RW13 - Holy Terror

by Richard Marcinko

  Still…

  “The altar right under the dome is cordoned off,” said Danny. “How close were you?”

  “At the velvet rope.”

  “Those four pillars, the pieces that hold the canopy over the altar—they’d be perfect spots to put a bomb,” said Trace.

  “If you had enough explosive, you could take out the pope—and blow off the dome,” added Doc. “A good enough explosion there, everything above comes tumbling down.”

  “I think we should take this to the ambassador,” said Danny. “Demand a sweep.”

  “No. Backass will just do it himself,” said Trace. “And claim it was fine.”

  “We could go on Italian TV and demand that the place be inspected,” said Danny. “Put a little pressure on them through the media.”

  “That’s a good idea—unless we’re wrong,” I said. “Then we’ve blown our only shot. We have to find the bomb ourselves.”

  “How are we getting in?” said Danny. “They have all our photos except for Trace’s. They’re watching the streets, the square, every alley—the security people all have photos, and video cameras, even in the sewers.”

  “We’ll just find an easier way to drop in,” I told him. “No big deal.”

  It was a little more involved than I thought it would be. Pus Face had sent out a series of directives to the effect that I was a raving lunatic, not to be trusted. This increased the degree of difficulty as I lined up the resources I needed, making people who wanted to help me have to go through a few more hoops. By the time we got everything together, it was nearly nightfall Saturday, only a few hours before the VIPs would begin filtering in for midnight mass. I like to work at night, but I can do without the tight deadlines.

  Among the many questions we weren’t able to answer at the time was how Backass intended on getting out of Vatican City, either before or after the attack. The original Saladin wasn’t a suicide bomber and Backass didn’t strike me as one either. We couldn’t figure out what the escape plan was, but if it involved either of the Holy See’s 737s, Backass was shit out of luck. Several key components in both aircraft were removed Saturday afternoon. It’s amazing how much access coveralls and a few smudges of grease on your face can provide.

  There are two types of high-altitude jumps, and each has its own special pleasures. High-altitude, high-opening jumps—HAHO for short—are a little like parasailing adventures. You jump out of an aircraft, deploy your chute, and basically turn yourself into a glider. Depending on the circumstances, you may fly forty miles to your destination. I wouldn’t necessarily term it leisurely—for one thing, if the mission calls for a HAHO jump, there’s a real good chance some of the folk down there have guns—but the pace is steady and as predictable as this sort of work can get, assuming the chute opens when it’s supposed to.

  The alternative is a high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) jump. The beginning and end of this jump are the same as in a HAHO—you get off the plane, you land on the ground. In between though, you’re not pretending to be a glider. You’re a rock.

  Or two rocks in this case: Trace went out with me, falling from the back of a specially rigged MC-130 made available with Frankie’s help and completely and totally without the authorization of Pus Face, Kohut, Crapinpants, or any of the other names that may or may not have appeared in the paperwork. Gravity tugged us to the tune of 180 miles an hour.* We were aimed at a sparkle of light smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. That was Rome—St. Peter’s was about the size of one of the molecules inside the period.

  Yeah, I know it looks like fun—and it is. But don’t let anyone tell you that a night jump into an urban area from the stratosphere is easy. It ain’t. On the other hand, waiting to deploy until we were about five hundred feet off terra firma made it impossible for the two anti-aircraft batteries the Italians had moved in to spot us.

  I got the audible tone in my headset and deployed. In the space between pulling the ring and feeling the ball-crunching tug that told me I’d deployed, I consoled myself with the realization that I was exactly on beam for the spire at the top of the basilica dome. If the chute didn’t deploy, I’d end up as Dick on a stick.

  It did deploy, with a hefty pull. It’s not always an advantage to have big balls, but it’s better than the alternative, all around.

  I took my mind off my pain by making sure Trace’s chute had opened, then got serious about landing. St. Peter’s loomed a hundred feet away. I tipped the canopy to straighten my aim, riding down almost precisely on target. I opened my arms and hooked onto the funnel-like mast at the very top of the cupola: bull’s-eye.

  Trace came in a few feet below and to the right, grabbing onto the upper crown of the cupola. We climbed down on opposite sides to the top of the large pillars that form the crown base. This was our most vulnerable thirty seconds—we had to stow our chutes quickly without losing them or falling off the cathedral. We were visible from the roofs of most of the nearby buildings, and the only thing in our favor was the utter audacity of what we were doing.

  Which was why, frankly, I figured Mr. Murphy would show up. He didn’t, though. I got my chute stowed easily, tucking it between the railings, then secured a rope to the rail and another forty feet to a second railing, this one at the base of the pillars themselves.

  If you’ve never seen the cathedral and its dome, picture a large beach ball with a toilet paper tube on top of it. The beach ball sits in the middle of a hat box, which is perched on a giant footlocker. We were at the base of the toilet paper tube. A narrow observation deck rings the cupola, with pillars on the outside and windows. Inside, a set of stairs with more than three hundred steps leads through the narrow cavity down to the base of the dome.

  When we got squared away, we scouted the cathedral roof below. Sharpshooters had been posed at the lip of the roof at the front of the building, where they could train their high-powered rifles on the piazza. But otherwise there were no guards at all in sight. Everyone was watching the doors and nearby streets.

  A jammer had been installed inside the cathedral to block anyone from using a radio or cell phone to set off a bomb. The system rendered conventional radios useless, so Trace and I had packed a line-of-sight laser unit to communicate with Doc and Danny, who were standing by in the MC-130 as backups in case we landed in the Coliseum by mistake. Hitting the plane with the laser would have been pretty difficult, so we set up a receiver unit on the roof of a building to the north. From there, the signal was transmitted via a conventional microwave to the aircraft. The sending unit, which looked a bit like a futuristic, sawed-off ray gun, had to be sighted into the general area of the receiver, and then guided with the help of a small set of indicator buttons until the beam “locked” with the receiver device. It was a bit awkward to use, and it took me several tries before I got a lock tone and was able to give Doc the good word. He barked “good” and signed off. It would take at least an hour for him and Danny to get down and get close enough to play cavalry if something went wrong.

  If we’d been tourists, we could have just opened the door and let ourselves in. But Trace’s traipse through the church on Friday had revealed new alarms and a video security system on all of the doors, including those on the dome and inside the cupola. Besides fixing the window I’d fallen through, they’d also installed alarms on it and all of the others. They’d even put alarms on the smaller eyebrow windows that opened into the dome interior. While at this hour it was likely that an alert would be disregarded as a malfunction, we couldn’t take the chance.

  There was one set of windows that had no alarms: the windows at the base of the cupola. This made sense, since the doors leading to the cupola were locked and alarmed; even if you went through the window, you’d be stuck.

  Unless, you went straight down three hundred feet to the balcony at the base of the dome.

  With help from my glass cutter—the diamond-tipped kind, not my fist—I removed the panels and then cut out enough of the frame to slip through
. Down below, a scattering of priests, brothers, and nuns were getting the interior of the church ready for the midnight mass. They were supposed to be done and out of the building at exactly 10 p.m. At that point, St. Peter’s would be swept by security forces one last time, with the doors opening for the mass at 11 p.m.

  My watch read 9:08.

  “Still want to go first, Spider-man?” asked Trace, getting our ropes ready. The dome is about three hundred feet high; we had 120 meters of 11mm rope with us*—just enough for me to kill myself with.

  “Just make sure it doesn’t tangle,” I told her.

  “It’s the bar I’m worried about.” She was referring to a long, flat piece of steel that fit outside the window and anchored the rope in place.

  “That’ll hold as long as the cupola does,” I told her.

  “Exactly.”

  If it didn’t hold, I’d plop straight down into the bronze altar canopy, ending up a holy hood ornament. Which I’m sure would have fulfilled the prophecies of some of the nuns I’d had back at St. Ladislaus Hungarian Catholic School.

  I made like a spider sneaking up on Miss Muffett, slipping through the window and lowering myself into the painted heaven above the altar. I had a rappelling harness on, and the process was a hell of a lot easier than it sounds.

  For the first ten feet. Then I slipped down a little faster than I thought I would. No biggie really, except that the shift in my momentum started me swinging on the line.

  Swinging was fine; I had to get to the side of the dome anyway. What I didn’t like was spinning. And I started spinning so much I could have been a fucking ballerina. At the same time, I was twirling across the damn dome, a pendulum gone crazy. Finally I slammed face-first into one of the prophets in the ceiling.

  He didn’t seem to mind, or at least he didn’t hold it against me. He stopped me from spinning, though not from swinging, sending me back out into space. Now I was like a stinking yo-yo, though headed in only one direction—down. The windows loomed closer and closer, and on one swing I thought I would put my left foot right through the one I had broken a few weeks before. I missed, however, and managed to get my foot onto the railing on my next pass. Not pretty, but I made it in one piece and without setting off any of the alarms.

  Trace, of course, came down perfectly a minute later. Sometimes that woman is so damn good all I want to do is smack her.

  We slipped into the hallway out of sight, pulled off our jumpsuits, and donned more appropriate garb—a monk’s robes for me, and a white nun’s habit for Trace. I shaved off my beard for the mission—the sacrifices you make for this job. I hadn’t seen my face in almost twenty years, and I looked about as ugly as a breeding cow’s pussy. I’d also had my hair cut monk-style, with a tonsure at the back. (It’s a bald spot to make it easier for God to aim his thunderbolt if you mess up.) But there was one consolation: After all this raping and scraping, I wouldn’t have to do any more novenas to get my ticket through the pearly gates. St. Peter wouldn’t recognize me.

  I pulled out the handheld explosives detector and turned it on; it took roughly a minute to warm up and get ready. The alert was piped through an earbud; I arranged the cowl to make the wire less conspicuous. Trace’s habit was one of the old-fashioned kinds and covered her head, making her earpiece easy to conceal.

  Backass’s people had set up an impenetrable perimeter around the cathedral, which meant that once you penetrated it you were home free. But just to keep the people on the perimeter from getting bored, I had arranged a small diversion. As Trace and I made our way down the staircase from the dome, a taxi raced up Via Della Conciliazione toward Piazza San Pietro in front of the basilica. The driver, though certainly as crazy as any native Italian (which says a lot), was in fact Sean Mako, who’d stepped off a plane a few hours before at Leonardo da Vinci airport. Hailing a taxi, he had struck a deal with the driver, who agreed to show Sean the city for “only” two thousand Euros and as much vino as he could drink. This proved to be only a glass and a half after Sean slipped a little GHB into his first Chianti. (GHB is gamma hydroxybutyric acid, better known as the “date-rape drug.” Not FDA approved.)

  Sean left the driver in the bar where they had stopped and continued the tour in do-it-yourself mode. At precisely 9:15, he raced down the broad avenue in front of the basilica, dodged two roadblocks, and veered across the circle. He then cut back to the right, swung completely around the obelisk at the center of the square and managed to get up one of the long, shallow-rise steps before his wheels and caltropshredded tires finally gave out.

  Sean had picked up a passenger along the way—supposedly for authenticity, though personally I think he was trying to make a little money on the side. The passenger got out calmly and began walking away, ignoring the forty or fifty armed guards who rushed them. Sean claims that at this point he began singing “O Sole Mio” at the wheel. I take that with a grain of salt, though I believe him when he says the Vatican drunk tank is a cheap place to spend the night.

  As more than a hundred law enforcement officials completed the arrest, Trace and I reached the hallway behind the Altar of St. Leo the Great on the main floor of the church.

  “You look lovely in white, Sister,” I told her.

  “Up yours, Brother,” she said, grabbing a bouquet of flowers from a box near the archway and walking into the church.

  I gave her a few seconds, then followed, head bent and hands folded, walking toward the center of the church. If I looked like I was praying, it wasn’t an act—at this point I figured that if I didn’t find the bomb, I’d be blown up.

  The area around the Pope’s Altar and the huge bronze canopy over it had been cordoned off with thick velvet ropes, but there were no security guards to stop anyone from getting past. In fact, the only people in this part of the church were two brothers in black robes arranging microphones at an ornate kneeler at the center aisle. They were uttering bits of Latin prayers to test the devices.

  I walked to the rear of the Pope’s Altar, genuflected, then unhooked the velvet rope so I could pass. The altar was on a platform that would make a perfect hiding place for a bomb; packed with enough explosives the force would easily lift the roof above. I knelt as if praying, then slipped the probe of the sniffer out, moving my hand steadily across the step.

  No bing.

  I made my way around the platform, from right to left pretending I’d been assigned to smooth the rug so His Holiness wouldn’t trip. If there were stray molecules of explosive, the sensor wasn’t finding them. I moved up and checked the altar itself, arranging the candles as if I’d noticed one out of alignment. The earphone remained silent.

  I started around to the front of the platform, between the altar and the Tomb of St. Peter. As I did, one of the priests asked what I was doing.

  I’d been so intent on using the sniffer that I had lost track of who was around me. The priest stood at the railing that surrounds the tomb. Bowing my head in his direction without answering, I genuflected—when in doubt, kneel, as the nuns used to say.

  “Brother, what are you doing?” demanded the priest. He was speaking Italian.

  “I’m looking for bombs,” I told him, lowering my head slightly and pulling my sleeve up to show him the device. “This tool looks for traces of certain molecules in the air.”

  As I looked up, the priest’s eyes seemed to snap into mine and hold them. “You’re not a priest, are you?” he said in Italian.

  “No, I’m a security expert from the U.S. The robes are meant to make me less conspicuous.”

  Now the priest’s stare made me feel as if I were in the confessional at St. Ladislaus, having to confess—well, never mind what I had to confess. I would have felt more comfortable staring down the barrel of a machine gun than holding the gaze of the white-haired shepherd of God. Finally, he nodded solemnly.

  “Do your best, my son,” he told me.

  If he said something else, it was drowned out by the distinct buzz from the unit as I reached the front
of the altar, the probe pointing over St. Peter’s Tomb.

  Time out for a second if you haven’t seen the inside of the basilica. St. Peter’s Tomb is a large semicircular area in front of the Pope’s Altar, one level down and set off by a railing. (Technically, it’s called “Il Confessio,” a term for a crypt that has linked passages.) It looks more like an elaborate chapel than a tomb, and includes the niche where the saint’s bones are preserved.

  St. Peter’s Tomb sits like the tip of the iceberg at the peak of a large underground necropolis or burial ground that the basilica and its predecessor were built over. The grottoes or tombs of the popes flank St. Peter’s. Around and below them are the remains of the Roman graveyard that St. Peter was interred in. Mausoleums and passages through the city of the dead extend beneath the basilica. The grottoes and the necropolis—called Scavi, Italian for excavations—lay beneath the floor beyond the tomb and are ordinarily reached through small stairways in the pillars beneath the dome.

  A temporary platform had been placed across part of the Tomb near the altar to make it easier to celebrate mass. This was where I was standing when I got the alert.

  The sniffer had found an extremely minute trace of PETN—an important ingredient in Semtex and similar plastic explosives. But it was a fleeting hit. I reset the device and failed to get another alert, even when I selected specifically for PETN.

  Two false positives in the same area?

  An area not accessible to the public?

  I squatted down and slowly wanded the temporary platform but got nothing. Then I went across the platform to the railing, leaning over the side. A fence-like grille had been installed around the area below the temporary platform, blocking off the metal doors at the sides. As I put one foot over the railing, trying to find a space between the ring of candles to get over, a voice behind me said, “No, brother.”

  I turned slowly. The priest I’d spoken to a few moments before stood a few feet away, frozen. Next to me was the other cleric who’d been with him, holding a 9mm Ruger.