff, if he was caught out in that part of the country when the missiles were in the air. Yeah, safe place unless…”
“Unless what?”
Jace pointed to Dan.
“Unless you’ve got the codes for the Apollo’s Spear program,” finished Dan.
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“The codes are what you recovered for us, and the euphemism for Apollo’s Spear is that it’s a defense satellite,” said Dan. “What it really is, is a satellite armed and ready for kinetic bombardment.”
“Kinetic bombardment?”
“Yeah. It’s a kind of bomb with no explosive materials. It’s just a tungsten rod that drops out of orbit, with a bit of a rocket boost for extra love. When it hits... it's nuts.”
“How hard can something like that possibly hit?”
“The satellite has a range of sizes depending on the target. We’ll be using a rod forty feet long by one foot in diameter. It’s a bunker-buster. It’ll hit with about the power of forty-three tons of TNT all aimed at Vito Mondalo, but with no nuclear fallout. The bunker has a missile defense system, of course, but this thing will come in too fast and at too steep an angle for them to do anything about it. Odds are they won’t see it coming at all and even if they do, they won’t be able to get far enough away from it to escape before it hits. It’s just too fast and hard to detect. It will gouge a crater out of the ground large enough to encompass the entirety of the bunker, and Vito Mondalo, plus whichever bosses show up, will be disintegrated. Of course, the downside of this fact is that eventually we’ll all end up inhaling some of the molecules that used to make them up, but that’s the price you pay for a crazy idea like this.”
“Holy fuck. I’ve been carrying the codes for this in that briefcase?” I asked.
“Part of them. The codes aren’t in any one place and they’re all encrypted. The more pieces you have, it gets exponentially easier to crack it. With what you delivered, it turned the task from something that might take a several lifetimes without a quantum computer to something that I can do within a day. Starting from yesterday afternoon,” said Dan.
“You’re not wasting any time then if you’ve organized this for tonight,” I said to Jace.
“It was either tonight or wait another nine days for the satellite to be in position again. It’s expensive as fuck for the government to get these rods up there, so they don’t have an entire network of them yet. It only has a certain range outside of its orbital path,” he replied.
“Wow. Something tells me that Rockwell isn’t going to be the big story on the news anymore.”
“No. You want to come watch the end of an era?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re going to set up in the hills at the edge of the plain and watch the formation of the Mondalo crater from a safe distance. Austin, Ryan and Stefano will be there too. It’s too important for me to miss.”
I thought back to the sound of Vito’s fist hitting Eliana’s stomach. The things he’d said to her were the god-awful cherry on top of a sundae he’d been serving up to her for twenty years. Yeah, I’d like to see him disintegrated.
“I’m in.”
Eric
In the foothills at the edge of the desert was a small and unassuming building that in days gone by was used by meteorologists. The instruments were almost entirely automated now, sending data back to a central location like a lot of other weather stations.
Along with Jace, Austin, Ryan, Dan and Stefano, we climbed what remained of the gentle slope to the top of the hill. Out there, in the darkness, was the Mondalo bunker, soon to be known as the Mondalo crater.
I couldn’t see any sign of it with the naked eye, but it was easy to spot with the night vision binoculars that we passed around. Every ten or fifteen minutes, while we watched, a car would come from one direction or another, showing us where the roads were.
Using the binoculars, I followed one as it crossed a small bridge over some deep crack in the bone-dry earth, and then a few minutes later when it came to an outer perimeter that was still a comparatively long way out from the main buildings. From there, I followed the coils of razor wire away from the road and saw that it was patrolled by an army of well-armed Mafia soldiers. And this was all before you even reached the main fortifications around the buildings in the middle.
I handed the binoculars back to Jace, who held them to his eyes for a moment, then passed them to Ryan. He looked up at the sky as if maybe he could pick out the satellite that was going to really put his foot on the throat of
the criminal underworld.
“Big day, Jace,” said Austin to his brother, after the flow of cars had stopped for a while.
“I wish you could have known Mom and Dad. So you could know why I…” Jace trailed off.
“I know it, man.”
“This is it. This is it, everybody. This night, we are going to witness the last gasp of the old Mafia. There won’t be anything left that’s big enough or organized enough to fight back even if every last one of them banded together instead of doing the smart thing and retiring early. We win.”
Jace pulled out a phone and made a call, put it on speakerphone and holding it out in front of him so we could all hear. I recognized the voice of Vito Mondalo when he answered. Not Victor, the politician from the TV, but Vito, the Mafioso who had nothing but contempt for the entire world and everybody living in it.
“Evening, you’re late. Where are you? The peace-pipe is lit, the gang’s all here, you don’t want to be rude, do you?”
“Fuck you, Vito. You cock-sucking, mother-fucking, piece of shit conceived in a gangbang.”
“Those are some big words for an orphan. Is that wind I hear? Are you fuckin’ walking? Lose your billions in a bad investment or something?”
“It’s time, boss,” said Dan.
“Do it.”
Dan pressed a button on some app on his own phone. Simple as that. Somewhere, miles above us, death itself was coming out of orbit.
Through the phone, I heard some other voice talking to Vito. “Sir, that wasp nest by the southern door is getting bigger, the guys didn’t-”
“Fuck off, you dumb cunt, I’m busy here,” said Vito.
“Did I hear that right?” asked Jace. “You’ve got a wasp problem?”
“Yeah, apparently.”
“I hate those motherfuckers almost as much as I hate you, Vito. Tell you what. You could say I’ve been in the pest extermination business for a long time now, let me take care of that for you.”
“Whatever, son,” said Vito.
“I’m not your son, fucker. Anything you’d like me to tell your daughter? Want to go out on a high note?” said Jace.
“Everything I’ve got to say to my daughter I already said a couple days ago, but I’m going to fuckin’ remind that little turncoat when she arrives.”
Jace looked at me while my blood turned to ice. “What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t heard? Boy, some bitch at the Movega Towers Hotel was cleaning the room, recognized her from the news and called the cops. The cops called what’s left of the Pirozzi Family, and they called me,” said Vito.
“Where the fuck is she?” I yelled.
“Who’s that? Tell your dog to shut the fuck up,” said Vito.
“Where is she?” Jace repeated my question.
“Last I heard, she’s almost here.”
I looked down at the plain and saw a set of headlights emerge on to the road nearest our hill, the road a car coming from Rockwell would have taken. A strangled sound came from somewhere, it was a couple of seconds before I realized it was coming from me.
Vito laughed. “I’ve heard that sound before.”
“Stop it,” I said to Dan.
“Fuck you,” said Vito.
“I… I can’t stop it,” said Dan, turning white as I advanced on him.
“Stop it!” I yelled.
Jace and Austin stepped in front of me before I got my hands on him and I stopped in my tracks. Ryan threw me a set of keys.
“Catch them,” he said. “You’ve got four minutes, tops. And counting.”
I turned around and barreled down the hill towards our waiting cars, glancing up at the sky in terror every few steps and hallucinating one of the stars getting brighter and brighter. At least… I hoped to fuck it was a hallucination.
Eric
Some of Jace’s soldiers saw the look on my face, the way I was running, and reached for their guns. I shoved one out of the way and flung the driver’s door open on one of the cars.
A second later, Austin’s huge frame was beside me in the passenger seat and the car was flying backwards before the door was closed. I swung the wheel around, doing a j-turn that slammed the door shut and had Austin leaning on me hard, and floored it down the hill.
The headlights bounced crazily as the car went airborne over a speedbump and then hit the road, sending sparks flying as it bottomed out. Austin braced himself against the roof while getting his seatbelt on and I squeezed every ounce of power out of the engine that I could.
I turned a hard left at the bottom of the hill, sending the car into a drift that almost landed us in a ditch, but I pulled it back in time and we fishtailed for a few seconds as I regained the momentum that the turn had cost us. Austin had his gun out already.
This was a fucking nightmare, it had to be a nightmare. If I stopped their car in time, how could I get to Eliana before the people who were already in the car with her?
The best case scenario was that this was going to be a hostage situation. What to do then would depend on how close to the blast we were. How close was too close to survive? Fuck, fuck, fuck!
I wished Ryan or Dan were fast enough to get to the car to tell me that now. Fuck it. I’d have to worry about stopping them first and then think about shooting or talking.
The car went airborne again over a slight rise and then down into a small dip. A few more of these and we’d be out on the flat ground. We were down in the last dip when a streak of fire shot down from the sky like a giant tracer-round and turned the night into day.
“No! Fuck! NO!” I yelled over and over until I thought I was going to shatter the windscreen, slamming my hands on the steering wheel.
We came over the last rise and, a split-second later, a shockwave rocked the car enough that we fishtailed again. The entire desert was gone in a cloud of dust, except for a distant fireball that was rising into the sky incalculably larger than the one I’d unleashed on the Smoke Devils.
With the car under control once more, we plunged into the dust and I concentrated furiously on what little I could see of the road, still screaming a constant stream of expletives. Austin was deathly quiet under the tortured whine of the engine.
The sound under the tires changed for a second as we crossed the bridge over the split in the ground and then went back to normal on the other side. Out of nowhere the car appeared right in front of us, sideways on the road with the headlights pointing to the left and right.
“Fuck!” I slammed on the brakes, sending us into a skid that only stopped when we rammed the side of their vehicle at relatively low speed.
I jumped out, my gun was drawn before I even thought about it, and I leaped on the hood of our car on my knees to be able to cover everybody in the front and the back at once. I took a deep breath to tell everybody not to move and was choked by the sand and dust all around us.
With my right hand holding the gun and my left arm across my face to try to filter out some of the airborne grit I squinted my eyes into the car. The driver’s window was blown out and so was the rear window on the passenger’s side.
Blood was splattered all over the windscreen and of the three people in the car, none of them would have listened to my instruction even if I had been able to yell it out. None of them were moving anyway because they were all dead. None of them were Eliana either.
The rear passenger’s door was open. There was a fourth passenger in this dusty hell somewhere.
“Eliana!” I called, taking a breath against the crook of my elbow and then screaming her name again.
I stood on the hood of the car, yelling in every direction, and straining my eyes through the grit for any sign of movement. There was nothing but an ominous rumble from the site of the Mondalo crater.
Austin stood in the wedge of space between the car and his open door, gun at the ready, as I jumped to the ground and circled the car load of dead Mobsters. Had there been some kind of standoff inside the car as they drove?
I had to physically force myself to walk around the rear bumper of the car, dreading that I might see her body on the ground, or a trail of blood leading off into the gloom. Was she out there? All alone? Hurt? Because I had to be here to see Vito’s demise?
If I had been with her, the Pirozzis wouldn’t have been able to muster enough men to take her away from that hotel room. This was my fault. Kendall was right… live for revenge and hate, and you will create what destroys you.
There was no body on the ground. No blood. There were footsteps leading off the road to the right.
“Eliana!” I called, and listened.
And listened.
And listened.
“Eric?”
“Eliana!”
“Eric!”
I ran blindly off the road in the direction of her voice and almost ran into her, my eyes blurred with dust and tears as they were. I dropped my gun and buried my hands into her hair at each side of her head, gripping her tight to make sure she was real.
Our foreheads pressed against one another and we slowly crumpled to the ground together. My throat was choked up more than I could blame on the dust.
“What the fuck was I supposed to do without you?” I asked.
“I don’t know… what the fuck just happened?”
“You could say that a hand laid upon you in anger has been punished.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t explain it right now. Oh fuck. How did you escape?”
“They didn’t search me!” she said. “The guy in the back had a gun pointed in my direction until we were almost at some fence checkpoint thing and I guess he felt safe because he put it away. I pulled my gun out and shot the driver first. I don’t know if that was a good idea.”
“Well, it worked, so we’ll call it a good idea.”
“Then that light… was it a meteorite?”
“No.”
“But it came down right on…”
“Your dad. Yes.”
Eliana’s gun dropped next to mine, from a suddenly limp hand. “Is it over? Is he…”
“Yes. I love you, Eliana.”